This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's Tech Talk and my name is Jeff Zandu. Last week we heard about the things that mid-culture pops met. Amortage said in 2017, this week his promise will all be happy.
I remember the words clearly, happy, happy joy joy. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm in a good mood already.
So it's part two of 2017, Matt's plane. So last week we talked about data breaches, powerlessness, abusive tech companies and tone deaf CEOs. But you claim that you were actually optimistic after what sounded like a terrible year. I think you've got some explaining to do, Matt.
Jeff, well, I don't want this to be a rehash of last week's show, but, you know, let's take the powerlessness for, for example, that's something that we've talked about a lot since the summer. On the face of it, having a generation of people who feel that they have no power in the face of, you know, big technology companies, that's not a good thing. But what you have to then consider is whether or not that belief is true or not. A lot of people are starting to understand that they actually have a lot more power than they think they have.
And this generation, this kind of millennial generation as well, it might think it has no power, but it's actually very politically and socially active. And it's actually very savvy. Yeah. You know, they're starting to use the the tools that social media companies give them to organize, to share opinions and to create movements that are actually very large and transparent.
So that is something that I'm very optimistic about. If you look at the election that happened in Alabama a couple of weeks ago, yeah, a lot. Yes, a lot has been made of the African American vote, the female vote, the Hispanic vote, to help defeat Roy Moore, but less has been said about the vote of millennials who also came out in force and voted for Jones. Yeah.
So it's not necessarily that the generation is more liberal, but they do seem to be more progressive and inclusive and secular, even if they're quite conservative in other ways. So it's a kind of a sea change in opinion, I think, and that's helping to change society. Actually, that's pretty because I see a lot of my nephews and nieces who are much younger, they're like 15 and below 15 as well. And they talk about a little bit of politics and stuff.
And it's a very knowledgeable and they're very educated about it as well. So yeah, it is so happy. Happy. So what else do you have in your mid-morning happy meal for us then?
Well, as we mentioned last week, we're on the verge of a new leap in technology, which I think we'll be talking about a lot more in 2018 in part that leap is being powered by artificial intelligence. So at the moment, a few of our listeners will probably have unintrusive little speaker boxes sitting around in their homes. And those little boxes are listening to them and waiting to act on any spoken commands. So right now those boxes, they don't do very much apart from deliver news headlines and weather reports will help you to reorder toilet paper.
You know, they're not really very impressive yet, but they are the first wave of a new generation of devices that is designed to do a bidding by communicating to us in natural language in our own language. So for example, I have a little app on my phone called VoiceDream. It's an app that offers text to speech. So it will read web pages, text documents, ebooks, that kind of thing.
But what's unusual about it is it allows me to purchase voices from different companies. These companies are all pioneers in artificial language and creating human sounding mechanical voices. So you can buy one that sounds like a kid, you can buy one that has a Southern American accent, you can buy one that has a South African accent, all these different kinds of accents and voices. And some of the companies are a bit more advanced than others.
There's still a way to go, but even with this app, the stage of development it's at now, the voices reading my books to me sound more human than they sound to machine. So it's not perfect, but yeah, we've made real strides towards getting these natural sounding mechanical voices. I'd buy a happy, happy, joy, joy voice, a matte sounding voice. That would be my app for next year.
I will put that out before next Christmas. So why is that still revolutionary though? Because the screen is actually a really strange way for us to communicate. In a lot of ways, it's really inefficient.
How many times, for example, have you written an email to someone? And the tone of that email has kind of been lost in translation. So you send what you think is either a neutral or a friendly message. And it's interpreted by the recipient as something offensive, something's been lost in translation.
And we've all been in that situation. As a species, we're designed to communicate face to face, or ear to ear, if you're listening to this show. Using mechanisms like words, gestures, and of course, using body language. So when it comes to machines that help to organise our lives, they don't have our brains.
They don't have our personality. So we have to find another way, an interface for us to be able to communicate with the machines. I think as I mentioned on the show a few weeks ago, I've started dictating the notes for this show into the speech to text function on my laptop. Doing that, the results I get there, they lend themselves a lot more readily to speech because instead of writing words down, which results in a different grammatical structure, it's not the way you speak, my notes are now in a form that is much easier for me to speak them out.
So ignoring the data privacy issues, how revolutionary do you think this change is going to be? It's going to have an absolutely enormous impact. One thing that really gets in the way of the adoption of new technologies is the learning curve for using it. And this actually inverts that relationship.
It turns it completely upside down. Very shortly, we will have machines that learn to use us. Now, that might sound a little bit frightening on the face of it. But what we're doing is removing the operating system.
We're putting it in the background, which is actually where it belongs. I know people like you like tinkering with things, but for most of us, we just want things to work. So is it really hard to move from one operating system to another? Well, I find using a Windows computer really hard, especially if I have to give a presentation, I've got no idea what buttons to push and everything.
Nothing seems to work. But the fundamental differences between a Windows and a Mac computer are actually very, very small. Nothing that I couldn't overcome in a few minutes or at most a couple of hours. The hard part is actually in teaching someone to use that computer in the first place.
In parts of the world that are more developed, we forget how weird and alien this kind of technology actually is. So those of you with kids, you watch them pick up and understand tablets and phones and computers very, very quickly. They even understand how smart TVs work, something I think even Albert Einstein would have struggled with. But part of the reason that kids pick up this text so quickly is because they're in an environment where they're surrounded by this stuff and by people who know how to use it.
So they're picking up on and improving on the knowledge of the people who are actually around them. Can we assume that everyone has that exposure and experience as well? Well, you show that same technology to someone who has no experience whatsoever, and they'll just be lost. They don't know to hit the buttons to turn it on.
They don't understand anything about it. So artificial intelligence powered technology removes that operating system. Obtaining information then becomes as simple as speaking. Of course, we're not going to replace screens completely, probably for the simple fact that reading is a faster way to absorb information than having it spoken to you.
But it's the bigger picture that's important here, I think, in a world where speech recognition technology is embedded in everything. Everything is, or a lot of things are going to become faster and a lot more natural, turning on a light, turning on the TV, getting into the car. Everything will become a lot simpler to do. So we no longer have to remember one communication language for the washing machine, another one for the phone, another for the computer, or some combination of shouted words and hitting with a hammer for the smart TV.
It means the machines in the cloud can literally talk to us, and they will simplify a lot of the actions in our daily lives. So whether that means scheduling a reminder for an appointment or buying the ingredients that I need to make that mirror finish, Christmas cake, once you remove that learning curve and make it simple and intuitive to use any piece of technology, you make that technology much more accessible. But are we making things too easy? We already seeing AI and robots, they start to take over jobs and even our professions now?
OK, and I promise you happy, happy, joyous. This is the part of the show where you have to bear with me that this is actually about happiness and optimism. Because I think the majority of us will see our jobs, our professions disappear within our lifetimes. If you've been following US politics, you may have heard a lot of talk this year about putting miners back to work, ignoring the argument about whether or not coal should be included as our energy of choice.
Coal mining is a hard, dirty and dangerous job. It's a job that is largely being done by machines already. We don't want people to cut coal by hand, especially if the machine can do it far more efficiently, and it does it without the added risks of burying people underground or creating long-term health or even terminal lung diseases. The society will eventually have to pay for.
So for unemployed coal miners, yes, I agree that sucks, just as it will for all the people in white colour professions that artificial intelligence will be upending in the near future. I don't see the happy, happy joy of this happy, happy, joy, joy episode. He promised the whole entire episode, but now we're down to the last 10 minutes of the show. This is the tension and drama.
That's why it comes before the break. We'll be right back. BFM, 89.9. Better finance management.
BFM, 89.9. And we're back. My name is Jasantar Togetov with Cloud Sportsman, Amatish. Now we are doing a show about things that Matt Amatish has learned in 2017.
We're doing part two, which is happy, happy, joy, joy, because last week was all about doom and gloom. And before the break, Matt's version of optimism had us all being put out of work by robots and sentient computers. Yes, I'm going to give everyone a break from that. And I'm going to turn the tables on Jeff again and ask him about what he learned in 2017.
So this time around, I'm going to say that in the year 2017, it has made me really look at Bluetooth technology in a completely new way. I remember the first few times we were doing the shows, not 20 minutes. OK, and thank you for that, Jeff. He killed our Bluetooth yet again.
No, no. When we started off, Bluetooth was like one of those technologies that everyone would throw in just because it's like a new tech that you could do anything. We had the running drive about Bluetooth speakers. All the technology you ever saw was a Bluetooth speaker.
Everything just had to have a Bluetooth, but it never really worked well. Bluetooth was such a horrible technology that you ever step five feet away, you lose connection to it. But Bluetooth 5.0, though, that for me actually changed my perception of Bluetooth. You can now connect to multiple devices, you could control and sync what type of volume and from where you want it to come.
And finally, though, Bluetooth is stable. So last week I've been trying to buy headphones. Yes, yes. It obviously works with Bluetooth and most of them are with Bluetooth 5.0.
It's that thing that I look for now, which is surprising because we muck around with Bluetooth before. And now I would say, you know what, in 2018, if your phone doesn't come with Bluetooth 5.0, don't buy it. Yeah, I have to say one of the things that is the first thing I check whenever I update the OS on my phone is Bluetooth still working because that's the function that seems to not survive the upgrade. Because we see autonomous vehicles coming into place and it's all connected to your phone and how is it connected to your phone?
Bluetooth. Is that underestimated technology? It has that thing that it would work seamlessly. Back then, it wasn't working seamlessly at all.
It always used to drop connection. But now, whenever I get into my car, my phone is just synced immediately. Whenever I step out of it and I get to my office, it's synced with my PC. Whenever I get to my phone, it's synced to my speaker itself.
I think Bluetooth this year has really changed my mind. Yeah, I'm hoping that my development, which is using microwaves, will actually come out onto the market next year. At the moment, I'm going through my human demonstration models quite quickly. I've got several brains so far.
But we are getting close to a frequency that will only cause mild brain damage. I'm looking forward to that, man. Now that Bluetooth is officially cool, what messages of cheer do you have for everyone listening in that? Well, I promise we get back to the enjoy joy.
Now, a lot of people take time off work at the end of the year because working is rubbish. I can agree to that. Yeah, exactly. Especially this year.
I think this is work. Think of all the time that we waste having to go to work. So for a few very lucky people, they actually enjoy the work they do. But the majority of people are simply doing something to earn enough money to feed and house themselves and to feed and house their family.
There's not a lot of choice involved. If you're at the lowest field under the jobs market, you pretty much do whatever you can and hope that you're going to have some kind of job security. Even if you're at the other end of the jobs market, let's say you spend years and years qualifying to become an accountant. What happens if you suddenly realise that your job is actually deathly dull, that numbers and tax calculations don't rock your world and that if you spend another minute doing it, you're going to attack your colleagues with a stapler.
The answer for most people is that they swallow the hate and spend the next 30 years in some kind of career coma because they've got people depending on them and people who depend on that income. So this isn't so much of a 2017 realisation or revelation for me. I think for quite a while I felt that for most people working is kind of pointless. And as technology gets more sophisticated, it can easily replicate a lot of our white collar job functions as well.
And it's making the arguments that we need to work. It's making them progressively weaker. What would we do without jobs? Well, this is one of those instances where people, especially politicians and economists, will tell you that we will turn into lazy fat slobs, shoveling junk food into slack mouths and sitting bug-eyed in front of the latest edition of Call of Duty.
For some people, that is actually their dream scenario. I can see Jeff has drifted off into his own little world now. But I don't think most people would. I think we would find things to do.
There might be personal things. There might be things for the community. I know the example I'm about to give is very middle-class, but one of my school friends is currently taking his kids on a six month round the world trip. Wow.
Yeah, exactly. He and his wife took furloughs from work. The kids were given permission to do their school work remotely for a few months. And the family has been off exploring South America, Micronesia, Southeast Asia, and now they're doing a month in South Africa.
OK, admittedly, you need to have fairly solid resources in order to do something like that. But it's been an incredible experience for them, especially as the kids are all between the ages of like 10 and 14. So they're doing it during their formative years, rather than taking the more traditional teenage gap year where all they're really interested in is cheap. Yeah.
Yeah. So in a world without work, I think more of us could do things like this. You know, we could take our families to experience other cultures, see other ways of living, you know, dual kinds of weird and wonderful stuff. Because the idea of defining ourselves by our jobs is actually a relatively new one.
It's not much more than 150 years old. Before that, it really was a case of, you know, working to live rather than living to work. And what decision did you come into terms of financing this new lifestyle for the new world? It might be a rather controversial statement to make on a business radio station.
But I think the capitalist system as it is now is pretty much done. I mean, it's not going to collapse overnight, obviously. But when we look at previous economic upheavals, big shifts in societies and industry, when technology is displaced workers, it's usually opened up new industries that absorb those underused resources. So as one industry dies or mechanization replaces labor, something else opens up and that workforce is used somewhere else.
That doesn't seem to be the case with a lot of the industries now. The new companies and industries we're creating and inventing also seem to require very few human employees. So in very basic terms, that means you have a system that really doesn't work anymore, too many vendors selling and because people don't have jobs or income, too few consumers. So I think we're coming to a crossroads where we're going to be looking for, you know, a complete change in new economic and social system.
But why do you think we'll give up working? Because of the machines, I don't think there will really be jobs for us to do, not meaningful ones anyway. And we've also talked this year about the thorny issue of transhumanism. You know, just as we're not going to be able to avoid artificial intelligence, in a few years time, people with machine or computer enhancements are going to be quite commonplace.
So if you look at a future where enhanced people are competing with unenhanced people for the same jobs, that's probably a very bleak future. So I'm optimistic. Happy, happy, joy, job. I'm optimistic that we're going to find another way.
Because unless we throw all of the technology out of the window, that new way is going to involve the machines doing most of the work for us, rather, and us finding other ways to make our lives meaningful. What's your message for 2018? Well, the first step on this road to self-empowerment is paying for stuff, which, again, is not what people expect you to say. I think that's probably going to be my mantra for next year.
At the moment, getting things free costs us too much. We're paying too much to not pay anything. We're giving away far too much information, far too readily to the companies that we deal with online. That information is personal, it's valuable, it's a resource, and it's a resource that we should control, not one that we should give away just so that someone can like a picture of your latest latte.
I'm not advocating that we sell that information to companies either. I'm just saying, make Mark Zuckerberg happy, give him 10-ring it a month, and stop getting those horrible contextual ads and videos in your feed. Pay Google an annual fee for using the search engine. Do you think people are willing to pay for this stuff?
Well, I think the argument is kind of the wrong way around. I mean, how many of us use social networks or online services that we don't really need, just because they're free? Those things actually give you really negligible value, but they're always working in the background on your phone and your computer, so they're tracking your location, your browsing history, your habits. They're building this very detailed picture of your life, which they're then selling on to other companies to sell you more stuff that you don't want.
So you're not really getting value for money out of a lot of the free relationships you have already. I think it's much better to pay for what you use, street, Facebook, like you would Netflix. For me, paying for things is the first step towards taking the power back. You make yourself a customer and you make the tech companies actually work for your business, because the free model, it's just not sustainable and it's not in our best interests, because it makes companies jump through hoops, it makes them do very strange things that are not very transparent just so that they can be profitable.
So I'm saying, make it transparent, give them your money and demand something in return. And how will that make us happy? Because you take back control and we're telling the tech companies you guys work for us. For too long now, I think we've been passive.
The thing with a lot of tech companies, social media especially, is that they want us to be active. They want us to engage, they want us to use that service. It's their strength, but it's also their biggest weakness because it hands us a big lump of power. So that's why I'm optimistic about the future, because it puts us in a position where we can change the balance of power in our favor.
It's not something that is going to happen overnight and I think there's going to be a lot of pushback from the companies to maintain the balance in their favor. But I think we stand a decent chance of winning and I think one of the steps is paying and telling these people, no, you work for me. So your happy, happy, joy, joy is us paying for things, so we got to spend more money. That's where we find happy, happy, joy then.
Yes, because when you pay your in control, you're not being dictated to by somebody else, you have the other hand in that relationship. So go ahead, spend the money on Matt Amatich, because that's the happiest, happiest joy joy you'll ever hear of Matt Amatich throughout 2017. And Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas.
We'll be right back with Geekswalk's After Days BFM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.