so how do we survive technological change this question has been at the heart of my lectures this year and I know that you have other questions about the future foremost among them when are The Killer Robots taking over and where is the flying car I was promised will we ever be able to see beyond the current observable universe oh it's much worse than that the observable universe is shrinking if you want to know what are my odds of winning the lottery you come straight to probability because probability is all about How likely or not events are to happen I think the chance of there being an Undiscovered second species very like humans out there in the world today is pretty slender however and these are the pictures if you haven't seen them I mean New York was orange the air was orange they said one day out in that air was like smoking a pack of cigarettes it had the same effect on the lungs as smoking a number of cigarettes so people would never smoked in their life were suddenly going to suffer some of the same health effects any further questions is a brand new podcast from Gresham College a place where we ask our speakers all of your questions that went unanswered following their lecture guests have included Ronald Hutton Robin May Chris lintot Sarah Hart and Maggie snowling any further questions all episodes are available wherever you listen to your podast [Music] fors we are told that it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future this is a a witty aphorism that's variously attributed to Albert Einstein Danish physicist Neils bour and several others and it's an expression of uncertainty it implies that predictions must be 100% accurate in order to be useful and that failure to anticipate the unexpected makes any attempt to consider the future futile in short the world is a volatile and uncertain place where Global shocks are common but we can chart scientific and technological progress and better than ever before phenomena such as the weather are now more intelligible and predictable thanks to Information Technology increasingly we also have access to databases of information on technologies that are in development so with specialist input we can evaluate or at least speculate upon the prospects of WEA and perhaps even when they may come into mainstream usage in a world where it can come to Market so rapidly we need to be able to anticipate how it could be used and misused when I was working in the police I found that cyber criminals made use of most new tech pretty much as soon as it became available so it was a logical step to try and anticipate what they would do next to scan the Horizon for technology that was being developed I began to analyze patents I reviewed published academic papers and I followed media coverage to ascertain what people were working on and as I did it quickly became clear to me that I doesn't develop in a vacuum it interacts with and impacts upon its environment and on other Technologies so it wasn't going to be enough simply to consider in isolation the future of social media or the future of artificial intelligence I'd need to build a model in which I could describe those interactions and those impact ta I would need to build scenarios for possible Futures and in order to do that I would need to enter the Mysterious World of Futures thinking Futures thinking is a discipline that seeks to apply those formalized methodologies to how we consider inevitable change some academic researchers locate its origins in ritual attempts to for see coming events such as divination and astrology but the modern discipline grew in the mid 20th century out of the need to anticipate changes in The Wider world that could impact public policy and business operations with the Cold War as its backdrop it's no coincidence that future thinking as a planning tool was first popular in offshoots of military departments like the research development the Rand Corporation and in multinational companies like shell the futurists of the 60s were understandably attracted to the year 2000 as a Time Horizon in 1967 Herman khn's and Anthony J vena's best-selling book presented a framework for speculation on the next 33 years there were even board games sent entered around this kind of forecasting here's one it's called future and it was produced in 1966 by the Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation in the US I picked this one up um on eBay actually in the states when I was over there players are asked to place bets in the billions of dollars on the probability of 60 possibilities of the next 20 years and these are very much of their time because they were selected by futurists at the Rand Corporation there is more than a little US military group think going on here but let's pick out a few examples so imagine by 1986 drugs to control personality are widely accepted and used that's given a probability of 60% short-term weather forecasting is highly reliable that's also 60% and if you remember the great storm of 1987 you may think we didn't quite get there wide practical uses are made of lasers in industry and Medicine 80% household robots are widely used and faximile newspapers are printed at home 40% racial barriers are effectively eliminated 40% a staggered Work Week replaces Monday through Friday standard 20% and not to be forgotten an economic and Military Alliance exists between the US and the USSR that's also quite low um 3D TV and brain computer interfaces get a look in and the Chance element of the game is governed by throwing an icosa hedrin a ided die there are also news events that serve as wild cards some of which are slightly wackier than others um they include UFO lands no one aboard new pills make time travel possible car floats over magnetic Highway and new election will be determined by national computer so it puts a futuristic spin on strategy games like risk and diplomacy and as the creators themselves acknowledge it's not exactly fun for all the family we might describe it now as serious gaming designed partly as a training aid to encourage employees to think about the future of their organizations but it also has a crowdsourcing element it asked players to send in their answers about what they thought the world would be like in 1986 my paper form was never filled in so if anyone does have a time machine that I can borrow I'm willing to go 50/50 on any winnings although I should point out that my Recollections of 1986 are rather Niche and I'm not sure that knowledge of the UK pop charts Commodore computer games and mopet related trivia are exactly what the Kaiser Corporation was looking for now games like these blend scientific method and Imagination much like the best science fiction they take us away from forecasts that are linear projections on individual events and Technologies to scenarios in which different factors and developments converge and impact upon each other a player of this game was expected to reason for example that should one event occur entitled more than 120 million cars on the road this might increase the probability of another event that cars would be banned from cities in hindsight we know that the one doesn't necessarily result in the other nevertheless in the last 60 years governments International organizations and corporations have become more interested in building these kinds of scenarios that anticipate change and it's a practice that involves imagining a world in which certain features are plausibly present then considering their impact on society and how they might interact it has a number of advantages one of which is that it can uncover issues we might have missed if we'd considered those Technologies in our isolation it's also dare I say more fun for the people doing it and it's more engaging for the audience which is really important if we want someone to do something useful with it but it wouldn't be robust enough if it were just the product of my imagination the scientific basis lies in systematic review of information on Technologies in development and in validation of those time frames in the scenarios by experts in a project I worked on a few years ago I wanted to know whether it was reasonable to expect that by 2030 we would print our own food and prescription drugs at home so I asked industry experts and was Guided by their consensus this is otherwise known as the dely technique and it features prominently in some well-known Tech Futures projects such as the Pew research centers future of the internet but there is of course um a parallel evolution in which fiction writers turn their attention to Future and alternative worlds from the fantasy writers of ancient Greece and Rome through the development of science fiction at the hands of jeul van and HG wells in the 19th and early 20th centuries to a plethora of future oriented novels movies TV shows in the late 20th and early 21st centuries we have a rich history of the future in the popular imagination and we have to some degree all become Futures thinkers the technology press is now full of predictions that science fiction writers got right including the use of debit cards which first make an appearance in Edward Bellamy's hugely popular 1888 novel looking backwards and video chat first described in EM forers 1909 Nolla the machine stops more often than not the architects of our Tech future are themselves science fiction fans electronic tablets are rumored to have been inspired by props in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey in Belgium a national telecoms provider assumed the name of the Rogue artificial intelligence in The Terminator franchise Skynet in the US the manufacturers of a meal replacement drink called it soilent apparently in homage to the 1973 movie soilent Green about a cannibalistic dystopia I'm not sure what their sales were like Tesla's cyber truck is reported to have been inspired by the hover cars in Blade Runner and of course the word metaverse currently used to describe immersive online environments has been lifted directly from Neil Stevenson's novel snow crash so it's clear that this Collective imagination is directly shaping the development of technology and much like science fiction writers when we build scenarios we can bring them to Life by considering experience from different perspectives for a a project that I led in 2012 at the European police agency we imagined it in 2020 from the perspective of the fictional government of the Republic of South Sylvania which was a relatively small middle- inome European state but we also created a citizen consumer called Kino and two businesses cesis systems a manufacturer with quite a complex supply chain and an online service provider called Lucha and if you're wondering where that name laucha came from it was in fact the only fruit-based name that hadn't already been trademarked by a big tech company for a more recent project we created the fictional city state of New San joban now this one is at The Cutting Edge of tech adoption it's California meets Singapore um a little bit like Sam frano in Disney's Big Hero 6 and in the accompanying video series that was produced by the cyber security company Tren micro it even had its own breakfast news show now technology has always been Central to the scenarios envisaged by science fiction writers and by Futures thinkers alike someone like HG Wells had a foot in both of those camps and at the turn of the 20th century his book anticipations opened with a forecast on Locomotion and the economic social environmental and Military impacts of the mechanical Revolution Alvin Toffler in his best-selling 1970 book on the digital Revolution Future Shock identified technology as that great growling engine of change and disputably a major force behind the accelerative thrust it's quite Macho isn't it and as soon as we consider which information Technologies are likely to be present to some degree in 2030 based on the current signals that we have now it's immediately evident that they're also likely to accelerate each other the seamless connectivity promised by 5G 6 G and low earth orbit satellites will enable the proliferation of semi-autonomous and perhaps even autonomous vehicles Edge Computing will enable the massive internet of things to operate without centralized control artificial intelligence with greater Automation and less human involvement as we saw in a previous lecture devices connected in this way include brain computer interfaces and Robotics the future of extended reality or metaverses depends to some extent on that 5G and 6G connectivity but also on blockchainbased Technologies such as non-fungible tokens nfts to establish the ownership of virtual property and generative AI to populate Virtual Worlds with synthetic individuals now the difficult part here is the timeline companies and governments don't just want to know what to plan for they also want to know when it's coming this is big business for Market analysts and some of the larger International consultancies but distinguishing dead SS from overblown ideas can be tricky particularly when big Tech is so prone to Hype its own products hype is so ingrained in the culture that market analysts Gartner have developed a tool to help organizations see through it and they call it the hype cycle for emerging Technologies much hyped Technologies can fall by the wayside even when they're subject to considerable investment and intensive development they may never survive the ENT from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment it sounds like something from Lord of the Rings doesn't it the trough of disillusionment I have a sticker on my laptop that commemorates the first successful flight in 2016 of Aquilla Aquilla was meta's experimental solar powered drone and the idea was that these drones would provide internet access in remote parts of the world they were an incredible feat of Aeronautical Engineering and I was lucky enough to see one in real life albeit not Airborne like this one calling it a drone almost does it something of a disservice it had a wingspan bigger than a Boeing 737 and it was designed to fly at altitudes between 60,000 and 990,000 ft so above commercial air traffic but just 2 years after the first flight meta announced that its research facility in Bridgewater in Somerset in fact would close in 2021 Google's balloon-based rival project Lon suffered the same fate despite being successfully deployed to restore internet access after natural disasters developments in rival technology such as spacex's starlink satellite based infrastructure and continued expansion of undersea cables and aerial fiber projects appear to have proven more practical and more scalable so far at least then we have the hyperloop one originally proposed by Elon Musk in 2013 and envisaged as a supersonic Inter City rail system that would transport passengers in capsules on a cushion of air in low pressure tubes thereby cutting the journey time between Los Angeles and San Francisco to just 35 minutes this project had backing from Richard Branson um there had been a prototype constructed in Nevada and there had been successful tests with human passengers but nevertheless the company was shut down in 20 23 other hyperloop projects do remain in development around the world but the withdrawal of that highest profile developer has understandably been interpreted as evidence that the technology itself is unfeasible but some other Technologies can be remarkably persistent in their efforts to break through to the mainstream virtual reality was first touted as the next big thing in the 1990s I remember watching it being showcased in an edition of the BBC TV program Tomorrow's World in 1991 as archive media coverage of virtuality and other contemporary Hardware records the experience was very tethered rather uncomfortable pretty heavy and suffered from very low frame rates but fast forward 30 years and we're starting to see stories of lightweight wireless headsets like the Apple Vision Pro ruining intimate relationships because they are so absorbing as we explored in my metaverse lecture last year we humans have always sought immersive experience whether that's in panoramic paintings Cinema 3D viewers or video games the basic desire has remained constant but it's taken time for the it to catch up current VR applications now promise better graphics lower latency less nausea and a more social experience and that's because we have better internet connectivity than we did in the 1990s even so it's still unclear whether VR will take off this time around or whether it will experience yet another winter developments outside it can accelerate or hinder it during the covid pandemic lockdowns and travel bans resulted in a huge increase in the use of video calling tools like zoom and teams their popularity didn't diminish once the lockdowns Ended as many companies realized they could cut travel and Facilities costs by keeping workers at home and many workers were reluctant to return to the office fulltime concern for the climate is also beginning to have an impact on people's willingness to travel long distances and we might naturally expect that this will accelerate further adoption of digital Technologies but the dynamic between it and the climate appears to be more complex than that shifting our work and our social meetings to Virtual Worlds May reduce consumption of fossil fuels for transport but additional processing requires additional power and many more servers that need to be cooled big tech companies have traditionally favored colder climates for their massive data centers but so too have cry cryptocurrency miners Iceland provides our current signal of of how this tension might evolve in the future in 2018 it became the first country in the world to expend more energy on cryptocurrency mining than on household usage now there are specific circumstances to that including a population of under 400,000 people and the highest share of renewable energy in any national budget but given the expected increase in demand worldwide it's reasonable I think to expect that this tension will present itself in other countries in the future when we look to the future of a particular technology we therefore need to consider its potential interactions with at least all of these aspects of society communic ation money Logistics and transport government and diplomacy food trade healthc care and Medicine energy outer space work and play climate and environment arts and education manufacturing and population and demographics I'm sure I've left some out when we look ahead say to 2070 it's true that uncertainty and unpredictable ability inevitably increase but if we take AI as an example we can see that it's already having an impact in many different fields across all Industries AI is changing how we work in some specialisms such as copywriting generative AI large language models are replacing human employees in the field of healthc care there are documented concerns about racial bias in algorithms commonly used in clinical Care at the same time machine learning is revolutionizing drug Discovery and cancer Imaging as Richard side Bottom's excellent recent gram lecture demonstrated for us outcomes for some of us appear to be improving thanks to AI we now need to make sure that everyone can benefit the UK National Grid is expecting power usage by data centers to Surge sixfold in the next 10 years and total Demand on the grid to double by 2050 due in part to Future growth in AI but also Quantum Computing the timeline for Quantum is particularly uncertain and that's one of the reasons why I have avoided it until now in my lecture series but already researchers are concerned about its potential to disrupt some of the Technologies on which we currently rely where classical computing power has to date grown exponentially by powers of two as described in Mo's law Quantum computing power according to Dowling nevan's law in is projected to be doubly exponential it grows by the powers of powers of two millions of times faster than classical Computing the bits of classical Computing can only be one or zero but Quantum bits qits can be one zero or in a state of superposition where they have some probability of being one and some probability of being zero cubits can therefore hold more information than bits and this promises a huge increase in computing power for a range of problems now in my field of cyber security we are looking out for Q day or Y2 q and that's the date when a quantum computer is developed that can break most modern cryptographic standards how we secure our messages and our data now if you remember the hype around the millennium bug or Y2K you may be tempted to take all of this with a rather large pinch of salt but in 2018 the US national acmy of Sciences engineering and Medicine estimated that a quantum computer with 2,300 cubits could crack encryption using 1,20 four bits in under a day Quantum computing power is increasing all the time in October 20123 atom Computing announced the world's first quantum computer to exceed 1,000 cubits nonprofit organization the cloud security Alliance currently expects us to reach y2q in 20130 and they've built a handy Doomsday Clock online so you can count down in real time if you so wish there are reports that national security agencies and criminals alike are looking forward to this date with great relish even that they have been harvesting vast amounts of encrypted data now with a view to decrypting it later and Bad actors won't need to own a quantum computer just as they've been able to misuse cloud computing they may be able in future to access Quantum Computing as a service using a commercial provider so to counter the impact of this researchers all over the world have been working on new Quantum secure communication and encryption methods and in February of this year Apple announced that it would apply its own postquantum cryptographic protocol pq3 to the iMessage service that millions billions of us use so what then of the flying cars that were so prominent in science fiction and in all those predictions of the last century the hover cars of Philip K Dix do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep and the movie adaptation Blade Runner which look that was predicted to happen by 1992 and 2019 respectively or what about the family friendlier model used by the Jetson I used to jokingly point to flying cars as an example of how technological development doesn't always meet the expectations of our Collective imagination and yet just recently we've seen a flurry of activity in precisely this space in March of this year a Chinese company purchased the rights to manufacture the air car originally developed in Europe and capable of transforming from a car into an aircraft in just a couple of minutes there is even a manufacturer called Jetson whose tagline is that everyone is a pilot and the UK government has launched its future of flight action plan which predicts that the first pilotless flying taxi will take off in 2030 I would be a fool to try to say with any kind of certainty whether that timeline is achievable but the prospect is growing that in the not too distant future we may be able to ask Dude where's my flying car without irony considering the future of it in this nonlinear imaginative way also has a curious bonus it sheds light on current trends that we may have missed because we are in their midst we're living them minute by minute in the course of the last two years lectures several themes have emerged and recurred they extend into the future but they also yield insights into how we and the world around us are changing right now and one of these is the nature of identity who who or what can have one and who we consider ourselves to be the days when we had one means of proving one identity are long gone I am already all of these people online please listen to my folk music 10 years ago activists pointed out that the policy of social media companies to demand that people authenticate their accounts with government issued documents in many cases imposed on trans people identities with which they no longer identified at the same time we already have synthetic influences artificial personalities such as fashion models who exist in data but not at all in the offline World virtual worlds are are full of these entities and as we saw in a previous lecture billions of connected things like the Street Lamp outside my house our domestic appliances and all our devices have unique identifiers our understanding of authenticity is changing too tools such as face swap apps and deep fake technology make it harder for us to trust what we see with our own eyes equally simply identifying something as synthetic no longer seems to be sufficient for us to distrust it computer generated effects are the norm in movies and the game industry where it's also become commonplace for actors to license their likenesses to Studios who use computer programs to animate them dead actors are regularly brought back to life by this process add to that the fact that many of us think nothing of interacting with chatbots rather than human customer service agents and that there are burgeoning if rather volatile markets in both digital currencies and non-fungible tokens for digital artworks that don't exist offline and it's clear that developments in it challenge our historic appreciation of authenticity and the preference for organic over synthetic in that evaluation on the subject of chatbots if you watched my lecture on sex and the internet you'll remember my ill-fated and rather short-lived relationship with my AI boyfriend who I christened burnard we now have so-called death bot which enable grieving relatives to create avatars for deceased loved ones with whom they can text and audio chat and these present clear ethical concerns specifically about the Dignity of the deceased and how these Bots May hinder the grieving process they also have the potential to be used to create a simulation of a relationship with an expart part even when that X is still alive persistence was a key theme of my previous lecture on data protection we are now humans who persist in data data on us persists unless we take the trouble to demand its removal as large language models and machine learning continue to improve increasingly lifelike digital versions of us could exist without our knowledge and persist without our consent we can take as our current signal for that the fact that there are are already dead people on social media between 10 million and 30 million on Facebook alone according to estimates naturally that number is growing all the time and researchers at the oxf internet institutes have projected that by 2070 dead people could outnumber the living and that of course presumes that Facebook itself will persist until 2070 which is by no means certain just as our digital selves are becoming more persistent and more complex so too our digital experiences are becoming more embodied immersive technology like virtual reality speak to our need to feel like we are really there physically and emotionally present in digital spaces further developments in haptic technology promise to heighten our physical sensation and in my lecture this year on brain computer interfaces we fa the possibility of human augmentation through it that is embedded in our tissue the distinction between the physical and digital Realms is therefore increasingly blurred if and it's a big if this trend continues along the same trajectory for the next 50 years we could well be superhuman in a number of different senses and there's even a possibility that our human code will solve the pressing problem of where to store even greater amounts of data generated by us our devices and the tools we use in the emerging discipline of molecular Information Systems universities and tech companies are exploring the potential for large amounts of data to be stored in DNA thereby integrating silicon and biomolecular systems it's equally evident that humans are increasingly dependent on it this may strike us as individuals when we Doom scroll social media glued to what everyone else is up to or chase the approval of peers with our own content when Facebook goes down some people on this planet call the emergency services I'm not joking they do it's also discernable at a process level when organizations hit by cyber attacks that disable their it systems have to resort to using pen and paper and when thousands of students receive unfairly downgraded exam results due to overreliance on an algorithm and it's apparent at the level of critical infrastructure when we hear for instance of hundreds of power outages on smart motorways and conversely successful cyber attacks on energy grids and Healthcare providers in light of that current Trend towards greater Automation and use of machine learning these signals would seem to indicate that resilience will be a key concern in the coming years both of the systems to which we Outsource an Ever larger number of human processes and of us as humans should these systems go down and this in turn takes us back to my my very first gram lecture way back in September 2022 it was on the governance of it who owns it who is responsible for it and who gets to make the rules the Cold War superpowers envisioned by the 20th century Futures thinkers are the same but different so far the US and China dominate Ai and Quantum computing Russia is to some extent relegated to disruptive and irritating miscreant private companies like SpaceX arguably have as much power as any state and depending on your perspective us and Chinese social media companies are National Security threats delete as appropriate at the risk of being less than charitable to some very hardworking people at the United Nations so far it has taken over 30 years for the world's Nations not to reach a legally binding agreement on how States should behave in cyberspace and from the vantage point of 2024 the likelihood that we will be able to govern emerging information Technologies by consensus seems pretty low I really hope I am proved wrong on that one I am prepared to concede that prediction May well be difficult but I would also maintain that considering how the future might play out has always been a worthwhile Endeavor one of my favorite predictions comes from someone who used to frequent gram College on its original site in Bishop's gate this is the frontis piece to a discourse concerning a new world and another planet in two books by John Wilkins founding fellow of the Royal Society Bishop of Chester and brother-in-law sir Oliver Cromwell and in this book he discusses the possibility that our moon may be inhabited by people he calls selenites he writes I dare not myself affirm anything of these selenites because I know not any ground whereon to build any probable opinion but I think that future ages will discover more and our posterity perhaps May invent some means for our better acquaintance with these inhabitants it is the method of Providence not presently to show us all but to lead us along from the knowledge of one thing to another for me this is a br Brant prediction that combines scientific method with imagination and it's a great illustration of how one can arguably be right and wrong at the same time however we look at it there is no denying that we have an exciting time ahead of us thanks to it human knowledge and capacity are likely to expand beyond our expectations and I hope the professor of rhetoric will forgive me for encroaching on her territory for a moment um because I can't not mention the announcement last week that AI enabled scanning technology had successfully read a charred rolled up Papyrus detailing Plato's final resting place and his last words it's being heralded as a landmark discovery that could spark a second Renaissance similar tools for deciphering ancient languages are assessed to be reshaping the humanities in a way similar to the invention of the microscope and the telescope a second Renaissance is something I can definitely buy into and it's perhaps worth noting that as a precursor to the Royal Society gram college has played its own part in scientific discovery so I don't think it's unreasonable for me to predict that in 50 years time one of my successors will be standing here looking ahead to it in the 22nd century that is of course assuming that the Killer Robots don't get us first thank you very [Applause] much so what do I do legisl changes that need to be implemented in order to prepare Society for the next 50 years of tech or even perhaps sooner than that and the changes that they may bring there's so many so I'm just going to take one example um we've talked a little bit in the lectures about the governance of AI um and one of the things that is starting to happen is regulation around artificial intelligence in terms of hard legislation really it's the European Union I that's that's leading the fry on this so we have the EU AI act that's coming into Force um but what we've also got is um gosh a kind of soft power um movement to get countries together and big tech companies together um to at least a agree some principles now there are organizations like the oecd the organization for economic cooperation and development that already have principles about about what good AI looks like what responsible use of AI looks like how it should be governed um but that's just advisory really um so back in November uh the UK government organized an AI safety Summit AT Bletchley Park where they decoded um the Enigma machine um and they managed to get China to attend but also Elon Musk so it was quite a a a mixed bag of people but I think it was a a great example a great reflection really of where the power lies these days um that you need to have China at the table if you're going to agree Global principles on things now there's been a lot of debate since about whether those that agreement has any kind of teeth and they were just an agreement on principles it's another thing to implement that and make sure that everybody in in reality operationally is using the those safety measures that they're not stealing each other's research and development and intellectual property which I'm afraid to say does happen all right we can take perhaps a question yeah from the audience here just wait for the mic um lovely um talk you given thank you um very fascinating range of topics um the thing that concerned me was the year 2030 and quantum computers does that mean that everybody's password everybody's bank accounts potentially could become unsafe um I think potentially is the operative word there um so it we do have a bit of a problem with this timeline because it it's one thing saying that there's a computer that can do it um but as you might have seen that big picture is of a cryostat that that's what's required to cool a quantum computer so that it can function they're not very stable right now um you know they they're getting more and more powerful but they're not very stable it's not it's not what you might call a plug andplay technology just yet um so we could have y2q um or Q day where that's possible that's not the same as that technology being in the hands of people who then want to decrypt all of our messages but one of the things that I like about what security researchers and and companies like apple also signal the messaging Foundation they've done this as well is that they've looked ahead and said because of you use the word potential and that's the right word I think because of the potential we therefore need to put better security protocols in place because once it happens it could suddenly happen very quickly and I and I I think that's the the key here is people are anticipating that change you'll be relieved to hear that financial institutions are are very very keen on having Quantum secure cryptographic standards and being able to use those as well there's another side to this as well um which is that there are research institutes and um there is a a program here in the city of London as well looking at how you can use quantum Computing to secure things to secure internets to have a Quantum Internet that's just more secure so it's I don't like to use the phrase arms race but this is what we find about technology is that you know we develop something then we find some vulnerabilities in it or we see the potential for a vulnerability so then we have to harden those targets etc etc etc and all the while of course we've got the bad guys who are looking for those vulnerabilities and what they can exploit actually there's a good thought experiment um do you think that Tech Innovation is is infinite gosh right so there was there was a really interesting discussion although there are some really interesting discussions at the moment um around what makes Tech Innovation Plateau um and so keeping that theme of you know the 1960s in the Cold War let's think about the Space Race you know we had a massive burgeoning of innovation in a couple of decades in the middle of the last century and then we haven't it's started to tail off a little bit hasn't it it's started to stagnate a little bit um so I think there's more to be done to understand what happened there with space technology and whether that will be repeated in it my I I always have a a slight err of caution around this because I've seen um Tech hype and Tech Winters we've seen a couple of rounds of AI being the next big thing I mean now feels different I have to say just because what we haven't seen before was everybody using it everybody using chat GPT and the thing about chat GPT and large language models is that if we all use it we're making it better really quickly because it's being trained on the data that we're all inputting we're kind of we're like a massive crowdsourcing experiment for it to you know gen generatively get better and better really quickly um I think sometimes when the Technologies converge that I showed for 2030 they converge in ways that we hadn't planned and we hadn't expected so in my wildest imaginings of what technology might enable another technology it's like things like DNA storage that's not being talked about a lot but given that we have a problem that we need to solve which is we're going to run out of storage in the world what are we going to do um if DNA storage suddenly becomes the next big thing and becomes widely available that could accelerate all sorts of things that we saw on that chart in a way that I couldn't have anticipated so something just takes off captures everybody's imagination it has utility exactly the right moment and I think when we look back at VR you know I remember watching that addition of Tomorrow's World and thinking this is amazing these people look like they're really there in that room with these massive headsets on wired into this massive base station um but it didn't take off because we didn't have quite the utility and we didn't have the infrastructure sometimes it's that moment in time it's the intersection that means we have a massive acceleration in Innovation but I think we need to do more work on what happens when it falls flat thank you um you touched a bit on China and America and Russia I was wondering about the impact on geopolitics of this it Innovation and the impact of innovation on geopolitics yes I'm writing about this at the moment actually so watch this space um it it's been really interesting to watch the interaction between the two so yes we have we're still to some extent sorry to say it we're still to some extent in the Cold War as far as technology is concerned um because um if we're thinking about some of the biggest players here and I was very disparaging of Russia but you know Russia are you know some of the world's leading cyber criminals but they're not necessarily the world's leading Tech developers and and that's where I think we see that IM balance that the hard negotiations now are being done by us and China um who at the same time portray each other as National Security threats so we've seen recently um President Biden signing into law the ban on Tik Tock in the US unless it's sold to a US company in the next nine months um equally WhatsApp has been banned in China recently so this idea that publicly available technologies that all the rest of us use are are seen as threats in those countries I think is is is a really interesting one um so let's think about the perspectives here um China is very interested in information control much like Russia Russia is very interested in information control controlling what their populations see um so a tool like WhatsApp which has encrypted Communications that are designed to be private that are designed not to be intercepted by anybody whether it's criminals or the governments is therefore a threat because the Chinese government can no longer see what's going on on their citizens phones the other side is that um because the Chinese government has passed a law that says that they have access to the data of any company operating in China That's perceived as a threat by the US and to a certain extent the UK and the European Union because that suggests that the Chinese government can read everybody's Tik Tok accounts and so it's the same kind of standoff with this with similar preoccupations but for different reasons and what I see is the the kind of the tech Wars you can call it techn nationalism or digital sovereignty there lots of different ways of calling it is somehow overlaid on all of the trade negotiations and particularly if we're looking at the UK that you know know post brexit has China as one of its largest trading partners puts the UK in quite a strange situation um where it's caught between us and China and you know we've also got to think about our national security and our national cyber security I mean that's there's so many things I could say about that but I'm conscious that we're going to run out of time but that it's a brilliant question thank you well someone is actually asking that's that could be a good question actually for our professor of rhetoric working on Democracy but someone is asking actually about um a voting a potential of having an online Global voting system in which everyone on Earth could vote on important Collective issues would that be would that is that is that something that would be possible I mean geopolitically as you said it would be a brilliant way of solving the stalemate that we currently have around the UN cyber crime treaty right if we could all vote and say this is what we want this we we don't want that wording put in there you know let's let's have a pile on and do this ourselves no um so with anything Global and we see this even in terms of Internet governance we always have that follow-on question of okay who owns that who gets to run it we could put the United Nations in charge of it but bless them they've got a lot on their plate right now um and you know it's it how do we keep that secure that's what I always think about next um Independence I think is a really really difficult one in that situation um but yes maybe this is actually it touches very nicely on um retrofuturism you know the History of Science Fiction um lots of Science Fiction writers and some of the TV shows that I grew up with certainly in the movies I grew up with predicted we'd have a world government didn't they by a certain point in time I don't know I don't feel very hopeful about the world government but maybe if the Martians show up we'll all be able to pull together um so we talked a little bit about the sort of vigilance of like sort of international on the international scene but I guess on the other side as individuals how can we be vigilant against sort of really powerful and potentially exploitative big tech companies yes um so firstly watch my other lectures um because the last one was all about data protection and I and I went through you know collecting our Health Data where that might be shared and it is I mean there's there's no getting away from the fact that that's an effort vigilance is a brilliant word for it because you know we need to be aware of what's being collected on us in order to be able to exercise those rights if we don't know then we can't enforce for ourselves um equally in terms of what's coming um one of the things that I've struggled with is when I I run these Futures projects or I build these scenarios I did the first one in 2012 actually it was fairly manageable for one person to read the tech news about what was in development and I had a small team of people who went through all the scientific abstracts when I came to do the one with new San joban back in 2020 um I went into the world intellectual property officers uh database of patents there were 8.4 million patents with the phrase artificial intelligence in it now some of those might be hyping it a little bit it might not have been AI at all but I suddenly realized that this wasn't something that humans could do anymore so there is a sense in which by embracing the technology and I know I've said this as a researcher rather than an individual citizen but get to grips with some of this stuff if you haven't already because it's only when you use something like chat GPT or something like a you know a generative image generator like Dary that you can see what it's doing that you can kind of get inside it you don't have to be technical to do that it's language you know that's all we're doing is putting language in there and it's responding to our language and you can kind of learn um what it's doing um there's also um I've done a number of lectures on cyber security and Online safety and things like that um and it would be remiss of me not to mention the um gram cyber shorts that we produced last year a couple two or three black and white videos very much in keep calm and carryon style um about the three main things that you can do to protect yourself online in relation to passwords checking out um who emails are really from and keeping your software up to date that kind of thing so if you're here for the first time and you're thinking the future looks scary what about now don't worry there are very basic things you can do to protect yourselves well on there's VAR positive notes thank you very much Professor Ben for this wonderful lecture thank you
2024-06-04