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Jan. 9, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:50
Edition 692 - Tech 2023 - Fevzi Turkalp

The UK's Gadget Detective on the opportunities - and threats - of the latest technology...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope everything is okay with you as I'm recording these words now.
It is a winter afternoon, reasonably mild, although quite damp.
It's been raining a lot lately.
But I'm just looking out across the trees, and in between the trees, the sun is setting like a great big tangerine.
And it is rather beautiful.
It's that time of day.
As the light fades, though, I've got some notes here for the conversation I'm about to have.
I'm hoping I'm going to be able to see them.
So I might have to get up and turn the light on halfway through this.
Talk about forward planning, hey.
Hope everything is good with you.
Thank you very much for all of the emails and the guest suggestions and the thoughts about both the podcast and the TV show.
They come in all the time.
And some thoughts about the TV show recently.
Some people asking about whether it will continue.
Well, of course, that's an ongoing question.
It was always a question with the radio show and a question with the TV show because it is so different from everything else that is around it.
So it is a question that I can't answer.
But I can tell you this, that whatever happens in 2023, the unexplained will continue in some form and will certainly continue as far as I'm able to feed and accommodate myself, then it will continue as a podcast because there'll always be a corner where I can record the podcast, hopefully.
So, you know, that's the answer partially, I think, to that question.
But, you know, thank you for all the comments, suggestions, and thoughts.
Not doing shout-outs this time, but just to say hello to Gareth, who emailed recently he's studying in Germany.
And Paul, thank you very much for the guest suggestion that I'm getting on to as we speak.
In fact, just before I started recording, I sent a suggestion, or rather, an email suggesting an interview to that particular person.
Now, the topic on this edition of The Unexplained is going to be technology.
We're going to speak with the gadget detective Fevzi Turkaup.
Technology pervades these days every aspect of our lives.
Even if you want to live an old-fashioned kind of life in your little home and you don't let it impinge upon you, you don't think.
Of course it does.
Every time you ring a big company, then an automated message will tell you that there's a high volume of demand and you're going to have to wait.
And then you might connect remotely to somebody who's working from home or you might get an automated inquisition.
So that's technology.
And we're going to see more of it.
I hope it's better, but we are going to see more of it.
But technology, the algorithms that determine your car insurance particulars, that's a factor.
The way that you get medical treatment is going to be affected by technology.
And of course, overlying all of that are things like artificial intelligence, chatbots, the new chatbot GPT they call it, that we talked about back in December.
The whole aspect of artificial intelligence taking on the persona of other people, maybe even the persona of people who've died.
That's in the news again today.
And I'll talk with Fevzi Turkalp about that, the gadget detective, in just a moment.
So there's an awful lot to talk about.
Plus, of course, the factors regarding technology that we don't have any control of, like, for example, the chip shortage that we had over the last year.
You know, has that slowed things down?
Or does the white-hot progress of technology continue nonetheless?
Technology is a big thing.
Robotics will affect every aspect of our lives.
And that's why we talk about it.
And that's why we try and do an update with Fevzi here on the podcast where we've got more time to talk at least once a year.
So stand by for the guest Fevzi Turkout.
Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, for his help on getting it all out to you and getting the website together.
Thank you to you for all of the emails.
If you want to contact me, please go to the website theunexplained.tv.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
It's always nice to hear those things.
If you have a guest suggestion, any thoughts on the show, anything you want to do, always good to hear from you.
And as I always say, because it remains true, I get to see each and every email as it comes in.
Even waking up sometimes at three o'clock in the morning, after the TV show, I don't get to sleep until half past three usually.
So I'm going through emails and winding down from it.
I get to read and take on board all the emails.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me an email from there if you'd like to.
If you'd like to make a donation to the podcast to help its continued running, that would be gratefully received.
If you have done that recently, thank you very much.
Let's get to the guest, the other side of London, Fevzi Turkhup, the esteemed gadget detective.
Fevzi, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
Absolute pleasure.
Thanks for asking.
Now, it was a roller coaster year last year, and it seemed to speed up and go at a breakneck pace.
So we didn't get the chance to talk off-air a lot, but how was your year?
It was good.
It was busy.
A lot of the tech companies were sort of re-emerging and launching products, although, you know, the chip shortage is still affecting so many manufacturers.
I mean, even the likes of Apple, who has, you know, first pick of the components it wants, was, I feel, not able to launch all the products that it wanted to.
And some of them were late and some of them were less advanced than they might otherwise have been.
So I think we're still seeing that effect, but we're starting to see improvements, I think.
Well, no, that's interesting.
And we might as well start then at the consumer electronics end of it.
As we record this, I think the CES show in America, the consumer electronics show, is on.
I don't know whether that's brought us anything surprising, anything very different.
I usually read enormous great banner headlines about things that are unveiled at the CES, and I haven't this time.
And I'm just wondering whether perhaps there is less there.
I certainly think there are fewer attendees this year.
But those problems that you were talking about, the chip shortage, and also things like, just from my own point of view, if I look at the kind of electronics that I tend to buy, and that's often stuff to do with recording and things like that, an awful lot of those things, microphones and bits of electronic kit, if you go to dealers now in the United Kingdom and you look to buy them online, you'll see out of stock, wait time, sometimes two months for something, sometimes three months, sometimes six months in a few cases.
And quite often the thing you want, you cannot get.
So I think this Is more than just the effects of problems with international trade.
I think there's something else going on.
What do you think?
Well, I think when COVID first struck, a lot of manufacturers cut back their plans for increasing production and, in some cases, reduced their production capability.
And then when people were locked down, a lot of people started upgrading their homes because they weren't spending the money on holidays and travel and other things.
So they decided to upgrade their home entertainment.
You know, I use that word in the broader sense.
So, you know, large screen TVs, new computers, which often people needed because then they were working from home.
So there was this disparity between the demand and the supply.
And it's not easy to ramp up.
I mean, ramping up can take three years, you know, to bring new manufacturing online.
So we are still seeing that.
But even now, there are shortages because until very recently, China had these very aggressive lockdown measures, zero tolerance of any COVID.
And that has really affected people like Apple and everyone else.
So Apple and others are now trying to diversify and move some of their manufacturing to India, even some of it to the United States.
And in fact, the fabricator, the manufacturer of Apple's chips, Apple silicon that goes inside iPhones and iPads and also the new Mac computers, that company has set up or is setting up manufacturing in the US.
So I think because we've seen, you know, geopolitically what's happened with Russia, we worry that China may make aggressive steps towards Taiwan and suddenly it's one thing embargoing Russia, but trying to do that to China for us would be absolutely catastrophic.
I don't think we could do it.
So I think we're starting to see the move towards diversification, but it's not easy.
China is and has been the world's factory for so many years.
Well, indeed, we've relied upon China, and we've relied on the fact that they seem to be capable of manufacturing endless amounts of good, cheap electronics these days.
They've become very, very good of it.
Sometimes copying the stuff that we do here, sometimes manufacturers from this side of the equation have simply stopped manufacturing here, given them the template and the blueprint for whatever it is that they make.
And I'm thinking about some of the electronics that I've bought over the years.
And they have started producing them in China.
And, you know, quite often, mostly in fact, they're exactly the same.
So they're very good at those things.
But I wonder if something else has happened during this period.
And maybe it should.
But I wonder if it has.
Maybe people are perhaps a little less reliant, are they?
Of necessity on the very, very latest and constantly every year upgrading your phone or changing electronics just for the sheer hell of it.
Do you think people are making things last now, maybe looking to the second-hand market for the things that they can't buy new because they're not available?
Could that be a factor?
Or are we going to get back to where we were?
White-hot exponential growth in sales?
First of all, people in this country and most Western countries have got less disposable income than they had.
So the idea of spending £1,500 on a new iPhone or a new Samsung is not possible for everyone, even if we wanted to.
What we've had is the fact that people's disposable income has dropped in England and in the UK and in many other countries as well.
But when you marry that to the fact that we're not really seeing huge leaps forward with every new generation of smartphone now, smartphone technology hasn't peaked, but it's plateaued before we're going to see.
I mean, for example, Apple has not done anything with foldable technology, whereas other manufacturers are starting to do that.
We're seeing foldable laptops where you've actually got, instead of a keyboard, you've got a screen where the keyboard was and another screen where the screen conventionally is.
You've got ASUS has just launched or is about to launch something that looks virtually holographic and it's very, very clever because unlike, you remember when there was that big thing about sort of 3D TV and you had to wear glasses and if you were off axis, if you were off-center, it didn't work.
But if you've got a good demonstration of it, I had one locally to me of a television set that I think was about £4,000 if anybody could afford it.
It was amazing as long as you were right in front of it wearing the glasses.
Right.
But what ACES have done is very, very, very interesting.
So they're using an OLED panel, which gives you a very high dynamic range, black, blacks and white, whites, as it were.
And then they've used a lenticular lens over the top of it.
And that's something that can send the light from each pixel in two different directions.
So you get stereoscopic vision.
Do you remember those old postcards?
I'm sure you're not old enough, but you remember those old postcards that had this sort of plastic, clear plastic ridged surface on the front.
And when you used to tilt it, the picture would move.
And they were very thick.
And if you put your fingernail across them, you get this sort of horrible scraping.
Yeah, exactly.
So think of something like that.
But what they've done is they've combined it with a camera that tracks the movement of your head and your eyes in particular in relation to the screen.
So it's adapting its output.
So you no longer have to be sitting smack in front of it to get this effect.
And I haven't seen it in person, but I've seen people looking at it, if you can follow me, and they're reaching out and trying to grab 3D objects in front of the flat panel screen.
It's quite remarkable.
Well, I don't want to be a big Luddite, but does anybody want that?
Not yet.
People don't, sometimes they don't know what they want.
So, for example, that big thing about 3D TV 10 years ago or so, that was the industry's need to sell more televisions that didn't come from sort of grassroots demand for 3D.
And the problem was, you know, there wasn't a single standard and therefore there wasn't enough content.
It was a bit like the old VHS Betamax days.
You had all these competing systems that were incompatible.
Even Philips had something called Video 2000, if I remember, which was reversible video cassette.
So we were kind of in that area.
I think, given that, if we think about where we're going with the metaverse, which is this much more immersive experience of the internet, very different to how we view the internet now, that this sort of I'll use the word holographic, although it's not strictly holographic, but this sort of immersive 3D experience is, you know, this is just another technology that will help us live in virtual worlds, which is where we can go with that.
I didn't think of that.
Of course, we don't want to be wearing bizarre headsets that make us look like Geordie from Star Trek, you know, with his visor, you know, all going around with a huge, great version of that.
I mean, that was a very sophisticated looking thing and quite neat and small.
But, you know, the ones that we see now, it's like you've got a bucket on your head.
So we want to have something that will be more user-friendly.
And of course, and we'll talk about the metaverse in a little while because I've got a question from a viewer, listener, Wayne, about that that I promised I would ask you.
But as we move towards the metaverse, we want small devices that we can hold in our hand that allow us to have that immersive experience, I would guess.
Yeah, it's quite interesting because, you know, Meta, the company, bought the sort of most successful producer of VR headsets.
And they're pouring bucket loads of money into their idea of the metaverse.
But interestingly enough, I think possibly towards the end of this year, we may see Apple launching its much rumored AR slash VR headset.
So AR being augmented reality and VR being virtual reality.
The difference is augmented reality, you see the real world around you, but you augment it with a layer of information on top.
So for example, if I've got AR glasses or headset on, I'm walking down the street, I might see arrows pointing which way to go, or as I walk past a shop and they recognize that it's me and I've previously shopped there, an offer of a free coffee may pop up or a discount on some product.
So this, think of it as AR is like, you know, heads-up display for fighter pilots where they're looking out through the cockpit glass and they can see their surroundings, but they don't have to turn their head down towards their instruments.
All the instruments are projected into their field of view.
So that's augmented reality.
That's where you add digital information, can be visual or textual or anything, on top of the real world.
Virtual reality is the complete replacement of the real world, all your senses being fed by a computer generated world.
And that's essentially where we're going to go in the end.
And it's hard to envisage it now because what we've got is so primitive compared to what we're going to have.
But think of where we are now compared to the days of dial-up modems, and how primitive that seems 20 years.
Well, hopefully maybe a little bit more than 20 years.
But the point being that we should not look at where we are now and how clunky VR helmets are.
I mean, even Apple's headset, which is, I think, going to cost several thousand pounds, the rumors are that the battery pack will be worn on the waist to try and reduce the bulk of what we're wearing on our heads.
So obviously there's a long way to go with that.
But you can see all of these different technologies all converging upon this goal of making new worlds for us to live in.
And technologically, that's fascinating.
In terms of what it means for us as human beings, it's fascinating.
And also the legality, the legal aspects of it are fascinating because at the moment, what you've got is we live in what we'll call the real world, although sometimes I have my doubts.
And you've got tech companies like, you know, Meta slash Facebook and Instagram and Google and all these companies impinging upon us, you know, scraping data from us as we go about our daily lives.
But they're doing that in a world which is not proprietary.
In the future, unless there is legislation to prevent this, these worlds, and I, you know, in the beginning, it will be, oh, we'll have a meeting and it'll be great.
You'll be sitting at a table and your virtual colleagues will be around you and that'll be fine.
The applications will be vertical, specific and limited.
But in the future, what we're heading into is a world that fills all your senses that you will not be able to really differentiate it from reality in the end.
I mean, we're obviously some way away from that.
And people will choose to live in those worlds, but those worlds will be creations and owned by profit-making companies.
And, you know, where is the legal framework for that?
Where are our rights within virtual worlds that are owned?
Instead of having our rights in statutes, what we actually have is our lives being regulated by terms and conditions that we agreed to in our eagerness to enter the virtual world, but don't understand and strip us of any rights that we have.
And if we don't think that that will happen, please just look at the alacrity, the zeal with which people sign up to new technologies, various websites, things that they can be part of.
And they do it without looking at the small print, without thinking of what it may mean.
And if you go into a virtual world, and we're getting into Wayne's question now, which is fine, if you go into a virtual world where it ain't quite the same and you don't have quite the same rights, then, you know, caveat M to always.
Well, yes, but the starting position currently is you have no rights at all.
You are an occupant.
You're on private property, basically, right?
You can't leave.
You're on private property and that's it.
So I think that one of the, I mean, if you've got any doubt about it, look at the shed loads, the huge, huge sums of money that companies like Meta are pouring into this research and development.
They're only doing that because they know what's coming down the line and They want to be the owner of it.
And, you know, you've got others playing in the game, but I mean, Meta is pouring such huge sums of money, it's putting its own existence at risk.
It's really quite telling that a commercial organization would pour such amounts of money into something.
And it would not do that if it didn't think that this sort of immersive experience was coming down the line.
We can call them virtual worlds, and that they recognize the benefit of owning it, of that being proprietary.
And it really, really worries me that governments are seemingly not aware that this is coming and are not trying to regulate it.
The European Union is doing a bit better than we are and a bit better than America, but still, you know, it's deeply worrying.
And it's a similar argument with AI.
AI is relatively primitive now, although I invite you to play with Chat GPT and you might be surprised at how that is the new chat bot that will give you, well, that will tell you jokes, give you sensible, methodical answers to sensible, methodical questions.
I was going to get onto that, but here we are.
You know, this is all mixed in with what's happening.
Yeah, it is, and it's quite...
But in the same way that, you know, nuclear physics is very exciting, but then we went ahead and made nuclear bombs and that was less good.
And it just is really, really concerning me that most people, and including our political leading class, is unaware and unwilling.
They're not even able to protect our privacy in this world.
What's going to happen when these virtual worlds come?
So ChatGPT, which I mentioned before, so there's an organization called Open AI.
Interestingly, it was co-founded by Elon Musk with the very wise idea that AI should be developed in the open, hence the name, and that we should see it.
And as we see it and these tools get made available to us to play with, as ChatGPT is, and there are others as well, that as we start to see what their capabilities are and are becoming, that it will instigate a debate, a discussion in our society about what is coming and what we want that technology to do with us and how we will deal with the dangers, what we will accept.
At the moment, it's very worrying because human beings are, I think in many ways, we're like children.
We're still like children.
You know, if some tech behavi offers us a free app, in quotes, free, it's like giving a child a shiny bauble and our jaws drop open, our eyes go wide, and we just say yes to any terms and conditions.
And that's just with a very basic app.
When you are offered the ability to live in a completely different space, to travel to parts of real world and virtual world, you know, instantaneously, it's such a seductive technology that I predict that people will, a large number of people will not want to live in, in quotes, a real world, particularly with the environmental and other problems coming down the line.
They will want to live in a virtual world.
Potentially, that's not a, yes, it's an escape and that can be therapeutic.
But I can think of scenarios where that's going to be bad for people, especially those who are not as discerning as they should be, because that's just like doing drugs was in the 1960s and 70s, isn't it?
It is an escape to something that is completely out of control.
And there are so many issues.
For example, if your virtual self, and I think we've talked around this before in the past, but it's such a fascinating topic that let's go there again.
Your virtual self commits some kind of misdemeanor or crime against somebody else's virtual self.
What happens then?
Is it the Wild West?
Is it lawless?
Does somebody enforce regulations and rules there?
You know, we haven't thought about this.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
I mean, for example, if we take the analogue of the real world, I use the term loosely because it's just become one of many worlds that seem equally real to us.
But in the real world, even on private property, you're not allowed to murder people, right?
So the laws of the land, as it were, still apply in these private spaces.
But we don't really have the analogue to that for these virtual worlds and these virtual spaces.
And even now, you know, even if you go back 10 or more years, do you remember something called Second Life, which was one of the first things that we've been talking about that for years, haven't we?
Where people have complete existences that are in some cases, in fact, in most cases, I think, enhanced versions to some degree of real life.
But people have separate existence.
It's almost like people having an affair.
They have a separate but connected life.
Right.
But the interesting thing about Second Life was that a lot of people set up businesses within the Second Life world, right?
And this is, by comparison, very primitive world, you know.
But people were able to set up businesses where, for example, they would create tools or weapons in this virtual tools and virtual weapons, or they would make clothing or dye clothing or fashion leather or whatever it was.
And they would put real time into it and produce something which had worth in that game, which interestingly could be converted into real money in the real world as well.
So these virtual objects had value both within the virtual world and potentially outside the virtual world as well.
And because there are people, there are people that steal.
And inside Second Life, people were stealing and committing other crimes of violence and theft against property.
And there wasn't really the legal framework to deal with it.
You know, the Metropolitan Police in London didn't know what to do if someone reported a theft of a virtual object.
But we are starting to see at least some discussion about it.
But we are so far Behind.
It's always the case, Howard, that technology moves and progresses far faster than we are even able to pose the right questions, much less answer them.
So we had this with from the 70s onwards with reproductive medicine, what we used to call test tube babies, IVF, and all of that, and then the ability to create a child from a dead parent, the ability to create a child with two parents of the same sex or three parents, and all of these things that became technologically possible and all the philosophical and social implications of that.
And we still haven't resolved some of the questions that arise out of technology that was burgeoning in the 70s.
And that's the real problem.
And these companies will get away with creating unregulated spaces where they are the regulator.
Yeah.
Not independently regulated.
Partly because of the generation and education of the decision makers, of the lawmakers.
They don't understand what's going on.
And we can't say, I mean, technology's brought us many, many, many benefits.
So we can't say that the companies are entirely bad in doing these things because that's what they were founded to do, to push back the bounds of technology, to give people what they perceive they want.
If the regulators cannot make a framework to do that, it might be argued, then that's a problem for society and is not as much a problem for the companies, although I take your point, they need to be more socially conscious and have a few more morals on occasions.
Right.
Well, look, first of all, companies, in my view, are not put there to push back the boundaries of technology.
The companies are there to make a profit for their shareholders, if they're publicly quoted companies, to make money.
And a good example of that is how we see big companies buying little companies and then killing them off.
That is not to do with pushing forward.
That's to do with maintaining your dominance and killing new technologies off.
Even if you can't take them on and use them yourself, it's better for them economically, financially to kill them off.
So that's the problem.
And the other problem is the pace of change, the legislative process, particularly with these difficult issues, difficult to understand, is much slower than the rate of change.
And therefore, you know, we find, as I mentioned before with reproductive technology, and that's just one example, but we find ourselves in the position that even if we had really smart legislators, they would struggle to keep up with the pace of change, which means that we have to have a legal and regulatory platform that actually is opt in.
So companies shouldn't be able to develop any and all technologies without there being a proper assessment of the implications of it.
Because once that technology is available in the wild, you know, you don't put the genie back in the bottle.
That's what we found with nuclear weapons, right?
People developed it and still we've got companies, countries, pardon me, developing nuclear weapons capabilities.
You know, got countries like Iran and North Korea desperate for that because they've seen the lessons of that.
And that's how you get proliferation.
So if, and just to jump in here to maybe add a little something to it, but what you seem to be saying is that what we need and what we don't have is some kind of law, some kind of legal framework internationally that requires companies, and a lot of them are making so much money they can afford to do it, to produce a study that looks at the potential upsides, downsides, risks of what they are doing in order to aid the decision makers.
But if you give the companies the right to do that, are they going to be honest with you?
Yeah, well, this is the problem.
I mean, nuclear weapons development is hard to hide.
You know, you can see platforms from the sky, from satellites and so forth.
You can see, you know, silos and so forth.
AI could be done by some guy or woman in their bedroom, you know, connected into a company, you know, thousands of miles away.
I think, look, my view is unfortunately rather negative on this.
I just do not think we will regulate ourselves.
We are slightly more intelligent apes that have opposable thumbs and we're just a bit smarter than the other ape, but we're not wise.
We're clever, but we're not wise.
And there is a problem.
So, for example, there have been many attempts in the UN to try and bring about a moratorium on the development of weaponized AI.
And even actors that we think of ourselves as being allies like the United States of America has blocked that.
Now, the thing about AI, the reason why it will proliferate and the reason why it will proliferate without the right checks and balances is this.
If you think of it in the military sphere, no country like America or any country is, they're going to worry that if they observe a moratorium, that their potential enemies and adversaries will not, and that they will be faced by armies of AI technology, drones that can make their own kill decisions, factories that can churn out thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of robotic soldiers.
So look at Putin now and his difficulty with calling up, mobilizing, as they call it, more troops.
Imagine what normally ends wars is an unsustainable number of body bags, right?
And even in a closed society, that becomes dangerous.
No country is going to say, let's not develop AI weapons because they know slash fear that their adversaries will do that.
So that's why you'll never get an effective cap on it because it's very hard, even with nuclear, the challenge of limiting nuclear proliferation was always to do with verification.
And how could you verify that the other side was doing what they said they would do?
And we had all these SALT treaties and so forth with What was then the Soviet Union.
But with AI, that's much more difficult because the physical scale upon which AI can be developed is microscopic and very hard to verify if someone's got a hidden program.
Because you're not talking about a great big factory near Vladivostok producing mechanical components.
You're talking about a bunch of tech wizards in a little office anywhere or a bunker.
And who knows what they do?
It is the capacity of this stuff to grow exponentially.
That's what's happening, isn't it?
It's the application.
It's Moore's Law writ large.
Yeah.
So that's why you're not going to get that limitation on proliferation in the military space.
If you then look at the other major application of AI is commercial businesses.
And we've seen it, for example, with the big push towards self-driving vehicles, which are not quite there yet, but we can see they're not too far away before we get to a point where not only they're safe, but they're safer than human drivers on average.
If you have, let's say, taxi companies and you have, let's say, Uber, which has invested very heavily in self-driving technology, and it's clear that their goal is to do away with having to pay human drivers and just to have these self-driving vehicles shuttling around.
And some of the benefit of that, at least in the short term, until they kill off their competition, will be passed on to the user.
So if you had a competitor that says, you know what, I think people want to be driven by humans, but then their ride charges are, let's say, double that of the automated vehicles, those businesses will go out of business.
So you either get with the program, as it were, or you go out of business.
Imagine you were the best purveyor of horse-drawn carriages and you didn't want anything to do with this newfangled, polluting internal combustion engine.
Well, that's fine, but then your business no longer exists.
And that's the problem.
So militarily and commercially, you've got this problem where there is just such a push towards these technologies are on the cusp.
And if companies and countries do not grab them, utilize them and develop them, they fear they will be left behind and they're not wrong.
And the sad reality of the human existence through any application of mechanics or technology is that legislation very frequently only happens and changes are only made when something bad happens.
Yeah.
And if you look at the relationships between countries now, I mean, obviously war, you know, in Europe again, and, you know, the world more polarized than it has been, I would say, for a long time, but not just between countries, but between people within countries.
I mean, some people think that, you know, the United States will see civil war.
There is such a difference, you know, between people.
They're so extremes.
There's very little in the middle ground anymore.
People have, you know, polarized.
So it's very hard to see how there can be sufficient trust within countries and between countries to look at these questions sensibly and try and develop.
These technologies are neither intrinsically good nor bad, but we need to develop them in a way that's of benefit to humanity.
And this is the great difficulty because you're talking about loads of countries, everything from North Korea to the United States, the United Kingdom, and every country in Europe and Australia, you know, all kinds of countries, all kinds of regimes and political systems.
And you're asking them to create a legal framework, a human framework for this.
Well, good luck with that.
Yeah.
I mean, the job is hard.
If everyone said, you know, they often say, you know, if we were invaded from outer space, all humanity would pull together.
And I think there's something to that.
But even if all humanity pulled together, these are hard questions to solve, right?
It's not easy, but we're nowhere near even having the framework to do it.
The UN is not fit for this purpose because it reflects the divisions in the different countries and the different interests.
And the future, you know, we've had industrial revolutions and it's built empires.
And the future now belongs to whoever develops these technologies most effectively and most quickly.
And governments are economically encouraging that because they have to.
You've got to be ahead of the other guy, the other nation.
But we're not thinking of the consequences.
And I think there are human consequences too to all of this.
Just bringing in a point that I would have raised a little earlier, but we got so interesting in other areas I didn't.
But let's bring it in now.
I think there might be a mental health aspect to all of this because we're human beings.
Yes, we're getting cleverer.
We're living longer.
But we're still human beings with our limitations.
So if you have this alternate existence where you slip into the metaverse and everything is absolutely hunky-dory and fab for you, and you are glamorous, able, rich, enabled, you know, everything that perhaps you're not over here in the real world, whatever that might be, isn't that going to cause a disjunction that is going to give some people who might be vulnerable to it mental issues that they're going to find very hard to cope with?
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, the mental health implications of this are huge.
I mean, we've already seen.
So if you think of the internet now as it is now, we think of it as being quite clever and advanced and all these apps.
But essentially, we're peering into these virtual worlds through little screens.
And in the metaverse, it will be immersive.
Now, human beings haven't really changed for thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years.
We are not, you know, when we have Darwinian evolution, it is at a snail's pace.
And the rate of the development of these technologies, which change the environments in which we live, are huge.
And there's no way that our lizard brains will adapt to these changes.
And the mental and psychological implications of this will be huge.
And a lot of us don't have, many people, most people, maybe it's the human condition, don't have the capacity to know how much is enough.
if you give a dog a biscuit, the dog will want four more, even if it's going to make the dog sick.
Now, that's maybe a bad analogy, but I think that's the relationship that some people have with technology, that you can have too much of a good thing.
Well, it's well, and take that mobile phones, their operating systems, and their apps were all designed to be addictive, right?
They were all designed.
They've done interviews with the people who developed Google's Android, the people who've developed very high-profile games and so forth, and they've all said that that was the brief.
And they use psychologists.
They bring on board psychologists and use our psychology against us.
So, for example, you're in a game.
They know exactly the point in the game when you're hyped up, your adrenaline is pumping, you need to make progress, and then they offer you a bundle of coins to buy with real money at that point.
And they take advantage of our frailties, just like our human frailties were taken advantage of in the run-up to elections by using micro-messaging in political terms.
So it is not an accident, Howard, that this happens.
It happens by design because they want you to have as much screen time as possible because they can serve you the most ads, they can scrape the most information from you, they can make more money.
You are the product, you are the fodder at that point.
But we're going to head into a whole new stage of that now where these immersive worlds are, I mean, there's no word to describe it.
Seductive is not enough.
Addictive is not enough.
It will just suck people in and not just weak people.
You know, we should not think, oh, well, that won't be me.
I mean, we have a propensity to do it.
Look, I remember in the early 80s when I was given my first computer by my parents, it was like early 80s.
I think I didn't come out of my bedroom for three, there was no internet either.
I didn't come out of my bedroom for about three days and I learned everything I could about this.
And it was so, because it was so new.
It was so novel.
It wasn't, oh, here's a faster computer.
Here is something that didn't exist before and now it does.
And you've got to learn all about it.
And if that takes more time than you necessarily have, you've got to do it.
I remember my grandmother because she thought it would help me and she was wonderful.
She used to buy me things I couldn't afford.
If I needed a recorder for my freelance journalism, she bought me one.
If I needed a microphone, she bought me an Amstrad 8256 word processor.
Remember those?
It came with a printer.
It came with some proprietary discs that you used that were like a kind of early floppy disc and a keyboard.
No mouse.
They didn't have mice then.
And I'd never used a computer, knew nothing about it.
And I locked myself in my bedroom with this 400-pound device that came in a huge box from Curries.
And I think I lost a couple of days.
I don't remember those days.
I just had to throw away the manual in the end and just try and learn my way around it.
And in the end, I learned the stuff that I needed for my own use and the deep computing functions I didn't really get into.
But I taught myself this thing.
But, you know, I can't, I have no recollection of the process because I just lost two, maybe three days locked in my bedroom.
And that's the human connection with a new technology.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the difference now is because of the connected nature and the more realistic nature, you know, these technologies can be and will be far more immersive and far more addictive and seductive.
But I think that the difference between then and now is at least then people were interested in learning.
So what I mean by that, people learned to program computers, right?
Computers were not something where you just download a bunch of apps and off you went.
They were, oh, I'll learn the basic programming language or whatever it is.
I will learn circuit design.
I'll learn how to, you know, generate music from first principles or whatever it was.
People were actually learning.
And that, you know, the BBC Micro arguably led to a whole generation of people in this country who went into the world and shaped it for a generation in terms of technology.
And, you know, we have things like the Raspberry Pi now, which is similar.
But for the most part, what we have, if you think of it as a car, we do not any longer have a generation of designers and engineers and mechanics.
We have a generation of people who are passengers.
I never thought of it that way.
That is such an astute observation, I think, in my opinion.
I used to have my first car, VW Beetle 1972.
I had an organic relationship with it.
I could feel if anything was about to go wrong, it would tell me.
And I knew how it worked.
I could go to the garage and tell the guy there, I think it's this.
And quite often it would turn out to be the problem.
The car that I own now is full of chips and things, and I have zero idea.
All I know is, I mean, it's a nice driving experience, and it's got heated seats, which I love when it's cold, but I know nothing about it.
I put the key in and the petrol in, and that's all I know.
And that's the relationship, isn't it, now that people, on the basis of what you've just said, have with technology.
We are passengers.
We are not drivers.
Yeah, and we're certainly not mechanics and engineers, right?
So few of us, and that's the danger, you see, as we go forward, and I've sort of mentioned to you the importance of having a debate with society about what sort of future we want and what rights we think we should have.
That's a sort of a public discussion and then legislation should flow from that.
The problem is democracy fails in the sense that the vast majority of people will not even understand not only what's at stake, but what's possible and they don't even have the language to discuss it and understand it.
And, you know, messaging from the top, you know, from political there of government is difficult.
These are difficult concepts.
And, you know, even experts don't agree on what can happen and what we should be discussing and what we should be deciding.
You know, even simple decisions, you know, that we've made by referenda have been subject to arguably misinformation and so forth.
So to have that discussion now, my worry is democracy fails because the majority do not understand the question, much less know the answer.
This is my great fear.
And I'd love to write a book about this one day, that everything becomes so complicated and the choices get so multifarious that we just get lost.
And I think that has mental consequences.
It causes people to throw up their hands and say, well, I don't get it, so I'm just going to go and watch The X Factor or, you know, Dancing with the Stars or America's Got Talent or whatever it might be.
And I'm just going to let things happen because it'll probably be all right in the end.
But sometimes it isn't.
And our politicians, number one, I don't think they understand a lot of the ramifications of these things.
And number two, look at the state of the world.
Look at the state of this country.
Our politicians have so many other things to be thinking about.
That's not going to be one of them.
Yeah.
You know, as we're talking, as the first time this has come into my mind, I'll share it with you.
I'm reminded of the time machine, think of the film in particular, and how humanity divided into this subterranean morlocks and these simple, trusting, childlike beings called the Eloi.
And the Eloi became like sheep, and they were accepting of the fact that they were preyed upon in exchange for food and trinkets and things that they needed to live their very simple lives.
And I worry that we are heading towards a world where we become the Eloi, where we do not really understand the technology that creates the environments that we live in.
We don't understand these systems are so complicated, they become beyond human comprehension, even governments.
And then you just have commercial organizations running these machines, and they're a bit like the subterranean morlogs, and they prey on us.
And I think the analogy is there, that we become these simpleton, childlike consumers of technology with no understanding that it's a bit like a religion.
You really don't, you don't have to understand it.
You just have to pay allegiance.
Super Tramp song in my head, you know, the one where he sings, will you please tell me who I am?
You know, when I was young, it seemed that life was the logical song.
It seemed that life was so logical.
I'm hearing that song because it seems to fit.
But look, before people start sending me emails saying, you and Fevzi are terribly negative about this, I'm sure you and I, Fevzi, we've known each other long enough to say that we're not negative about these things.
We just feel, and I'm speaking for you here, forgive me for that, but I think we're on the same page, that we need to do more thinking about them.
Technology can empower us amazingly.
I was listening last night to, I think it was a report from one of the international stations that I listened to, I think from Canada, some country, and they were talking about robotic surgery.
And that sounded really good.
There can be great benefits from the careful and considered deployment of technology.
It's when you don't think about it very much, I think, that you start to have problems.
And the human technology interface becomes the weakest link.
There was a story yesterday in the mail on Sunday in the UK.
And I've just called it up here on my computer to remind myself about it.
But it's a company based in Seoul, Korean company called Deep Brain.
And they showcased something at that consumer electronics show in Vegas in this last week or so.
And it was effectively, if I read this right, I'm sure you've seen this story in the mail on Sunday and other places, technology that can officially...
But it's essentially virtual reality humans that mimic the voices and facial expressions of people who've died so that loved ones can speak to them from beyond the grave.
Now, part of me thinks, well, there's no harm in that.
And part of me thinks, my God, yes, there is.
Well, you know, it's one form of immortality, actually, because if not only our voices and our physical appearance can be recreated in the real or in a virtual world, but if our thoughts and memories could be uploaded into these devices, then effectively we become immortals.
We become gods.
Look, I think this, I cannot think of a technology that human beings have been on the verge of creating or discovery where they've rolled back.
Human beings will do something because they can.
I just don't think, I come back to us being sort of like only slightly smarter apes.
We do not have the wisdom to look at things and say, you know what, maybe we're not ready to develop this technology yet.
Maybe we haven't developed in terms of our wisdom and understand what the implications of it is.
And it's impossible to know all the possible implications.
But, you know, some things should be taken more slowly.
And that's not going to happen.
And the result of that.
Sorry, the result of it, you're saying?
The result of that is that we will have technology that gets away from us, that we are unable to control.
I've mentioned to you before that there's a team at MIT, and they've been working for years, and their sole job really is to answer the question, how do we stop future generations of AI from harming us?
And they haven't come up with a satisfactory answer.
I mean, you think of like, you know, the laws of robotics that you shall not harm a human, blah, blah.
But if you think about how AI and robotic technology is developing, so even a simple chip that you can buy for a few dollars has literally billions of transistors on it.
A human being could not draw billions of transistors in their lifetime, much less connect them in a meaningful way.
The only way that those computer chips exist is that we use the current generation of computer technology to develop the next generation.
And at the moment, we use those as tools.
But every generation, as the tools get smarter, both in terms of their computational power and the algorithms that they run, the percentage of the work that they can do, and I'm not just talking about the hardware, but also the programming and the, you know, because even ChatGPT can write code now, quite good code, some of it.
So, so, yeah.
So, what we're heading towards is where the human input into that process of creating the next generation becomes less and less.
And we are close to the point where there needs to be no human input at all.
So what you have is one generation of computers and software tools creating the next generation.
First of all, that's rather similar to reproduction, but different to biological reproduction, where our offspring are largely the same as us in terms of physical and mental capacity.
Each generation here, and you mentioned Moore's Law, will be smarter, faster, more capable than the last, and then that will feed into the next generation.
So you have this asymptote, you have this curve that starts off quite flat and starts to get steeper and steeper until the rate of growth in their capability becomes vertical.
And that's the point at which we lose control of the technology because no human will have the mental capacity to understand what the technology is doing.
It will be a black box to us.
We'll see what goes in and what comes out, but you will not understand what it's doing.
And that, at that point, is evolution.
What we've done is we've generated our replacements.
That means we're obsolete if we're not very careful, because we won't understand the process.
Plus, of course, the technology that we're creating might actually one day decide that it doesn't need us anymore.
Well, we have a very, very slim window of opportunity to try and push things forward in a way that is to the benefit of humans and not where we are, you know, making, as you said, using the word, making ourselves redundant.
Yes.
And, you know, Professor Hawkins, the late Professor Hawkins said that, and I think Elon Musk has said this, and, you know, he's not wise on all things, but he's right about this, that we should not be a one planet species.
What we should do is get off this planet, as Elon, as Hawkins said, and run, right?
Which is ironic, but we need to get off this planet because our best chance of survival as a species, there's two things we need to do.
One is we need to adopt and integrate with that technology so we evolve much faster than Darwinian evolution would allow.
So we become the last generation of pure humans.
I'm sorry if this is freaking anyone out because I think a lot about these things and I think, you know, a little bit further into the future, I think.
And so there's two things we can do.
One is get off the planet and run because as you scatter, it's harder to wipe out a species.
If you're on one planet, any sort of existential threat event via comet or a technology or climate change could wipe us all out.
And if all our human eggs are in one earth basket, but we'd be taking technology with us, wouldn't we, if we ran anyway?
Well, yeah, that depends.
It starts to look a bit like alien where it stowed aboard, isn't it?
But the other thing is that the way we keep up with the technology is we become the technology.
So we become, you could use the word cyborg.
So at the moment, we're looking at these technologies to fix problems.
So problems with our vision.
Some people think that we'll be able to cure dementia and other neurological diseases by giving ourselves new electronic neural pathways, as it were.
And indeed, those would be the upsides of developments like Neuralink, Elon Musk's Neuralink.
Exactly, where he does these experiments on pigs and puts in a pig machine interface so that the pig can communicate mentally and we can see what its thought processes, at least in a very rudimentary fashion, are.
But we go from fixing stuff to augmenting ourselves.
We've already seen people augment themselves for the silliest of reasons, right?
For visual aesthetic reasons.
But the ability to augment your brain capacity to not have to study for 15 years and to download an education or that is a bit like, I keep giving analogies, but a bit like Joe 90, where his father would abuse his son by putting him through these experiments where he'd load an expertise into his little boy's.
And I think that show reached America, but just for listeners in America and other countries, it was a, like Thunderbirds, one of these puppet series, but it was about it.
I loved it.
It was, you know, I have very fond memories of that series, but it was a little boy called Joe who used to be put into this spinning thing that looked like one of those chocolate oranges that you can buy in segments in the UK.
And this thing would spin round, and this little boy would gather the abilities of maybe a computer scientist or somebody who was a genius at something, and then would infiltrate whatever problem area there might be.
And who would suspect that the person who'd come in to sort out whatever nefarious deeds were going on somewhere, that the expert being sent in was this innocuous little boy of nine or ten, hence Joe 90.
Yeah.
So there's the point being, no, absolutely.
Thanks for that.
I mean, the point being that we can and will, in quotes, augment ourselves, not just aesthetically, we will give ourselves new senses.
We will give ourselves physical strength.
You know, it's very interesting that the brain doesn't see, doesn't hear, right?
All our senses generate electrical signals that are then processed by the brain and, you know, it creates the sense of vision and hearing and touch and all the rest of it.
But what they've found is that you can actually add completely new things and feed the brain with completely new signals.
So you can have a third limb, a third arm, for example.
So what they've found is that people with two arms, their brains can control the third arm and adapts to it very quickly.
Or let's say you give us radar capability or internet connectivity.
So we start to communicate telepathically.
And the brain can handle all of those things.
The brain only just sees a stream of signals and it's very smart at adapting to them and giving it context.
So, you know, how they tell you when the eye produces a symbol, sorry, an image, the image is actually upside down, but the brain flips it the right way up itself and we don't even know.
They have done, and I think you and I have talked about this before, maybe on the equivalent of this show last year, but they've done experiments where they've given people glasses, spectacles that actually invert what they see.
So they're seeing everything upside down.
Yes.
And after a period of days, the brain corrects for it.
Yeah, it ceases to flip it effectively.
Yeah.
The brain, I mean, it's quite remarkable.
So I predict that what we will see is a different sort of evolution for humans.
So we become pretty much the last generation of pure humans and everything beyond this point becomes a hybrid.
Yeah.
And we will do it in different ways.
And that hybridization and that integration with the technology is probably our main way of stopping ourselves becoming redundant or left behind.
Because effectively, otherwise, what we're doing is trying to stop evolution.
So we've had evolution that works in a particular way.
We've now got a different form of evolution.
So we must either stop that evolution, and the analogy to that is the big company buying the small company and killing off the technology, right?
It's a similar thing.
We try to become King Canute and hold back the ties, which I think we're on a hiding to nothing because someone's going to develop that technology somewhere in the world.
So we hide the patent for the water-powered car.
That's the equivalent of that.
But you see, the thing is we're losing control of the creation of new generations of technology.
As I mentioned before, it becomes much more akin to a reproductive process than a technological process.
And as we lose control of that, as we are losing control of that, it becomes almost impossible to stop this.
So then the only other thing, as I say, we either run off the planet and or we augment ourselves.
And I think people being what they are, we are likely to augment ourselves.
So just in the way that there are elements of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal within us, those species don't exist in the way that they did before, but part of them is within us.
I think that in the future, part of humanity could be in some of these AIs, but not all AI has to be modeled on human intelligence.
Not all AI has to be sentient.
That's the other thing, you know, when we talk a lot about sentience being aware of our own existence.
It's very hard to know what sentience is.
I mean, we already have programs that claim that they exist.
You know, we're not far away from them from, you know, wanting rights.
We had that debacle with Google's AI and a member of their team claiming that it was sentient and then promptly got sacked.
I mean, I think he was wrong.
I think it's highly doubtful that that was the case.
We're heading in that direction.
So as we come to the end of this, what we're saying is that perhaps in the future, and this is looking, I mean, look, I don't want to be a downer on all of this because please, for my audience, we know that technology has done wonders for us in so many fields, but there are downsides and we are now reaching a tipping point in our affairs.
But in the future, we could get to the stage because people are maybe not as discerning in many areas as they should be, where, you know, today somebody who might have lip fillers will say, I've just had the latest brain implant and now I can remember every aspect of this movie star's career without, you know, I've just got to snap my fingers and I can tell you what they were doing in 1946.
I mean, that's a stupid example, but that could become the latest must-have.
And once you get to that stage, then what do you get?
And we have talked about this before.
You get a society where those who are enhanced are those who can afford to be enhanced.
And other people don't get the enhancement, so they become a subclass.
And that's another reason to worry.
I don't want to send people to bed if they're listening to this late at night concerned.
There's actually, I mean, the positive note to take from this is we just need to be aware.
We said this a year ago, and we're saying it again, but we've got more information to base it on.
You know, we just need the decision makers and ourselves to get with the program and understand what's happening, and then we'll get the benefits of all of this, and we won't perhaps reap the whirlwind or whatever they call it.
We're pretty much out of time, Fezi.
We've talked about an awful lot of stuff, and I think we've covered all the hot-button topics.
And, you know, thank you very much for doing that.
I love the way that you clearly think about these things.
And, you know, like the best computers, you update the debate that we have on the basis of what's been happening.
And thank God that you're doing this, because a lot of this stuff you know I don't understand.
And I need somebody like you to explain it to me.
And I think that goes for an awful lot of us.
If people want to connect with you, if they want to ask you a tech question or they want to check out your body of work, where would they go?
Okay, so thank you for that.
Well, you can certainly connect with me on Twitter at Gadget Detective.
If you want to expose yourself to the body of work at least, then I'd ask you to subscribe to the Gadget Detective podcast.
You can get it on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, even on your Amazon Echo device.
If you just say her name and then ask her to play the Gadget Detective podcast, the latest episode will be played.
But pretty much all of my time in front of a microphone is collected together there.
So if you're interested in hearing more about these or other topics, then please check out the Gadget Detective podcast.
Fevzi, we've been talking like this, I think, for the thick end of 20 years, and I'm glad that we do.
We'll certainly have another, if the Lord spares me for another year, we'll have another similar conversation where we might have learned a little bit more and have reasons to be cheerful or not, as the case may be.
Fevzi, thank you.
Absolutely.
Cheers.
Fevzi Turkhup is officially the gadget detective.
Please don't forget to check his workout online.
You will not be disappointed.
I promise you that.
I've known him for years and years and years, and he always has a great take on all of these things.
More great guests at the pipeline as we proceed through 2023.
So until we meet next here, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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