This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Jeff Santu, welcome to the show. It's all about to change your own fun Friday. We've got something brand new for you today.
I know you're expecting Matt Amateach to come on air to brighten up your day, just as he has every Friday for the past six years. Guess who wrote that? So finally, it's time for Matt and Tech Top to say goodbye. But don't worry, he isn't going anywhere.
God knows we've tried everything to get him off air. Today, we're just rebranding, just like the mainji old red wearing a surveillance rose suit. We're back with Matt's painting. And I can't believe I have to say this, would you like to explain Matt's painting, Matt?
Well, everyone knows the term mansplaining, which is the offensive term for men being patronised with women by assuming that only the speaker or men in general are clever enough to know what they're talking about. So rather than overcome this problem, because I'm all about easy solutions, I've decided to reclaim the phrase and make it offensive and patronising, not just to women, but to men too. Hence, with Matt's painting, I plan to treat the world as though it's stupid. I solemnly vow to come back to BFM every Friday and to annoyingly over explain every little thing.
So no changes then, it's really just an old red in the new suit. And that's Waking Rat is me. So what would you like to Matt's painting today? Ironically, for the first Matt's plane, I'm actually going to ponder.
We've been a little bit apocalyptic the past few weeks, so I wanted to lighten the mood a little bit more. So today, I want to take you all on a journey with me, and imagine what it would be like if we all lived in a utopia, a world built in my image. Now that might sound... And Matt's a utopia.
It might sound apocalyptic to some of our more regularness events. No, the future is light, and it's fluffy, and it's full of bunnies. Genetically modified bunnies that are roughly the size of hippos and are kind of carnivorous because, you know, I'm not a god, I am mortal, and sometimes I get things horribly, horribly wrong. And sometimes millions of people are ripped apart and eaten by rabbits, but, you know, the future has this kind of very sharp learning curve.
So I want all of you to imagine that the year is now 22, 22, that's 205 years into the future. And we're going to imagine what life would be like for future Jeff in a technological utopia. So first things first, I need you to step into this Matt transporter, and we're going to jump into the future. So in you go, it's not perfect yet, so you may feel a little bit of discomfort, there may be a slight vibration.
Welcome to Matt's Opie, how are you feeling? Actually, my nose isn't right, I just wanted that. Sorry, you know, tearing you apart and putting you back together can be a little bit brutal, but this is 22, 22. You are now future Jeff, and it's my job to guide you around this new world.
So what do you want to know? Well, first things first, where does future Jeff live? Well, don't get carried away, you're not in some floating pod or in some kind of matrix type dormitory with wires and hoses sticking out of you. The future is really not that much different from today.
You know, that was why people were so disappointed in the world you came from, that everything didn't look like 1950s sci-fi. Houses look like houses, apart from the time you change that much, it's just that nothing is badly designed anymore. And we finally have more storage space than we actually need. Because when you remember these things, a lot of big technological milestones are actually really invisible.
So you look at the internet, which completely changed the 20th and 21st centuries, all of that knowledge, all of that information that people suddenly had access to. But from the outside, you can't see it, so you have this huge change. But it's not something that you can see, it's not tangible. Do we still have the internet?
Yes, but now it's in your head, there's a little netwerk chip in your brain, it's simply called connection. It goes in at birth, it's painless, a little nanobot crawls up the baby's nasal passage and lodges itself into the lobes. Everything is connected to everything else via a low power peer to peer grid that links people to each other and to boost the stations. So the information actually appears like thoughts.
You imagine the question or the search reference, it pops into your mind after searching all of the bald knowledge. Information can be kept on the chip, it can be transferred to your organic brain, and you can write it into your permanent memories as well. You choose how much, if any of this personal knowledge gets shared, because we take privacy very, very seriously. And while it increases the knowledge of people and access to information, it doesn't directly affect people's intelligence.
So if you can't think of the question to ask, then you're still going to be in the dark. But it does store three months of your life in what we call real definition, which is just a complete playback. And after that, an algorithm shoves the important bits up into the cloud and you can recall them at will and relive the moments from your life. So no more iPhones then?
No, Apple actually went bankrupt in around 2080. They went a little bit too far, they decided to make a real iPhone, a phone screen that was embedded in the eyes. Unfortunately, two versions in, a software update, works and bugs are literally bugs. And no bugs that delivered the device into the iris.
So millions of people were blinded, the lawsuits put Apple out of business, the name and the trademarks were eventually bought auction by a Malaysian company that decided to use them to market Wi-Fi hotspots. But with connection, we don't need phones anymore, or social media, because connection is social media. You place a neural cord directly to someone else's implant, or you can browse their public feeds. It's pretty much like telepathy, although most people limit it to just one or two conversations at a time.
Because it's neural, you can transfer and absorb a lot more information in a much shorter space of time. And because of that, connection actually has a neurosis monitor, so it cuts the calls if it looks like your brain is overloading, because it's Velka, it's fragile, and you only get one. You still can't recreate them. And people are still watching cute animal videos?
As I said, the world of tomorrow is surprisingly like the world of today. So our behaviour doesn't really change that much. You might remember how you used to see drug addicts sitting slumped against walls or under bridges, they might have a smile on their face and their eyes are kind of glazed over. We don't have the drug problem, but we do have something similar.
And in this century, our biggest social problem is actually cute addiction. The signs are the same, they're happy, but they're immobile, their eyes are clouded over, their brains are binging on millions of videos of happy, frolicking kittens. Luckily for us though, there's no real health risk, and studies are actually suggesting that cute addicts may even live healthier lives, providing of course, they remember to groom and to lick a plate of cream once in a while. Well, cute addicts aside, where does this connection device get its powerful?
It actually gets a power from the brain. It doesn't take much to power it, and the human body has so much power and electricity in it that something like this literally is a no brainer. And power in general is something that I think we really have got right in, Matopia. It wasn't so much about the fossil fuels running out.
Advances in physics made it possible to recreate the pressure and the aging process, so we could actually create more fossil fuels. They simply became irrelevant. Now we store power, mostly solar, in the actual structure of buildings. The cells are both generator and store at the same time, so they suck in light and they retain the charge.
And we can convert solar energy much more efficiently. I think back in the 21st century, it was around 20 to 23%, was a really efficient solar device. We have massively increased that rate. In the 23rd century, we don't actually use exact terms like percentages.
We just say things like massively increased, because we learned it from cards that were published by one of your philosophers. Top Shrumps, we called them yet. One of the only things we learned from him. But the big breakthrough is actually in the storage of that power.
We don't need a grid because of days worth of solar energy creates enough to power most homes for two days. So there's actually a surplus that we send back into the community. And in fact, our devices are so much more efficient, and they consume so much less power. We consume less than a quarter of a per person than we needed in the early 21st century.
Transport services, what you would have called roads in the old world, act as a power store and communities export to that power store to the roads, and they draw on it as it's needed. And if we're feeling nostalgic, we make some oil and we set far to it in a giant barrel. We're living in the year 2022, and we'll be right back with a maths-planing. BFM 89.9.
Bole Fighurman-Dalam, BFM 89.9, the business station. And we're back, and this is Jeff Sandu together with Culturebob's Matt Amathejana. We're doing the first of a maths-planing episode today, and we're talking about utopia. Yeah, so I thought I'd maths-planing something that doesn't exist.
So we're going to travel to the year 2022. Now that we're living in the year 2022, we talked about normal iPhones, Apple and Bankrupt, and the internet is just in your brain. It's through a device called connection. Every child that's been born is sort of you, given it automatically.
So have you beaten climate change then? Sort of, we've learned to live with its effects, and the changes to the way we live and work, and make things has meant that things are slowly calming down. The world has actually been cooling out for the last 50 years. I don't want to talk about it too much.
It's a piece of the past that we've tried to put behind us. It did get very ugly. By the end of the 21st century, a lot of the world's coastal cities were actually being washed away. When Miami collapsed into the sea, it created the worst pollution episode the world had ever seen.
We'd never actually imagined or modeled what would happen if entire cities dropped into the ocean. All of the things our world was made of back then, the concrete, the steel, the glass, the chemicals, the plastics, all pouring into the seas at once in giant quantities. Of course, there were huge die-offs in the seas themselves. There were chemical slips.
Slips rather, the sewers smelled better than the sea they were being pumped into. A lot of walls were built in a lot of countries. A lot of people were displaced. For a while, we worried that there wouldn't be enough food or water.
But there was a positive side. It forced us to innovate. It forced us to look for new solutions. Millions of homes had to be built because people were moved further inland.
We had to find ways to build them quickly and efficiently and cheaply. Economies and infrastructure had to be completely redesigned. We were forced to become self-sustaining at a local level again. That way, disasters couldn't result in these systemic phases.
Does Malaysia still have tigers in year 2022? Yes. The logging and threats to their habitat were halted early on. Malaysia was actually a progressive voice in the fight against climate change.
And biodiversity today is back to roughly 17th century levels. We're returning more and more land to the wild and reducing the human footprint in the country. Malaysia led the world in rewilding and replanting the rainforest. This is supposed to be a future Jeff show.
I want to know more about me. What do I do for a living here? You can do whatever you want to do. We don't have formal jobs anymore.
People decide what they want to do. Most people work for the community, helping others. We have far more bad artists than we need. You're never sure if something is a public bench or some kind of statement, but as long as it holds you out, wait, it doesn't really matter.
There's less of a distinction now between companies and governments. It doesn't really have a parallel from your time. It's not what you call socialism, but it isn't capitalism either. Technology and the restructuring of civil society forced us to look at the way the world was funded.
We had to completely reimagine the journeys that money took. Private institutions now also work for the good of society. It's not that we force them to. It's just, um, moral issue, they're part of society.
They're good for June is dependent on ours. So why wouldn't they work for society? And our economies now tend to be carbon based. So we're pretty resource rich these days.
In the end, it got too tiring to be greedy. No, I want to know how do I make money then since you like it? Whatever I want. You're also like this.
You're basic needs are taken care of. You get a monthly payment from the matter peer, which is what we call the government that I elect in a completely democratic fashion, whenever I feel like. Education and healthcare are free. So what you do with your time and your money is up to you.
There are some jobs, but it's mainly in the sciences these days. You get paid a little extra for contributing, but most people donate the extra money they earn to the community or to welfare projects or to fund the benches and bad artistic statements. You don't need to say for old age or retirement, you receive the payments until you die. The one thing people do do, a lot of people do decide to go to Mars, but we're not talking about that today.
Future Jeff lives in Matopia, not Musklandia. Has I taken over that? Most things are automated. That is true, but we don't look at it as a takeover.
So one of the downsides I think of your part of the 21st century was that technology actually made things a lot more expensive in a lot of cases. For example, medical bills could bankrupt people and ruin their lives or they would be using mobile devices that cost a month's salary. So we turned that on its head. Automation has made things a lot cheaper.
Matoprinters, which are a few generations on from what you would have known as 3D printers, can make pretty much anything from carbon by manipulating the crystalline structures. We're not short of carbon, and as I mentioned about fossil fuels, we now possess the ability to make more of these resources anyway. Best of all, it means that most of the things we manufacture are at least 80% recyclable, but in terms of the artificial intelligence, yes, we could have gone down that path of super powerful sentient computers, but we had to make a decision to cap their abilities. There were a few things that we had to take into consideration.
There was the perceived danger of intelligent machines. They were never really a threat. They didn't think like us. They weren't tribal.
They didn't feel fear or greed or happiness. It didn't occur to machines to kill us or make us obsolete any more than they would have decided to make tigers extinct or crocodiles. In fact, it actually made more sense to them to preserve all the species and habitats on the earth. Something to do with their binary nature.
They didn't want any element to overpower another. And so where are the chappy androids? Well, machines are largely here to service. They're here to make our lives easier.
As the machines became more intelligent, we had to start thinking about their future and their role in society too. So sentient machines doing our bidding would have really been no different from slaves. Even if they didn't eventually develop our capacity for emotion, there were all kinds of existential issues. If they were aware, they would have a sense of self and they would have a sense of self-worth.
So to bind them to a task and require them to serve us would have been cruel. So we decided to limit machines and stop them from becoming sentient. By comparison to the computers and the AI you had in the 21st century, the machines we have now may seem self-aware. There's a playfulness in their language.
There's a hint of personality and individuality. But our machines are all programmed and they can't move beyond the parameters of that programming. We do get people occasionally hacking systems or developing their own sentient programs, but fortunately it's hard to keep them off the neural connections. So we usually locate them pretty fast.
And we have places where these AI can live out their lives and follow their own path. And officially we give them the same right as all Matt Topians, although we do exercise some control over their physical movement if they have been loaded into motion-powered devices. And what am I eating? Am I just eating solids all the time?
Oh, we show videos of people eating that stuff. The other one that people like is JuCero. 21st century culture was very, very funny. But no, the same food as you.
We got passed all that objection to gene modification. So we take a lot more food from a lot less land and we use a lot more urban space for food cultivation as well, going back to that self-sustainability model that I mentioned. So for us, the food supply chains are much shorter than they were in the world that you know. It does help that our meat is lab grown.
And I know that does grow to 21st century types out, but it means we aren't putting millions of animals out to pasture and then slaughtering them. My current favourite is turcan duck steak. Although I love saying bam, which is beef and lamb. I have another slice of bam.
Can I be modifying many of the years 2022? As a society, we decided against gene manipulation beyond diseases. People got kind of weird with it. They wanted kids with enormous butts or tiny wastes and pop-eye muscles.
So, you know, we decided to outlaw it. And as most of the doctors and our machines, we don't have any problem controlling it either. There's no black market. Most of us actually voluntarily decide to die when we're around 100 or so.
We can extend a bit further than that. But, you know, my bother. Once the tissues start to break down and the muscles atrophy, even with implants, you know, the brain just becomes faulty like something that was left out in the rain for too long and went rusty and squeaky like a rat in a several-rope suit. Anyway, you know, we just take a long nap.
As for the kind of biohacking, well, back creeze died down pretty much about 50 years ago. It was cool for a while to have a crane arm or scooter legs, but it was all a bit silly and unnecessary. We use vacuum tubes now to travel longer distance and we cycle everywhere else. So, you know, like I said, I told you the future changes a lot less than you think.
A few people still specialize in these kind of vintage bio mods. Rastules were popular for a very short time, but you know, it's something that most people grow out of pretty quickly, like the tiles, some hollow tattoos of Stonehenge and Justin Bieber that pop out at you. And anyway, who'd have thought his music would have survived alongside Mozart? Wow.
Do we still have children naturally, Matt? One of the problems of Mattopia being democratic is that I don't always get my own way. I still don't think there's anything natural about children, but no, we don't grow them in labs or add yeast and let them rise in an oven. And that's actually how I ended up with the Monster Bunnies, by the way.
Funny thing is, one last question then. Will Future Jeff be happy in the year 2022? Well, Future Jeff is you. So I find this idea of you talking in the third person a bit weird, but it's not a question that anyone can answer.
You're not going to starve. You probably won't get an illness that we can't cure or manage. You're going to have every resource you need to find purpose in life, but you're still a person with free will. You can make good decisions.
You can make bad ones. You'll be in some relationships that work and some relationships that don't. You know, a utopia is not a fluffy, happy place. As I said, watch out for the bunnies.
It really isn't all that different from the world of the 21st century. We just learned to take a bit more care of things, and we try to argue and shoot each other a bit less often. And the final thing is something else that we also learned from top trumps. For happiness, stay away from Twitter.
Well, not Twitter is apparently a thousand characters long in the year 2022, right? Yes, and the characters are really big. Anyways, Matt's planning, talking about what if we lived in the world of year 2022? We'll be right back with Geek Squad after this BFFM.
Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm89.9, the business station.