JEREMY KEITH: Ladies and gentlemen, please give thunderous applause to Tom Scott!
(APPLAUSE) TOM SCOTT: Thank you very much. Thank you.
So in the very first talk today, Warren Ellis said that predicting the future was a mug's game.
So there's been enough history today, let's try and predict the future. (LAUGHTER)
You don't really notice change happening.
Google was incorporated 16 years ago yesterday. 1998. The easy access to information that
it ushered in changed the world. And sure, if it hadn't been Brin and Page, it would
have been someone else with a similar algorithm, but can you imagine taking someone from 1996,
never mind Victorian times, which we had earlier, just 1996 -- and showing them today? A small
little magical device in your pocket that can answer 99% of all your questions about
the world, and 99% of all your requests for media, but that reports your location to the
police constantly so they can look you up if you need to. And then, you've got any number
of instant ways of communicating with people around the world, nearly anyone in the world...
all of which is monitored all the time by shadowy government agencies.
Would they think we're in a dystopia? Would they think we're in some sort of utopia? Well,
it'd be somewhere in the middle. So let's plot a line. All the way over here, is 1998,
the founding of Google. Right here in the middle: is where we are now, 2014. Let's see
what someone from 1998 would think about today, because what I'm going to do, is go about
sixteen years into the future, into 2030. And let's say that we have roughly the same
orders-of-magnitude increase in access to information.
Let's propose some slightly fanciful technology, that is about as fanciful as Google would
have been, all the way back over there.
Let's do a talk from dConstruct 2030.
And it would start a little bit something like this:
Teenagers are becoming telepathic, privacy is dead, and we're in another tech bubble.
Welcome to 2030. Or at least, one possible 2030.
For the less-technical folks in the audience, it might be a little bit difficult to work
out what is in the heads of thirties teenagers walking down the street, earbuds in,
throat mics on, muttering to themselves constantly, emotions flashing across their face faster
than seems reasonable. And anyone who joins an Engine network right now with no prior
experience, will find it overwhelming. It takes about four or five days of constant
access before your brain starts to get used to the enormous tidal wave of data that hits it
every single second. Most people, particularly those over the age of about 30, will give up within
about four or five minutes. But there's a reason that you hear testimonials from the
people who've stuck around about slowly becoming telepathic.
What we have today is a confluence of two things. First and foremost engines.
Lin and Xiaoming's paper. Now legendary in computer science. It's difficult to remember now
just how difficult it was to get information before Ganymede came along -- in the early
days of Google, the same as in the early days of Ganymede, it wasn't intuitive, it was a
difficult process.
You forget, now, that originally you had to actually type. You had to spell things correctly.
You had to load the right data, you had to give it the right hints and ease it through
the first stages of the process. So Ganymede, and the other engines, could kind of work
out what you were asking for. It wasn't intuitive, just like typing that you just had to learn.
Okay, you don't have to learn typing any more, but once upon a time that was important.
But it was still a light-speed leap forward. Before Ganymede, if you wanted to go out with
your friends to a restaurant, and you wanted to find somewhere, you would have to open
one app to find a restaurant, and then you would open a second app to see if it was any good,
and to see if it met your dietary requirements and your budget, and then you would
open a third app to see if there was a table.
I mean, more than that, you might actually have to use an old-school web page,
if anyone remembers those.
Well, you could try and wing it, of course, plenty of people did -- but if you wing it,
you were likely to be disappointed. And no-one's disappointed any more. Ganymede, and later,
the other engines' ability to take petabytes of images, text, video, anything and to infer
truths, to infer patterns, to infer faces and dialogue and anything from them, in real time --
that was a jump on the scale of the mass printing press, on the scale of Google.
No-one believed, in the mid-nineties, that a search engine could realistically pull in
results from the entire web and send them out in real time. Not realistically.
Couldn't be done.
In the mid-tens, nobody thought that a search engine could realistically answer queries
like "where should we eat tonight"; not pull in the meaning of "we" and "eat"
and work out what you're actually asking. And yet, here we are.
Ganymede allowed that orders-of-magnitude increase in access to information. Lin and Xiaoming
had the perfect combination of philanthropy and business acumen: they released
the engine algorithm as open source -- that's what sparked the "engine explosion",
that's why throat mics actually started working... -- but they kept their then-incredible exabyte
of structured data, of inferences, of patterns, to themselves and their company.
But that, on its own, doesn't explain the muttering teenagers. The second part of what
we have today is... is more a social change, really.
One of the key points about engines is that the more open you are, the more information
you give them, then the better they are. That's why those of us who remember privacy
don't really get as much out of them: I mean, yes, we keep throat mics on at work, we take them
off when we get home, but the idea of allowing any third party access to everything we say,
everyone we meet, everything we do, everywhere we are, is abhorrent.
The idea that we should do that is just wrong.
I remember clearing my cookies every day.
Ask your parents. (LAUGHTER)
Now, most of us, we suck it up, we deal with it, because the results are worth it, the
payoff that we get from being open is worth what we perceive as a cost. But we still take
our throat mics off when we get home. Hell, I still use a keyboard every now and again
to write code; some of us still have to, even as typing becomes a more and more niche skill.
The only way to stay connected to everyone in your social circle, right now, no matter
which engine you use, no matter which particular company runs yours, the only way to
stay connected to everyone is to be entirely open. That's the only way that the engines know
which of your thoughts to send to other people, and which should come back.
Do you remember the Facebook News Feed, and later the Twitter News Feed?
You remember the fuss that caused? (LAUGHTER)
You remember how it prioritised information that was more important to you?
I'm offline right now, at a conference, but as soon as I walk off and put my earbud back in,
my engine will start catching me up at 800 words a minute, faster
than anyone could possibly speak but still slow enough for people to understand, for
the brain to understand, and it will start catching me up just on the important things,
just on the things that matter to me.
That's what those muttering teenagers are doing: as they walk down the street, they
are talking to a thousand people at a time, mediated not by an artificial intelligence,
just by algorithms. They talk to the world, and the world listens back, they are taking
part in, I don't know, a giant 20th century chat room? 18th century coffee shop? --
It's something much much bigger than the sum of its parts, certainly.
I was telling worst-case-scenario scare stories about flashmobs back in the tens,
and -- we hadn't seen the start of it.
That's the crucial part of engines. You give, they give back.
All of those engines talk to each other --
okay, no, the companies that control the engines have data-sharing agreements between
each other, because it's not a good idea to anthropomorphise these things. If it needs to,
the little engine on my phone, that I carry in my pocket, it can access the downlinks
from the military drones hovering over Brighton, circling at 30,000 feet.
Okay, the outsourced, privatised military drones hovering over Brighton at 30,000 feet.
Maybe it needs to guide me past an obstruction, maybe, more likely, it wants to magically
route me towards a friend, or maybe it wants to magically route me away from a cluster
of people with ASBOs, or whatever ASBOs are called now. Or maybe it just wants to answer
my questions about finding a pub where I can see the sunset, and no-one's asked that question yet.
In exchange for me knowing that, right now, then other engines, from the government
and police, can always see what I am, who I am, what I'm doing, and what I'm going to be up to.
They know everything about me. But I also know everything about them.
Those of us who weren't able to make that sacrifice... don't get to use engines.
That's not a choice, the same way not having a smartphone wasn’t really an option,
neither is not having an engine connection.
I mentioned people with ASBOs, by the way: we’ve seen a lot of press about those excluded
by the algorithms. Cory Doctorow, who’s up next, talked about Whuffie in his book
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. A magical currency based on reputation score.
Now he wrote about neural implants and brain backups, and essentially an automated system
that worked out what other people thought of you and used that as an actual currency.
Bruce Sterling, we heard this referenced earlier, Maneki Neko.
It was used as an example of plausible deniability earlier,
but it was artificial intelligence that was mediating that, a network that actively
attacked people who were trying to bring it down, and made their lives very difficult.
What we have is so much more mundane than either of those options, so much less explicit.
Your engine notices the time that it takes you to respond to things, notices the reactions
you have to people, notices who you avoid, and your biases start to get taken on by the engine.
And it was designed by engineers in Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun, so,
as Fox News so delicately put it, and I apologise for the accent,
“there’s some folks it just don’t work so well on”.
Do you remember the racist webcam, did anyone see that, from 2009? It was an HP laptop with
an automatic tracking camera, and it wouldn’t follow you unless – and I’m quoting here
– you had enough “difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek".
Yeah. It’s that, but worse. Because all the implicit associations, all the hidden biases,
that study after study after study after study have shown are in everyone's heads?
They get picked up by engines.
The fact that college professors are more likely to respond to inquiries from men? Picked
Picked up by the engines.
It’s not clear enough to quantify, it’s not clear enough to defend against.
It's not one thing that you can pull out of the enormous web of connections and patterns
that the engines pick up, and you should have seen the fury when one CEO said well,
that's the way it should be, engines should reflect the biases of the people who own them.
And then what about the people on the other end of the scale? The people who want to be
popular, or don't want to be popular. We were starting to see sponsored lives, back in 2014.
Just the very start of it. The people who were -- yeah, I hated the word back then --
the people who were vlogging. The people who were talking into their webcam once a day and uploading
their lives and their thoughts and their experiences. And kids, teenagers, kids younger than that,
were flocking to these people. And old media, television in particular couldn't understand
it, why would you want to just watch someone talk into a webcam. And they were trying to
ask that even as they were updating their antiquated reality-show formats to become
ever more and more artificial. Saturday night entertainment, 2014, BBC1:
celebrities doing acrobatics.
No wonder the kids flocked off to YouTube and its successors.
And no wonder the advertisers went with them.
Streaming lifelogs, of course, had been tried for years, back in 1996 was arguably the first one,
the first real-time feed, that was pre-Google. But the trouble was, with the exception of
some obsessives, and folks who were happy to watch people play video games 24 hours a day,
you still need an editor. No-one has time to watch lots of people's entire lives,
so you still needed an editor to package up the highlights, tell a story, work out the
details, and put it together for consumption. Well, engines can do that. Powered by measuring
attention responses, constant, automated A-B testing, and all its successors.
They can do that. They did it.
Almost everyone born after 2010 is now providing a lifelog for their friends, and if they're
good at it, if they're popular, they're providing it for an audience beyond that as well.
No wonder they're the ones getting sponsorship and product placement -- and for advertisers, there are
no limits on how sneakily or subtly you can start putting product placement into there.
The regulation hasn't caught up with it yet at all. And it’s notable that there are people, folks in the news,
folks who really don't want to be there, they have that audience
even though they really don't want it.
There used to be that concept of the A-list celebrity and the Z-list celebrity, of course,
the idea that Hollywood and movies and television and gossip magazines, they were the arbiters
of who was a celebrity and who the public cared about. That was the idea, right?
You appear in a movie, you appear on television, you are in. You are part of that celebrity.
That's not how it works now. Celebrity works like the music industry used to.
Sure, everyone knows that a folk-rock-sea-shanty band is not going to make the top of the
Radio 1 playlist -- they’re friends of mine, they played Glastonbury, they're really good --
but that's fine, because they know that a folk-rock-sea-shanty band's not going to be there,
they're not aiming for that.
They're aiming for the portion of their audience that likes folk-rock-sea-shanty bands.
They're aspiring to be the greatest folk-rock-sea-shanty band they can be.
That's what they're aiming for. That's what their audience wants.
And as the music industry always was, they can talk directly to those people,
they can get the fans, they can target a niche.
That's how celebrity works now. You can target a niche. It doesn't matter, you may never be
a Hollywood A-list celebrity, but it doesn't matter. You may be more interested in...
it's always video games -- some form of video game, some specific form. You can aspire to be the
celebrity player of that particular genre and you will find an audience, and they will
know where you are, and the advertisers will follow.
Of course, we've seen the dangers of this, haven't we?
Cardinal Richelieu's quote, supposed quote,
"Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world,
"and I will find something in them to hang him."
Which has never been more true. We've seen modern engine technology
used by oppressive governments just as often as we've seen it used to take them down: yes,
knowing the identity of every protester in a mob is devastating knowledge, but it will
not stop that mob storming the gates of your palace
If they're already there, it's a little too late.
We've also seen what a mob of angry, bitter keyboard vigilantes will do to someone
that's offended them when they really do have access to every aspect of your life.
Hiding from abusers, from stalkers, is significantly more difficult than it ever was.
There is no off button, no block button for face recognition technology,
despite the EU's ham-fisted attempt to force one into law.
Politicians. Politicans! Politicans have found that not only are their current lives open
to detailed analysis, but their previous ones are too: Facebook survived long enough to
get its data hooked into engines, just long enough. And of course, your privacy settings
don't matter that much when every tourist photo you've ever appeared in is now available
for download as well. It odesn't matter whetehr you tagged that as "remove me from this photo"
because that doesn't really apply any more.
When all of your users have blanket access and just give it over?
Well, your life, from the advent of smartphones onwards, is perfectly searchable.
(LAUGHTER)
I can’t even claim I was young, I was, like, mid-twenties at that point.
And even if, somehow, you manage to come through all that squeaky clean, without a stain on
your character, without a bad picture anywhere, can you claim that for everyone
you were ever associated with? Everyone you've ever appeared next to?
Can you say for every word you ever
anonymously wrote on every web forum anywhere, that all of those were fine?
When IP address logs, which are in the engines,
and prose analysis, which is really easy to do,
can trace it back to you with 95% accuracy?
We're at panopticon now. We're there. At least, for everyone who lives in a city, or uses
anything other than the postal service, and that's 85% of the UK population and rising.
But... have you seen the crime statistics?
Pretty much every type of crime is down in the last ten years.
That's not a statistical blip, it's not under-reporting,
the percentage of crimes going unreported has gone down too.
And yes, there's a methodology for that, you can look it up.
I know correlation is not causation,
I know that the two don't go together, but if you go out into the street and just
ask people, people who grew up post-Google, if they would trade everything that the last 16,
the last 32 years has given them for some nebulous concept of privacy? You are going
to wait a long time before you find someone who thinks that's a good idea.
And if you talk to the kids who grew up post-Engines, then privacy's this strange thing that their
grandparents believe in. Why wouldn't you share exactly what you're doing?
That's just the right thing to do.
Imagine, for a minute, that you're sitting back here in 2014, the day before Lin and Xiaoming
released that paper. Nothing seems to have changed for a little while.
The last big revolution, back in 2014? The last big revolution was Twitter,
and that was eight years old. It's ancient history.
There was just enough complacency, just enough thought of stability
as they came out of a recession, that they'd gone and got themselves into another bubble.
Apps this time, smartphone apps. Previously, back then, it was the dot-com bubble, but
now, apps. There were companies investing billions into little toys on phones, they'd
They'd never get their money back. They knew, somewhere they must have known
they were never going to get their money back, but it meant their competitors
weren't getting that little toy on the phone.
And maybe, maybe they'd make enough money back with advertising or whatever idea they had
that they could start to make something out of it. That's exactly what's going on now.
Engines, the engine I use, the engine those muttering teenagers use -- has just
been bought for twenty billion dollars. It'll last, what, a couple of years? The investors
are banking they can make that money back in that time, they won't make their money back,
just like last time, and just like the time before that.
But my point is not to complain about people being people and making some poor investment choices.
And my point is not to mourn my old-fashioned ideas of privacy: because even back in 2014,
that ship was sailing and it would have taken an incredible effort to stop it.
Privacy was already dead, it's just that not everyone agreed with it yet.
And my point is not to be someone
from the previous generation complaining about muttering kids and their damned distractions.
Of course they're distracted, they're part of what may be the greatest thing ever to
happen to this planet.
My point is this: the dot-com crash, all the way back then, didn't kill dot-coms.
The app crash did not kill apps. Not the concept.
It killed a lot of the individual ones, but we're still using them.
And the engine crash won't kill engines. But -- you're sitting here,
and you think the world is always going to be like this. Everyone does. I do.
We've always had engines, the same time we've always had smartphones, back in 2014.
If I think back to my time in university, I had a smartphone then. I just remember -- no, I didn't.
I had an old brick of a Nokia, because that's when I went to university.
But my brain's casually edited in that, of course, we always had smartphones.
But here's the thing: it might not have been engines. It might have been anything.
It might have been nanotech, or biotech, or some weird thing I can't think of even now.
Predictions of the future never ever turn out to be true.
But that next thing, whatever it is, it is right around the corner.
It always is, no matter what year it is.
Whatever that next thing is will change the world, and it will arrive so fast,
faster than anyone can think. But it won't be shocking. It won't be startling.
It won't plunge us into a horrible dystopia or elevate us to a glorious, technicolour
future world, the same way that our world, right now, isn't really either of those things.
Whatever comes next will change our lives, and we have the choice to shape how it'll
change our lives, but it will change them. And those lives will, by and large, get a
little bit better, just like they usually do. So whatever that next thing is, and whatever
year it actually turns out to be, I hope I'm with you to see it.
My name's Tom Scott. Enjoy the rest of the show.
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