The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 290 - Guest Catchups

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March 19, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 290 - Guest Catchups

Top people - top topics - Strange Galactic flashes, MH370, Wikileaks and our roboticfuture...

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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 Return of the Unexplained.
	And for the person who emailed recently, actually a few people have emailed over the months about this, and asked me why I say sometimes the return of the unexplained and sometimes this is the unexplained, just for a bit of variety, really.
	I might have mentioned that before, but just to nail that one before we go any further, thank you very much for all of your emails, the guest suggestions that have all come into my website, theunexplained.tv, maintained, honed, designed, created by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
	If you have made a donation to the show recently, you know who you are, and thank you so much from me.
	I couldn't do any of this without your assistance in so many different ways.
	On this edition of the show, we are going to get into a number of the interviews that I've aired on my radio show very recently.
	Three of them recorded here and one of them done live on the air there.
	Good things that I felt needed to be on the podcast so that you could hear them.
	So we're going to put those on here.
	They are Arvi Loeb, Professor Arvi Loeb.
	He is a Harvard professor of space matters and he is somebody who is very well connected.
	In fact, astrophysics is the handle that he has, but he's part of the highly respected Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
	Talking about fast radio bursts, but so much more than that.
	A wonderful man to have on the show.
	So Arvi Loeb will be here.
	You might have been reading about those wiki leaks that suggested the security services have ways of activating microphones and cameras in things recently revealed.
	I'm going to be getting the latest on that as it stood a few days ago from Fevzi Turkau, the United Kingdom's gadget detective from gadgetdetective.com who kindly recorded a piece with me about that that you will hear.
	Also, another newsmaker on the show about some new research to do with the tragedy of missing flight MH370.
	And Professor Chari Patiarachi from the University of Western Australia, whose research in oceanography suggests where the plane might have gone down, if indeed it did go down.
	So we'll have him on the show too.
	And at the end of this, David Wood, futurist, talking about what the future may hold for all of us.
	And I'm not talking about the general ebb and flow of events here, but I'm talking about the fact that technology is advancing so far, for example, that many of our jobs, including this one, may become redundant or obsolete.
	You might have read about that as a possibility in books when you were a kid, but it looks like this stuff is beginning to unfold.
	And the question is, are politicians really being honest with us about what that future might hold?
	And are they making plans for it?
	I think there is a committee of the House of Commons here that is debating this.
	But is enough work being done, really?
	So we'll talk about that with David Wood.
	Four great guests on this edition of The Unexplained.
	If you want to get in touch with me to have your comment about the show or to suggest a guest, then I'd love to hear from you.
	Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show when you email.
	And you can do it through the website theunexplained.tv.
	All right, let's start with Professor Arvie Loeb.
	This story in the news.
	Oh, no shout-outs on this edition, by the way, but I promise I will get through to a lot of shout-outs in the next edition, and I am seeing all the emails as they come in.
	From the Daily Telegraph in the UK, a team from Harvard University suspects mysterious energy flashes detected in faraway galaxies may be caused by a species of super-advanced aliens firing up interstellar spacecraft.
	Well, that was the point to take this up with the man behind that research, Professor R. V. Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
	Fast radio bursts are a new population of astronomical sources discovered over the past decade.
	And they are very puzzling.
	They are extremely bright.
	They originate from the edge of the universe, distances of billions of light years away.
	And these are radio sources that are far brighter than any other source we know about.
	Most astronomers prefer to believe that they have a natural origin, that possibly they originate from the collapse of stars into a very compact object called the neutron star.
	That's a star that weighs roughly the mass of the Sun and has a size of a big city, 10 kilometers or so.
	And we know that neutron stars emit radio waves.
	However, the neutron stars we see in our galaxy, they are called pulsars.
	They are seen periodically because they generate a beam of radio waves, just like a lighthouse, and we see them coming back periodically.
	These are tens of billions of times fainter than the sources of fast radio bursts.
	So it's really a puzzle as to what generates them.
	And the reason I was inspired to consider a possibility of an artificial origin is because our civilization is now contemplating the use of a beam of light to propel a sail.
	The situation is similar to a sailboat where the wind gives the power to push the sail.
	One can imagine using light that bounces off the sail to push it.
	Haven't there been people on this planet talking about using laser beams to do that?
	Exactly.
	This is called the project Starshot.
	And as it turns out, I chair the advisory committee for that project.
	And since we are contemplating doing that ourselves, and the idea here is to push a very lightweight probe that weighs roughly a gram towards the nearest star at a fraction of the speed of light, since we are starting to develop that technology, it's quite possible that there is an advanced Technological civilization out there that already perfected that technology over the past billion years or so.
	Okay, so we're talking about doing this with something very small.
	In order for us to see and register this here on our planet, if there are aliens doing this, and that's a big stretch to accept that, but let's accept that for now, their technology would have to be of a massively greater, more powerful order, wouldn't it?
	That's true.
	We are seeing these bursts coming from the edge of the universe.
	That means that the amount of power used is quite large.
	So in our paper, we estimated that it's equivalent to all the starlight, the sunlight that is falling on the surface of the Earth.
	So you pretty much need to use solar cells, cover the planet of the size of the Earth, and use the energy coming from the host star, in our case it's the Sun, and beam it into a radio beam that is pushing on a sail.
	It's a lot of power, but it's interesting that you have just the right amount of power on a planet like the Earth near a star like the Sun.
	So that's one of the coincidences that we found.
	Also, if you imagine the engineering constraints on such a project, you need to cool the system such that it doesn't overheat.
	You don't want to melt the system.
	So the amount of power being radiated, a fraction of it gets dissipated into heat in the system.
	And so given this engineering constraint, we also estimated that the size of the dimmer need to be roughly the size of a planet like the Earth.
	So it really needs to be of a massive scale, but still within the realm of possibilities for an advanced technological civilization.
	One puzzling fact about the fast radio bursts is that at least one of them for sure keeps repeating.
	So they cannot be associated with a cataclysmic event, an explosion of a star.
	Are they repeating?
	Is this particular one repeating in a non-random way, Avi?
	So it actually does not repeat periodically.
	When we look at pulsars, they come back just like a lighthouse, they keep shining at a periodic fashion.
	These fast radio bursts do repeat, one of them repeats, but the repetition is not periodic.
	It's actually a very unusual, it has an unusual pattern.
	There are clusters of repetitions.
	You see a lot of them coming within a single day, but then nothing for many days.
	And this particular one was observed to repeat many times by now of the other of hundreds of times.
	So clearly it's an unusual type of source.
	And also the emission appears to be concentrated around a preferred frequency, radio frequency.
	It doesn't seem to be distributed over a broad range of frequencies like pulsars do.
	And so it's puzzling.
	Now, the idea behind our possible interpretation is if you have a beam of light that is used for propulsion, that beam of light sweeps across the sky and we see it for a brief amount of time.
	This is the leakage of radiation that is going around the sail that that civilization is trying to push.
	Of course, you know, this is a speculation.
	It's one possibility.
	But the reason we decided to write it up is to put it on the table so that when more data is being collected, one can rule it out or perhaps there would be some peculiarities that would support this possibility.
	And that's the one thing that came out of my first conversation with you when we did a whole hour together, Arvi, that you are not afraid, as some of your colleagues might seem to be, to be, to think out of the box, which is something unusual.
	However, just one point about this.
	And, you know, what do I know?
	I'm not a scientist.
	But you're talking about them, if there are aliens, possibly using a technology that we are thinking about now.
	What makes you think that they wouldn't come up with something completely different that we couldn't even conceive of, rather than something that we're just coming up with here?
	So our imagination is obviously limited to what we can achieve or contemplate of achieving.
	Back 60 years ago, radio communication was developed by our civilization.
	And at that point, we started exploring or checking whether there are any artificial signals coming from the sky.
	That was the beginning of the search for extraterrestrial signals.
	Now that we are starting to develop the technology of light sails, we can start to look also for similar signals from space.
	I agree with you that there might be signals we haven't yet contemplated simply because our technology is relatively primitive, but we are doing the best we can.
	And I completely agree.
	We have to be coming up with some ideas, otherwise in science and life, you get completely stuck.
	How do we verify any of this?
	How can we set out to prove it or partially prove it?
	Yes.
	So it's easy to disprove it.
	For example, if we find circumstantial evidence that indicates that a particular natural astronomical source is responsible for these fast radio bursts, an example would be that we find an association between fast radio bursts and the locations of supernovae, explosions that resulted from the collapse of a star, let's say a decade before the fast radio bursts.
	That would indicate that perhaps these fast radio bursts originate from neutron stars that are the end result of a collapse of a supernova.
	and it's possible that there is something unusual happening on a neutron star when it's born in the first few decades.
	And so, if we find an association that some or all of the fast radio bursts take place in supernova remnants, where a supernova took place a decade prior to that, then we will know there is circumstantial evidence for a natural astronomical origin.
	So, it's partly a sort of process of elimination.
	Might it be possible to verify this by doing what they did in that wonderful movie, Contact, I know it was Hollywood fiction, and send back to them something like their, if there are, if there is a VEM, there are a VEM, send back to them what they're sending to us.
	In other words, signals on the same frequency?
	No, well, there are two reasons why two-way communication is not possible.
	First, these signals are arriving to us from billions of light years away.
	So that means it takes billions of years for us to communicate, to send the signal back so that it's received.
	Of course, there could be an advanced civilization of this type in our galaxy, and there could be not just one, but many.
	And at some point, we could establish contact with those.
	But we don't know if that's the case.
	If there is a fast radio burst taking place in our galaxy, that would be tens of billions of times brighter than those that come from great cosmological distances.
	So there is a chance that within a century, we will detect an enormous signal from our galaxy that is from the same type of source as those that come from distant galaxies.
	And in that case, we will be able to study it in great detail and learn all we need to know about it simply because it's in our backyard.
	And then we could communicate with that civilization.
	That's possible.
	Now, but before we have any communication, how can we verify if it's artificial?
	Well, there would be all kinds of peculiar patterns.
	The frequency patterns would appear to be unusual.
	There could be temporal profiles that indicate that it looks like a beam that is sweeping across the sky and is being occulted, let's say, by some obstacle, which in this case would be the sail.
	So there are some characteristics that could help us identify an artificial origin.
	If they have, I'm saying they again, that's a big, I know you should never assume anything, but let's assume there's a they.
	If they have technology of this order and magnitude, why are they only apparently from what we know, and I know that we don't know everything by any means, apparently traveling in their own area?
	In other words, if they've got technology like this, why don't they come here?
	Oh, sure.
	I mean, but of course, the travel time from those distant galaxies is very long to get to us.
	So if in our neighborhood there are civilizations of this type, they presumably are traveling.
	It's not clear that the Earth is a very attractive destination for them.
	And it really depends on what their goal is in making this travel.
	So one can only speculate.
	It could be to just spread their species and colonize distant places.
	But it could also be for commercial reasons.
	So it's unclear, and we should not speculate on that.
	And the reason why, I mean, there is the famous Fermi paradox, if they exist, why haven't we seen them?
	It's quite possible that we are not of interest to them.
	Just like as we walk down the street, we often step on ants and we don't care too much about them.
	It's not as if they are significant enough for us to just pay too much attention to them on a daily basis.
	Right.
	My kitchen at the moment, it's springtime here in the UK, is full of ladybugs, as you call them in America, ladybirds.
	And I shuffle them out.
	You know, I help them out of the window without even a second thought.
	Maybe I need to be thinking about them in the same way that we need to be thinking, or some civilization out there needs to be thinking about us and vice versa.
	It seems to me, Avi, and we have talked before, and you were fascinating when we last talked, and you have a great capacity for thinking beyond what other people think.
	Do you share my thought that we're not that far from making the discovery that we really are not alone?
	It seems now that this is getting a momentum like a snowball down a mountainside.
	It's getting quicker.
	Yes.
	My sense is that we're not special.
	Whenever we thought that we're special in the past, we were wrong.
	I mean, we are not at the center of the solar system.
	The sun is not at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
	The Milky Way galaxy is not at the center of the universe.
	There is no center.
	And so clearly, we are not special in terms of our physical location.
	However, some people still tend to believe that we are special biologically, that perhaps there is no life elsewhere.
	My belief is that life is probably common, especially primitive life in the universe.
	With respect to intelligent life, I'm completely agnostic and I think we should just search for it and look for signals.
	So I think we are very likely to find evidence for primitive life within the coming decade or two elsewhere.
	And that could come as evidence for biosignatures, molecules that are indicative of life in the atmospheres of other planets.
	For example, TRAPPIST-1 is an excellent example for a planetary system that was just discovered over the past or announced over the past month, where there are seven planets, three of which are habitable.
	You could imagine liquid water on three of them.
	And they are passing in front of the star.
	So we can actually look at the light from the star, the host star, that is passing through the atmospheres of these planets whenever they go in front of it, and then search for, for example, for oxygen, molecular oxygen that would not exist in the atmosphere of the Earth if not for life.
	I mean, it would basically react very quickly.
	Within a million years, it would disappear from the atmosphere of the Earth if there was no life on Earth.
	So you can look for oxygen, you can look for methane and other gases that are indicative of life.
	And I think we are very likely to find evidence of that sort within the next decade or two, simply because I don't think that we are very special.
	Last question, and thank you for doing this again at the weekend.
	Should we be preparing, I'm talking about governments here, civilization in general, for the inevitable, that something will be discovered.
	It will be game-changing, whatever it is.
	Do you think we should be preparing if we're not?
	And would you like to be that part of that process of preparation?
	Yeah, well, I think we should prepare if we are talking about intelligent life.
	And that is highly uncertain.
	And so a lot of people take the approach of saying, you know, it's unlikely and therefore there is no need for a contingency plan.
	But even unintelligent life is a mile marker, isn't it?
	Because if you find unintelligent life, then the chances are eventually you'll find something a bit cleverer.
	Yes, and I do think that it would have a huge impact on our society in many different ways, including our philosophical view on our place in the universe, religious beliefs, our way of thinking about everything up there in the sky.
	We are usually thinking of it as completely irrelevant to our daily life, but this would make it very relevant.
	So I do think that an international discussion on this is healthy.
	And it would come inevitably as soon as we discover evidence, even for primitive life, as you say.
	So I do think that in the coming decades, this discussion will occupy front stage, especially in discussions between scientists and the society at large.
	Sounds like you're excited.
	I am excited, and it's a great time to be a scientist.
	It's a great privilege.
	Science is a learning experience.
	I'm trying to keep a modest attitude where I let the data, the observations, tell us what reality is like.
	And I feel humbled by nature.
	It's always surprising.
	And it's a fantastic experience to learn new things every day and stay young at heart by being a scientist.
	Professor R. V. Loeb with a lot to think about, wouldn't you say?
	And my great thanks to him for making time in a week of interviews that he had.
	He was on air just about everywhere for making time for me.
	He's from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
	And I'm sure we'll be soon hearing more from them.
	Now, in the news in the last, what, week or two, we've been hearing about these new wiki leaks that suggest that the security services have found various ways, loopholes, I guess you could find in various bits of kit, flaws in them that allow them to be used for what we used to call surveillance.
	There's only one person I would want to run this story past, and that is Fevzi Turkup, the UK's gadget detective.
	Wikileaks have published almost 9,000 documents that appear to come from the CIA.
	It details their wide range of hacking tools.
	It's an entire hacking toolkit that allows them to get into Windows computers, Android smartphones and tablets, Apple smartphones and tablets, Macs, Linux computers, and internet routers, as well as TV sets, it seems, as well.
	So there's a real big toolkit there.
	There's even a set of tools there that allow them to hack someone's computer and then make it look like a foreign government did it.
	But unless I've got this wrong, they're not actually publishing how to do it, are they?
	They're just saying the capabilities there.
	There is detailed descriptions of the capabilities, which machines are vulnerable, such as which types of Samsung TV sets are vulnerable to this.
	And they haven't published the code yet of these software tools.
	But I understand that that will happen once Wikileaks have worked with the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Google to help them patch the vulnerabilities before they're published.
	Now, you know, part of this is no big surprise.
	It wasn't to me, really.
	If you listen to people like the conspiracy theory broadcaster Alex Jones in America, he's been saying for a long time, at least a year, your television is spying on you.
	And, you know, for some of us, that is real tinfoil hat territory.
	But here we are, and here we are, and here we are, as Status Quo once sang, you know, it's happening.
	Yeah, so what started out as, you know, paranoid conspiracy theory is less so now.
	These capabilities clearly exist.
	The CIA are clearly not the only ones who have these capabilities.
	And therefore, there's two possibilities.
	One is if one is a high-value target that they will go after specifically, then that's one thing.
	The other thing is, you see, this gives them the ability to trawl for information and just see what turns up.
	And they have increasingly intelligent software that can then go through all the material that's been trawled, all the audio and video recordings, and use artificial intelligence to pull out things of interest that then require human attention.
	I was a little sorry and sad for Samsung, you know, who do undoubtedly a lot of good work.
	A lot of people use their phones and stuff.
	It kind of seemed to me that with so many companies developing similar things at the same time, it would be inconceivable if this can potentially happen with their televisions that it wouldn't happen with other televisions.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, Samsung Probably targeted first because they were amongst the first to have this capability built into their TVs.
	So these are the high-end Samsung TVs that have a microphone so that you can exert voice control over your TV and a camera so that you can actually gesture in front of it and swipe and do the sorts of gestures that you might do on a tablet, for example.
	So some of that is available.
	Now as microphones and cameras go into other TVs, but all sorts of other devices now, so we have this internet of things, all our household appliances are increasingly internet connected.
	Those things are very susceptible to this attack.
	One, because of their ubiquity, and also because the companies that produce domestic appliances don't have decades of experience in securing them on the internet.
	And that's a problem.
	And I'd like to mention one other thing for you, if I may.
	Something that a lot of people haven't touched on, which is really interesting, is that it appears from these documents that the CIA was trying to find ways to infect cars and other vehicles' computer control systems.
	So you know, we have not only self-driving cars, but we have cars that have the ability to park themselves and so forth.
	Now, there are claims that they may have been using it for investigating how to commit an undetectable assassination.
	In other words, to take over the control of a vehicle whilst it's being driven and crash it in order to kill the occupants.
	My God.
	And look, there's a great big thing here.
	It may be the elephant in the room for all that I know, but the fact that the CIA are doing this, well, you know, we have to believe, and, you know, many of us do believe that they would be using these things if they were using them to try and trap bad guys, stop terrorist attacks, and all the rest of it.
	Problem is, the fact that we now know about this means that they were not very good at keeping all of this secret.
	No, and that, I think, bears some serious thought and scrutiny by democratic governments and whatever oversight these sorts of organizations have.
	Because, first of all, you have to ask the moral question of, is it moral that you know about a security flaw in a commonly used piece of equipment, such as an iPhone, for example, but you don't inform the manufacturer so they can fix it?
	Because you may say, okay, the CIA is benign and they will act in our best interests, even if you believe that's always the case.
	If the CIA know about this vulnerability, then there will be other governments and other non-governmental players who also know about it.
	And by not telling the companies, the CIA is effectively putting us at risk by being hacked by others.
	So there is that question.
	Then there is a second question.
	Even if you think it's moral to develop and store these tools, what is your checklist to go through once all this stuff leaks, which it will inevitably leak?
	At some point, this stuff comes out.
	The FBI had its information leaked from the inside, as we know, and now the CIA and others will follow.
	So should they not, instead of saying we don't talk about security matters when asked if these is really genuinely their toolkit, should they not have a system whereby they're talking to all the major companies now to help patch up the damage that they've caused?
	Well, that's very, very crucial, I would have thought, to all of this.
	You know, there are two levels of this, and we've hinted at this and in other conversations we have as well.
	There is the so-called Internet of Things, which is your kettle, your microwave, for all I know, your lavatory, everything connected together to the Internet to be more controllable, whoopee isn't that great.
	And of course, the big infrastructure items like power stations and stuff like that.
	Now, the problem with all of this is that if the good guys know how to get into these systems and start manipulating them, that's one thing.
	But if, as you said, somebody outside also gets into those systems, then we are looking at a very, very serious situation.
	Imagine, for example, if the power grid was taken down.
	Yeah, and that's absolutely possible.
	It's possible to either take down a power station or to take down all the smart meters that are going in at the moment to cut off supply to either individuals or whole areas by just attacking all the smart meters.
	So that's very much possible.
	So cyber warfare takes place on many levels.
	So you've got the utilities and the infrastructure of those.
	And then as we've seen asserted recently, they have the ability to interfere with the functioning of democracies as well.
	And you can actually sink a Western democracy into turmoil by interfering with its democracy.
	And, you know, I think we've heard a lot about what's happened in America in this way.
	Watch this space for the elections that are coming up in Germany and France.
	And every time there is a leak of some candidate having been involved in something that he or she should not have been, ask yourself the question, where did that information come from?
	And who would benefit from that information being public?
	Yeah.
	Yes, very much interesting question.
	Is the answer then for us individuals, us poor people, caught in the middle of this great big cyber chess game, to tape up the microphone on the telly, to disconnect the kettle from the internet, and to turn off the computer and turn off the broadband whenever we're not using it?
	Is that the way to do it?
	If you hide from it, and maybe that can be extended to governments as well, they can have a policy.
	If you move away from it all a little, then perhaps you can be safe, yes?
	Yeah, you can never be safe.
	That's the first thing.
	But what you can do is take measures to reduce the risk to you.
	And in doing that, you have to have a think about what profile you represent and who might be interested in you.
	If you're a journalist, for example, you may be of higher interest than if you don't do anything that's of high profile.
	So you have to think about that.
	In terms of things that you can do, look, there's no perfect solution to this.
	But if you think about the webcam that is built into your TV or more commonly into your laptop, for example, a piece of black tape over the webcam will work a treat.
	It's a very low-tech solution, But it's a good one.
	Microphones are harder to obfuscate.
	You can try things like Bluetack, but they don't do much more than muffle the sound.
	So you can do things like that.
	Consider using some of the less popular antivirus products.
	And one of the things we learned from this CIA league was that they had developed attacks against the popular antivirus products.
	And that's long since been my suspicion that they'd found ways around that.
	And then unplug the things that you can unplug when you're not using them.
	So we mentioned those boxes you can speak to, like the Echo or the Google Home.
	Those devices don't rely on the button that says it's turned off the microphones.
	Physically unplug it.
	The problem is as microphones and cameras are built into more and more appliances, that becomes harder.
	I mean, are you going to unplug your fridge freezer when you want to have a private conversation?
	Well, not if I don't want my spaghetti bolognese to go off.
	That's the problem with that.
	I suppose you could send the bill to the CIA, but I suspect you wouldn't get very far.
	I mean, you know that the internet and YouTube and Facebook are great repositories of information, but also repositories of some trash.
	There is a video doing the rants about one of these devices you talk to, and the person says, can you define for me the CIA?
	And the very posh female voice says, the CIA is an intelligence agency based in the United States, whatever.
	And the final question is, are you connected to the CIA now?
	And the device goes silent.
	I mean, that sounds like a joke.
	And until a few days ago, I would have laughed my socks off.
	Now I'm thinking, is that for real?
	Is there something really going on here?
	I favor the theory that as with many other questions you can ask these devices, sometimes they do go silent rather than say they don't understand.
	Well, they usually go silent when I say, Howard Hughes, broadcaster, tell me all about him.
	And we tried this together, didn't we, with Alexa?
	And Alexa knew nothing.
	Not that she should or anybody should, but it just goes to show to Alexa, I'm a complete non-entity.
	To be frank, Howard, I think that says more about Alexa than it says about you.
	Well, that's very kind of you, Febsi.
	It's very nice of you to dig me out of that one.
	It's a very worrying world, Febsi.
	Just quickly, what do you think that Mr. Trump and Mrs. May and Mr. Putin, well, you know, if he's in, you know, if he's interested in all these things and reads the papers, what should they be doing now?
	Should they be talking to their security services and saying, you need to sharpen up your act or what?
	Yeah, I mean, obviously this is not good because if Wikileaks, if Julian Assange is to be believed, he says that this information came from an air-gapped computer system within the CIA.
	And he pointed out that there was a facility within the consulate in Frankfurt and it suggested it came possibly from that facility.
	Now, the thing is, an air-gapped computer system is a system that's not connected to the outside world.
	It may be an individual computer or a network of computers, but as a whole, it's insulated from the outside world, which means that if that is true, if that is true, then the most plausible explanation of how this information got out is that it was leaked by someone in the CIA or a contractor.
	And we saw that with the FBI in Snowden.
	So maybe they need to look at their contractors' policy.
	But I still think that the more important question is they should assume that at some point, if they develop these weapons, that at some point that these weapons will leak out.
	And they need to think about whether it is wise to hold such weapons.
	Don't forget, you see, to use these weapons, even if you store them on an insulated air gap system that's not attached to the internet, to use these weapons, they have to be on the internet.
	They have to travel through the internet and infect someone else's computer.
	And at that point, they have lost control of it.
	It is possible for someone to capture it, identify it, modify it and use it.
	And that's the problem.
	And in fact, some of the tools that the CIA have that were leaked out were captured from foreign governments and used and co-opted for their own purposes.
	So they know, as well as we now know, that it's impossible to really secure these weapons.
	So they need to ask themselves, either should we be holding it, is it responsible?
	It's like having dangerous nuclear material that you can't keep under control.
	If you can't control it, should you instead try and push for some sort of moratorium?
	But it's difficult because no one will admit that they're doing it.
	It's all a worry.
	And as you said about 90 seconds ago, even if you have an air-gapped system and you really protect yourself, you cannot allow for the human element.
	So even if you put tape over all of your lampshades, unplug the kettle and do all those things, you may not be safe at the end of the day.
	And that's a bit of a worry.
	I wonder if that is all going to lead, and we've talked about this before, to the death of the internet, the fact that people simply, because it's so hacked and bugged and messed around with, nobody will trust it anymore.
	No, I think that the internet or what the internet will become is to become so ubiquitous, so intrinsic to our existence, that you might as well say that you're going to cut off people's electricity supply.
	I think what will change is that people will get to the point where even those that are concerned about their privacy, they will give up.
	They will realize that they're fighting a losing battle and it will be the death of privacy, the death of being able to speak freely either in your home or elsewhere.
	And that has serious implications for our democracies because without freedom of speech and freedom of thought, you cannot have a fully functioning democracy.
	God, and as you said those words, I had a mental picture of a man in a black blazer with white piping standing on a beach in Wales, punching his fist into the air and shouting, I am not a number.
	I am a free man.
	That's a whole other thought, Fevzi.
	That was 1967, the prisoner Patrick McGooen.
	Maybe that's here now.
	Yeah, I really think things have changed and we don't yet really, we haven't really understood what we've lost.
	And I fear it's going to be very hard to recover that sort of privacy now.
	Got to go, got to go and check my emails.
	Fevzi, thank you so much.
	Absolute pleasure.
	Anytime.
	Fevzi Turkaup, thank you to him from GadgetDetective.com.
	If you want to take a look at his site, I think you will be impressed.
	Now, MH370, the fate of those people on that apparently doomed plane, has probably been in the minds of most of us who've ever flown on an aeroplane and all of us who have compassion in our hearts for the relatives and friends of the people who vanished when that plane did.
	Scientists at the University of Western Australia think that they have found a way to perhaps kick-start the search for the wreckage and also explain where the plane might have come down.
	I've been speaking to a man who's been making the headlines over this last week or so.
	He's done a lot of interviews, and I'm glad he did one with me, despite the big time difference between London and Perth, West Australia.
	His name is Professor Chari Pattiarachi and he's from the University of Western Australia.
	He's an oceanographer and has been using his techniques and computer modeling to work out exactly where the wreckage might have gone and now to work out where the plane may have come down, if indeed it did.
	The latest research is based on oceanography.
	So many people have heard about the debris which has been collected in the Western Indian Ocean.
	But they were actually directed by us.
	So we actually have computer models which predict where that debris may end up in.
	And we have guided individuals, Blaine Gibson in particular, and the next of kin, to go to particular regions in the Western Indian Ocean, in Madagascar, in Mozambique, for example.
	And they have been finding debris to being originating from MH370.
	And are you saying that those pieces of debris that have been found so far, and there haven't been very many, fewer than people might have expected, were because mainly of your direction?
	Yes, there have been to date, the Malaysian authorities updated this week.
	There has been 28 pieces which had been collected.
	And definitely they know three or four pieces came from MH3770 as being a Malaysian aircraft.
	There has been many pieces which have been identified as coming from a Boeing 777, but they have not been able to 100% verify that is from MH370.
	And there are some pieces that they have not been able to identify.
	Those pieces that have been found and the ones that are most likely to be from the plane as far as we know, the people who found them, did they do so because of the guidance that you gave them?
	That's correct.
	A majority of them.
	All right.
	So, you know, there were no debris found till the flaperon ended up in Reunion Island, which we predicted 12 months in advance.
	And of course, when we said in, you know, if we said 12 months in advance, debris will end up in the Western Indian Ocean in 12 months.
	I don't think anybody would have even believed us until it actually happened.
	So hindsight is a good thing.
	And what do you think of the speed of what's gone on with the search?
	Because it's been a, all right, they've had tens of thousands of square miles of ocean to comb backwards and forwards.
	It's a difficult thing to do.
	But why has it all been so apparently slow, do you think, Chari?
	Well, searching in the ocean is very, very difficult.
	I'm actually giving an analogy.
	Just imagine you're in a helicopter and you've got your eyes closed and you're going at four kilometers up and you're covering, let's say, for example, the landmass of Wales and you're traveling at 10 kilometers an hour.
	Just put that in your mind and see how quickly you can actually do that.
	Then you add to that, there's storms, there's big winds, there's huge waves, it becomes a very challenging endeavor.
	Before we talk about the reason you were in the newspapers here this week, talk to me a little bit about your methods.
	How do you predict where possible debris might go?
	So we do what is called oceanographic drift modeling.
	And it's, you know, people hear about MH370, but we've been using this for 20 or 30 years as oceanographers.
	I mean, we do that to looking at oil spills where fish and larvae end up in.
	Search and rescue, someone falls off a ship.
	Where does some of those bodies or people wash up on?
	Where do turtles migrate and whales migrate?
	So we use these techniques all the time.
	So it's not anything new.
	And it's very simple.
	I mean, if you think that we put an object into the water, let's say that you put an orange in the water and you follow where it goes.
	But we do that with a computer.
	So in a computer, we actually have a model, which is global models, which allow us, which takes into account all the data that we actually can get.
	So that data includes data from satellites, they're from ships, they're from robots, whatever data which is in the ocean globally goes into these models to give us a flow field in the ocean.
	So it's the same as what people do in the atmosphere.
	You actually know what the winds are doing at any given time.
	So then we take that velocity field and then we mark particular parcels of water in areas of the ocean.
	So we did that for this particular case along the seventh arc.
	And then we basically track them every hour about 50,000 Different parcels of water for two, two and a half years.
	So, computer-wise, it is quite intensive.
	We have to keep track of 50,000 particles every hour over a two and a half year period.
	So, it's quite computer.
	So, that then actually tells us where this debris may end up.
	There was a hint of I told you so, and quite understandably about some of the things that you said earlier, that you sort of knew that this was going to happen and you tried to let them know.
	Has it been difficult for you to get your message across because it's been such a big, complex multi-nation search?
	It is.
	I mean, it's sort of, as you probably know, in any system, there is a lot of inertia, you know.
	So it's been sort of hard in terms of client to getting the message across.
	But, you know, I told you in one hand, we said where the debris may end up in.
	And then when the flaperon was found, we did our simulations again.
	And they said, you know, we basically said it's most likely not in the area that they're searching, it's to the north, which is what they came out 15 months later and told us.
	So that's sort of a little bit frustrating that they should have, you know, listened a little bit earlier, maybe.
	And as you say, there was a flaperon discovered.
	Are you surprised that more pieces of wreckage and debris have not been found?
	I mean, I think that crash investigators tend to say that the things that do float are things like the tables and seat covers and that sort of thing.
	The biggest...
	We don't know where it went down.
	That's what we're trying to find out.
	In the same way, we actually don't know how much debris is actually still floating around.
	Since the crash, immediately after the crash, there was a tropical cyclone went through the area and two more actually went through in between before it actually ended up.
	In fact, one of the debris, which part of the wing, the biggest piece which has been recovered so far from Pemba Island in Tanzania, was found very close to a tropical cyclone going through, close to Madagascar.
	And so all of these different systems do have an impact on the amount of debris.
	And most of the things that has been found, you know, you have to remember that it's after 15 months and over a longer period, has been ones which are aluminium, which doesn't obviously corrode as much.
	And they also have this honeycomb structure inside in person, basically strengthening, which basically makes them flaw.
	Right, so they would be buoyant.
	The reason that you made the newspapers this week, I saw reports of what you've said in various newspapers over here, was that you are now thinking that you have an idea of where the plane may have come down, not necessarily where the wreckage has gone, which you've talked about before and told them about before, but now an idea of where it might have gone down.
	Yeah, so as I said right at the beginning, we were, you know, 18 of the 22 pieces that has been found has been predicted by where we said that debris would be coming up, where it would make landfall.
	So then we can go back and say, well, where did that debris originate from?
	And then we know, so that's the area that we said we have a better idea now based on the oceanographic evidence where it may have originated from.
	So what's your best guess then, your best scientific guess, your best calculation of where the plane might have come down?
	It's no different to exactly and consistent with all of the other studies that has been done.
	So what ATSB has said, which is guided by the Australian CSIRO, there's a European Union study with the Italians, there's a study from the US.
	It is to the north of the area which they have looked at and which has been recommended now by the Australian ATSB, the 25,000 square kilometers.
	Our estimate is that it is more to the northern part of the 25,000 square kilometer area.
	Right.
	And how do you feel when you read, I think it was about a month ago, reports that the search was being, I think, either stopped or scaled back, much to the consternation and upset of relatives of people who died or disappeared, vanished on this plane?
	Well, they basically announced in June or July last year that if the plane was not being found on the seabed when that 120,000 square kilometer area was complete, that they would not be looking, they will suspend the search.
	So they will not extend.
	And then there was a review by the Australian ATSB, which before that search was finished, saying that it is highly unlikely that the plane is that 120,000 square kilometer search area, but it is to the north.
	So, and then what the authorities said is that we're going to suspend, we're not going to look anymore, but we want more credible evidence.
	And what I'm saying is that from an oceanography point of view, this is as much credible evidence that we can get to get some certainty or an estimate of where the wreckage is most likely to be.
	And are you confident, more confident perhaps, than you might have been before, that this mystery might now be Closer to being solved?
	I mean, as I said, we knew this, you know, soon after the debris was found in, you know, in Reunion Island, when the flapron was found.
	We did quite extensive studies because we were allocated time on a supercomputer in Perth.
	So we were able to do some extensive modeling and predictions to be able to do that.
	So that was in September 2015 that we knew then that it was not going to be in the area that they're looking at.
	In the area that you believe that the plane may have gone down, whatever happened to the wreckage after that, how deep is the ocean?
	Give people who don't understand these things an idea of the colossal depths we're talking about.
	Well, as I said, it is four kilometers.
	And my example of the helicopter was basically that.
	So if you're actually above land in four kilometers and, you know, closing your eyes, trying to find a plane.
	Is this...
	It sounds like from all of the news reports and all of the churnings over of this over the last period since this happened, it sounds like it is.
	Well, it is, because I think, you know, it's about safety of people.
	And it's people, you know, as a humankind, we get a little bit scared when we can't explain how things happen.
	And this is the biggest thing, you know, as the next of king basically says, there's 8 million people who gets on a plane every day.
	We need to know what happened to this plane, you know, because it can happen to anyone.
	Absolutely.
	Chari, thank you for coming on my show.
	One quick thing before you go, Chari.
	I understand that you were in a very unique position as regards the tsunami back in 2004, which a lot of us woke up to in this part of the world.
	And you were actually part of it.
	Tell me about that.
	Well, I'm from Sri Lankan heritage.
	I grew up in Sri Lanka.
	So at that time, my son had just finished his A-levels and we went on holiday as like a reward.
	And of course, as everybody knows, it was boxing day.
	We went down to the beach.
	And on the way to the beach, the waves came and people were running onto the road and things like that.
	And I, being an oceanographer and also doing research on tsunamis at that time, knew that it was a tsunami.
	And as Sri Lanka doesn't get that, there was no record of any tsunamis, I did, I suppose, what I shouldn't have done, went to have a look.
	Well, I guess you would have had to.
	It's almost like being a storm chaser.
	Do you run away from the big one that's coming towards you or do you want to know more about it?
	No.
	Yeah, well, I actually went to the beach and I knew, you know, a tsunami usually is about three or four waves.
	So I made sure I asked the people, I couldn't go further because there's lots of boats on this road, which has been watched over from the first wave.
	And I asked people how many waves had come.
	They said two or three.
	I said, that's fine.
	It's come and gone.
	So I was safe.
	But again, I couldn't go to the beach because the boats were on the way.
	So we turned back.
	When I went there the next few days, where I was standing was a railway station and the whole railway station was gone.
	There were seven meters of water 20 minutes after where I was.
	And so then, you know, I was again like here, I was very much on the press because I was the only one who could explain what a tsunami is.
	The government then nominated me to be in the team which basically developed the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System, which is operational.
	And then I have been traveling all over the region to try to teach people about tsunamis and how to model them, how to predict them.
	Yeah, so.
	And you experienced that.
	Do you think that we're going to be seeing more of those things as because the world is a turbulent world, the climate is changing, they say?
	It's a sort of an interesting thing as well.
	As I told you, so these are what we call seismic tsunamis.
	They're due to underwater earthquakes.
	They're also tsunamis which are due to weather, basically thunderstorms and storm fronts.
	And it's very common in Fremantle of this area.
	We maybe get about 20 a year.
	And it's also quite common in the United Kingdom as well.
	There has been quite a few which come across the seven estuary, etc.
	And last year, as I said, where there is a swim from mainland to Rotteness, which is 20 kilometers, I swam in a team.
	And while I was swimming in a team, this thunderstorm comes along and generates a meteor tsunami.
	So now I have a very unenviable thing that I have basically got my feet wet.
	I'll swam in both a seismic tsunami and a meteorological tsunami.
	I think that must be unique.
	And just to explain to listeners, Rottnest is an island off Perth, Western Australia.
	It's a place where a lot of tourists go.
	I did a radio show from there with a guy called Chris Tarrant years ago.
	We spent virtually a week doing a show from Rottnest.
	It is very different from the mainland, and people do try and swim, don't they?
	Well, it's the biggest open water swim in the world.
	So they actually had it last week, and there were 2,500 people participating in this swim.
	Wow, that's all part of life in Western Australia.
	Sum up for me, though, just going back to the Indian Ocean tsunami, which was the boxing day one everybody was transfixed by at the time.
	If anybody asked you what the experience of being part of that was like, how would you sum it up?
	Unreal.
	I mean, I think I wrote a little Article afterwards, and my catchphrase is that we have spent a career working with the ocean and finding out the ocean, but I never knew the ocean can make such a huge destructive force.
	And it's also surreal because the tsunami is such that you could run.
	You could theoretically run away.
	But if you're running away, you turn left, you survived, you turn right, you died.
	And that's pretty hard to think about.
	And thank you to Professor Chari Pattiarachi at the University of Western Australia.
	We'll follow his research, of course.
	And MH370, a terrible, terrible tragedy and something that we need to sort out and solve, that is the mystery of it, as soon as we possibly can.
	It's taken a long time and a lot of anguish for the poor people connected in personal ways with the passengers on that plane.
	Well, now to end, a look at the future.
	And this is something that I did on my live radio show with a man called David Wood.
	He's a futurist, writes and broadcasts about these things quite prolifically.
	And we discussed the whole idea that maybe one of these days, quite soon, robots might take over many of the things that we do.
	And he asked the question, which I've been asking, we both have for years, many of us have.
	What exactly are politicians, the people who govern us, doing about this?
	How are they planning?
	This is David Wood, Futurist.
	Now, David, you and I had a little conversation before we came on air here by phone, and you and I came up with a great, great quote.
	It was yours mostly.
	You said, if we sleepwalk into the future, it will bite us on the bottom.
	Quite so.
	I mean, we can't just take for granted that the technology is going to make our lives much better.
	Plenty of examples in the past when technology has actually made a whole lot of things worse.
	We can see all the surveillance cameras everywhere.
	We know that people are watching what we're doing all the time, watching what we're typing online.
	And we can shrug our shoulders and say it's fine.
	But then we get bad politicians elected.
	We get people offering us all kinds of offers that we wonder how did they know this about us.
	And, you know, there's a lot of fearful scenarios ahead, as well as good scenarios, I have to say.
	Well, David, I think a theme about all technology that I think applies to probably most of it is that it's all good up to a point.
	Now, you talked about surveillance cameras.
	Well, of course, in the center of big cities like Liverpool or Birmingham or London or Glasgow, it's good to have some surveillance there because if somebody does something bad, you'll catch them doing it.
	But the problem is that this stuff can be taken too far and people can be tracked too much.
	I noticed to partial amusement and partial horror this evening that I'd been looking at eBay earlier in the night and I'd looked at an item which is a little bit of studio equipment called a limiter.
	Okay, if you're a musician, you're going to know what I'm talking about, compressor limiter.
	And I'd looked at one particular item that I was sort of interested in and checked out the price.
	And lo and behold, I came here and I always check my Facebook social media before I go on air.
	That item that I'd looked at on the train on eBay is on Facebook right in front of me.
	How did they know that I had looked at that item on the train coming in here?
	And how did they come to put it on my Facebook feed?
	That, I think, is a bit intriguing.
	It's only my personal view.
	There may be people who think that's a good thing.
	Personally, I see that as a bit of an intrusion because what else are they looking at?
	I think it's going to get worse in the future.
	In the future, there's a bit of an echo here when I'm speaking.
	We have a problem here that we've been trying to get the engineers here to sort out for about four or five months now.
	We get this reverb effect that comes on at the quarter-hour mark and goes away.
	So by the time I finish saying these words, it should be all right.
	Tell me if it is.
	Great.
	Let's keep going.
	So the worst thing that's going to happen is that the adverts are going to be smarter.
	They're going to know when we're at our points of weakness.
	They're going to know when we're a bit depressed.
	They're going to know when our minds are wandering.
	And they're going to sneak in at that moment and make their pitch to us.
	And we're going to end up buying things that later we think, why did I buy this?
	We're going to pay over the odds.
	We're going to vote for politicians that in our better moments we would have thought, no, there's no way I'm going to vote for them.
	So that's part of the risk that's ahead.
	And people may still say, well, that's not too bad.
	But in other parts of the world, you know, if you happen to let slip that you're an atheist or a transgender or homosexual or a lapsed Muslim, these things could be capital punishment offenses.
	I mean, look, it's interesting to have this discussion, I think, about the future.
	And I'm fascinated by all of this stuff because I kind of see things happening, and you may be too, that people don't seem to click on to.
	And maybe they should.
	You know, people seem to be generally happy with all of this stuff, which, of course, is, you know, facilitating their lives.
	But politicians, it might be argued by those who might argue it, are not being entirely honest with us about the impact of these things.
	And why should they be?
	Because as the great Sir Robin Day once said to a former defense minister who walked out on him for saying this, was it John Knott?
	He said, you know, and you politicians who are, if you'll forgive me for saying so, here today, gone tomorrow.
	He didn't like all of that.
	John Knott took off his microphone and walked out of the TV studio.
	But the fact of the matter is that politicians are elected mostly on short cycles.
	They're there for five years.
	They might be, if they're lucky, there for 30 years or a lifetime.
	But, you know, most of them are not there forever.
	So they don't have to worry about the impact of the things that you and I are talking about now.
	And that, I think, is slightly dishonest.
	Now, I know there's a committee in the House of Commons that is beginning to probe these things.
	But really, what do you think, David?
	And this is only a personal view, and I might be wrong.
	It wouldn't be the first time.
	It needs to be higher up the agenda.
	The future needs to be a lot higher up the agenda.
	In fact, the future is coming more quickly than it used to be.
	Once upon a time, maybe a politician could be justified in saying these things won't happen until a generation or two's time.
	But the things that once upon a time people would think may take 30 years could happen now in just two or three years.
	The progress of automation, artificial intelligence, it's really mind-bending.
	And politicians need to address these issues pretty quickly.
	Well, they do.
	And if you think it's not going to affect you, have another think about what you do for a living and how you work.
	Now, for example, I spend part of my working life, and I've been doing this for the better part of three decades in various places, reading the news.
	It's one of the things that I do, and I read the news and have been reading the news for years.
	It's a human skill.
	I have been shocked and surprised and slightly amused recently to hear how good the recognition technology is getting so that you can put words into a computer program and those words will come out sounding like a person.
	So what I'm saying is that I never thought that the human activity of reading the news, which has been something that I've made a living out of, journalism and newscasting for years, I never thought for a second that that might become obsolete.
	But now we're looking at a future where that might well happen.
	Quicker than people had thought.
	I saw something the other day in which some Google software was looking at a video in which the sound was removed.
	It was from the lots of BBC programmes and documentaries, news programs.
	And it was doing much better than the best human lip reader in figuring out just from the lip movements and facial actions what was actually being said.
	Didn't get everything entirely right, but it was already better than the best human lip reader.
	That's bad news for sportsmen and football managers, isn't it?
	Quite so.
	Some of their words on the touchline can be seen.
	But, you know, joking apart, technology is advancing at a rate that we cannot predict.
	Now, if you talk about robotics, I had Kevin Warwick, who's one of this country's leading practitioners, Professor Kevin Warwick on here, and we talked about the great advances that are happening at the moment.
	But robotics is moving ahead at a pace that it's going to be part of all of our lives before very long.
	And that is one of the things that this Commons Committee has started to consider, that robots will start to take over from people.
	And one reason they're going to be able to take over more jobs is that originally you had to program in every single time exactly what the robot needed to do.
	But now they're able to learn on the job, as it were.
	They're able to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn't work.
	And as soon as one of these many connected robots learns how to do something better, they're all connected together.
	And so instantly, the others get better at it too.
	That's one reason why driverless cars, which are a kind of robot, are getting so much better so much more quickly.
	And occasionally they have glitches and occasionally they have a crash or almost a crash, but then straight away it's all being analyzed and a new version of the software is pushed out and so that won't happen again.
	So more and more quickly robots are doing more and more jobs, not just the routine mechanical things which have got fairly well-defined formulas and sets of processes, but things involving some empathy, some emotional expressions, some care and compassion.
	That's coming too.
	Well that's interesting and it's not entirely a bad thing that they can reflect us and they can act accordingly.
	The difficulty comes and this is the point where in the last year or two we've started to get some concern, where it seems that robots a little down the track are going to have the capacity to think and act for themselves independent of what we tell them.
	They're already doing that to an extent.
	They can be told, look, your job is to figure out a way to get a high score in this game without being told all the rules of the game.
	And it figures out by itself.
	Oh, this is how to move the controls.
	This is what to play in various times.
	And it can come up with new strategies that no humans had ever thought of.
	So indeed, they are still getting their goals set by humans, but they're using their own intelligence to figure out unexpected ways of meeting the goals.
	That's good, but it's also worrying because inevitably they're going to get more control over society because we're going to think it's good.
	And still, however, there will be bugs and defects.
	I mean, all the software that we use have from time to time got bugs in it.
	And we sort of curse it then.
	But if it's got more and more control over what we're doing, if it's figuring out which drugs to give us, which medicines, which treatments to give us, and it gets it right a lot of the time and then gets it badly wrong, then that is, of course, a real concern.
	We've got to get to news in just over a minute from now, so we have to be brief about this one.
	But what do you think that we can do about this then?
	If that is going to be the situation where there is this possibility on the horizon they might start acting independently, do we have to start passing laws?
	Do we have to start regulating technology firms?
	What do you think?
	Most important thing to do is to have exactly the kind of discussion you and I are having now.
	There needs to be a broad discussion with people from all parts of society, not just the academics, not just the technologists, not just the business people, but people from all backgrounds.
	And then we can break through away from just the hype and the science fiction.
	We can see what's real and we can figure out what's desirable.
	Because we have to say that this is real.
	It's here and it's now and it's coming towards us at a pace that is far faster than we thought it would be and its consequences will be much bigger than a lot of people assume.
	And, you know, that's exactly what you just said, isn't it?
	Agreed.
	This is going to push many of the present-day issues and concerns way down the pecking order in terms of what's really important.
	We're talking about the future this hour with futurist David Wood and all of those questions that politicians tend to swerve and sideline that we need to be considering.
	Jason Ger, thank you very much for your tweet.
	It says in the 1970s, there was a drama called The Changes where everyone started smashing up technology and went back to Basic living.
	That's something that there are people at the moment, modern-day Luddites, I think they call them.
	You know, there are people like that who are actually considering completely walking away from technology and living a life that's devoid of it.
	And I can see some benefits in that.
	Mind you, I don't think I could live without the internet radio.
	And John, regular tweeter and text, John, thank you very much.
	You tell me that it wasn't Robin Day who was walked out on by John Knott in that interview.
	Actually, it was.
	We've just checked it online.
	You said it was Paxman.
	It was Robin Day, but thank you very much.
	Maybe there was a Paxman interview as well.
	But as far as we can see here, it was the great and late Sir Robin Day who was walked out on by government minister John Knott, Defense Minister, I think he was then, who didn't do himself any great favours.
	David Wood, futurist, let's get back to you.
	David, the future is something that is exciting for a lot of us, and we keep being built up by big business for it to be exciting.
	But there are lots of things we need to be concerned about.
	Now, I heard a discussion somewhere else over the weekend where they were talking about Luddites as they were.
	Now, Luddites back in the day were people who in this country and in the United States, and we're talking about, I think it was the 1800s, smashed up equipment that was taking their jobs.
	But there is a whole new, and we're not recommending anybody does anything like this before anybody says that, there is a movement of people who are eschewing, I think is the word, technology, isn't there?
	It's a growing campaign.
	I think people are objecting to bits of technology.
	As you said, I don't think it's very practical and credible to give up all of technology in our present state.
	We use transport, we use the internet, and we all benefit from modern medicines of one sort or another.
	So I think it's unusual, very unusual for people to give it all up.
	But what's more credible is people will say, you know, the way this is going, it's pushing greater inequality.
	The people who do all right, they are doing very well indeed.
	The top 1% or the top 5%, however you count it.
	Whereas more and more people are missing out.
	This is a very important point.
	Now, we're not being political here.
	This is not a, well, it's something for politicians to consider.
	But we're not being partisan when we say that money and power is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people who have the ability to deploy this technology.
	Now, that's good for them.
	And it may be that certain things happen more efficiently and things to buy are cheaper.
	The problem with that is going to be in the future, this future that we're looking towards, is that there will be an excessive population who are trained to do some of the old things that have been taken over by technology and have nothing to do and not much of a way to earn a living.
	That's going to give us a problem, isn't it?
	It's going to give us potentially a very big problem.
	You mentioned the Luddites and people said, well, in the past, it's true people lost their jobs when more automation was introduced and weaving and so forth.
	But over time, they could retrain.
	They could become used in different factories and later on they could learn other skills or their children could learn other skills.
	But the problem today is that automation and technology is going to take over not just one or two jobs, but almost every job, I would say, in the next two or three decades is going to be radically changed.
	So people might retrain.
	They may spend two or three years learning a whole new skill and then discover that the software owned by a few very powerful companies is able to do that job as well, better than them.
	And again, this is not a political point, but if more and more people are thrown out of jobs by increasingly efficient technology, the problem will be for the people who control that technology that they're going to cease to make quite the level of money that they did, because those people who haven't got jobs are not going to be able to afford the things that are being now produced more efficiently.
	Quite so.
	There's this famous story at the Ford Motor Company.
	I think it's about the 1930s or 1940s when one of the Ford family was showing around the union leaders the new robots, automation was being introduced.
	And the manager said, look, these robots are never going to go on strike and never going to get tired.
	Quick as a flash, the union leader shot back and said, well, will these robots be buying cars?
	And if people are pushed out of work, and they may have some money as a result of some welfare handouts, but often that's a fairly low level of subsistence.
	And worse, many people will feel lack of meaning, lack of purpose, and they're going to look around for something else to get their meaning and purpose from.
	And in some cases, people are going to turn to poor substitutes.
	This is a political point in a way.
	When you say poor substitutes, David, you mean crime?
	Well, perhaps crime.
	But if we look at the life expectancy of different groups of people around the world, it's usually been going up and up.
	You know, every decade, people live longer.
	Well, but recently, in some areas, it's been going down again, especially in the white working class or middle class in many parts of America.
	People are living less long than their parents used to do.
	And what's killing them, it's not so much the chronic diseases like heart disease.
	It's things like suicides, it's things like drug addiction, and it's things like chronic alcoholism.
	And as a result, it's heartbreaking what's happening in these societies, in these parts of the world.
	And as a result, they're attracted to populist politicians who often don't have their best interests at heart, to be frank.
	But again, if you look at, say, Donald Trump, just to bring his name at random into this, he is bringing back factories, isn't he?
	He's bringing back car factories to Detroit.
	He's bringing back production from Mexico.
	So it's a seductive claim.
	But as a futurist, I'm bound to say that the place where these jobs are going to is not some overseas country particularly.
	It's automation.
	And if a country like America or Britain tries to avoid automation, Tries to say, well, let's resist this.
	Guess what?
	Other countries overseas, such as China, they're automating even faster than we are.
	There are more robots being deployed in China than anywhere else, and it's driving down their cost of production even more.
	At the same time, they're getting higher quality, fewer defects, and that's going to take even more jobs away from us.
	So we have to look forward to a transition in which most people will not find their main purpose through jobs.
	People will find their main purpose in things apart from jobs.
	Which means we're going to have to do things which I think one Scandinavian country has been looking at, maybe giving everybody a basic wage.
	And this would be, I can't imagine how that would happen in this country or the United States, giving everybody a basic wage, and then you live your life according to the way technology is configured and the amount of work that's available.
	But everybody gets a share in what is being produced.
	You say you can't imagine that coming in.
	Well, I can't imagine it being...
	I think it would be over...
	Let's say it would be over a lot of dead bodies, I think.
	How quickly opinions changed about gay marriage, for example.
	20 years ago, you would never imagine that such a thing would be possible, but fairly quickly it's changed.
	But there was a debate, and there were organizations like Stonewall who were doing their work.
	There was a debate, and the issues were out there.
	These issues that we're talking about, how often do you hear them talked about on radio or television?
	Not often.
	Well, I'm glad to say you're pioneering the way here with others, one or two others, that there is some recognition that this is a topic that needs to be looked at, looked at increasingly quickly.
	And after all, we already have a basic income for some people, old-age pensioners, they don't have to work in order to get their pension.
	Young school children, they don't have to work in order to get the money to go to school.
	And if people really are ill or genuinely can't get a job, they get some welfare.
	And what we're looking at is the possibility of expanding this.
	And with automation and the robots generating more and more abundance, which is what we're talking about, doing things more productively, there should be more to go around.
	And we just need to be sensible as a society.
	And that's a very big if, of course.
	And there's all kinds of difficulties in the future.
	I'm not saying this is going to be easy.
	It's going to be very hard and challenging.
	But I think the possibility are we might get there a lot quicker than most people expect.
	Well, that's an optimistic view of a pessimistic future.
	I'm not sure about that because you've got to get politicians on board.
	You've got to get the public to understand it and want to vote for it.
	And of course, you can't be the only nation in the world that does that.
	If you're going to make a radical change like that, other countries have got to come along with you.
	So you've got to have somewhere some big central power deciding how much technology should we have, how should it work, how should it be deployed, and who gets the benefits of it.
	That, to me, is a big undertaking.
	And to some people, that's going to sound like communism.
	So if we can do it locally, then we avoid some of these risks and issues.
	And I understand why people are frightened of this kind of thing.
	So the idea of doing a local experiment with universal basic income, which is one of the names for this extension of the welfare system, it can be done in a city, it might be done in part of a country.
	And then people look at it and they'll see how well it goes.
	There are already some experiments underway.
	And we can already see, you know, guess what?
	It doesn't make people lazy through and through.
	That's one of the criticisms.
	If you give people money for doing nothing, they'll just spend all their time sitting on their sofa eating too much.
	Well, a few do that, but many more people.
	It gives them the confidence.
	It gives them the reassurance.
	They don't have to worry so much about where the next meal is coming from.
	It gives them the ability to get their lives together, even start businesses.
	And the more these experiments are seen to be successful, I think more and more people are going to try them out further.
	Definite food for thought.
	Futurist David Wood, and thank you very much for his contribution to this.
	That was from my live radio show.
	If you want to get in touch with me about the podcasts or anything with guest suggestions, thoughts about the way that I do it, things that can be improved, anything really.
	And by the way, thank you so much again for your support over this period that I've been through.
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	So, like I say, more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	So until next we meet.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	The last time I checked, and please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you.
	Take care.

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