All Episodes
Previous Next
July 24, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:16
Edition 651 - Numbers Stations/Cyberworld

Two guests - Prof. Philip Davies from Brunel University on the deep mystery of radio stations that repeat sequences of numbers 24/7 And futurist/author Tracy Follows on preserving your identity in a cyber-world...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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.
Well, by the time you hear this, with any luck, the heat wave that has been dogging the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe may have abated somewhat, as they say.
But as I'm speaking these words today, recording this for you, the temperature in London is forecast to get up to about 41 degrees Celsius, which is something like 105?
Is it 106?
I need to do the conversion.
Kind of temperatures that we're just not used to here in London.
And if you couple that with the poor air quality in parts of London, then that becomes a pretty serious problem.
Or pretty serious situation.
The advice that is being given is for people not to travel unless they have to, in the worst of it.
And I know that temperatures like this are a walk in the park in certain parts of Arizona and Dubai, in the Middle East, places like that.
But here in London, we're not geared up for it.
So what we find when we get a protracted period of it, things begin to fail and people start to feel ill.
Now, at this moment, I'm sitting here in my shorts and a t-shirt, and it is like doing a recording in a sauna.
I'm using a different kind of microphone to do this.
For my technical friends, it is a vintage Sennheiser 421 that I was able to pick up.
And this microphone was used by a lot of the American radio stations, probably in the 80s and 90s.
And it's just an interesting one to use, but it's impervious to heat and problems and difficulties.
And so I'm using it because it's not going to break down on me.
So if I sound different, that is the reason for that, the extreme heat as I'm doing this.
Now, I'm taking one show off the radio show, or rather the TV show, and that will be the 24th of July.
Not because I'm going to go away on holiday.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to be here.
I've got a whole ton of things to sort out.
I've got to catch up on emails.
If your email required a response and you didn't get one, please remind me.
I am so far behind on that stuff.
But please believe me that I get to read all of the emails as they come in.
You know, sometimes I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I'll turn on my phone and check the latest emails.
So please know that your email will be seen.
But if your email required a response, please let me know and I will get back to you.
But I've got a ton, a ton of things to catch up on.
A pile of laundry and, you know, medical visits and stuff like that.
So that's why I'm not going to be doing the 24th TV show.
However, to compensate, two different editions of the podcast here, including things that you've been asking me to put out as podcasts and I haven't over the last few years.
And I want to get them out there so that, you know, they're online almost as part of the, is it a journal of record?
Is that the way they'd put it?
So I'm going to do that on this edition and the next edition of The Unexplained.
They're things that you've asked for over the years and I never got round to putting out.
So thing number one, Dr. Philip Davis from Brunel University talking about numbers stations.
I'll explain when we get nearer to it what they are, but they're a clandestine way of communication and a fascinating one that dates back to when I was a kid and maybe when you were a kid.
And I've had so many emails over the years asking me to tackle the topic of numbers stations.
Dr. Philip Davis from Brunel University has researched them.
He's on first.
On second is Tracy Follows, researcher, author, who wrote a book called The Future of You.
She's a futurist, essentially.
Tracy Follows in the book shows how our personal freedoms and potential will be transformed over the coming decades, essentially, by technology.
A lot of the things that are beginning to happen, you may not be ready for.
Tracy Follows will talk about that in this edition of The Unexplained.
She will be the second thing you will hear.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep those coming.
And thank you for all of the messages on my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
I get to see all of the messages as they come in.
And, you know, it's really great to know that I'm part of a kind of community here.
Please also check out theunexplainedlive.com.
That's the special website I set up to explain about the cruise experience that we're doing towards the end of this year, October the 28th, it all begins.
Well worth looking at, theunexplainedlive.com and my Wayne website, designed and created by Adam.
The main website is theunexplained.tv.
It's a lot to get in, isn't it?
Okay, so on this special edition, in the sweltering...
I'm frightened to look at the temperature now.
Actually, because it's comparatively early, I think it's about 30, I think I can see that readout.
It's about 34-ish now.
So we haven't got to 40 in my living conditions at the moment.
That'll probably come later today.
Okay, it's going to sound ridiculous if you hear this and it's a lot cooler.
But as I'm speaking these words, it's dang hot.
Let's start on this edition of The Unexplained, Dr. Philip Davis from Brunel University on the subject of numbers stations.
Now, numbers stations are, if you've ever tuned up and down the dial, occasionally you will hear people speaking, perhaps in German, perhaps in English, random sets of numbers.
It is and has been, for as many years as I've been alive, a total mystery.
This is Dr. Philip Davis.
They are strange radio stations that appear and disappear often quite rapidly, and they've been there since I was a teenager and got my first shortwave radio, reciting in English or German or other languages strings of numbers.
Five, seven, nine, eleven.
I can remember the first time that I heard a number station.
It was on my very first Dixon's shortwave radio.
I think I was probably about 13.
And I ran to my father, who was a police officer, and I said, Dad, what do you think this is?
He said, I don't know, son, but I think whatever it is is mysterious.
And he began to think along the lines, which I hadn't thought of, I was a kid, of espionage.
Number stations continue to broadcast.
They continue to baffle people.
One of the people who've been studying, and there aren't very many numbers stations and what they might be is Professor Philip Davis, Director at Brunel Center for Intelligence and Security Studies, Brunel University.
He's online now.
Philip, thank you very much for giving up part of your bank holiday weekend to do this.
My pleasure.
Number stations are a fascination.
I have no idea whether that little potted history of my own experience with them is common.
I think it is.
I will be honest with you.
They came into my life much later and really as a sidelong aspect of my doctoral work on the Secret Intelligence Service.
And so I come to less from the kind of radio ficionaries point of view than where they plug into a wider narrative around the development of British intelligence.
I think a lot of us start with the interest.
If we're interested in radio, then we're interested in something strange on the dial.
And then we start to think of what might be behind that.
And that's the position that I've been in for the last several decades, simply wondering where these things emanate from and what possible use they might have.
Yeah, I mean, the general consensus is that they're almost certainly part of a clandestine radio communication system between organizations that do what's called human intelligence, that is to say running human agents who provide information, as opposed to the organizations that attack codes or do satellite imagery, for communicating with their sources.
But there's also no question that some of them are also fraudulent.
Some of them are specious in the sense of being hoaxes, and some of them are probably deception operations.
But the general view tends to be that they're one leg of a communication system for talking to human sources.
I think for my listener who might not have heard a number station, I've got a quick 20-second montage of some of the number stations from around the world.
And if you're okay with this, Philip, I just want to play this so that people who may never have heard a number station, maybe have never heard shortwave radio, you haven't lived, this is what they sound like.
One, seven, three, one, seven, three, one.
I have to say, Philip, in my lifetime, I've heard many Eastern European number stations.
Certainly when I was a kid, and mostly in German, seemingly emanating from East Germany or somewhere in that environment.
I've never heard an English number station.
Are they common?
I'm not sure I would say common exactly.
Probably the most famous one is the Lincoln Shapocher, where the numbers are read in a machine-generated, rather well-heeled English accent by a woman, or by a woman's voice.
And that one actually became the focus of quite a clever documentary by the BBC back in 2005.
Right, and a lot of people asking questions I've seen while I've been researching this online as to what the Lincolnshire poacher might be.
That would see, if you were conducting clandestine operations, it does seem strange that you would use a voice like that.
Does it not?
Well, first of all, the number stations run in kind of three or four different modes.
So you've got the number stations which read off three and five number groups of numbers.
Three or five digit groups of numbers.
You've got ones which send MOS.
Other ones which send series of beeps, which anybody listening to short wave playing during the 80s would recognize from sort of satellite broadcasts.
Satellite signals rather.
And the other ones also send a kind of white noise hash, which is probably consistent with kind of high-speed data transfer you'd have heard on the 1990s PC modem.
So you've got some of them are sending voice numbers, some of them are sending voice codes, some of them are sending digitally encoded values.
And the idea here is that this plugs into an old practice for using shortwave radio to communicate with human sources who would have had a receiving set, very often but not always a transmitting set, but who had been receiving on the shortwave bands.
Probably go back to about 1938 at SIS.
Okay, so I didn't know this.
They're pre-World War II.
I was aware of them being around in World War II, but they're actually predate World War II by, as you say, a year.
Not exactly.
The number stations, as we know them, start with the beginning of the Cold War.
But the use of shortwave radio to communicate with agents was initiated as considered quite an innovation at the time by the communications section of SIS in Iran in around 38.
And they began equipping the agents over the following year or two.
The work on it begins earlier, but I don't think they begin much in the way of deployed capabilities much before then.
So if I was thinking about the Nazis using this technology to communicate with people, perhaps undercover in the UK, of which there were many, I was wrong.
It was our side who began to use this first.
Yeah, I mean, the Germans used shortwave communications.
Everyone had to opt to shortwave communications once the war broke out, and you couldn't move couriers and the mails freely across borders and frontiers.
And of course, you couldn't otherwise get to people who were in hostile territory.
So you had to go to shortwave radio.
The Germans were using it to communicate with their agents, which is, as you know, were all sort of captured and either turned or the occasional one shot in the tower during the Second World War.
And in fact, a lot of the initial clues for finding the Double Cross agents, as they became known, came from intercepting the German Secret Service, the APFERD's radio communications to them and the radios being operated.
And here's an interesting one from the point of view of somebody like yourself who's listening as a keenly engaged amateur originally.
Most of the work of intercepting the ABFER communications to their agents was done by people called voluntary interceptors who were amateur radio operators who are working on behalf of the radio security service.
Now, isn't that interesting, Philip?
And presumably that's because, you know, the Ministry of Defense, the war ministry, couldn't have ears everywhere listening to every frequency at every time.
So you depend on people who listen as a hobby.
Yeah, you just couldn't have enough intercept stations operating on any national budget.
So all the amateurs got mucked in and contributed very the interest ironically, the interception of these signals was handled, was governed, it was managed by the secret intelligence service, who are normally responsible for foreign operations, but the intercept work was done domestically because you were intercepting a foreign German communication.
And that was then fed through to the security service, MI5, who did most of the investigations, arrest and handling of them.
And the people who used these, you know, this method of communication, presumably what?
Would they have a little radio set, we've seen these in movies, haven't we, and on TV shows, in a little leather case, and they'd go to somewhere private, pull up an aerial or throw up a piece of wire, and then they'd be listening.
Absolutely.
I mean, one of the interesting things about the number stations, as they emerged in the Cold War, is their transmission only.
There's no sort of identified counterpart signal going back to them.
Whereas if you had somebody sitting there with a B4 or a B5 set in the Resistance or the Secret Service in Europe in the Second World War, with somebody cycling to generate electricity or whatever, then they got caught when they transmitted.
So the Germans had a really extensive intercept network within Germany and occupied territories, especially across France, where they could pick up on the transmissions from an agent or a resistance cell sending messages back to London.
And that was how an awful lot of them got caught at the beginning of the war.
So to a certain degree, it was the answer to the message, the original signal, that got you caught and shot or sent to Harvinsbruck.
And so the interesting thing about the number stations, as we now know, is they only transmit.
And what you're doing is you're minimizing the risk of a dialogue where the person who's receiving the signal is sending back and can be caught.
So how do you know, if we're thinking about maybe wartime or whenever, in the Cold War indeed, how do you know that your message has been received, is the only proof that your message has been received when that particular order or instruction is actually executed by the agent?
No, the clever thing is just because you send the instructions by radio doesn't mean the reply has to be by radio.
Ah.
So what?
They could send a letter or phone and say, weather in Scarborough, beautiful.
Yeah, or they could drop something in a dead letter drop.
Or reply another way.
So just because you send by radio, the other person can add a dead letter drop.
And then they reply by message.
The other thing is, you see, the radio technology changed.
And in the Second World War, you had broadcast signals coming out of London to our agents on the continent.
They'd put up their folding radio.
They'd send a broadcast message back.
And that was where the Germans could pick them up.
The technology changed so that people would record a message, then play it back at high speed as a burst transmission.
So if they did come on the air, they'd only be on the air for a couple of seconds, which is very, very hard to tie down and intercept.
But by the 1980s, you're not even doing that anymore.
You're using a burst signal, but you're no longer broadcast signaling.
And what you're doing is you signal up to the military communications satellite of the country for whom you work.
Right.
So this, indeed, in this day and age, satellite technology is involved in this.
It's not only shortwave radio.
As part of the control communication network for handling agents.
And so you have to think about communications with agents not being a single channel.
It's part of a network.
So you'll have accommodation addresses where they'll write to it, and somebody else can go and pick up a letter.
They'll have dead letter drops where they drop things in an old brick somewhere or something like that.
And then you've got a shortwave radio.
Then you've got internet communications and so forth.
And the vulnerability is always when the agent communicates back.
So that a man called Olya Penkovsky, who is a really important source in the Cold War and a subject of a recent film called A Courier, gets picked up by the KGB when he's putting a message into a dead letter drop in an abandoned building in Moscow.
That's when you become visible.
Lots of SOE network agents, lot of resistance people got caught when they were transmitting.
So using the burst transmitter reduced your vulnerability.
Using a satellite uplink reduced your vulnerability because you weren't broadcasting.
And unless people picked up the side leakage or side lobes from your radio, they weren't going to know you were there.
And then in 2000, between 2010 and 2012, the Chinese managed to penetrate a cyber-based communication used by the CIA to communicate with their agents in China.
And they rolled up the whole network.
It was catastrophic.
So it's when the person communicates to you that you're vulnerable.
So when you look at something on the number stations, insofar as we have reason to believe that they're the transmitting end of that communications link, the answering end would come in through dead letter drops, through cyber, or through a satellite uplink.
Many different kinds of responding options.
And what about the way that these things were broadcast?
I was always, the one that I used to pick up the most clearly, and I'm talking about when I was a kid, so that's a few years ago, was a woman's voice as if she pitched her nose and it would be Acht, Acht, Neuin, Siemen, Acht, Acht.
It would be like that.
And you'd think, what could a string of numbers like that, and how many numbers could you say in any one session anyway?
How much information could you impart on, and this is the Cold War, on one transmission?
Coded telegrams tend to be fairly brief, as telegrams always were.
So the idea is you're going to put in only the most essential.
The Lincolnshire poacher, which is the one I know best, would send, I think it was 200 blocks of five digits on every given transmission.
So there'd be the call sign, you'd get the 200 blocks of five digits, and then there'd be an end signal.
And that would call the end of it.
So you would have whatever cipher system you're using around those digits.
Because you could use multiple different cipher systems around that kind of a transmission, would limit what you do.
You might have to break it up into multiple messages.
One of the rules that was given out to the SOE networks, resistance networks in the Second World War, was never to make long transmissions.
It was to, if you've got a long message, break it up over multiple signals over a period of time.
So a certain degree, you can always say, well, I've got at a given time of day, two o'clock in the afternoon, the Lincolnshire poster is going to come online.
You're going to have 200 code blocks to work with.
And the answer is, yeah, but if I've got a longer message, I'll do it over two or three days.
And the other clear thing they do is they transmit blocks continuously.
So people can't come along and say, they started transmitting today when this happened, and they transmitted six weeks later when that happened.
You can't tie it to an activity.
You can't do what's called traffic analysis.
It's just a continuous thing.
So they'll send random numbers out there when they're not actually sending messages.
Can you think of any occasions where the use of a number station has perhaps saved the life of somebody in the field?
You know, in any era, World War II, Cold War, even the present day?
Not really, because in truth, we've not really had anybody come out and talk in any detail about the impact of the number stations.
The level of confidence I have when I talk about this is because in 2005, a man called David White, who'd worked for the Diplomatic Wireless Service, went public and talked about having been working on one of his foreign postings alongside one of the women who'd been hired to read the numbers.
And so she just, her daily job was to walk in, go on the air at a particular time, read off numbers, and go for coffee afterwards.
That was quite significant because the Diplomatic Wireless Service is the wireless communications network operated by the British government.
It was actually the original shortwave communication system set up by the Secret Intelligence Service, BMI6, in 38.
And the Foreign Office after the war said, that's rather nice.
I think we'll have the lot.
Thank you.
Took it out of SIS's hands, began to run it, but it remained the wireless communications network used by SIS to handle their agents.
And a few years ago, around the same time, they did some direction finding on the Lincoln Shapocher and located it not in the UK, but in Cyprus.
But what do you have in Cyprus, but the two sovereign bases, including an outstation and the diplomatic wireless service?
Wow.
So, yeah, that's kind of how you home in on this.
But the problem is, apart from White's revelations, when he came out and talked about it in 2005, nobody else has.
And so it's not really possible to tie these specific clandestine radio operations to any specific events in intelligence history.
So, Philip, we've worked out between us that number stations are certainly an enigma used by both sides.
The insecure part of it is not receiving the message, but it's getting your reply back.
That's the point At which you might be caught.
Number stations, I'm curious to read that they are still being used today and thinking about how they might be used.
I would presume if you're out in Afghanistan and you're doing deep intelligence or in Cuba and doing deep intelligence, then your number station might be very useful to you.
Is that the kind of application they might have today?
I think that's the most likely scenario, particularly if you're in a remote part of the world and you require instructions, then a shortwave is really, really good for doing that.
It doesn't run risks of a lot of other things like couriers, which is how, of course, they managed to bag Osam bin Laden, or similar such activities.
And the person listening to it has no idea to whom it's directed.
It's simply governed by how fast the signal peters out.
It goes in all directions at once.
So you don't have a clue as to where the receiver might be, where the recipient might be.
And that means it's very, very secure in that way.
And yeah, it's now, I think, it's as important as ever because the level of intelligence activity has been steadily increasing across the board since the early 2000s.
And the diversity of intelligence operations have increased because you still have to have operations against foreign governments.
You're now trying to penetrate terrorist organizations, insurgencies, transnational organized crime, and so forth.
So it's a piece of what they call tradecraft, operational technique that can be used for all kinds of different contexts.
Right.
So these things still have a use in high security areas.
What about the actual codes, the ciphers that are used for number stations?
I'm presuming that they must be of great complexity, otherwise somebody's going to break them.
No one has yet broken one of the number station codes, so I think we can assume they're fairly secure.
It's worth pointing out that in communications security practice used by governments, when you have a communications channel that you're not sending a message on, you continue to send rand very often continue to send random numbers.
over it so it stays live.
And so somebody intercepting the communication won't necessarily know where messages begin and end, and they won't be able to correlate messages with activity and do what's called traffic analysis to figure out who's talking to whom and when.
So if you've got a large number of random numbers sitting on the channel, that's going to make decryption harder because you're looking for patterns in the numbers.
And if you've got random numbers, then that makes the identifying the patterns that would give you a meaning more difficult.
It makes the competition more difficult.
So that's not going to help anyway.
But the likelihood is that they'd be using some very, very secure enciphering techniques, such as one-time pads, where you and the other person share a set of digits, which you use, or letters which you use to interpolate with your original message to generate your cipher.
And then you send the cipher.
But the problem is, the thing is, you've got a copy of that little one-time pad sheet, and they've got a copy of it.
Nobody else can do that, because numbers are random here.
And once you've used it, you throw it out, use a new one.
And unless somebody has a copy of those sheets, they can't actually get into it.
So if they're using one-time pads, they're basically going to be impenetrable for all intents and purposes.
They may be using things called book codes, where you have a common document that you refer to and use that in a similar kind of way.
As long as nobody else knows what book you're referring to as the key for getting into your communications, then that's going to be impenetrable.
Or they may use fairly powerful machine-based enciphering systems like you would have seen used on the Enigma machines that were used by the German ARPFER to communicate with our agents.
Now, admittedly, we broke Enigma, but good luck, good fortune, and good technique.
You're not always going to get that way because the technology is now very, very much more difficult to penetrate.
So there could be very strong machine codes.
It could be book codes, could be one-time pads, but all of these would be very secure.
In 2021, which nations do you think are still using number stations?
Are we?
Assuming the Lincoln Shaposho is still sending out of RAF Aquatiria or whichever sovereign base it is in Cypress, then probably.
Yes, certainly they're going on.
There's been some suggestion certainly over the last decade that the numbers of stations have been increasing.
And consequently, it certainly seems to be ongoing.
I mentioned earlier the fact that the CIA had lost their networks in China when the Chinese government managed to penetrate a successively secure cyber communications.
And I can see where that might motivate people to go back to tried and true standards like shortwave wireless.
Okay, so these things are still being used.
And I don't want to alarm anybody, but in the nature of your research, do you believe that there are still perhaps Eastern Bloc or perhaps from China or somewhere else?
Would we be naive to think that there were not still agents, just as they did in the 1960s with the Krugers and others, operating undercover, in plain sight in the United Kingdom, perhaps getting their communications in this way?
Absolutely.
Gordon Carrera has just published a very good book called Russians Amongst Us about resident illegals that the federal Russia is still putting into the Western world.
And that activity is still going on.
There's been a succession of espionage arrests and convictions for people who've been working for the Chinese.
Smaller numbers for other countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, over the last 20 years.
So it's still a very active business.
If anything, of course, the intensity is increased with the increasingly aggressive posture of both Russia and China and their desire to steal march information-wise wherever they can.
So I think we just have to keep listening and stay fascinated as I've been for all of these decades.
Well, on behalf of all those listeners who over the years have asked me for more information about numbers stations, Philip, thank you very much indeed.
Please enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for inviting me.
Subject you've been asking for for years, Dr. Philip Davis there on Numbers Stations.
Tracy follows next as she looks into our future digitally and how life is going to be transformed sometimes in ways that you will not like.
Last time we spoke, I think it was about 18 months ago and I said I must get you back on and here I am, true to my word.
I know that was very kind of you.
It's good to be back.
Your book, which is out, which I keep getting ads for, but if you're, I don't know if you're paying Facebook for advertising, but it's very effective because I get at least one a day.
The future of you, can your identity survive 21st century technology?
What gave you the idea for this?
Oh, well, funny you should say that.
It was Facebook, actually.
So back in 2016, I started to get some strange messages from Facebook to my email address, like my name, but it was addressed to dear Byron, Byron Lowarth, and kept saying, you know, you should see what your friends are up to.
Don't you want to update your status?
And I looked at these friends and thought, they're all 30-something males.
They're no friends of mine.
They look like they're having a great time.
But it transpired that somehow something had happened with my account.
I don't know if it'd been hacked or I'd clicked on a link previously.
Something had happened and I could no longer get into my account.
And Facebook thought I was a person called Byron.
And so I scanned in my passport to sort of re-authenticate myself and Facebook told me I wasn't me.
When you have that situation, how do you make contact with a person at Facebook and say, I didn't do this?
Well, there's no one in the system.
Like the official system, there isn't anybody that you can contact.
So I went round and round these sort of these notifications and I still don't have a Facebook account today because I was sort of in a limbo land.
But it made me think, hang on a minute, a machine has read my identity using an official document that the government gave me and that's not good enough.
So that doesn't prove or authenticate or verify my existence and identity.
And so then I was just starting to see everything through that lens then.
And I was really starting to question what our identity really meant, and who was governing our identity, and who really had control or was able to manage it in a world of technology?
Does our identity have less value in a world of technology?
That's a good question.
I think it's just a very different concept in a digital world.
I think that's what it is.
And I guess through the book, I came to the conclusion that, you know, we've had the psychology of the self, where we thought the identity resided in the consciousness.
And we've had the biology of self, where a lot of people have thought, actually, it's in the physicality.
If you change the physicality too much, you're no longer the same person.
But now the psychology of self and the biology of self has been joined by the technology of self.
And the interesting thing about the technology of self is it's not necessarily under your control.
So in the future, when we might have, I don't know, implants or, you know, augment our cognitive abilities or run our minds off the cloud, you know, who is it who's going to be going to be enabling that?
It'll be a platform in the same way that we have our external device of the smartphone.
So we'll presumably want to sign up to some terms and conditions.
And it's a bit more serious if those terms and conditions change than it is at the moment, perhaps with our handheld device.
The shock of this is the equivalent of me going into a hotel.
Remember when we had hotels?
In the days when we had hotels, and them saying, you know, me saying I'd like to stay here for the night, how much is that?
And me agreeing the price.
And then I get ready to book in.
And they say, what's your name, Howard Hughes?
And they say, well, I mean, I've got a silly name, but let's leave that apart.
I say, my name is Howard Hughes.
And they say, no, you're not.
I know who I am.
But in the modern world of technology, the sovereignty that you have within yourself to be yourself can sometimes be in the hands of another.
That's a scary prospect.
And that's what led me to write the book exactly, because I was, there's a lot of issues here around our autonomy, around our sense of identity, and as you say, self-sovereignty.
And I do think as we move further and further into the 21st century, there'll be a sort of, I guess, a countervailing trend, a counter-trend against this technocracy, which will be a trend towards more self-sovereignty.
And people will, I guess, want to find ways to exit the system that they might feel that they've become kind of trapped in.
So when you became Byron Loweth and you had a dialogue with the people, Byron Lowell, I mean, it's a great name.
You know, that is the name of a great writer or a composer or something.
When you became Byron Loweth and changed your sex and your identity completely, that was a disturbing thing for you, of course.
But your answer to it was to get off the platform, right?
Well, I just couldn't get in because if it wasn't going to admit to my passport, then I didn't really have a choice.
So I just haven't engaged with the platform and I've just used other social networks.
So I think, you know, I mean, I suppose I could set up another identity and access Facebook another way, but I had all my content there, of course.
But it's not just that particular example.
I think I just started to see, you know, things that were happening on social media like the growth of virtual influencers.
So we all know little Michaela, for example.
She's got millions of followers now on Instagram.
And she literally is a computer generated person.
And she has a lot of followers who follow her every move and every sort of cause and activist engagement and everyday commentary.
And this isn't seen as a sort of unreal or virtual world.
It's really seen as part of the real world.
And when I've researched with a younger generation, they're like, well, you know, she's really interesting.
I really like her.
I'll be friends with a virtual person.
So again, that's another aspect of our identity that is managed through the social networks that again is sort of flipping identity on its head, really.
And that means I've never thought of it this way.
And I've heard young people talk about, you know, virtual creations that they follow, you know, not just cartoon characters.
But that means that we as flesh and blood human beings, autonomous, self-determining supposedly, are toe-to-toe with things that don't exist.
Yes.
And even more interestingly, those things that don't exist are influencing how we see ourselves.
So if we see them behaving in certain ways, standing up for certain causes, doing certain collaborations, or augmenting their own physicality, albeit as virtual beings, if you like, virtual influencers, it has an effect back on us in the real world.
And we, because it's a reflection, really, albeit the reflection isn't real, although I say real and unreal, there's a generation upcoming that don't really see it as real and unreal.
They don't really see it as that sort of thing.
That takes me to exactly the point I was going to ask you about.
That sounds to me like there is a generation coming up that is losing its grip on reality.
Well, one of the things, in some senses, I do agree with that because what I found with a lot of research I was doing with a Gen Z audience, so up to about 22, 23 years old now, they are very keen, many of them are very keen to outsource much of their decision making to external intelligences, if you like, like a digital assistant like Alexa, or it could be a robot or some other sort of smart device in the home.
And part of the reason for that is they see that that kind of device will make a better slash more objective decision than they can.
And I was quite shocked by that because I'm quite old now compared to that.
And my view is, oh, it's my gut instinct.
You know, I would want to make a decision based on my feelings and my gut instinct, but they don't.
And it's interesting.
They would rather have the fridge tell them when they've had too many calories and shut its door, lock its door and stop them from indulging than rely on their own self-discipline, for example.
And to me, that's a very interesting change.
Well, that kind of, you know, you're voicing something that I haven't really voiced myself and should have, you know, because I, for fear of being told that I'm just an old geezer again, which I probably am.
You know, the fact is that in the world that I came from, and I'm talking about like when I was in my 20s, for example, which is a few years ago, individual autonomy had a lot of sway.
So if you wanted to make something happen, you would phone somebody up or go and see them in person.
And you would get them, if you could, you would persuade them to do what you wanted because they had the autonomy to make the decision.
And if they liked you and you could persuade them, that decision was made on a human level.
You're saying that today's generation and generations coming up are happier with computer says yes or computer says no?
In many senses.
I mean, I interviewed one young girl who, well, young teen, who was working in sort of fashion, very creative environment, and she wanted some kind of assistant service to tell her which clothes suited her best.
And I was thinking, well, isn't that what your best friend's for?
Not that you can always rely on your best friend to, you know, to tell you the truth.
But I was thinking, that's quite interesting because it's in a creative scenario.
And even then, you're not that keen to rely on your instinct.
You sort of want somebody to rubber stamp it, rubber stamp that decision.
And one of the things I was thinking about is, is this because we have so many things recommended to us on the internet?
It either comes recommended in an aggregate way or by certain peers or, you know, the likes of Netflix just shows you the next thing you want to watch.
And I wondered if some of it is because of that, really, that, you know, that generation haven't had to necessarily, all the time, haven't necessarily had to search out and define what's right or wrong for them because there's someone there to serve it up to them.
This is a kind of hive mentality.
We're going to take some commercials quite soon, but let's just talk about this for a minute or so.
In that I think I am becoming not victim, but I'm becoming part of it.
You know, sometimes I love technology and I love sound recording and broadcasting technology.
And in the past, if I wanted to buy something, then I'd probably want to try it out and I want to make my own decision about it.
Now, when I hear about a new product, maybe a new microphone or something like that, my first thought is, I'm going to go on my phone and see what everybody else is saying about it.
Look at the videos.
And if they say it's good, then it probably is.
We're losing our self-determination.
Well, this is the other reason I wanted to do this, but because I think the very nature of digital technology is that it's inherently networked, which means it's inherently communitarian.
And therefore, what is the role of the individual and one's own autonomy in an inherently communitarian world?
Because if the world is digitized, then that is what it is.
Big questions, Tracy.
But we have to put the other side of this, just to be fair.
A technology, I discovered computers in the mid-90s when they came into the place of work that I was at.
And we were connected to the internet for the first time.
And I suddenly realized this could be a great enabler for the newswork that I was doing.
And I became the first person in London to use the internet as a driver of finding stories for broadcast on the radio.
I suddenly discovered other media outlets that I hadn't been able to find.
And I was getting stories that other people hadn't got.
Suddenly, a world of choice was presented to me.
And that's the upside of it, isn't it?
You know, the genie's out of the bottle.
Absolutely.
I totally agree.
I mean, the subtitle is Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology, but it could be and thrive in 21st century technology because we've seen, particularly during the pandemic, the way in which people of any age really have turned to the virtual world.
Now, it could be work, but it could be gaming, it could be immersive media environments.
And actually, in a funny sort of way, when people in the real world feel that there are too many expectations on them in terms of their identity and they should meet some standards or expectations that they can't meet, they often go into virtual worlds and take on other identities and explore alternative identities in alternative worlds.
So that's, you know, there's huge potential in that.
That's really interesting and really creative and it's a way of us being much more expressive about our identity.
And then, as you've just said, in the workplace, when we finally do go back to some sort of workplace, or even if we don't actually in sort of remote working, we've got to think about the artificial intelligences that will really be working alongside us and helping us and collaborating with us on the tasks that we have to do.
And of course, our jobs will change in terms of the tasks that make up our job because a lot of them will be started off by AI and then we'll kind of finish them off and finesse them.
And one of the things I also explore is, will these artificial intelligences or non-biological intelligences come to the point where actually we decide that there's a moral patiency and as subjects they're worthy of moral rights.
And so in turn, perhaps we give them some legal rights and class them as persons, for example.
And so we might be working alongside some non-biological intelligences that are our co-workers and have some sort of limited sense of personhood.
And if you don't think, I'm talking to my listener now, that this can invade, I say invade, can impinge on what you do.
Just think about this.
In my own little world, you know, I occasionally, not nearly as often as I'd like, get asked to do voiceovers.
In the last year, there are more and more services that are offering sampled voices into which you put a script and out of which you get a reasonably respectable red script at a fraction of the cost of a human being.
Now, it hasn't gone all the way there yet.
It still sounds a little, in my ears, a little robotic and artificial.
You know, when that happens, and if that starts to happen in broadcasting, I used to read the news for a lot of radio stations.
You know, there'll come a time when you're just able to put the news scripts into a machine and the machine will say, you know, this is Fred Farquall here, and Fred Farquall will read you the news, and you won't need a person anymore.
But that's going to affect, if your job is reading the news and you're still doing some of that somewhere, that's going to affect your self-worth, I think.
Yes, well, because we often in the past used to get a lot of our identity from our occupation, and especially if that was to do with creativity or craft.
In fact, that's where a lot of the surnames came from, of course, literally identity.
But yes, in the future, I mean, I think there's an assumption that lots of creative types of work won't be affected by AI, but as you've just demonstrated, they definitely will.
And there's a company, for example, called Rosebud AI, which is worth people having a look at.
It's fascinating because that's looking at, they've got a data bank of models, and they claim that it's the most diverse data bank of models you could possibly get in the world.
And I think there's two and a half thousand.
I can't remember exactly.
It's a large number, but of course it is most diverse because none of them are real.
Again, they're back to being computer generated.
So if you were running an advertising campaign, for example, you could pick the type of model you wanted, the hair, their race, their age, you know, and put them in a scenario and literally create that ad.
So you don't have to do a photo shoot, you don't have to hire a model, you don't have to pay them, you know, royalties or usage fees or whatever.
And guess what?
They do exactly what you want them to do.
They're very manageable.
And so, yes, there's a lot of that.
Same in customer service, for example.
You know, Samsung have got their neon people, which are literally embodied AI.
So they have personalities, interests, they have a dialogue, they have expressions.
And you're kind of matched up with the one that the company sort of thinks based on the data they have on you fits your profile, really.
So this is happening everywhere.
And sometimes, interestingly, we don't always know that we are interfacing or interacting with the machine.
And this is going to, in terms of the technology, it's going to improve.
In terms of us, it's going to be a problem, potentially.
Look, my parents had a record called In the Year 2525 by a group called Zagre and Evans.
And it was going through the various millennia, in the year 3535.
You know, you won't need to walk.
You won't need to, somebody else will, you know, will eat for you and all of those things.
You know, that was seen as, well, that was just seen as an eyebrow raising pop song, you know, back in the 60s.
But it's becoming reality.
So I guess the crux of your book, You Tell Me, is how we retain our humanity in the face of this, which can be an enabler, but can also take away our independence, our individuality, and our autonomy.
Exactly.
So if we want to preserve our autonomy for whatever reason, then we need to do a little bit more research, I think.
We need to know about digital ID.
We need to know why it's happening and how it could happen.
We need to be aware of non-biological intelligences that might partner with us in the workplace.
We need to do more digging on the whole idea of uploading one's mind and creating a cyber consciousness.
And we need to think about our digital identity beyond death, actually, because that's one of the big areas in the markets that's growing up, which is a digital version of you, which preserves your identity even after you're gone.
And who curates that, who manages it?
It's kind of like an estate or having a set of digital assets that need to be managed.
And that's another thing to think about.
And that's what I'm trying to flag up, really.
All these different areas and encourage people to delve into them a bit more, you know, on their own behalf, do a bit more research and ask the right questions so we can lobby for the right kind of future that we want.
Sounds easy.
I don't think it will be.
That idea of allowing yourself to exist in the future after your death is a fascinating one.
I've never really understood how that could work because the decisions that you make and the reactions that you produce are determined by the circumstances you're in now.
And if all you have is a selection of things that I did and things that I thought and behaviors that were related to me in the past, then you can't possibly create a version of me if you'd want to do that.
And I'm sure you wouldn't.
But if you wanted to do that, you couldn't possibly make a reliable recreation of me that would go forward when I'm not here.
No, there are companies, I agree with you.
There are companies that say they can and that they can create, they've got so much data to train the AI on that actually it will post to your social network after you've gone.
It will comment on world events, all those sorts of things.
And also it will migrate you to any new social platforms that might emerge in the future.
Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know, but the claim is that you can kind of stay present and stay you.
I mean, there's always going to be unforeseen circumstances that, you know, your digital version can't really respond to because it's never had that data to be trained on in the past.
But I guess they're going to get much more sophisticated.
And somebody will need to manage it.
Somebody in your family or a friend will need to kind of manage it.
But I don't know if you've seen the digital Deepak, Deepak Chopra's avatar or digital twin.
It's pretty impressive.
And his view is, well, it should carry on beyond his death so that it can continue to mentor people, but also so that it can learn itself as well.
So he carries on learning even beyond his own death.
So, yes, it's quite a shift.
But, you know, of course, attitudes change.
I talked about the way that we react to things.
The views of people in 1970 are not the views of people.
And thank goodness, in so many cases, in 2021.
We have evolved, We have learned, we have mellowed in many cases.
I can't honestly, I'm worried that digital creations couldn't allow for that, I don't think.
But then, you know, I'm just flesh and blood.
What do I know?
It is interesting, isn't it?
That we have got to a point now in a trend where we don't really want to give up.
We don't really want to.
We do want immortality.
I mean, perhaps the human race has always wanted that to some extent, but there's an awful lot of investment money going into longevity sciences, trying to extend life or certainly have a longer, healthy life.
But then also these digital creations.
It is definitely something about the 21st century that is like, we don't really want to die.
We don't want to pass on.
We don't want the cycle of things.
It's assumed that there will be some way to overcome it just using technology and that we can kind of preserve our own identity, our own being forever.
I guess we just, it's probably always been around, but we've got different tools to bring it about differently now.
But if the future Tracy follows, you know, if you bequeath yourself to some digital presence that is you in the future when you're not here, which I'm sure will be many, many decades in the future.
But if there is some mess up with the software or some kind of technology crash and you become Byron Lowe, again, you won't be able to do anything about it.
You won't even know.
No.
Do you know what I might do?
I've discovered that he's got an Instagram account and all of his followers have all got names that are made up of arrangements of all my names.
So he's basically a synthetic identity.
Yeah, so I might go and haunt him on Instagram digitally.
Somebody obviously targeted you for this.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, that's a synthetic identity, which is taking a real person's real identity and mashing it up with some fictional names and fictional identities and these images of supposedly followers, but they're not really, they don't exist, and putting them onto an account.
So that's the fastest growing type of fraud at the moment.
God.
By and large, then, are you optimistic as a futurist?
Are you optimistic, pessimistic about our digital future?
I'm optimistic if we get more engaged in it, because what one can't do is let sort of technocracy override democracy or personal autonomy.
We have to be much more aware of it, be much more vocal about it, lobby for the things we want, whether it's digital IDs or vaccination certificates or not, or digital identities or not, digital twins or not, or mind uploading or not.
And I think we should have much more of a debate and a discussion about it.
So hopefully this is kicking it off.
Boy, well, I think it will.
And if a global pandemic is not enough to worry about, we need to be thinking about this.
We were starting to before all of this.
We need to continue to.
Tracy, thank you so much for staying up and making time for me.
Oh, thank you for having me.
Thank you very much.
Tracy follows.
And before that, you heard Dr. Philip Davis from Brunel University on Number Stations.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained Online.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe.
Stay calm.
Stay cool.
And above all, please stay in touch.
I'm off for a cold drink now and a bit of a lie down.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection