This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jeff Zundu. After last week's Seven Signs of Digital Happiness, Man Amityj has decided he's the audio buzzfeed. As the year comes to a close and we start to gaze Morosely at the Miesma of 2018, we're looking at the next big thing, Matt's plane.
Hey Matt, welcome to the show. Hey Jeff, how are you doing? Is it time for the Crystal Ball already? Not quite, we usually have that episode early in the New Year, so that's what you expect to see over the next 12 months.
But I had so much fun doing last week's list that I thought I'd indulge myself with another one this week because you never tell me not to. Here it is. But don't worry, I will probably be back to my normal rambling and miserable self again. By next week, between the two of us, we cover a lot of interesting stories.
But the thing about that, often the bigger picture gets hidden in the details. It's not always obvious what the implications of that technology are going to be. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I think it was the show I did with Rich Bradbury when you were away. One of the stories was a kind of plastic that's derived from this self-structure of mollusks, which is very, very tough and can actually repair itself.
Now, on its own, that's pretty cool, but it doesn't actually tell you or inform you that we're actually on the verge of a revolution in material science, where we may be swapping steel for carbon, where superconductors can be made from common materials like copper, and where smart fabrics and clothing connect as climate control devices to keep us warm or to keep us cool. So I thought it might be fun to look at a few of the things that, some of which we've covered this year, and developments that are coming on the horizon, and have a look at them in the bigger picture to give it that kind of macrofield. Alright, so I know you're going to go there. So let's start with the social media space.
Yeah, I mean, I've talked so much about the perceived power of social media companies this year and that there's a generation of people that doesn't really remember a world before Facebook. That's too scary to the village. I know. And that generation actually sees companies like Facebook as being a pillar of our world, but it's something that's inescapable, it's woven into the fabric of our society, which is really to kind of misunderstand the power that Facebook or any company actually has, because historically companies are very bad at making that next leap forward.
A lot of our listeners probably won't remember the US airline Panam, unless they watched the TV show a couple of years ago, but from the 1930s to the 1980s, if you thought about air travel, you probably had a mental image of Panam's logo and the company's iconic uniform. Oh, in the TV commercials? Yeah, exactly. As soon as you say air travel, you think Panam, if you're of a certain aid, yet in 1991, the company that had defined air travel went bankrupt and its assets were bought by Delta, which is a slightly less iconic brand, and that brand moved into history.
And those are very different industries to the text theater. But every era has its own version of the kind of hotshot startup scene, whether it was the guy who was selling pickaxes 200 years ago or a better pickax. Sticking with airlines, the upstart in the 1980s was Virgin, upsetting the status quo, refusing to take the routes that other companies thought it should take. But now Virgin is one of the most iconic airline brands and even has a branch that is pushing out into space travel.
It represents the mainstream pretty much in the same way that Panam once did. And it's a similar story with tech companies over the last few years. Microsoft ruled the world. It was split up by regulators.
It got a bit lost, and it's only really starting to find its way again today. Apple was on the outs until Steve Jobs came back to the company and released products like the iMac that paved the way for all the devices we have today. And as we see, it looks like Apple is actually losing its way today with products that increasingly only Silicon Valley billionaires can actually afford to buy. And UmaPargot, of course.
IBM is still around because it had to reinvent itself so many times. Dell, the company that more or less defined the hardware side of personal computing revolution, has found it very hard to stay relevant in this kind of post desktop world. And at the start of this millennium, could you imagine a company with a rosier future than Nokia? You know, at that point in 2000, 2000, 2000, everyone was using a Nokia.
Everyone was using Nokia. Nokia was this kind of giant competition slaying monster. Yet a decade later, it was already struggling to compete. Soon after that, it was subsumed into Microsoft, and then it disappeared.
It's been relaunched as a much smaller Android-based manufacturer only in the last 18 months. So why do you think that this will apply to the social media companies? When we see acquisitions like Facebook buying over WhatsApp, what the biggest tech companies simply just buy the future? Yeah, exactly.
And that's obviously what they're going to hope to do to innovate internally and to buy into all these ideas when they see them. But historically, that's not usually enough. Brands tend to move incrementally, but change is often fundamental and huge. So Blackberry went stratospheric because of email.
It was focused on that one thing, and it had the best email client full stop. But suddenly, we stopped caring about email so much. We wanted a computer that was in our hand. We wanted something that could surf the web, take pictures and record video, something that could play games and run apps.
And Samsung and LG and Sony and Apple and all those other manufacturers, they were much better at bringing that vision to life, partly because they weren't so focused on this email-only solution. So Blackberry has found it very hard to adapt and to change with the times. And in social media, we see it time and time again. So many examples of the companies that were once enormous and have just disappeared, friends know my space, the examples we often use, companies that had the audience, they had the ability and they had the power, but somehow they just could not stay ahead of the curve.
Even with companies now like Snap and Twitter, which have enormous audiences, but they just can't turn a profit. And Facebook is profitable, but when you look at companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, which are owned by Facebook, so we don't know whether those companies would ever have been profitable in their profitable entities on their own. So what changes are we seeing that might threaten them now? Well, as I said, brands tend to move incrementally, they tend to add one feature at a time.
They won't try and make too many unexpected changes to the user interface. Your experience of using it today will be much the same as your experience using it tomorrow. I mean, look how much people complain when a single icon changes. Oh, yeah.
Because it's on the app. Or the color. Yeah, exactly. So when change happens, it's often a lot more violent than just changing a color or an app.
Look at the camera industry that went from being film-centric to being digital. That was a huge shock because this whole support industry that provided film and developed film no longer had any value in the same way that streaming media has made DVDs and physical media largely irrelevant. So when we look at new technologies for communicating with one another, we often look at things like augmented reality and virtual reality on the one hand, but more fundamentally, we're looking at shift towards voice control of our devices and we're looking at devices that no longer need to have screens. In a world that is dominated by Siri, Alexa, Google Home, where does Facebook fit in here?
Well, that's the thing. Facebook belongs to a world of screens. Everything about the services oriented around us using it on that screen. And that makes it very difficult for Facebook to become something that doesn't have a screen.
It doesn't mean that they won't be able to adapt to this new shift. But as I said, history is littered with companies who focus on today and tomorrow, but they fail to see what's going to happen next week. Interesting. I made a lot of the notes for today's show using dictation on my computer, using voice control, which it turns out is a lot faster than me typing.
And it feels a lot more natural because the notes actually reflect my natural speech as well. So there are a lot of ways that we're already moving into this future of next week, this world of no screens. And when you see companies like Facebook rolling out, say, streaming media service to compete with people at Netflix, these are still moves into the on-screen world, while the technology is already rapidly pushing us away from those same screens. Matt is doing a Matt's Bling on the Next Big Thing.
We'll be right back at the FM 89.9. Break from midfield, the FM 89.9. And we're back. My name is Jeff Sandour, together with College of Ops Matt Amortish, and we're doing a Matt's Bling episode about the next big thing.
Matt, before the break, we were talking about social media technologies and how well placed they are to moving to a post-screen world. What else do you think you'll be seeing in the tech space in the very near future here? It's interesting when we do this prediction stuff, because I can say pretty much anything. And if it doesn't happen, I can just say, oh, well, or I can delete the podcast.
As long as I say, I'm right. I'm right. One thing I do think we'll see is tech companies taking a lot more notice of women. Now, we've talked a lot about supposedly female-oriented tech this year and how awful most of it is.
I think the thing we picked up was the smart hairbrush, which tells you if you're brushing your hair correctly. Devices that are obviously just things that geeky developers are hoping that women will like without ever having tried these products out on the market. And I think the tech industry is starting to wise up to the fact that capturing the female market isn't just about making a pink version of the same product. It's about actually appealing to people, because we make this assumption that it's only guys who are interested in tech, which is complete nonsense because tech is transforming everyone's lives.
So I think that this move away from screens is going to help as well. I think as devices become more integrated and accessible, I hope we'll be dropping that kind of male-first bias with technology and looking more at what people in general and their needs are, and catering to those irrespective of their gender. So from gender to humanity, we've talked about medical technology a lot this year. Breakthroughs in treating viruses and delivering vaccines.
So where is medical tech hitting that? It's really going into the streams. We covered a story last year, and I think you mentioned it again earlier this year, about how it transforms, taking ahead and putting it on a new body, which is really freaky. But that seems to be coming closer to reality.
I think the story we reported this year was it's an Italian surgeon, and I think there's a volunteer from Russia who's waiting for that transplant. So we're moving into this era of really extreme medicine. I think earlier this year we talked about transhumanism and post-humans in terms of a new step in mankind, and medicine is rapidly edging us towards this kind of future. But is it really a trend that some people see this kind of development replacing ahead, for example, as more of a stunt than a direction of, you know, for medicines?
I don't think so. I think we already have all kinds of implantable devices that control parts of our body that our brains are no longer able to control. We're looking at restoring movement to people with paralyzed limbs. We can already replace damaged or faulty limbs.
Well, yeah, no, exactly. We can graft on new parts. We can grow new ones. We can give people new eyes.
And in the next step, you know, we're going to have brain implants that can enhance memory and help people with dementia and all sorts of things. Medicine is on the verge of being able to change us, not just to patch us up and fix us up when something goes wrong, but to physically change us, to give us abilities that we don't possess naturally. And that's even before we get into the gene editing stuff that we don't understand either. You know, we sometimes talk about being in an age where humanity is able to terraform, to physically change the planet.
And hand in hand with that, we're now pretty much able to enhance ourselves both genetically and mechanically. So what we're going to become after that is pretty much anyone's care. So while we're talking about automation, this subject of killer robots has been back in the news in the last couple of weeks of price. So will robots actually kill?
Well, that has been our running joke. The joke gets boring. Get everyone scared and livened up by shouting killer robots. But there's been another push in the media recently from technologists and philosophers and ethicists and people who, you know, for some reason care.
The simple fact here, I think, is that whatever your view on this issue and however passionately you feel, very soon we're going to have robots that kill. We already have remote controlled drones that do kill under the direction of a human operator. The big, developed military powers are fighting more and more of these kind of small proxy wars now. So they're trying to reduce the harm of the armed forces that might be, you know, for example.
Yeah, what they're going to face, yeah, exactly. But by and large, the number of soldiers they keep under arms is reducing and it's becoming more difficult for them to recruit voluntarily. So that means more of the armed forces serving longer terms and spending more time in harm's way, which increases both the psychological and the physical risk to those troops. So you have this contradiction of people who support their government's desire for war or conflict, but at the same time, they're pressuring those governments to keep their troops out of harm's way.
So it's kind of inevitable when we have the technology to automate troops, to automate the army, and to let those robots decide who to kill. It's kind of inevitable that we're going to give them that power simply because some countries are going to decide to save their own citizens' lives, no matter what the ethical costs to the people they're making war on. So there's a dose of fun Friday from man. It's been fun, right?
Oh, yeah. So let's talk about another resource. There have been a lot of reports this year comparing data to the new oil, the currency of the new era. Yeah, there was another report, I think, this, well, yesterday morning in one of the Forbes or something again about data being the new currency and oil and things.
And I do think we're kind of being hoodwinked a bit with this. Yes, we are moving into this era of data. In fact, we're already in it. It's true.
We're moving to a time when that data is being commoditized more and more. But the idea that we're all going to become these little data merchants selling our information to third parties and then those people will sell them onto brands who will use it to target us for advertising. I think that scenario is actually a little bit far-fetched, partly because it doesn't really benefit us. It's kind of a shorthand answer to all of the automation that's eating away at the jobs market.
You know, you can say that, well, that person doesn't need a job if they want a hamburger. They can sell their personal information to McDonald's who will give them a hamburger and use that data to sell them more hamburgers. It's a solution that allows big companies to have their burger and eat it in this case. They can tackle their human workers and still argue that there's a mechanism for people to earn a living.
But in the longer term, I think it disguises the fact that production costs are falling. You know, we've mentioned this at think called zero marginal cost on the show a few times this year. Where the cost of adding an additional unit of say a blackberry is nothing. Most people would say that it's cost already.
But yes, no, that's the thing about all this automation. It makes your goods much cheaper to produce. What no one is talking about so loudly is that that also makes your goods less valuable. There's a concept in economics called normal profits.
So theoretically, as your production costs fall, competition between manufacturers should also make prices go down as well. Or at least come as close to production that production cost as the company can get away with and still make a small amount of profit. So when we talk about data becoming this new resource, I often think it's a way of distracting us from the fact that production costs in general are heading towards this zero point. And it's a way of trapping us into this cycle of paying the high prices that we can't pay.
And we often talk about the value of being a perception rather than a fact. Because yes, value is largely a perception. A company like Apple can price its phones at a thousand US dollars. But it's up to us to decide whether or not that represents value.
They don't get to decide that. If in the near future, we know that iPhones cost pretty much nothing to make. And the difference in production costs versus a Samsung Galaxy is a few cents. Then those margins can't be justified.
And the chances are we're going to act by buying the Samsung and not the Apple. So we're the ones who get to decide what the value is. For brands and manufacturers, that's one of the biggest drawbacks for them of this whole kind of knowledge economy. Because that knowledge, as we've seen with reports of things like the reports on companies off shore holdings.
That knowledge doesn't always work in their favor. So I hope that means we're ending today on a relatively happy note. And namely that despite all these dire predictions about what's going to become of us tomorrow. We're actually on the cusp of a lot of movements that are going to give us the ordinary people a lot more power over the companies and the products that we currently feel beholden to.
Well hopefully this has given you a clear indication of the next big thing. Thanks to Pudgebox and the annotation. Yes, and if you've survived the weekend and have some hope I'm under, we'll see you next Friday. We'll be right back with geeksquartz after this.
BFM 89.0. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews go to bfm.my We'll find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.