Internet DNA Podcast

Bill Gates created corona virus - you heard it here first, or second, or third - so that he can then fine the vaccine, uh? yes well, moving on Abi gets carried away with a long list of 'cant live without' apps that she really can live without. While Dan thinks there is a social movement to off grid living, and that this may drive the tech needed to accelerate developing countries further into the digital future We need radicals, but alas that isn't Dan. Instead we sum up our findings on whether tech is helping us or not.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

 Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of internet DNA with me, Abby 

 and me Dan, 

 this week, we're going to discuss whether technology is making us richer or poorer. What do you think then? 

 I think that really depends who you are. I think technology makes some people much more, some people incredibly more rich in general.

If we're talking about, has technology made us richer or poorer? We have to say it's made us rich thus far living standards have risen over and over and over. Are we at a tipping point that I think is an interesting question. We might be moving into. A point where it stops making us richer. And that may not be because of technology that might be because resources are harder to find a more expensive and we're starting to reach the limitation.

In standard of living. How about that? We can't all live like this, but I think that's been made clear 

 like this. 

 Yes. In the Western world, we consume vastly more than we can sustain. We can't bring everybody up to the standard of living otherwise. What we've got to hope is that with technology, we can make our lives more sustainable.

How about that? So a bit more of your solar punk. 

 Yes. We're becoming richer, but then we need to spend more money to be able to sustain as well. So I do wonder with all this technology and things, getting faster and expecting more, it's a bit like when we were talking about 5G that everyone expects everything quicker.

Are we better off. Or have we just got more money that we the did. So are we working harder to get more money, to spend more than actually we would have been just as happy if we had less money, did less spend less. When people say the population is getting richer, richer in what way? Because being better off.

So there should be the difference between what you have and what you spend, not the fact that we have become a richer society, 

 Standard of life. The measurement is a purely financial one. I think it does measure. The difference between have, and disposable income. 

 I can't believe that happiness is purely financial.

What's that? 

 Okay. But you've got to understand the definition of standard of life isnt the same as quality of life. Quality of life would include happiness, surely standard of life or living standards is an accounting measure. If we're talking about quality of life. 

 Yeah. Has technology given us a better quality of life?

 I mean, you've got to say yes. But yet 

we're now moving into diminishing returns. I think one of the things you've just mentioned, which is we don't own anything anymore. I've still got how many CDs or albums or, you know, I don't have the cassettes anymore because I don't have anything to play them on, but I used to buy my music.

And if I want to go and listen to something I bought in 1980, I can do so nowadays you don't buy the music, you rent access to it. And if you stopped paying all that music has gone, that is going to become. More and more of an issue, especially if you think that as you got older or as our parents got older, they accumulated the things that had the memories of their lives.

We won't accumulate those things cause we don't have access to them. You stop paying for your iCloud, you stopped paying for your Spotify. You stopped paying for your Netflix. 

 This is where perhaps 3D printing comes back in because maybe all those digital memories, you print stuff. I told you though,

you go around people's houses and you go, Oh, look at these ornaments. It's like, children's pottery.

 Bits of plastic. 

 But the other thing that I found quite interesting from that perspective of we're not owning anything is therefore a monthly outgoings are high. Now I know that millennials are finding it impossible to buy houses, which is very different from generations before. And that's been our Nest Egg, but I've begun to realize that their outgoings must be huge because they go out a lot more.

They're more interested to live in cities. They get takeaways. People don't cook of sort of twenties to thirties. All this I've only started to realize since lockdown, and couple of this with renting everything from cars to music, software, sofas, every month, the outgoings must be really high. And therefore the ability to save becomes really low and the house prices can seem high.

 The  problem that we have is inflation, which is making us all poorer every year by X percent, which sounds like a lot when they say, Oh, 2.5% inflation, but that effectively means after 10 years, you're 18% poorer. On the same amount of money. And so things have got much more expensive. I think in general terms, we are poor.

And now in 2020 than we were in 1990 

 at coffee for£2.90 is ludicrous or is that even gone up? Pints over five pounds. 

 if you talk to your grandparents or your parents, probably more likely our age, they talk about, I used to go to town with 10P buy two beers and a pie and come back. We've changed now.

That is literally the result of inflation. The money is worth less and less and less because we print more and more and more of it. Not on 3D printers on our money printers, we keep printing more money. And the reality is it just makes the money worthless, 

 but that isn't about technology

 is about technology because previously it was based on gold a thing.

The economy could only grow by X amount because if you couldn't buy the gold, you couldn't grow the economy anymore. You were on the gold standard. And when every currency was based on gold, if you look at inflation, it hardly happened at all. Then we moved off the gold standard, and then we moved into this for electronic banking or the ability to generate numbers, to just make money up.

And that is exactly what has caused the inflation that we lived through. If you look at the value of money and then you get to 1970, which is when America came off the gold standard because of the Vietnam war, it's literally like a different curve. It's like, it's piddling about doing hardly anything.

And then suddenly in the 1970 just starts accelerating. It's amazing. And that is how we're getting poor. Cause we think we're getting rich because we got more numbers. Cause we've got, now we've got a hundred pounds instead of 10 pounds, but that a hundred pounds is not even worth what 10 pounds was. So I do think it is a byproduct of technology.

 Looking at studies of, are we getting rich or poor because of technology, the inequality that it's creating, that sort of thing. It was sort of up to 2017. There's been very little about it since then. And I wonder why I wonder what has changed in those years. People just decided that Brexit was more important.

It doesn't seem like people are thinking about that inequality so much. So perhaps something has changed. The billion is. Of which have been made many by technology are starting to give away a lot more money and share a lot more money within companies. I mean, Bill Gates might look, but they give 99% of that money away.

Other people like the richer sounds guy has shared his business with a whole company of people that on vast amounts of money starting to give back, or is that just  

 I think it's just five of them. The time when that really was true, when the rich really did feel that it was a moral obligation.

It was the Victorian age when it really was a thing. If you were rich, you had to be helping, it was seen as absolutely important that, you know, part of your morality is that you help those off less fortunate yourself. 

 Yes. There was no state safety net. 

 think when you're Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, the fact, you give away money.

It's kind of irrelevant. You've got so much of it. You've got more money than most countries. It sounds very altruistic, but you've also got people like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson furloughing a lot of people for every bill Gates who apparently is trying to inoculate the world. He created corona virus so that he can vaccinate everybody.

 So technology sparks an era a bit like the American dream. You can come from anywhere. You can have nothing and you can make it big if you just work hard and have a good idea. Technology has spawned that again, there was a time. When people were just creating any old apps, some of working somewhat lacking, but they were able to make a lot of money mainly in America, suddenly leading innovation and earning a lot of money from it.

 Very few people. One of the things that you have to understand about the UK for example, is the period of highest social mobility. In the UK people moving up, the social ladder was the sixties. And we wonder why is that? Well, because we had grammar schools that took the brightest people and fast track them through and we had free university.

It created a generation of people who literally could through hard work, get better nowadays that opportunity's much reduced. And I think that's why we have this complete thing about celebrity, because it's the only way out sport and celebrity. Those are your keys to getting rich working hard. You're just going to basically be a wage slave 

 from very early on is if you don't have access to the internet or good access to the internet, and you don't have a device, you are so far behind someone that does.

So that is really pushing middle class and working class apart now, which is becoming 

 everybody who needed to work and needs that sort of stuff. Tends to have it, 

 but I'm talking about school children. You don't tend to have spare competitors in your house or spare phones in your house. 

 Yeah. Maybe I'm a little bit of an outlier though, where

exactly. So all the boys have laptops plus there's a Chromebook spare, and so maybe I'm living in a bit of an ivory tower, all families where there's one laptop in the house and all the children are having to share. And that's, especially in the current climate

 trying to work on it. Therefore the gap with children is getting larger.

So you're right. If technology was equal, there would be less inequality in the pay gap. 

 We would seem to me like in the general scheme of things, Chromebooks are not expensive. And I can see a situation where there's maybe a thing where you get issued a Chromebook by the school, and that is your Chromebook.

 I'm going to take it back to technology. And is it making us rich or poor 

drawn to that question? Technology has made us richer. It is now in the process of making us poor 

automation has been happening ever since the first computer came in the seventies, 

 since the first machine came in. That's what steam machines did in removing the amount of people that you needed to do stuff.

 And now we're moving into a time where it's taking office jobs, admin jobs, analysts, secretaries, and sales marketing. It's taking. Those jobs as well. So people that needed to be very tech savvy to be able to move to another job. But what's happening here is companies are getting richer because they are automating and they're having less staff and more productivity, but they're not handing it on to staff.

Or they're saying we haven't got enough money to handle this stuff. So where's that money going? If things are being automated and you can do things quicker and cheaper, where's the money going? 

 This is going in the same place. It always goes, it goes into the economy. Now you might say, it's not going in evenly to people when they said, Oh, we're going to automate the farms.

And everyone was like, Oh, all little farm workers are gonna lose their jobs. Yeah, they did. But they moved into other industries. It's a fair that has always been is that the machines are gonna take our jobs. And what happens is the machines take certain jobs and other jobs are created because of it to service those for every piece of analytical software, there's probably 50 people, data scientists, or learning how to build that.

I just think the jobs move, you don't have potato pickers anymore because you've got machines. But what you do have is people stacking shelves in the supermarkets. Now you might say, it's not such a great job. But farming is so much more efficient. You're creating jobs elsewhere. 

 What about if robots are starting to do all the jobs, the living wage, it's basically what we're on at the moment being furloughed.

Finland are trialing it. Is this a way that if we've plateaued in technology, With the living wage, make a difference and really start using technology to make us richer. And is it even possible? 

 That sounds very much like communism to me. And that has been a failed experiment. In my opinion, 

 the computers are doing everything. What are we going to do? 

 We want to do other things, you know, I'm not that prescient to know what will be the new jobs in 2020. If you think about it, all of our industry. Everything in and around the internet was created by technology. Those jobs didn't exist before. There's an entire world of jobs that were created, but there aren't any print setters anymore, but 

 they'll actually, I'm doing a website for a whole heap of print setters

 in its place has been many more jobs created in the internet and all it's little friends. So what I'm trying to say is, I don't think anything takes jobs away and that's a false paradigm. 

 I'm really glad you said that because I've spoken to you on this podcast before, when I've said jobs are created as they're taken away and you've gone. No, not as many. So I'm really happy that you've come around to it. And like, you've come around to my egg cups and 3D printing. It's good to know. 

 Is that what you're saying? 

 I'm glad to hear that. I'm right. Moving on then. About ways that technology is making us richer. If you don't agree with the living wage of, if robots are doing jobs, surely we should still be paid for it anyway, because how else are we going to live?

And there should be money being made by computers while we sleep. Type of thing. So when I see all this tech, startups, and apps and everything, they're always making something to take your time or take your money or both that you didn't really need before. So they're almost middle class apps for middle class people.

I don't need to have little tiny parcels delivered to my door. I don't 

 need? 

 To be able to put this little snap pictures that disappear onto the internet. I don't need to let my dog choose. A toy. The dog heard that from the online shop, just by their eyes. I don't need a subscription for my fish food to make sure that the fish is happy.

I don't knit. Should I stop? I was on a role 

 Then you shouldn't do those things. I'm hoping that the coronavirus. Some positivity that might come out of it is that people will realize that a lot of the things they're spending money on all very pointless, but then that's how the economy works. If people stop buying these things, then they will stop happening.

But while people do it and people make money from it, that's the very basis of a business. That's the basis of your business. You do some things and some people think it's worth paying for. 

 So great new ideas should be making life easier. It should be making a work life easier. Although that's having its problems, it should be like the flat bottomed paper bag that helped people carry their shopping better.

It's like a squeegee that helped you clean a bowl better. It's 

 They are  ever single day, not all of them succeed and they don't all succeed for the wrong reasons. Like, you know, you may have invented the most fantastic bath plug the world has ever seen. Yeah. Maybe 

 as a chip in it. And it feeds back to tell them how often I'm having a bath.

 Unfortunately, you're not that good at business and you just never get it to a point because you can't launch it 

 probably. It's not sexy. And the sexy things that get backed by venture capitalist is because a bit of their egos there and they go, Oh, well, I'd quite like to be seen with this or invested in this.

And it's not necessarily good for our society. I am hoping. On the flip side of this, that there are thousands, millions of non glossy apps and software that are being put to work in say developing countries, which are revolutionizing where they 

 live . I'm a massive fan of a thing called the gravity live, which is a very cheap piece of plastic, basically a device that has a poli on it that you can hang on your roof and you put a weight on it.

And it doesn't matter what the way it is, but let's say you put a bag of flour on it. And the way of pulling that down drives a dynamo. That runs your light act of that gravity. You're pulling that. So you've got free electricity, which in countries where there's nothing, it's amazing. Wow. Free light in your house.

Things are being created all the time. 

 Right? And this is what gives me hope. There's no point inventing frivolous stuff when people don't have any money. And I wonder in the developing world, if all this technology that is. Good and useful inventing things that help people survive. Perhaps you say that we have plateaued, but perhaps technology is helping developing worlds grow and grow and grow until they overtake.

They've got room to make smart cities, whereas us trying to change ancient monoliths into living, breathing zero carbon cities. Is impossible, but there you can create a brand new city. You can create brand new transport that is cost effective and fast and zero carbon. So maybe 

 to just see a whole world of this anyway, if you actually look at off-grid living and van life as a social movement, rather than a sort of instant banger in there is how do you live in a van where there's no water where you don't have any power, or how do you live in totally off grid life?

These things are coming. I just think they're coming slowly because a lot of us are trapped in the rest of humanity. 

 You've got to read, walk away by Cory Doctorow. Yes. It involves 3D printing of all sorts of different things. But this is actually that it's walking off the grid. The grid has got to controlling and differentiating between haves and have.Not so people are walking off 

 the grid. No, I watch quite a lot of off-grid living. Cause there's a part of me that is a grumpy old bloke with a shed and a hammer. There's a part of that life that quite appeals just detaching yourself from the madness of modern life. I'm not there yet, 

 but I'm not talking about those who have the luxury to choose to do.

I'm talking about those who don't have it at all 

 those people that. To do it are creating the technologies that will enable those people that don't have a choice to live it, all this simplification of water purification systems of solar panels, systems of power management, all of these things will trickle down to those people that.

Don't have the choice, but have to have a water filtration. You know, they've got these bottles now that you can just put water in and just leave for an hour and it completely filters the water. 

 So maybe to sum this up, technology has been making a switch. Everyone's got richer, but some have got more richer than the others and it's plateaued, but countries where there was less to begin with.

There's still plenty of way to go for them to get much, much richer using technology. So the success stories of 

 less wasteful way 

 being greener, living more symbiotically with the planet, living a more content life, having enough money brought on by technology. So this is the solar punk again, over the cyber punk.

Isn't it? That is going to happen in the developing worlds, which already we can start to see in the West. We've had our day. So maybe the success story of the technology is going to be in Asia and Africa countries that are about to have that time. And meanwhile, we can keep fighting away with how we deal with beautiful old creaky, windy buildings and underground train stations that are now spending our money on things that we really don't need.

 Exactly like the mobile network in Africa, they didn't have telephone lines, but they jumped that whole thing. They just didn't do that part. They went straight to mobile. We require some radicals to go and do radical thing to push the boundaries so that we can see that it is possible. And it's not weird.

 Is that you 

go read the book and then move off grid.

Well, we better go there. I wonder next week, if it would be interesting to explore apps and startups that are life changing, as opposed to the ones that we all know about in the West. 

 Okay. Well, let's do that then 

 let's do that. Okay. Bye. Bye.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.