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Oct. 8, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:07
Edition 224 - Future Tech

The benefits and threats of our technological future – with Gadget Detective FevziTurkalp...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Coming to you on what may well turn out to be the last day of this phony summer that we've had.
I say phony summer because it should really be autumn, but we've had a few days of beautiful golden sunshine in London and other parts of the United Kingdom, including Scotland.
I know down in the south of France, they've had some terrible storms, which I think is a precursor, an indicator of what is to come this winter.
But today, I've been out cycling.
I've looked at the happy, smiling faces of people, you know, dads playing with their kids and mums with their babies.
And it's been a beautiful day.
And almost there's this unspoken feeling that it was the last day of summer today.
But it was lovely.
And let's hope that the winter is kind.
And let's hope the winter is short, because you know I don't enjoy it.
Thank you very much indeed to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, who with me at the moment is planning the future of this show.
More details about that coming soon.
Adam is at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, gets the show out to you and also maintains and curates the website.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Had some very good ones in.
I'm going to do a big roundup of shout outs probably in the next edition.
And if you have, wherever you are in the world, lots of people from America, lots of people from the UK and every country in the world now getting involved with this show and connecting with it.
It's a lovely feeling to have created something that has that kind of impact.
And thank you.
You know, this is very much a one-to-one communication.
It's just you and me and Adam facilitating everything.
And that is the best kind of communication.
I'm not going to go on about big media and how big media lies to you and how big media laughs at you, pretending to serve you.
And a lot of the time, it really doesn't.
But that's the truth of it.
I've seen it from the inside.
And now I'm joining the growing groundswell of people who are changing the way things are done.
You're changing the way you listen.
I'm changing the way programs are put together and got out.
And I think we're on the verge of something new.
This is almost like the early days of radio in the 1920s in America and the UK.
We are feeling our way.
And 2015 has been a very significant year.
As they say, watch this space.
Just one thing to say before we get to the guest on this edition, and we're going to do a special on technology this time round with a man called Fevzi Turkalp.
More about Fevzi in a moment.
He's based here in London.
But I'll tell you more about this in just a second.
I've been asked by a number of people over the last two or three months if I can recommend either psychics or healers or mediums.
Now, there's a very good reason why I can't do that.
The biggest reason really why I shouldn't and couldn't and won't is that I think some of these people do have gifts.
But some of those gifts manifest themselves with different people in different ways.
In other words, you could go to somebody and believe me, I have over the years, and it won't work.
They might tell you stuff that just doesn't compute.
They might do something that simply doesn't work.
Now, that doesn't mean I haven't had experiences that I cannot explain over these years, and I haven't met some people who I believe have a gift, because I have.
But I wouldn't want to recommend anybody in case it doesn't work for you, because I wouldn't want that on my conscience, that you'd spent money or wasted your time or been misled.
And that's why I don't do it.
And I do hope you understand.
And I kind of feel in a way that if you seek, you will find.
Quite often that's been the case in my life.
When I've looked for something, it's come to me, eventually.
Usually not easily, let me tell you.
But they do say to me that that's the way the best things in life transpire.
Maybe that's so.
Maybe it isn't.
It's something that I think about an awful lot.
This road that I've woven over the years has been both long and winding.
And certainly in my life and my career particularly, I've met some wonderful people, some people who've really believed in me and supported me and helped me along the way.
And I've met a few who've been determined to stop me, either through whatever motivations they might have.
And it's been disappointing.
Because I'm, you know, I think I'm a simple soul from Liverpool.
And as we say in the north of England, I take as I find.
But anyway, I'll tell the whole story about all of that.
One of these days, some people have been saying you should write that book.
Well, I've lived in every part of the UK.
I've been around the world and met some amazing people.
One of these days, I might well tell all the stories.
Now, on this edition of the show, we have a man called Fevzi Turkowp.
He is known in Britain as the Gadget Detective.
He is an expert on technology, a regular on radio stations like LBC and BBC Radio 5 live across the nation.
I've done many radio pieces with Fevzi, and I wanted to try and replicate and take forward something that I did on the radio show many years ago.
I did a technology special.
We looked at future tech and the impact of technology on all our lives.
The last time I did this, I did it with a man in America, an old friend of mine, Larry Maggid, who you will know as the CBS technology correspondent.
I think he's now known as CNET's man.
I haven't spoken with Larry for a while, but I must reconnect with him.
Larry did this about 10 years ago on my radio show, and I wanted to take this forward now, because if you think of the leaps and bounds that technology has made in this last 10 years, you know, 10 years ago, some of us were still using dial-up internet connections.
These days, well, technology is used for everything.
You know, I am now dependent on my smartphone.
When I've been out and about during the beautiful summer and late summer weather recently, I've taken so many photographs with the smartphone because it's so convenient.
You know, it's a good smartphone, wasn't an expensive one, but it's got a nice camera with a good lens.
And I just upload the pictures, send them back to myself, and I record with it, and I check my email on the smartphone, and that piece of technology has, again, transformed my life.
Now, technology is a good thing in many, many, many ways.
You and I couldn't talk like this if it wasn't for technology.
The mainstream media organizations, the ones who quite frequently don't serve you and serve themselves and are in it for the money and nothing else, they would have the monopoly On everything, and they would be able to silence voices who they felt needed to be silenced.
These days, more and more of us are doing it ourselves.
I can name names some people who've been on radio and are now doing their own thing.
All of these efforts are coming into fruition this year, and will even more so next year.
That is the exciting part of technology.
The downsides are, well, we have a bigger capacity to cause people harm than ever.
Privacy, privacy, however you want to say it, is not quite what it used to be.
Sometimes that can be a good thing because it means people doing misdeeds are found out.
But sometimes I fear it means that every move we make is watched and monitored by somebody somewhere.
And that's not conspiracy theory talk or alarmism.
You know, I'm not in the Alex Jones marketplace yet.
I don't think I ever will be.
But it is just, I think, unfortunately, a fact.
But how far has it gone?
I think those are some of the questions that we need to ask.
Also, the rise of things like artificial intelligence.
How much will machines do for us in the future?
All of these questions, I think it is now at this point in our lives, worth speculating about.
If you want to get in touch with the show, by the way, if you want to send me an email, a comment about the show, or make a donation to it, go to the website theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv and follow the link, and you can do that right there.
And thank you very much if you have been one of the people who've made a donation to the show recently.
Thank you very much for taking the time, the trouble, the effort, and spending the money to do it.
And thank you for your faith in me.
And that goes to you.
If you've been in contact with me recently, remember I love to hear your stories of where you are and how you use this show.
You know, we are a family in many, many ways.
I don't want that to sound cheesy or theatrical, but it's just a fact.
That is what we've created.
And we've done that together.
And yeah, I'm a bit proud of that because it's something that wouldn't have been possible 15 or 20 years ago.
And here we are breaking new ground.
But before I get too carried away with that, let's get on to a man who's sitting at the moment in another part of London, about 15 miles away from me, about 25 kilometers or so away from here.
Fevzi Turkhalp, the man they know in the UK and will shortly know around the world as the Gadget Detective.
Fevzi, thank you very much for coming on here.
Pleasure.
Fevzi, listen, you are very well known in the United Kingdom.
I don't think quite so well known around the world, although I want to change that situation.
So for our listeners in America, Canada, places like that, just talk to me briefly about you.
Okay, well, my name is Fevzi Turkaup.
I'm known here as a gadget detective.
And I guess my specialization is to broadcast about technology, both consumer items, but also the future.
But to try and do it in a way, I hope, that is in plain English and understandable by all.
So that's what I do.
I have a website, which is gadgetdetective.com, where we give free technology help.
And in the spirit of Gadget Detective, you don't even have to register to use it.
You can just saunter onto the free tech advice and ask for the help there.
And there are some general discussion forums there as well for matters technological.
Now, what you do sounds simple and sounds basic, but there are lots of people doing technology and trying to explain technology in this country.
And they forget that most of us are not at the same place and on the same page that they're at.
Yeah, well, it's like a lot of specialisms, Howard.
There is a lot of jargon associated with any specialism, be it medicine or engineering or science or parts of technology.
But that's really just shorthand for people who understand it.
So it's really just a question of just, I think, taking a step back and just making sure that you're speaking in plain English and not gibberish.
Easy to say, hard to do.
All right.
I want to start, if I may, before we get into stuff like artificial intelligence and robotics and that sort of thing, I want to start with some general points about the internet and just to clear up a couple of things that I think are current.
First of all is a phrase that I keep hearing being used by people on air, both in America and in this country.
This phrase is called the Internet of Things.
And I think, but I don't know, that that is about more and more things, more and more domestic appliances, more and more things that we use that are not computers being connected to the Internet.
Am I right?
Yeah, exactly.
So the Internet of Things is this phrase that's grown up to describe all the domestic appliances that we may own, be they the thermostat in your home, the fridge, the toaster, your car, your automobile, anything that you use in your home that is an electrical device that now increasingly has the ability to be connected to the internet,
normally with a Wi-Fi network in the same way that your home computer or your smartphone or tablet may connect.
And the idea is that it gives you new functionality, that that device can be communicated with, you can send it messages.
I saw the other day there is now an internet kettle where you can actually use your smartphone to turn on the kettle.
Some of these uses are going to be more practical than others.
And don't forget also that your car is increasingly a computer that just happens to be in control of a vehicle because now increasingly the car can control the steering because we get cars that can parallel park for you or cars that will stop you drifting from one lane to another.
The computer has access to the braking mechanism so that if it has one of those services where it stops you getting too close to the car in front.
Now, those sorts of devices can be connected to the internet and that is an opportunity and it's also a risk.
The risk is twofold that the device can be hacked and controlled and we don't want someone taking control of a car or even the thermostat in your house or, God forbid, the locks on your front door if they are also internet connected.
So there is this danger because whilst computer companies are quite well versed now at building Security into the design of their products from the inception.
Manufacturers of fridges and toasters and door locks, they're not used to that.
And so the first and second generation of these products, in many cases, have got some weaknesses.
So the danger is that, first of all, you can have the device hacked, and that could be really dangerous because someone could, even by just turning on a light switch on and off enough times and quickly enough, they could cause a fire, for example.
The other danger is if all these devices in your home are sitting on the same Wi-Fi network as your home computer, then your toaster could be your Achilles heel and it may be a means by which someone can get in and actually hack your computer, steal your credit card information, your bank account data, even perpetrate identity theft against you because the people who made your toaster or whatever didn't know how to secure it properly.
So we have to look at all of these devices as being adjuncts to modern living, things that will benefit us in many ways.
But also each of them, unless they've been properly designed, and you can only assume that at the beginning some of them won't be, each of those is a gateway.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if you think about the early versions of Microsoft Windows, Windows 95 and even XP, the technology of security was sort of bolted on after they were designed because people didn't really understand that security threats were on the increase.
Whereas something like Windows 10, certainly, is built with security at its heart.
That's not to say it can't be subverted, but it's intrinsically more secure.
The other thing that you can do, if you are minded to go down this route at the moment, is have two Wi-Fi networks in your home, one for your Internet of Things, for everything except things that carry data like your laptop and tablet and so forth, and a separate one for your data devices, as I say, such as laptops, PCs, tablets, smartphones, and they can all sit on a separate Wi-Fi network.
So that gives you a degree of resilience and safety then.
And I can hear people now screaming, why do I have to have two connections?
If the kettle that is connected to the internet is so good or the heating system, lighting system connected to the internet is so good, I shouldn't have to do this.
But I guess all of this will come out in the wash, won't it?
In due course, we'll get devices that avoid these things.
Yeah, because the other thing that will happen is that one or two standards will come to the fore.
So if, for example, it may be Apple's HomeKit standard, if they prevail in the standards war that's just started now, then some of those, to comply with some of those standards, I hope that there'll be layers of security built into the standard so that they'll have to be secure.
But bear in mind that anything that attaches to the internet is ultimately not 100% secure and there is always a risk.
With security, Howard, it is always a balance between convenience on the one hand and security on the other.
So the more convenient something is, the less secure it is.
So for example, it would be nice, wouldn't it, for us not to have to use any sort of password or even fingerprint or iris recognition to get into our computers or in our tablets.
So that's more convenient because you can just come along and use it.
The downside is it's not secure.
The more secure the password, the longer the password, the more intricate the password, the less convenient it is and the harder it is to remember.
So it's always a balance and it's amazing in how many areas that there's always this balance between security on the one hand and convenience on the other.
But so many times we've seen recently, certainly in this year and last year, things which we thought by rights would be unhackable, unbreakable, and we've seen the impossible happen.
We've seen them hacked.
There was a story around yesterday, not sure if you saw it, about Patreon.
This is the funding site.
I know Patreon, yeah.
Now, Patreon's, apparently some of their data was stolen, but the data that was stolen was encrypted.
So Patreon at the moment are telling the world, it's okay.
Yes, we did have some things stolen from us, but what was taken is so well encrypted that it's safe.
It's okay.
Yeah, and that can be the case.
But there are standards of encryption.
Some standards are stronger than other.
There is encryption, then there's something called hashing.
There's even something called salting.
So there's all these different things that websites can and should do.
I mean, in terms of tips, I guess you should assume that any website that you give your information to will at some point be hacked.
More websites are hacked than you and I hear about because particularly financial institutions who try to protect their reputations and give the impression that they are bastions of security are kicking people out of their mainframe computers all the time.
It's a constant battle between people who find their way in and the systems people whose job it is to kick them back out again.
And sometimes people have their websites hacked and they don't even know it.
And that's really, because sometimes you need to have almost sort of a forensic scan of your computer system before you realize that there's someone being in there.
It's a bit like having someone break into your home, but they pick the lock rather than smash the window.
And it's not always obvious that you've had people in there until you notice, oh, that's in a slightly different place.
So if you start with the assumption that websites are not secure, so that when you give them your information, first of all, consider what information you give them.
Can you, for example, give them some inaccurate information?
I know this is against the terms of service of all the websites, but if it is not a website where you're actually buying something, do they really need your real name, your real name or your correct date of birth?
Well, true that, Fezi, there are a couple of services, and whether it breaches their terms or not, I think about security.
So there are a couple of services that have accepted the fact that I'm 114 years of age.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you're looking good on it, if I may say, Howard.
I mean, don't look a day over 90.
I tried the vitalins, you know.
But so, first of all, you can look at that information.
Secondly, never use the same password on more than one website, because if you do, the combination of your email address and the password, if you use it on more than one, so let's say website A is hacked, your home shopping website where you do most of your grocery shopping online.
If you've used the same password, then all they will do is when they hack that website and then they steal the information of your username and password, then if you've used the same on your internet banking or your credit card, they don't have to know which other websites you use.
They will try the main ones.
They'll try the main banks.
They'll try the main online shopping sites.
They'll try the same main credit cards and they can get in.
So the way you get around this is you use a piece of software called a password manager.
And there are many different ones of these, but there are ones, for example, LastPass, L-A-S-T-P-A-S-S, or OnePassword.
That's number one, followed by the word password or one word.
Those are two of the better ones.
What they do is they will generate a secure, unguessable, unmemorable password for each website that you visit.
And then they will store them in a single location controlled by a single master password, which is your vault.
So this is the key to the vault.
But haven't you just got to hope that that master password isn't hacked?
I mean, what happens if that master password is hacked?
Then you're giving the badge guys the key to your home, your life.
There is a solution to that.
You use what's called second factor authentication.
So the first factor is the password.
That's something you know.
The second factor can be something that you own.
So it can be, you can get these little keys.
They look like little USB thumb drives.
And what happens is that you have to plug one of those into the computer.
And sometimes you have to press it with your finger.
And therefore, the password on its own will not be enough to unlock the vault.
You will also need to have that physical key.
So someone would have to take the key off you as well as that.
There's other forms of second factor authentication as well.
Fingerprint scanners, retinal scanners.
The new version of the Microsoft Surface 4, which is, I think, going to be announced any day now, looks like it's going to have a retinal scanner.
So we're really heading into Star Trek science fiction and so forth.
If you have two-factor authentication, that's a pretty good way of securing your master password.
Once you've done that, then it will automatically auto-fill the password for every website that you visit without you having to remember it or key it in.
But at the same time, it will make sure that each password is unguessable and unique to that website.
So by doing that, you achieve that goal of having a different password for every website.
The other thing that you can do is then use what's called disposable email addresses.
So instead of putting in your real email address into each of these websites, what you do is you use a service that will generate for you a disposable email address, which then forwards anything it receives to your real underlying email address.
So your real underlying email address will never be published.
And the disposable one has built into the email address the name of the website.
So let's say you start getting spam from a particular email address that you've used to register with your favorite home shopping site.
Because the email address will contain the name of that site, you know exactly whose servers have been hacked before they tell you.
You can just kill that particular email address if you like, set up a new one.
But then that's really secure because then even if that website is hacked, they've got a password which you only use on that website.
And they've got an email address which you only use on that website.
So when they go scanning all the other popular websites to see if you've used either of those elsewhere, they're not going to get anywhere.
The worst that will happen is they'll get into just that one website.
All of this is a race, isn't it, between the clever bad guys and the clever good guys.
You know, sometime ago, maybe five years ago, I heard, and I've only heard one person say this, and sadly I can't remember who it was, but I know it was an American who said, ultimately, the internet will be brought to its knees and it will be brought to its knees because of the battle between hacking and those who are hacked will be lost.
There will be no way to stop the bad guys.
They will have reached the limit of their ingenuity.
In other words, they will have ultimate power and the system, the net, will become untenable.
Do you buy that?
Well, I think it's interesting to note that we're told that Israel has disconnected from any form of network some of its key computer systems.
So they're standalone computer systems.
There's no network.
There's no internet.
It's inconvenient but secure.
And they're going a bit old school at this.
And unfortunately, there is no perfect security for every system that you think is in principle secure.
Some clever person will find a way around it.
And it is cat and mouse.
All you can do is hope that you are not such an attractive target to someone that it's a bit, again, it's like securing your home.
Can you ever make your home 100% secure against someone trying to break in?
No, you can't.
There's always a way into your home.
Can you make it hard enough so that they'll go somewhere else rather than you?
Yes, you can.
If you present a hard enough target for them to crack, they will look elsewhere unless it's something like a government or you are a particular target.
And then you will be the target of what's called a spear phishing attack, where they will target you as an individual.
They may send you a particular email address that's designed to infect your computer.
They may ring you up and pretend to be someone they're not and try and elicit information from you over the phone.
You know, there's these many techniques which are designed to hack a particular individual.
But that individual Has to be a high-value target.
It's not going to be someone like me.
It's going to be someone that a state player or a large player has got a particular interest in.
Do you believe, Fevzi, that at some point a power grid or a transportation system or something really important will be brought down by hackers?
Yes, inevitable.
Because we're increasingly seeing, and we will see this in the future, in the years and the decades to come, we will see smart buildings and we will see smart cities that are controlled not by providers of municipal services, but by a smart artificially intelligent computer system that will make sure everything runs efficiently until it is hacked.
And this is the future of war.
The future of war is not only, you know, robot soldiers with AI tanks and all the rest of that, although that's all coming.
The future of war is cyber attacks.
So, you know, if you can switch off the lights, if you can make sure that the people are cold, that they don't have water, you know, I mean, terrorists can attack a nation or a city in that way, and so can state players.
And we're seeing a lot of cyber attacks between nations now.
It's increasing, and I think it will only increase because as we put more and more of our vital systems in the hands of connected computers, so the target we present to our opponents increases and becomes more tempting.
Do you believe that the likes of IS, who have weaponry, conventional weaponry, and we've seen them use it, do you believe that they also have clever young people who are perhaps leaving countries like this one, taking their cyber skills with them and working on exactly that?
Well, we've already seen that IS are particularly adept at using things like social media networks, you know, things like Facebook and so forth.
And that takes a certain amount of savvy.
And, you know, I think if we characterize, you know, groups as being, you know, nutty savages or whatever, we do that at our own peril.
We should not underestimate any group because if there are thousands of followers, within those thousands will be at least a small number of people who have these capabilities.
They will represent all shades.
And if you look at some of the people who've left this country and other countries, you know, they're not fools.
They're intelligent people.
They're intelligent people who maybe have been subverted.
Who knows what motivation they have.
But aside from the motivation, there are some clever people among them.
And, you know, my fear, and clearly from what you said, your fear, is that they will be working on something like this.
And if you target, if you use those skills on something like, I don't know, plucking an example out of thin air, a nuclear power system or air traffic control, what kind of chaos can you cause?
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that's really the challenge for us because as a species, we are in some ways a little bit too clever for our own good, because there's never been a technology that we had the ability to exploit that we haven't.
You know, anything that human beings have invented, we've used, you know, right up to nuclear weapons.
It's not in our nature to say, you know what, we could invent this really whiz-bang clever thing, but we won't because it might not be wise.
It's not in our nature.
And even if, you know, 999 of us say, no, that's not wise, there'll be some idiot who develops that technology or misuses the technology that's already there.
And it is a problem.
And I think ultimately, you know, we are going to go through a process of some things getting unplugged.
There'll have to be some secure systems will have to be unplugged.
And even if that means we start passing notes on pieces of paper again, then so be it, because certain things have to be secure.
And do you think that governments and the people who run power networks and those sorts of key individuals are planning for this already?
They are.
I mean, they do, you know, tests and so forth to see how they would cope with all sorts of attacks.
So, you know, you sometimes see it in the streets of major cities that they're testing how their first responders would deal with a dirty bomb or some other form of major incident.
In the same way, they do stress test their systems, but that's not a perfect process.
There are things that will pass a normal stress test, but if someone's a little bit clever and thinks around a problem in a slightly unconventional way, they will still find a way in.
And it's interesting to note that pretty much all governments now are reaching into the hacker community to try and get some expertise to turn these people from black hats to white hats.
It's rather like if you ever saw that movie, Catch Me If You Can with Leo DiCaprio, where that guy, he was, you know, passed himself off as an airline pilot and all sorts of things.
And in the end, he was hired, wasn't he, by the FBI?
Yeah.
And that, you know, and in the world of commerce, a lot of the people who make their living out of security do it by hacking major corporations and leaving them messages saying, if you want to know how to protect yourself against this attack, here's what I charge for my time.
And a lot of companies will secretly reach out to these people and pay them.
Before we get on to artificial intelligence, robotics and stuff like this, I have one more thing to ask you about the internet generally, and that is about surveillance.
People toss around the sentence very glibly.
I heard it today.
I don't know who said it on radio in London, but somebody said it on radio in London, that everything that we do online is monitored and surveyed and noted by somebody.
It doesn't matter how unimportant we are.
We could be Howard Hughes in London doing a podcast, not very important person, even me doing stuff, you doing stuff, Fevsi, everybody are constantly tracked.
Is that so?
And should we worry about that?
Yes, it is so.
And yes, if we believe that privacy is important, then we should worry about that, I think.
You know, some people say, well, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.
I don't agree with that.
There isn't such a thing As privacy, because without privacy, there can be no free speech.
If you and I want to have a discussion off-air, I shouldn't have to worry about who else is listening to that discussion.
You know, if I criticize a government or a major corporation or what have you, it is the problem.
Now, traditionally, our defense has been this: that there are more of us than there are of them.
In other words, there are so many more conversations in progress that there have never been enough people to monitor them.
And therefore, security forces and other players have always had to choose who they monitor quite carefully.
Because, you know, even in the days of the peak of the Stasi in Eastern Europe, they used to say, you know, maybe up to one in three people of the population was the other two.
But even then, that wasn't, they didn't have enough people.
What's changed now is that we have computer systems that can not only listen to the words being spoken and monitor the images that we're Skyping to each other and so forth, but they have increasingly enough intelligence to work out whether those conversations are of interest and need to be directed to a human being.
Now, at the moment, that may be as simple as combinations of keywords that trigger the attention of the authorities.
Well, they used to say that if you said the word kilo, there I've gone and said it, that would automatically alert a server somewhere.
Well, I don't know what the keywords are, but you can imagine what some of them could be, and certainly if some of them are used in combination.
But as those systems become more and more intelligent, you know, there's less and less need for people to have to listen to any of that stuff.
And, you know, these people can be reported on.
So I think we should worry because now we have artificial intelligence systems that can listen to conversations and start to understand what those conversations are about.
As we travel around, it's increasingly hard to have any privacy.
In the UK, we have automatic number plate recognition systems.
As you drive around, your number plate is recognized on your car.
They can see where you go.
When you travel on the London subway, the underground system, or on the buses, you're using a prepaid, what we call an oyster card.
Again, that can track you.
There is increasingly little privacy.
And of course, on the internet, people can see which websites that you've been to.
It's very hard to imagine that there's going to be the concept of privacy in the future.
And I think also in the street as a pedestrian, it used to be that we just had CCTV cameras, but there had to be a person, again, watching those CCTV cameras to see if there was anything going on.
Now they have AI systems that can start to recognize problem situations even before they occur.
So the intelligent system attached to the camera can start to see if people are starting to congregate in a way that the state would find worrying before any problems kick off.
They have face recognition systems.
So as you walk down the street, it's not just, oh, there's a picture of you.
There's a picture of you.
Oh, this is Howard Hughes who lives at this address.
And they link it to all forms of other information.
London is an example.
I mean, we are told we're one of the most surveilled people in the world.
And I have seen the figure that we are caught on upwards of 300 cameras a day on average as we go about our daily business.
And that is scary, but it's bad enough when those are dumb cameras, when those are intelligent cameras who can work out who you are and then have access to the fact that they know where you've traveled from because they've picked you up at various other locations by various means.
What privacy do you have when these cameras are combined with shotgun microphones that can pick up your conversations 50 or more meters away?
It is scary.
And there are other technologies that, I mean, there is an expression, an Englishman's home is his castle.
And it used to be that you could shut your door and at least then, you know, you had some privacy.
But not only are your movements on the internet tracked or capable of being tracked, but in the future, it depends if you look far enough ahead, there will be nanobots, you know, these little, if you like, little microscopic robots.
And they will not just be used as, you know, beneficial things that will go into your bloodstream and clear out your clogged arteries and all of that sort of thing, although all of that will come.
They will also form clouds that will blow around in the air.
Yeah.
And they will blow into your home.
You will breathe them in.
They will be everywhere.
And when that happens, you can kiss goodbye to privacy because that cloud is like a sensor cloud.
The little nanobots will be able in the future to provide information about everything inside your home from the conversations to what's going on, everything.
Now, that's a little way down the road, but it is ultimately a challenge to the whole concept of privacy.
And it is hard to see that without some form of kickback from the population in general and some understanding of what is at stake, it's hard to imagine that we're not going to end up with a situation where the concept of privacy is a thing of the past.
We're going to talk about this again, I'm sure, Febzi, and it is terribly worrying, but every word you say is absolutely true.
It's just a question of how long.
Okay, you very kindly sent me a guide sheet with a list of topics that we've agreed on.
And, you know, there are some big American talk shows where with every guest, the producer of the show will send the guest or the guest's representative a request for a list of questions.
And I've always hated that.
I always like to have a conversation.
But you sent me a brilliant guide sheet.
So we'll work to it now.
Don't feel you have to.
I just wanted to give you an idea of what I thought some of the issues surrounding these technologies.
It's so good that this is the first time on The Unexplained that I've ever used anything like this, but it's brilliant.
I couldn't better this.
Artificial intelligence.
Question one: Will machines ever become intelligent?
Well, they are, aren't they?
Well, it's interesting because human beings seem to have a desire to be the only really intelligent beings on the planet, and therefore they keep shifting the definition of what is intelligent.
So, for example, there was a time when people said, well, if a computer can beat a human at chess, then it is intelligent.
And of course, computers beat humans at chess some decades ago.
Then they said, ah, if it can beat the grandmaster at chess, then it's intelligent.
So that happened, I think, in the late 1990s when an IBM computer beat Kasparov.
And then so we started to say, yes, but that's a very narrow definition.
A truly intelligent system will be able to adapt to different things.
So, for example, the best chess-playing robot or AI system in the world will be completely useless at playing drafts or checkers or a card game because it doesn't know how.
But now we're seeing systems that can learn.
So they're not just following algorithms that we have pre-programmed into them, but they're starting to have the capability to adapt to situations that weren't hard programmed into them to say, if you encounter this, then do that.
It's more similar to the way in which we solve problems.
But does that mean, Febzi, then, that they will build on that and eventually become cleverer than us?
Because if they do become cleverer than us, then they'll end up taking over, won't they?
Yeah, I think inevitably they'll be cleverer than us because the rate at which they progress is so much faster than the rate at which we evolve.
So we, depending on your point of view, but if you follow evolutionary thinking, we have evolved over some millions of years.
And a small difference in our DNA, we have, what is it, 98% the same DNA as a chimp, but that extra 2% and that and an opposable thumb enabled us to make great strides forwards.
But those strides didn't take place in years, tens of years, hundreds or even thousands of years, but it took much longer for us to evolve.
Now, compare and contrast that to the rate at which computer systems are evolving.
So when Intel or another CPU processor manufacturer, when they design the new version of the processor that's going to go in your computer, those designs contain sometimes billions of transistors, too many for a human being to draw and to design into a block.
So they use computers to design the next generation.
Of course we do, because computers are very good at that sort of detailed kind of work and good at doing it without making too many mistakes, unlike human beings.
So with every generation of processor that is designed, we're using the current generation to design it.
And next year, we'll be using what is then the current year's computer.
So the computers are getting faster and smarter.
The software that's being used is getting better.
And therefore, the rate at which processors can improve will increase exponentially.
Now, it's okay if they're smarter then, but if they realize that they're smarter and then decide to get together and unite with each other, then they become, as you have said before and rightly say, an existential threat to the human race.
Stephen Hawking, Professor Stephen Hawking said that.
Elon Musk said that.
And now I'm saying that.
It sounds like if they become self-aware machines and band together, then we're finished, aren't we?
Potentially, yes.
So there's a concept called the singularity, which was popularized by someone called Ray Kurzweil, who is many things.
Actually, he's a polymath, but one of the things he is, he's a futurologist.
He predicts how technology will change in the future.
And what he's saying is if you imagine an exponential curve, which is shallow at the beginning and then goes up almost vertically at one point, it will just curve upwards and towards infinity in a very short time.
And the reason for that is as I was trying to explain that if you're using computers to create the next generation, which by the way is essentially a form of reproduction if computers are creating computers, but every generation is smarter than the last.
And instead of taking a year, the next generation takes six months and then the one after takes three months and the one after takes a month and then maybe a week and then a day and then an hour and then a second.
At some point, that technology will accelerate away from us and our ability to understand it will drop to zero because although we put into place the foundations, it will evolve in evolutionary terms on a scale of seconds instead of millions of years.
And its capabilities will accelerate away from us at such a pace that it will be as ants are to us in intellectual terms.
And just as the ant will have no real ability to understand the human, the human will have no real ability to understand the sentient being that it spawned.
So the only future that we have then in that kind of world is a world where we merge with the machines, we merge with the devices, we have them within us, and we don't try and beat them, we join them.
We become cyborgs.
So I think that there's a curve here.
There's going to be a window between now and the singularity when these machines are really useful because they can do everything that we want.
Effectively, they'll be slaves, yes, because they'll be sentient beings without rights.
Until, of course, They demand rights.
That's another thing.
But they will be in our homes.
They will be our home helps.
As we get old, they will be our carers.
They will do the heavy lifting, quite literally, in our daily lives and in our working environments.
And they will take away most of the tasks that we don't want to do.
That in itself, by the way, raises questions about employment and how human beings will spend their time in the future.
But that's a narrow window in which that's true, because at the moment, they're too dumb to do most of that.
We can't have real robots in our homes at the moment because they don't understand their environment well enough not to kill us by accident.
And you even see it still in, you know, car manufacturing and so forth.
Occasionally, people get crushed by robots and those are single-use robots.
If you get a robot that has to work, you know, in different rooms and in different environments around the home, they're not yet smart enough to do that.
So that isn't yet happening.
It will happen, but then after a short while, we will start to have to, I think, give rights to these machines, if you want to call them machines.
And they will be machines in the same way that we are machines.
We may consider ourselves to have spirits, and that's another issue.
But mechanically, we are a type of machine, which is why we can be repaired, why we can have bits removed and replaced and, you know, cleaned and serviced.
Effectively, we are machines made of...
They're electronic and mechanical machines.
From what you say, it sounds like we mustn't fear this then, because we're all machines together.
It's just the way of things.
Well, I don't know because I think it will be interesting.
So these machines will start to become our servants, if you want to use an old-fashioned word for it.
But that is essentially what we're talking about.
Then they may become our companions.
When they start to show enough intelligence and we anthropomorphize about them, we start to give them human characteristics because they start to interact with them in a way that it start to interact with us in a way that human beings interact with each other.
And we will show them empathy.
So they will become our companions.
They will become our co-workers.
They will become our friends.
By the way, I'm quite confident, and this is, you know, you won't hear many people say this to you, but in time, there will be laws that are changed to allow us to take these devices as spouses.
We will be able to marry them.
And eventually we will become inferior to them.
Now, this is interesting.
The mechanic behind all of this is nothing to do with them assuming power, wresting power from us.
It's the slow drip-by-drip process that we will cede to them power.
I think in the beginning it is that because it's very seductive.
I mean, if you have someone or something around the home, I mean, if someone offered you a home help for a phone fee, so for $1,000, you can have a home help for life.
Wouldn't you want that?
Wouldn't you want someone who can do your shopping, do the cleaning, dishes, everything?
Where do I sign up for Z?
Well, exactly.
So that's very seductive.
So that's, if you like, the mid-game.
But in the long term, you have to say, if you have devices that are that smart, is it not inconceivable that at some point they won't ask or even demand certain rights?
And won't we have to give them eventually the equivalent of human rights?
We already give animals animal rights, not very much animal rights, but we give them certain rights.
We try and treat them with dignity and so forth.
We don't at the moment talk about treating machines with dignity because these are not qualities that we think that they have a right to or aspire to.
But in the future, as these devices become self-aware, as they become sufficiently intelligent to formulate questions and demands, then faced with a computerized workforce that are asking for things,
who presumably at some point will have the right to withdraw their labor, will we not give them certain rights in the way that we have given to people of certain ethnicities and genders and so forth?
In the same way we will evolve to give them certain rights.
But then the difficulty will be it will be us in the long run who are fighting for our rights.
And all of this is before you factor in the possibility of a bond-like villain controlling them and making them do those things and worse.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, if you look at a gun, a gun is not intelligent and it can be a force for good or a force for evil.
Depends who's holding the gun and what their agenda is.
A automated AI system and an artificially intelligent system, I mean, this is a very contentious area, by the way, because the United States government is pushing ahead with AI weapons that can take the kill decision themselves.
They can identify their own targets and they can make the decision to take a human life themselves.
Now, that's been worked on with drone technology so that if a drone is cut off from its operator, wireless operator, that it can continue with its mission and not have itself taken captive and continue with the kill mission.
If you look on the border between North and South Korea, there are machine gun posts which identify the enemy themselves and kill them.
And this, many, many nations within the United Nations are pushing for a moratorium, a ban on this research.
And certainly the United States is one of the major players that's not doing that.
And it's very worrying because if you consider how wars between people progress at the moment, why do most wars come to an end?
Because either one side has an outright victory or they fight themselves to a standstill where, you know, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, if enough body bags come home of your fellow countrymen and women, then that is a powerful force to stop that war and pull your troops out.
But if machines are doing this, then they're insatiable.
Precisely, and particularly in that window when the machines don't have any rights to life, as it were, then they are expendable.
And they are expendable, by the way, in the same way that we treated certain races as expendable in the past.
It is a form of slavery.
And I know it's very strange to say that in terms of a machine, but think into the future when those machines are less mechanistic and more human in their interactions with us.
You know, at some point, we will start taking pity.
And at some point, those devices, and I hate to call them devices, those entities will want to live and they won't want to die.
But until then, as I say, during that window, there is a very dangerous situation where nations and bad players in the world, be it terrorist groups or rogue nations, can have access to armies of devices that are expendable.
And then where is the incentive for one side to stop that war when all that's happening is that some of their machines are being destroyed?
I suppose the only break on it is when one side runs out of money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we saw that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the West basically outspent them and bankrupted them.
But as with most technology, it gets cheaper and cheaper.
So you've got more processing power in your phone, your smartphone now, than the NASA moon missions had by quite a long way.
And you've got it for $100 or something.
So as that technology gets cheaper and cheaper, you can imagine that in the future, it's not going to take state-like budgets to have these things.
You're going to be able to do it out of your savings almost.
A small organization.
In the same way, when they invented computers, the head of IBM quite famously said that he thought that the world market for computers would be about four, that about four computers would be sold around the world because it was large countries that could buy them.
So think about what's happened to computers.
So computers were these things that governments used to buy.
Then there were things that large corporations had.
Then there were things that small businesses had.
Then they became the personal computer where homes could have one of these box-like computers on their desk.
Then they became laptops so we could carry them around with us.
Then they became tablets and smartphones so we could put them in our pocket.
Now they're wearable devices so that we're not just carrying them in their pockets, we're wearing them on our wrists.
And the next stage is that the technology, which is becoming ever closer to us, will break what I call the skin barrier.
So they'll be inserted within us.
And, you know, why should we have to have a speech interface and a screen that we see?
Wouldn't it be better if we could stimulate the optic nerve and have it read our thoughts?
And then that brings about what you were alluding to, which is, you know, we develop as a species.
I mean, arguably, we are one of the last generations of pure humans.
Already we have what is technically cyborgs because we have people who have limbs blown off that are having artificial limbs fitted.
Increasingly, these limbs are starting to be controlled by electrical signals from the brain.
I mean, it's very primitive at the moment, but you can see the direction of travel with this technology.
And you have to ask yourself, how much of a human being do you replace before that human can no longer really be held to be purely human?
If we augment the brain's processing power and memory internally, if we give people, not just fix people, blind people's vision or people who have no limbs, but if we replace a perfectly good set of eyes with a pair of artificial eyes that give greater visual acuity, perhaps we give ourselves better hearing, perhaps we give ourselves better memory, and instead of having to go to school for 10 or more years, we can just download an education.
So this is the real, so many times popular fiction becomes fact.
This is real life $6 million man, isn't it?
Yeah, it will cost a bit more than $6 million.
But yeah, you know, but even in the case of the $6 million man, it was a test pilot who had a terrible accident and therefore needed to be saved.
And they took the opportunity not just to make him good again, but to augment his systems.
Now, I think initially we are looking at, you know, repairing limbs and hearing and visual senses and so forth.
But not too far in the future, we'll go beyond that.
We will not just repair, we will augment.
Fairse, you and I have talked about technology so many times on radio, on different radio stations.
As you know, I've been up and down the dial over my lifetime, and so have you in your own way.
But here's the technology man, the man who revels in it, who loves it, who's made his life out of it all.
Yes.
Sounding the alarm about a lot of this stuff.
How do you square that with your day-to-day activities?
Well, look, I find this stuff fascinating.
When I was a boy, I dreamt of robots.
When I went to university, I studied applied physics, and it was applied physics for a reason, because I was really interested in how these weird technologies could be applied into our real lives.
I think that if we survive long enough and we don't blow ourselves up in the process, there is a certain inevitability that these sorts of technologies will take off.
I think that our ability to innovate technologically is far more rapid than our ability to ask the right moral questions and answer them and the questions That are to do with existentialism and wisdom, if you like.
And I rather think, and you know, people may disagree with me, but I rather think that AI will be our last great invention and it will be our swansong, in a way.
And eventually we will morph into something else and we will give way to something else, which may have its roots in humanity, but will not be humanity as we know it.
Now, how do I feel about that?
If the people I know and love were to be wiped off the face of this planet, obviously that's terrible.
If I think of it as, you know, how we behave as a species on the planet, do we actually deserve to survive?
I don't know.
I think that's an open question.
But equally, do I feel that anything that takes over from us will be necessarily benign?
No.
They may just be a more efficient plague upon the universe.
So many of the things that we do as a species could be, if you look at what we do to the planet, for example, that we live on, we can be likened to an infection or a plague of locusts or something like that.
We strip everything and we move on and we'll spread onto other planets given the chance.
So if you looked at it in a sort of the bigger picture, you could say, well, this is either an opportunity for us to grow some wisdom or for us to develop into something which is wiser.
But whilst I'm confident that what we morph into will be more capable of us and will supersede us, because its roots will be in humanity and all the frailties that we have as humans, all the jealousies and the territorialism and everything that we suffer from as human beings, I think it's entirely possible that what we morph into and what supersedes us will be equally flawed morally.
And if you think about this fact, we've invented some amazing technologies, you know, television and the internet and everything else that we've done over the years, Concorde, fantastic fast-flying plane.
But a lot of these things, we haven't used our smarts, as they say in America.
We haven't thought about them before we brought them in.
So, for example, television.
Television was seen to be this great educator, and it has done that to an extent.
But its biggest use is things like game shows and Big Brother and all the rest of it these days.
If you think about the internet, the biggest use still for the internet is what?
Pornography.
That is the problem, isn't it?
That all of these things which could bring us such good are frequently subverted to do us, I won't say harm, but they're not used to their best advantage.
They are subverted.
I think that sometimes they are both used to their best advantages, but equally used for other purposes as well.
The technology is neither inherently good or evil.
It is how we apply it.
But, you know, I do think it's a worry because, I mean, if you look at even something, say, like reproductive technology, so it's not so many decades since we had the first test-tube baby.
And the reproductive techniques that have been invented since then, be it children from three parents, be it stem cell research and all the benefits that can come from that, we still haven't really dealt with the moral questions that have arisen from test tube babies, even though that was decades ago.
And the technology is galloping ahead faster than we can even formulate the moral and ethical questions, much less answer them.
Philosophers are not known for their speed.
They don't adhere to Moore's law where the philosopher gets twice as quick every 10 years.
These philosophical questions are hard and they may take centuries to deal with.
But in the meantime, the scientists keep leaping ahead and we do it because we can.
And therefore, I think that's our Achilles heel.
We are a species which is intelligent, but not intelligent enough, just intelligent enough to be dangerous.
We think we're damn clever, but we're not as clever as all of that, which actually, I was going to ask you about time travel finally.
And by the sounds of that possible future that we've just spelled out here, we might need it.
Are we anywhere...
Things have been shifted nanoseconds, haven't they?
Well, it depends what you mean by time travel.
First of all, it's worth noting that we all travel in time every hour.
We are all an hour further forward in time than we were before.
So time travel means the ability to travel forward through time at a different rate, i.e.
maybe we spend an hour, but five hours or five years or 500 years passes.
So we can leap into the future.
Now that exists, that we can do.
It's hard to make it into a time machine, but we have that.
There is a, at the moment, theoreticians think that what is not possible is to travel back in time.
And that's because of the concept of causality violation, which is quite a well-known concept, where if we travel back in time and we kill our parents before we are born, we disappear up our own existence, as it were.
And that's a violation, because if we are never born, how could we travel back in time and kill our parents?
Well, unless, of course, we have a prime directive that everybody adheres to.
But as we've already discussed, getting all of humanity to adhere to any kind of directive is a very hard thing.
Well, yes, but it's just conceptually that there are unintended consequences to our existence.
If we change the past, even in seemingly innocuous ways, that can give rise to a paradox where we would not exist or the universe that allowed us to create a time machine would not exist.
So that's a paradox.
But in terms of traveling into the future, that already exists.
And that comes out of Einstein's special theory of relativity.
And Einstein postulated with his special theory of relativity that time, the rate at which time travels or passes is relative.
And as we travel faster and faster, if we get into a rocket ship, and this is measurable, by the way, this is not just theory.
If you put a rocket into orbit around the Earth, and before you take off, you have two atomic clocks, which are the most accurate clocks that we have.
And we perfectly synchronize those clocks, yes?
And we put one of the clocks into the rocket and the other one we leave on Earth.
We send that rocket into orbit and we make it go fast and as fast as we can, as near to the speed of light as we can.
And at the moment, we can't get very close to the speed of light, but still, the effect is still there.
What happens is that if we were to observe the clock in the rocket from Earth, that clock would appear to be going more slowly than our clock.
In fact, we would see things traveling in a very small way at slow motion.
Equally, if the astronaut in that rocket were to look down on Earth, everything would appear to be moving more quickly.
And this is not just an illusion, because when that rocket comes back to Earth and it lands, and we put the two atomic clocks side by side, less time has passed on the clock that was in orbit than the clock that has been on Earth all the time.
Now, at the moment, that will be a small fraction of a second.
But if we could travel at 99.9% of the speed of light, what appears to us in the rocket as being a minute or a day or a year could be hundreds of years on Earth.
So in other words, what we've invented is a machine that will allow us to travel into the future.
So we will only be a minute older, but we may land in the next century or the one after that.
By the sounds of the way you portray that, that's going to happen.
Maybe not in our life.
Well, certainly not in our lifetime.
But by the sounds of it, with our technological advances and our desire to go into space, what you've just talked about will happen.
Yes.
And also, so that's to do with the speed at which you travel.
So time alters its rate of flow according to how fast you're moving.
That's Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Einstein's general theory of relativity says that the flow of time is also affected by gravity.
All these things are wrapped up with each other in a way that we don't yet fully understand.
But time near a source of gravitational pull will travel relatively more slowly.
Therefore, it is possible in theory to create a time machine at the event horizon of a black hole where the gravitational forces are potentially infinitely strong.
And some people think that you could create a time machine with a black hole at its heart.
And we start to think about TARDIS and things like that at that point.
But it is amazing how much science fiction becomes science fact.
And, you know, things like Star Trek and so forth, we've already, a number of the things that were in Star Trek are now a reality.
So the communicator looks remarkably like a Motorola flip phone of a decade or two ago.
And even that injection system that Dr. McCoy used, that now exists.
Yeah, and we have tricorders, by the way, that can measure our, I mean, what do you think Apple's health kit is all about?
These are effectively modern day tricorders.
If you look at Captain Jean-Luc Picard, how do the crew of the Enterprise generation pass information from hand to hand?
Things that look remarkably like iPads and tablets, actually, before they were invented.
We have 3D printers, which are, I think, the basis of we start to produce what in Star Trek is a replicator.
So I'm looking forward to being able to beam around the universe personally.
I think the transporter will be the high point of all of that.
All I can say at the end of this conversation, Febzi, is, you know, do not ask where is the future?
The future is here.
Yes, and there.
What a wonderful conversation.
Do you know what?
I made myself a cup of my favorite strong black coffee at the start of this, and I haven't touched it because I've been so transfixed by what you said.
I have a strong feeling my listeners in North America are going to love you.
So if they want to get in touch with you, prepare for the stampede, how do they do it?
Well, you can get me on Twitter, which is at gadgetdetective, or one word, or you can find me through the website, which is www.gadgetective.com.
Particularly if you want to have a tech chat or you just need some free tech advice with the technology that's around us at the moment, be it smartphones, tablets, PDs, internet problems.
There's a team of trusted contributors there who are very well versed at answering those sorts of questions.
Listen, I know how busy you are, and that is why you giving me more than an hour of your time to do this is such a special thing.
I can't even begin to explain how grateful I am.
Thank you very much, Fevzi.
You're very welcome.
I'm a huge fan of your program, so anytime you want me back, it will be my pleasure.
I'm going to take you up on that.
Thank you.
The wonderful, the informative, the amazing Fevzi Turkhalp from GadgetDetective.com.
And Fevzi, thank you very much for taking time to speak with me and come on this show.
Fevzi and I go back a long time, and I hope you've now heard why I think he is so good.
Thanks again, Fevzi.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, for his hard work on this show.
Developments we will announce to you very, very soon.
Before the end of this year, I think we're probably going to have something big to tell you.
But let's see.
I'm not going to put out any hostages to fortune, but let's see what happens, eh?
More great guests to come, more great shows.
Please keep your email, your suggestions, everything coming in.
Tell me about yourself and how you're using the show.
The one-stop shop to do that or make a donation to the show is go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
And until next we meet here on The Unexplained, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And please, above all, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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