The Future of The Internet 

I give it a lot of speeches every year, but I was especially honored to be asked by my friend Alex McNabb to give a speech at Geekfest - a great home-brewed event for computer geeks in the UAE to meet up, chat and generally geek out together.

As is usual with these sort of events, Twitter has become the currency underpinning this event, and I was happy to see everyone turn out last night. I gave the last speech of the night, which you could see as either “the main event” or the “graveyard shift” given that I didn’t get to speak until 10:15 on a Thursday night, which meant that many of the people I hoped would attend had already run off in search of beers. I can’t really blame them all that much.

For those of you who missed it, here’s the text from my speech. I didn’t mean for it to sound so apocalyptic, but I do think that there’s a lot of themes and topics here that warrant thinking about...

The Future of The Internet

9km off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, Sir Bani Yas Island is a nature reserve accessible only by seaplane or boat, and offers a wonderful location for a romantic getaway.

While on the island, we were taken on a nature drive with a local guide who showed us the various flora and fauna, as well as the island’s various landmarks. While driving near the palace of Sheikh Zayed, the tour guide told us that the football-field sized plantation we were driving through had been made into a curious shape, and asked if we could guess what it was.

I promptly took my iPhone out of my pocket, opened the Google Maps application, and pushed a button that showed me my location on a satellite map. “A coffee pot!” I exclaimed proudly. And then it quickly dawned on me what has just taken place. I had just called up a geolocated satellite image of where I was standing. With my mobile phone. On a desert island.

Beyond the hype and Twitter-madness that we read about every day, a new reality is dawning. The technologies and platforms we are currently experiencing are fundamentally changing the ways in which we live our lives.

If we just think back to the summer of 2006, Italy had just won the World Cup, Lebanon and Israel were at war and Shakira was telling us her hips don’t lie.
However, at the same time, Facebook was an invitation-only student community none of us had heard of, Twitter was making its quiet debut and the iPhone had not even been announced.

If we fast-forward to our lives today, we cannot comprehend a world in which we could not communicate with our global networks of friends on Facebook, talk to a brand that did not tweet, or have a mobile phone that could only make phone calls and text messages.

Our world is changing faster than we can imagine, and this is why we find ourselves living in such interesting times. We all know that change happens, but the speed with which it is now taking place is just terrifying, and the problem is that the technology is actually starting to overtake us.
A friend of mine told me the story of how when his grandmother saw her first TV broadcast in Bahrain in the 1960’s, she shrieked at the sight of the man reading the new, ran into her bedroom and put on her hijab.

Certainties of life
There are a few certainties that we have learned over the last few years, and while I don’t think we need to talk about them too much, it’s important to assume that these will be the key drivers for where we are going. Technology will get exponentially smaller and more powerful. We all know how our modern digital wristwatches have more processing power than the computer that put the first man on the moon.

In 1999 at COMDEX, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.” Of course, that launched a million “if Microsoft made cars” jokes in response - “at least cars don’t crash twice a day for no reason. You’d need a new car overtime they repainted the road, etc.”

When I moved into my previous house in 2000, I had a 64K Internet connection. My new house has a 24MB connection for about the same price. So my Internet connection is now 375 times faster than the one I had a decade ago, and that’s despite us living in Etisalat’s world.
For years now, we have all been pushing technology the way we used to push food. Food is good, so no matter how much food we have, that’s a good thing. But we lost the ability to discriminate between what is enough, and what is too much. In the USA, for the first time in history, the current generation of children will die younger than their parents did.

Why? Because of too much food, and the wrong kind of food.

Technology is starting to work in the same way. More technology! More gadgets! Boo to downtime! I want it all in the palm of my hand all the time. I want it to work on the trains and planes! I want it to speak my language!

What is happening over time is that the technology is getting better and better at knowing us, and is increasingly getting better at putting us in context. Look at Google Ads, 60% of the UK’s digital ad revenue comes from advertisements answering a question you are asking. They don’t care about the old things – age, height, gender, ABC income – all they care about is what you want. And if Google Adwords is great, how long before the computers start working a lot harder for us in helping us interact with other people.
The thing is, we are already starting to shut down these parts of our brains that no longer need to work hard for us. What’s the point of knowledge when any question is a Google search away? What’s the point of remembering my wife’s birthday – December 9 by the way, - when I’ll get a Facebook alert anyway?

Up until now, these have been pretty simple things, but we’re starting to let go of them. We’re starting to let go of them and surrendering the hard work to the machines, and they are gobbling it all up faster than you can imagine.
 
Stalking

How many of you have Facebooked a girl you met? I can hold my hand up because the last girl I Facebook-stalked is now my wife. But how many potential employees have you Facebook-stalked? Or Googled? Or Linkedin’ed?

How great would it be when all those social spaces we inhabit start to talk to each other, and start to make more and more assumptions about us. How long before Facebook doesn’t even bother waiting for me to tell it what I want and just starts analyzing pictures? Most of the pictures we take with our phones are geotagged, and maybe it can find out that I like sports, or skiing, or drinking by knowing where those pictures were taken.

No need for me to ask where the nearest boozer is. It knows that’s what I want because every picture in my album is of me in a pub. Holding a pint of Stella.
And then, that’s when the fun will really begin. Because how cool will it be when someone selll you a pair of glasses with a small Heads Up Display that face-recognized the person in front of you, and then started downloading all the facts you needed to know about them. How about a slideshow of the last 10 pictures on Facebook and quick skim of their Linkedin account, or their last 5 Pandora choices.

The things, the gap between what we can think of and what we can create is getting smaller and smaller.  These ideas are already coming to fruition, as I’m sure many of you have seen the “Sixth Sense” video on TED. And we clap our hands with glee at how much we like it. And then, how long before someone says to you “why mess around with clunky glasses when I can embed a chip in your spine that will hardwire directly to your brain. You can do this faster and better than anyone.

The problem is that this is how it starts. Information is becoming the new currency, and the more we give up, the more value we are given back, and the easier it becomes to get us to do what they want. That’s the whole thing behind advertising, right? Getting people to do what you want.

So back to the microchips. When they start, we won’t have anything to fear. “Here, just let us implant this microchip in your spine for free. We promise we won’t sell your stream of consciousness to anyone.” And then, over time, things will start to happen. You’ll be able to have a free chip if you sit through ads, you’ll be able to do things faster and better and quicker than ever before. And then, you won’t even need to remember people’s names, or where they live, or what they do.
As we let the machines do our work for us, we will get dumber, and don’t try to tell me that they are not already doing everything for us. And in our lust for things to be faster and bigger and more efficient, we are already letting them to all the work. But one of the scariest things about technologies that we are creating is that we are becoming increasingly unable to deal with their consequences.

 
Overtaking us: Deepwater Horizon & the May “Flash crash”

The Deepwater Horizon was a 9-year-old semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit, a massive floating, dynamically positioned drilling rig that could operate in waters up to 8,000 feet (2,400 m) deep and drill down to 30,000 feet. That’s how high most commercial airlines fly. However, the Deepwater Horizon was only operating at 5,000 feet when the blowout preventer on the ocean floor failed, killing 11 men and ultimately spilling 4 million barrels of oil - that’s the daily output of the entire UAE.
What was most shocking about the spill was how unprepared the world’s biggest oil company (BP) and the world’s biggest economy (USA) was for the disaster. It took them three months to cap the well. And remember, that well was only operating at 1/6 of the depth it could have been.  We have become very good at building things in the race to be faster, shinier, smarter & richer, because we are rewarded when we do so, but the Undo button is getting harder and harder to click.

Speaking of clicks, let’s talk about what happened with the click of a mouse in Kansas on May 6.

Mutual fund Waddell & Reed Financial, of Overland Park, Kansas (yeah, I know) started a program at about 2:32 p.m. on May 6 to sell $4.1 billion of futures contracts, using a computer sell algorithm that over the next 20 minutes dumped 75,000 contracts onto the market, even automatically accelerating its selling as prices plunged.
After the firm started to sell, many of the contracts were bought by high-frequency traders, computerized traders who buy and sell at high speed and account for a big part of trading in today’s markets. As they detected that they had amassed excessive “long” positions, they began to sell aggressively, which caused the mutual fund’s algorithm in turn to accelerate its selling.

In those nine minutes, $1 trillion dollars in value was wiped off the stock market, and then rebounded just as quickly. It took the US government 5 months to issue a report on what happened.

In 1997, reigning world champion Garry Kasparov played six games of chess against Deep Blue, a supercomputer created by IBM to play chess. It beat him, but that’s understandable when something can analyze 20 million positions a second. That sucks, but it’s not that scary. But this is the scary part: After the loss, Kasparov said that he “sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine’s moves.”

The reality is that as technology continues to accelerate, we will be increasingly unable to keep up with it, and no matter how hard we try to opt out of the grid; we will not be able to.
The reality is that all we get to do is adapt to the choices we are given. Are you a Mac or a PC? Are you a Republican or a Democrat? And increasingly, the only choices we will be given is the choices either we think we want or they think we should have.
It’s one of the reasons why I like Gonabit, by the way, because you’re not allowed to just opt into the things you want. There is still something to be said for the joy of discovery.
But how long before computers just start doing the filtering for you, and making your choices for you. We are all doing the thinking for each other, and that is a very scary proposition.

Why? Because we are predictable and we are all the same. We might think we are different, but how good has Amazon gotten at recommending books to us? Or Facebook suggesting friends? They will only get better at this, and we foolishly continue to ask them to do the thinking for us.
And how long before the computers decide “oh fuck it, let’s just do the thinking for them. All they do is get in the way anyway!” Remember what HAL said in the film 2001, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

The computers have already started to outrun us, and it’s only a matter of time before they start to do things that leave us in the dust. But there are things we can do to prepare for the Holocaust, and that is to do the things that only humans can do. And if we do that, I promise you one thing. We are destined to die in a world we do not recognize.
The truth is that if we do not stop accepting that all technology is good, and that all efficiency is good, no matter what the cost, we will start to lose our own sense of humanity. I got married in July, and while I had 80 Facebook friends “liked” my comment or posted a comment on my wall, I don’t think 5 of them picked up the phone to call and congratulate me.

There is only one thing that makes us human, and that is each other, and we need to remember that. We need to talk to each other, love each other, and allow each other be inefficient and make mistakes, or the computers will do it all for us.