Internet DNA Podcast

With all those earnest 2020 predictions and 2019 'best of's, we thought we would do something a little different, ludicrous predictions; no plugs, no wires, no plugs just magic. Immortality, the Silicon Valley Caliphate, King China or will the internet will just break under all this pressure. Its all to play for.

Transcription

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

Hello, welcome to this week's episode, internet DNA with me, Abby. Dan. This week when everybody seems to be talking about the best of 2019 what the big thing in Tech's going to be next year? We're going to do it a bit differently. We're going to talk about ludicrous predictions. Instead, I just thought we could have a bit of fun here. Maybe we might even have a Christmas seat laugh. Do you want to start then or should I start with my first prediction? You're gonna probably be the queen of ludicrous. Okay, so my first prediction is that the Internet's going to be broken by 2030 what do you mean by broken? I knew you'd like that. It's just too non-tech, isn't it? Well, what I mean is we're going to be using so much data and so many warehouses full of data. We're getting so fast with all our super fast enough fiber and our 5g electricity needed. It's just going to grind to a halt. We're just going to have sucked up all the electricity from everywhere and sort of go poof and suddenly we're going to be back to pre-board band era. And what would Jeremy Corbyn and re nationalizing the internet is? It's dead cert. No, he's offering free broadband. That's not nationalizing the internet. The whole point of the internet is it, which survive a nuclear war. You can't own the internet. It sounds like China doesn't it? But he is in his manifesto. That's socialism for you along with the trains, you know, I don't mind getting political about these things, but it's trains. When it was British rail, what I remember is that there were no trains, so not that keen on it. China's tried to control the internet, not own it so much cause that's awkward, but it hasn't worked. It's a biggest problem we have in the UK is that people don't have free access to the internet. So actually having been rude, you slightly agree with him because what you're saying is the internet is creating a two level society. There are those that can afford all the subscriptions and the internet fees and the way that everything's going. You never own anything. You just rent it and then there are those that can't and what Jeremy Corbyn is saying because he's a socialist is we shouldn't have that two tier. Everyone should be able to for the same, which is actually [inaudible] correct as an idea because what tends to happen is the idea is that everybody gets the best, but actually what happens is everyone gets the worst. Okay, I'm going to move on to another one or do you want to do one? I like the fact that you think that will run out of power. Yeah. What's this space? Wow. Okay. So mine is that we will unlock unlimited power, the 15 so, Oh, okay. We've got 20 years more so by the time it's dribbled to a Holt, suddenly we will get magic energy and it will be unlimited and we won't actually need plugs or anything. Well that's my other one. Fully wireless like no more wires please. Thank you. I said that in a meeting once. I was like, it can't be long before we don't need wires. And people looked at me, it was the guys from Sonos as well, and they looked at me like I was mad. I was like, surely not that bad. Nope. I read today that Apple are going to launch the iPhone 1314 whatever it is, we'll have no ports. Well that's just quite annoying. Well, yes, maybe it is. It's like when Apple suddenly decided that we weren't going to have a CD drive anymore and we just weren't ready for it. But I think it's also like people going, Oh, it'd be really annoying not to have wind down windows. It's like, no, it won't be annoying because electric windows are just easier until they break. Yeah. Okay, good. And films, when you drive into a Lake, either you want a wind down window, then yeah you do. But then probably what you really want to do and not drive into late [inaudible]. Okay, so let's go back. Infinite power by 2050 this seems to coincide with where am I going to be a carbon neutral world as well. So how's it all going to work? There's a whole bunch of different ways that we're going to have to manage this. I think nuclear is going to be a part of it. Now hopefully we can get around this current official model and getting into a fusion model, but there's a lot of energy in the world, either WYO tide or waves or geothermal or sun, and it will get to a point where we realize that we need to just get along. If we can't do anything in the desert, why not just cover it in the solar panels or if you can't really do much in roll County area as far and then run geothermal plants, it's not, we will unlock some magical thing, but that we will get more clever with the things that we do. So America has a supervolcano, which we know is the Yellowstone national park that can just generate all the power for the entire U S how do you get the power from it all? Power generation is the same. Yeah. A volcano by its very nature is quite volatile and it says it is quite far away. Yes. But it's all going wireless. It doesn't matter how far away does it. That's what five GG is all about. So when we get to 24 G, which is what you're saying, it doesn't matter how far away is it? You're absolutely right. There are many plugs in the desert though to plug it in. Any plugs is wireless. We're getting rid of wires. I did. I mention that before. We haven't got to that one yet. So I think Yellowstone national park, the way you do is you pump water down into the rocks, not into the magma, but close enough that it boils. It comes back up with steam, it drives a turbine, it converts back to water. You pump it back down again. It's just a closed loop. It's exactly how nuclear power stations work. You pump cold water, the power from the nuclear reaction and heats up the water, turns into steam, drives a turbine. You cool it back down, which is those big towers that everyone thinks of, the nuclear power station. They're actually the cooling towers. And then you pump the water back round again. And so the only reason that we're not using yellow stone and deserts is because it's cheaper to use fossil fuels and things that are bad for the environment. So when it comes to a critical point and price, that's when this will be opened up to us. Yeah, sadly. I mean you'd hope that we'd do it before then, but actually we all know it will be driven by a price is actually that wagering a bet on this. My prediction is it's a collecting that one cracking. What am I eating? Yeah. Will you still be alive and you'll be guys, I intoned you so and Arby's saying, well actually we've been living without the internet for 10 years now. Dan, I think I told you so. I'm prepared to take that back. There's no internet health. The thread two 30 I'm all in. That's 10 years. Okay, I'm going to do my next one. So there's always this corporate spirit reality thing that people are businesses by intern at the moment. It's very much mindfulness, but I think in the future, the next health is going to be energy clearing. And by this I mean that people are going to have device free days or instead of walking meetings or standing up at your desks, you're going to have pattern pencil meetings or that's going to be device free areas in your office with your bean bags and stuff. In fact, the quiet coach on the train going to be completely full because everyone is going to be wanting to clear the air and clear themselves of the brain fry. That's my prediction, Ryan Fry. I like that. I actually think maybe the other way round so I'm only being contentious but I think that that's, you're going to be a bit of a backlash against all this non tangible social responsibility stuff. I mean beanbags and chills zones and device free days and you know that's your weekend. That's where that's for your choice. That's not corporate responsibility. If you don't want devices in your life, put them down, walk away, do your work a different way. People can't. And also the work life system that we live in means that we're working hard and we're working at weekends anyway. So by doing that with F, we'll have to incorporate mindfulness and beanbags into our every day includes work day so that we don't feel like the slaves. We really are pretty okay. I think some companies will go that way. I'm always amazed by Toto Wolf who runs the Mercedes-Benz formula one team where everybody has to do meditation every day and you think, wow, that's a really high pressure. Everybody's busy all the time kind of workplace and yet he believes so much in the power of people being able to quiet their minds down. So even in that kind of company, which has been massively successful, he's got those kind of things to work. So I think some of it will be good and I think really that will come down to the economy. Your business is doing well, then you can afford that sort of stuff. When you feel really under pressure, then everybody has the feeling, whether it's true or not, that you have to be working every minute of every day, even though it's not that active. But going back to our meeting podcast, perhaps it would be much more productive if it was just pencils and pads only. Well, I specifically never take my laptop into meetings because I believe that you don't listen because you're too busy looking at things on a one man mission to prove that my energy clearing prophecy right then, so that's, I'll run with you just for fun. It's actually because I think that when people are distracted by phone or the computer or the slide show, they're not actually listening to what people are saying and what they really do is they lock themselves what they want to say and they just wait for their opportunity and so therefore it's kind of utterly pointless to have the meeting. That's a really interesting point that we didn't bring up in the decision paralysis. You're right, people are so set on, I've got to get my point across. Sometimes when you're nervous and you need to bring your point across, you can't take in everything that's been going before you because you're focused on what you've got to say afterwards. You can relax and then listen, but you're absolutely right on that one. That's another interesting point Barb. Really sort of in the 90s believed in this idea of the third space that they would be these places where you could just go hang out with your laptop, maybe have a coffee like we work but not formalized in that you would rent it out. If you imagine somewhere like the broad Gates sensor, just cause we know where that is by Liverpool street. If that was just a set of desks with plugs, some internet, you could go to a bar or a cafe and get a coffee, but you were welcome to stay there and meet people and we would be a much better incubator of people in ideas than these incubators. And I really hoped that that was going to take off cause I don't really like offices anyway, but it hasn't, but it has. That's what everybody does. I can't believe you're saying it hasn't and they're encouraged to do so in cafes all day in the cafe. I'm talking about a non owned space. I'm not talking about sitting in Starbucks. I'm talking about that there would be public spaces where you had access to the internet and a plug. There may be businesses around the outside just so your drinks and food and so forth, but the actual space is not owned by Starbucks or Costa or, and why is that important? One of the most difficult things for especially small companies to get going is that ability to just be in a space with other companies, but similar things. We lack that synergy and the problem with we work and they put you into a cost situation before you've necessarily got fully functioning idea. They're very expensive. They're the new private members club basically. We used to go to men now, then there's clubs become, so let's move on. What's your next one? Plugs. No plugs. Yeah. Well not just plug, just no wires. Nothing. No, it was, that's amazing. That's magic. It's already there, isn't there? We've already got wireless charging. I know it's very near field so you have to be very close, but almost everything now works off Bluetooth. My bag is full of bloody wires, which really I shouldn't need in this day and age and I don't know how much you've been on bits of why the connect to other bits of wire that connects with some thing. Why can't it will just work, don't need a port on the side of my laptop. That's changed from one form of it to another form and now all my bets have to be born again. It's just annoying. Not only is it annoying, it's a massive waste of resources and I understand a business case for it, but actually you say you buy this thing, you buy it once, so buy a good one. You pay more because it's well-engineered. You won't have to buy another one in three years time because while, unless you drop it in a Lake or drive your car into a pond when you need your windup windows or wind down windows in that phase that you might lose your cable at the same, they're like monitors, why can't I just connect to the monitor? Just go, there's a monitor over that. That's its number connect. Now you've got the screen that that's it. The bandwidth now exists, especially with five G, the microwave's, the millimeter waves, and then you've got the long way of stuff for generating, you know, long distances isn't quite such high fidelity or feed, but that doesn't matter. You kind of accept that. If I'm sending a file to try to, it's going to take longer than to send it to my screen. With all this waves, the microwave's and things just going through the air from one place to the other, surely it would affect us well, the some managers to power the entire planet. Yeah, that facts. You sit in it too long. You might get sunburned, but they've tested 5g now and shown absolutely across any of the bandwidths and no LFX now we all know 20 years in time it may be we have to wear little metal band round our head. Maybe that becomes a new fashion thing that helps you to stop your brain being synchronized to the mass. I don't know. Oh, my end of the internet happens because everyone realizes it's killing them, so I might win my bet after all. You may well do. Yeah, but yeah. Okay, I've got another one. This is my last one. I predict that Silicon Valley is going to become an independent state as sort of califate and from it. It's going to rule the world, which it basically already does and their currency is going to be Bitcoin and as strengths you're going to be paved with gold and else outside is getting poorer and poorer as the internet dwindles. Wow. So you believe the internet is the one ring to bind them all? Lord of the rings straight, make seven rings, lock rings, all the different types of people and then create one ring to bind them all that is the ring or it's a bit like in the hunger games, isn't it? Where one precinct is really rich and all the others are really poor and they just play with the others. The reason I thought about it is because really the Silicon Valley companies do rule the world and they're only going to get more powerful. So I just thought in the end they'd put a wall around themselves and keep on going. So I'm going to run with that, but in a different way. Okay. China will own the internet. They will buy Facebook, they will buy Google, they will buy what we will see over the next, let's say 30 years is the change of the guard from to Eastern. Yeah. Because we've kind of run our model to its point of pointlessness. So I imagine this little fluffy, beautiful picture of Silicon Valley floating around in the clouds with its gold and things, and then you go, boom, China's gonna run the world. And that was quite austere. No, I think it might be good for China. That'd be good for China. Yeah. In the sense that it might actually be quite benevolent. I don't have this idea that the Chinese are just waiting for us to be weak to come clambering. Oh, you know, I just think people are people who once they got the feeling that they, the new America, you know, the America of the fifties you felt that it was their job to the cost of the world and to guide it in the right way. Because at the moment it's in that horrible position feeling challenged all the time. Do you see what I mean? Well, I think Chinese people are lovely and they have a lot of humility and think that they're family orientated and kind. I don't think China has created any Wars recently, so that's a good, but they have created surveillance and if you read the list of what they survey within their own country, that's the only thing that terrifies me. I would be put on a black list and not be able to get insurance because I had jaywalked or I'd had my music too loud. That happens with Zackly the same as your caliphate of Silicon Valley because they are data companies. All companies basically make their money by selling you over and over again. Facebook, Google, Apple, they're all doing the same job. So in our predictions, would we rather be run by Silicon Valley or China? Part of me that says it would be interesting to try a different model maybe from this consumerist nonsense that we live in that maybe try something else might not be better, but how will we ever know why? Other thing is that within the next 30 years, the first immortal will have been born. It's a brilliant one. Why didn't I think of that? Yes, I'm with you all the way on that one and that's a game changer that was in, in between that we would either have our first amnio, if you remember the matrix, they were all these bodies living in bottles of amniotic fluid that kept them alive and they live. Yeah. That people will start to want to retreat from reality because maybe the environment becomes almost unlivable in or maybe society becomes a thing that people don't really want to live in anymore. You basically say, well fine, I'm going to become an amnio. I will do my work, but I will do it all digitally and I can live in whatever world I wish to live in because we will have the bandwidth to do that. So they're very beginnings of how to live your entire life in it, not with sort of choose to be in choose to be out. I would say the trajectory that we're on at the moment, that is a very real possibility. I wonder as well though, whether if we became amniotic, would we bother with immortality because to be immortal we're having to really deal with the real world in how we're progressing and how we're looking after our bodies. But if you're moving into a virtual world, we might learn how to upload our brains and carry on forever, but we wouldn't worry about our body in the same way that an immortal person would. Well, maybe that is the very definition of your immortality is the fact that you can live as a conscious entity forever and ever and ever. Maybe completely bodiless. So maybe that is the doorway through immortality, removing the physical thing that dies and in some way being able to [inaudible] and allow to continue your consciousness in a way that you wouldn't be able to distinguish between yourself now and yourself in the construct. I have a smile on my face, just so much to talk about in that area, but we haven't got time. So I think that's a good place to leave people. The fact that is, we started off with these incredible nonsensical, and actually we do thought about them that they're not that far away. Most of them, it's still within our lifetimes so much they were willing to take bets on them. So that's how close they are. It's not like we're thinking of something 500 years from now. I missed the words. We're going to have to wrap it up, think about it for a full night, and we can come back and maybe attack it from a different angle. Well, we'll squeeze another one in around Christmas sometime. It's so goodbye for now. Bye for now. Hi.

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