MSP104 [] The Future: Asked Myself Everything?

This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It is one Friday, my name is Jaffs Andu. It is no surprise when Matt takes an idea and stretches it, until it's so thin you could wrap it around a nanotube. We've had asked Matt anything, we've had asked Matt more anything, and this week's MSP is Ask Myself anything.

Matt, what does that even mean? Hey, Jeff, well, you know, over the last few weeks, like you said, we've had asked Matt anything, we've had more of that, so I've been taking listeners' questions. Friends have been asking me questions. You even asked me a bunch of questions last week as well.

The only person who hasn't actually asked me any questions, apart from the 7 billion people on the planet, who have no interest in asking me any questions, is of course myself. So I thought today, you know, I'd challenge myself and ask myself anything. Most people would call that the quiet reflection. I'm not sure that it's radio.

Still, this won't be the first time we've broken the word entertainment. What do you want to ask yourself? Well, you know, we're getting to that part of the year where we do a lot of the roundups, we do the best ofs, and we start to think about, you know, what kind of technology we expect to see in the next year, in 2020. It's possible even that future Matt is going to make an appearance on the show.

Yeah, exactly. Hopefully not. We'll try and get the year off to a good start, put him off till the middle of the year. But, you know, one of the recurring questions that came through in the previous AMA episodes, it was, you know, the idea of privacy, it was that whole idea of switching off and technology encroaching into our lives, these kind of different aspects of things.

And, you know, that gets me thinking, because I have to ask myself questions like, you know, do I actually use technology well? Do I overuse technology? You know, do I look for a solution that has a basis in technology when there's actually a much simpler way to do it? So, a case in point, last night, I spent 10 minutes looking for the remote control to turn the TV off.

It completely escaped my attention that I could do it manually. So, of course, I went over to the TV, and I didn't even know where the button was. I had to actually run my hands around the panel to find the buttons, and it made me ask myself, because I've had this TV for, you know, the best part of 10 years. Have I ever switched it on or off manually before?

And I'm not sure that I ever have. So, where's the remote? I still don't know. I've no idea where the remote is, but at least I know how to turn the TV on and off now.

But, you know, that brings you to start thinking about, you know, how much technology is designed like that? You know, I've got other devices where half the functions are on the machine, half of the functionality is on the remote or on a phone screen. I've got, you know, some of those Bose audio streamer things. Fantastic devices, but without the app or the remote control, all you can do is turn it on and off.

You really can't do anything with it. So, you know, is there a lot of technology that's doing this? And too much tech is designed like that? Well, I think so.

I mean, look at the new Apple MacBooks. They've got that smart, interactive smart tab. Now, they've brought back the hard escape key, the physical escape key. But wasn't it obvious that people would actually want that?

They don't want these occasion sensitive menu bars. They just need these kind of hard keys for things. So, yeah, it doesn't make you think, who are these devices actually being made for? So, sticking with Apple, we have the new, was it the Mac Pro that came out this week?

And in its most high-spec version, it costs more than $50,000 US dollars. Obviously, that's not aimed at consumers, but as somebody pointed out on Facebook, you can buy a Tesla Cybertruck for that for the cost of a new Apple computer. It doesn't make any sense. And they will charge you $400 US dollars to have it on wheels.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw wheels. And of course, when you buy the, I think it's the $5,000 US dollar display, you still have to buy a stand for it. Which is $1,000?

Yeah, exactly. So, we've lost the battle between forming function then? Well, you know, on last week's show, I actually defended printers. You know, and we talked about the complexity, you know, how difficult it is to actually make a printer that functions.

But we also have to look at how our devices become so minimal that they've become, you know, effectively useless. So we were sold on this kind of myth of the touchscreen being highly efficient and very interactive. But today, more and more devices are being sold with, you know, pen technology. So, you know, Steve Jobs telling us for years how rubbish it was to have a mouse, how, you know, we don't need input devices like pens.

Yet, you know, the biggest selling point of the MacBook Pros now is the interactive pen. We're seeing so many devices using these tools. So have we gone a bit too far? Isn't that the bridge until everything becomes fully voice controlled?

Well, everyone knows that I'm a fan of this kind of jump to voice control technology, even though I don't have much voice control technology in my house, because a lot of it links back to companies that are just listening to what you're doing, which I'm not a huge fan of. But yes, speaking is the most efficient form of communication we have. Otherwise, we'd do the show by email. You know, it would be even more drawn out than it currently is.

But what happens when we get to that revolution? And there are people whose voices can't actually be recognised. So if we have this kind of voice activated world, what happens to the people whose voices can't be recognised? The people with disabilities?

Well, not just people with disabilities, people who've got accents. I mean, most Malaysians know how difficult it is to get voice recognition technology to understand English in a Malaysian accent. You could have people who have speech impediments. It could even be as simple as people who haven't really slept.

You know, you have that slariness to your voice. We can't all be best all the time, no matter what Melania Trump thinks. You know, what happens if you go out, for example, Jeff, and you've had a couple of drinks, of course, you take a grab home, because you're a responsible person. And what happens if the front door in your alarm system don't recognise your voice?

Because you've had one beer too many. Do you have to sleep outside your own house? Because you can't prove to a door that you are who you say you are. So you're worried about people being left behind?

Well, we've already sort of seen the start of this two-tiered society. This technology has a technology, have not. And it's largely based around people who can afford things. We can't afford things.

But it isn't just individuals. We're seeing entire nations slipping behind this divide as well. But we're seeing these big underclasses starting to develop in richer countries as well. But what we're also seeing beyond that is that some countries are using the privilege of access to technology, actually as a social lever, so they can deny you access to government services according to your behaviour.

So it becomes this lever and mechanism of control. And this is only going to get worse? Well, even though we don't like to think of it, the technology that we have now is quite basic compared to, you know, what we can see coming over the next sort of few decades. And in an automated future, access to this technology is going to be critical to participating in daily life.

Whether it be jobs, whether it's to do with getting housing, accessing education, even being able to access your own money and use and spend your own money, or having the privilege of being paid, a lot of this is going to depend on your access to the technology. So the gaps in the society start to widen even further when you look at things like DNA modding and gene editing technology. You know, we've spoken before about the emergence of a new kind of human elite species that is largely based on being wealthy. And this is going to be especially important in a society where there are going to be more costs.

But there's also going to be less work. So the people who have the resources are going to enhance themselves and they're going to have a bigger chance of finding those very few jobs. I didn't actually mean to start the show like this today. I'm kind of jumping the gun away.

What was the original question? Why are we letting you ask yourself questions? OK, well, I mean, I don't want to get, you know, to meta about it and start pulling down the fourth wall or whether the quantum computing version of that is, I don't know, a six-dimensional warp impossibility. No, but, you know, sometimes I have to pause and I have to ask myself, do these shows actually do any good?

You know, it's very easy just to sit here. We have a bunch of talking points. We can chat about stuff for 20 minutes, but, you know, does it really add any value? Are we kind of educating anyone?

Are we challenging or changing anybody's opinions? Or, you know, are we just broadcasting to an echo chamber and reinforcing that the divides already exist? Are you expecting me to have the answer? No, of course not.

And I don't really have one either. You know, there's that whole thing as well about looking at the past to help see the future, which is something that people kind of sometimes overlook. There was an interesting story this week about younger people today not knowing how much wildlife they used to be in the world. You know, every generation remembers there being more butterflies when they were kids and more birds.

Not in that golden age, everything was better kind of sense, but in terms of physical memories. And this has actually been identified as a thing called shifting baseline syndrome. It was first illustrated by the academic Daniel Pauli at the University of British Columbia back in 1995. And his findings on this, because of course, it was just supposition at the time, but his findings are actually slowly being borne out by research that's been conducted over the last kind of 20, 25 years.

Because every generation considers the natural abundance of their age as the norm. Well, yeah, if you're born into a world that has 200 tigers, 200 is the number of tigers that there have always been. So in these subsequent studies, newer generations actually find it hard to picture more than the norm that they were looked up with, which is why, you know, when you see pictures of anglers and it goes from generation to generation, they all look really happy with the fish they've caught. But three generations ago, the fish were way bigger than the next generation and the generation after that, because that norm has changed.

You think, wow, I caught the biggest fish that it's possible to catch. You don't think that two generations before the fish was twice as big. You know, the memory that things used to be bigger slips from from view. So the idea of clouds of butterflies becomes this fantastical thing that you only see in magic realism movies as CGI.

You don't think of it as something that actually happened to people. And I kind of wonder if the same baseline syndrome also applies to technology. I'm going to ask you a question because, you know, this 10 year age gap roughly between the two of us. What are your memories of the technology of your childhood?

The first thing that comes to mind is this thing called the Viewmaster, which, you know, you had one of these binoculars thing where you put a film in and you could flip it through. And I like Michael Jackson's trailer music video thing. That for me, mind boggling, because I had it. OK, but I always had like, I always wanted to cover about like something that I could travel around.

I love skateboards. So a whole lot for me was like the dream when I was in my childhood. OK, but what about how many things like computers and access to that kind of technology as well? I mean, what do you kind of remember being around the home when you were a kid?

I was I had a industry point one. OK. And it was alien to me. It was tough.

Like it was clunky. It was big. It was beige in color. It's boring.

It was really boring. I couldn't do anything with it. No. So and if you look at that 10 years between the two and 10 years.

And the difference is even more much, you know, when I was a kid, people still had black and white TVs. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, if you had a portable TV, most people had color, but if you had a portable TV, it was probably going to be black and white. Obviously, people didn't have computers in their home, no internet. There weren't even any malls for me. I lived in Hicksville.

Wow. You know, music was on vinyl and tape. There were three TV channels. There were four when I was in my teens.

We were just on the cusp of VHS coming in. So, you know, before that, you could only watch Star Wars if you went to see a movie theater. And home appliances were something that you had to repair. So, you know, I've watched all the digital technologies come in and that that journey has been a massive one.

And it's even bigger for people in the generations before me. So you wonder what the generations of today would remember about the tech they grew up with? Well, yeah, it's that same shifting baseline syndrome. So has the technology shifted massively, say from 1995 to 2005?

Do people see that in that generation as being a gradual evolution or is it a huge change? So one of the discussions I had at last week with a group of friends was, has the purpose of going out changed, you know, when I was of the age, Monday to Thursday, you know, we'd go out and play pool and play darts and chat with friends. Friday and Saturday night, you know, you could go to places where you could potentially meet someone where you maybe could find a partner. Because they were not dating apps.

And definitely no hookup apps. The closest we got was that movie, Weird Science, where nerds build their own lady. It's actually less creepy than it sounds. Actually, maybe it's not.

Yeah, it sounds like it's actually creepy. But, you know, here's a generation whose mating habits can actually be kept separate from their social lives. They can do all of their dating on the apps. And when they actually go out with friends, they don't have that pressure of looking for someone.

They just spend the time with people. So there's this huge generational shift. And you wonder how they view the transition? Well, even though that's kind of fairly pointless, because, you know, really, we've got to wait till they reach your age or my age, because we've got no idea where the technology is going to end up.

We know where it started. So maybe their experience to that point is more of a gentle transition than the brutal shock, I said, that it had been for older generations. But will that still be true in 30 years time when, of course, I will probably be dead and gone. And will there be an even larger gap between the technology they had as kids and the technology of the day?

And who knows? Maybe I won't be gone. Maybe I'll still be making these shows from the cloud. Well, you can really feel all those positive vibes flowing through today.

So hopefully the clouds will have cleared a little bit and maybe we'll even get a burst of sunshine. When we come back in just a moment, also we've got a peaceful giveaway coming up. That's Jeff trying to lift your spirits for part two of the show. VFM, 89.9.

Beats, food, mixed names. VFM, 89.9, the business station. And we're back today on MSP, we're letting Matt ask himself questions. So far, it sounds as though he's the one of the verge of a nervous breakdown.

So let's try and steer this into a sunny territory. Do you think we deserve the technology we have? Well, there's a lovely story on the MIT Tech Review this week. I'm not going to go into it because we're going to talk about it a bit more in Geeks.

But it's about people and apps and having accidents. So, you know, the issue of whether we deserve that tech, whether we're too dumb or whatever, it's a difficult question. You know, so we go back to that idea. Is it because, for example, mobile screens are really impractical?

Is that one of the reasons we're having the accidents? Will the move to screen this technology help that? But of course, all of these things, you know, we talked about the exclusion of people from the technology as well. But this all also links back to the idea of privacy.

And so do we know what we're giving up? Well, yeah, I've got a friend who says he doesn't care about data mining. He's happy to let social media companies pretty much do anything with his information as long as he gets the service for free. He isn't worried about cameras.

He isn't worried about surveillance. He's happy to have ads that are targeted to his preference. And I asked him, you know, have you thought this through? Have you thought through the long-term implications of this?

And I have to say, I think he has. Oh, wow. Yeah. Do you think we've reached the point where people simply don't care?

Well, that's the point. I think my friend doesn't care. But whether or not that's true, it doesn't make it less dangerous. I mean, take something like mental health awareness.

We keep being told that we're about to face this tsunami of tech-linked mental health problems, those same issues, whether it's anxiety, depression, eating disorders, they can affect your health insurance premiums, your eligibility for jobs, whether you get a mortgage, whether you're fit to look after your kids. Even basic items like driver's licenses can be affected in some countries. So as much as we want to open the debate on the awareness around mental health issues and try and reverse the stigma, people are understandably reticent to kind of make these issues public. So it's something that people approach covertly?

Well, you know, that's the irony, isn't it? The internet makes it easy to search things. You can search your own symptoms. You can go and talk to people on support groups.

You know, there's even a whole ecosystem of websites where you can take like depression surveys and that kind of thing to see if you have the symptoms. And of course, it doesn't leave a trail of doctors visits. It doesn't have this trail to insurance companies. It might be able to pick up.

And it allows you to take your time. You can self-assess and you can actually talk to people in these communities and figure out whether you need to go and get some help. So a story that came out, I think, on the new scientists this week, turns out that a lot of these mental health health sites are actually selling your data. This thing that you want to keep very private, they're actually selling that data to third-party companies.

And regulations around medical data? Well, of course, there's the GDPR data regulations in the EU. And most sites globally tend to adhere to that because, you know, you can't tell where you're going to get customers to your site coming from. But a team from privacy internationally in the UK looked at 136 of the leading mental health sites in the UK, France and Germany.

And they found that 76% of those sites carried marketing trackers and many of those trackers were actually linked to the profile trackers of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Meaning they can identify you. Well, I mean, I'll just be clear that Facebook, Google, a lot of these companies, they make it very clear that their trackers can't be used in that way. Not just as part of their general terms and conditions, but, you know, there are legal implications under legislation like the GDPR.

But we've seen that some companies like Cambridge Analytica, for example, are able to fly below the radar and they can ship data out of those services that maybe they shouldn't be entitled to. So the new scientists, the art found that, or privacy international rather, they even found that some of the sites sent the results of the depression surveys to use that took and sold those results directly onto data brokers. So if it is tracker identified, it can be added to who knows what information those companies already have on you, even if it's still in basic information like IP or location. Do you really want ads for cut price anti-psychotics or antidepressants following you across the web?

It's not always going to be appropriate. You don't want to click a link in your presentation and find an ad for cut price Xanax on your client's screen. And you have to ask as well, how long are those sites going to store those questionnaires that you answer? It can be a month, a year, are they going to keep them forever?

Now we talked about DNA and privacy a few weeks ago. Law enforcement agencies in the US accessing DNA databases, is this something that's on your mind as well? Well, totally. I mean, on the one hand, you know, that story came out that it was using commercial DNA databases rather that allowed at least to track down the familial link to the Golden State Killer.

And now he was a notorious serial killer who killed 12 people and raped 45 women in a 10-year spree across California from 1976 to 1986. Now the same company that broke that case, GD Match, they have over 1 million voluntarily entered DNA results in their database. And they've been bought over by a company that has an avowed intention to use the site as a law enforcement tool. Comitially.

Well, yeah, I mean, I imagine there's got to be a financial component. So Verigine, the company that bought over GD Match, is described as a forensic genetics company. So that's essentially DNA results with illegal application. And the CEO of Verigine Brett Williams is quoted as seeing the acquisition as part of a strategy to change the way that crimes can be solved, namely genetically.

Can you opt out? Sure, GD Match users can opt out. I imagine that won't be so easy for new users. But you can see how that loop is starting to tighten.

There's so much information about you online. And we're going to talk about facial recognition technologies and how those can be used as markers in geeks after the break. So now we get to a point where even our genetic markers are searchable. Which brings us to lawmakers.

Well, yeah, there was another lovely story this week. US lawmakers are seeking to force Apple and Facebook to introduce backdoors in encryption protocols to give law enforcement access. Now, the reason for that is because they say terrorists and criminals are using all the secure encryption to prevent eavesd medifying and evidence scattering. The same encryption, of course, protects the majority of law abiding users.

So again, that brings me to another question. Are our lawmakers fit for purpose in this kind of age of digital economy? To a lot of people, it sounds like a reasonable request. Yeah, but what you're doing is actually announcing to the world that your software has massive security flaws.

And those flaws won't be patched. They will be maintained. And that certain people will have the encryption key. Now, that's an invitation to probe for hackers.

It doesn't matter if they're individual hackers, they're criminals or state-backed. It puts all of our information at risk. And it highlights that gap between how things work and how are kind of lawmakers that you think they work. I think that the quote from Apple's user privacy manager, Eric Newen-Schvander, was, we've been unable to identify any way to create a backdoor that would work only for the good guys.

Of course, that statement in and of itself should be game over. Why does it give it to you? Because it is so futile. At some point, they have to realize that it isn't physically possible.

That people are better protected without the backdoor and that spy agencies just have to find other ways to surveil. It's just totally pointless. It grabs a few headlines for that particular politician. But it wastes money.

Not only does it achieve nothing, but it actively sets the companies, the users and the law enforcement agencies back, because they're all mired in this discussion instead of getting on with their thing. As usual, this has been like drawing back a dusty curtain to find a filthy and smudge window that doesn't actually let any like in. So anything a little bit more hopeful on your mind? Or when we did the AMA a couple of weeks ago, so Frieda brought up 3D printing.

And there's a great story, a 3D printing story this week. So a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology collaborated with a tech firm in Israel to 3D print a plastic bunny. Well, I can see how that might make you smile. Does it really take such a huge collaboration to 3D print a rabbit?

It does when the rabbit contains a set of genetic instructions to print a copy of itself. It's self-replicating? Well, not quite, although that would be a goal for the future. We had a story I think about a year ago about the band Massive Attack encoding one of their albums, encoding it into DNA and embedding that DNA into cans of spray paint.

And this is kind of a similar story to that. So a DNA sequencing machine was able to read the code embedded in the plastic rabbit and send the print command to a 3D printer that made a second copy of it. That second copy also included the DNA markers and was used to make a third, etc., etc. So they were even able to replicate a rabbit.

I like saying replicate it. After it had been stored for nine months, the DNA had actually survived. What real world applications does this have? Well, DNA is essentially living memory storage, right?

It is a person's blueprint. So imagine it being used as an organic thumb drive in the future. Or it could just be used for messages, like the ones you used to get on the run-out groove of vinyl records. Often the guy cutting the acetate printer records he'd add a message either from him or the band.

There was a master engineer called George Peckham. He was infamous for adding the phrase, a porcupine cut and etching it into the vinyl groove of the records so your trainers might have a genetic version of that in the future. They might just include the DNA message. Just do it.

That's maybe a little bit lame. Well, yeah, it's very geeky for sure, but we don't know yet what the practical applications might be because we're on the wrong side of the development of that science. Imagine Captain James T. Musk of the Starship Tesser Prize arriving on Mars full of machines that have their own blueprints genetically encoded, which means anyone on the team can fire up a replacement for any machine, for any part, for any of the technology they need to build their habitat, or even machines that are sent ahead of colonizers and they might actually have to wait for a thousand years for the humans to turn up.

I mean, you talked earlier about Microsoft Word 3.1 or whatever. Well, we can't even open Word Perfect documents from the 1980s. So how would we deal with legacy technology a thousand years down the line on another planet? Well, I can see these taking us to another story.

This one is from the website Futurism. And yeah, at least some scientists are starting to think long-term. Researchers at the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, and that is actually real. I haven't made that up.

They're looking at a potential 1,000 year-long journey to one of the potentially habitable exoplanets that have been discovered. I think one of the ones they mention is Proxima Centauri B. Is this like that? Yeah, me question that Christine asked you about time travel?

Not quite. Although anyone who is interested can read Jodie Taylor's Chronicles of St Mary's series about time-traveling treasure hunters. But no, these guys genuinely mean a thousand years. Generation after generation of people whose sole purpose is to keep on trucking towards a planet that may or may not be inhabitable.

And anyway, I mean, they're basically just looking at the science to see if it's feasible. And they reckon in terms of the physics, at least, it will be, finding people willing to fulfill it for 30 generations of their descendants to the quest to boldly go as another matter, of course, especially if you get there and it isn't habitable. It's like, what do we do now? But having instructions baked into DNA and technology is going to help those guys, because back on Earth, by then, we're all going to be cinders of dust orbiting a continent size Supervolcano.

Well, Matt, I hope you got all the answers to the questions. You were asking yourself. That was another episode of AMA. And hopefully, I think that- The last one, the last AMA, this time is Ask Myself Anything.

Now, though, I know a lot of people may have been tuning to Wait for this moment because they didn't want to win themselves the PS4. Recently, Sony announced three PS4 bundles. And what I have here with me is the PlayStation 4 Party bundle that comes with a 500-gibites PlayStation 4 Jet Black version that comes with a contrasting white sleeve box. It has two games inside the EA Sports FIFA 20 and the Crash Team Racing Nitro Fuel, two DualShock 4 wireless controllers and a 1-plus-1 Extended Warranty.

Now, all this is bundled into an amazing party bundle that's currently on a promotional price of 1,499 ringgit. But, Matt, we don't just do announcements like this if it wasn't for something special, right? No, we don't definitely. So, we are giving away this PS4 party bundle and it's dead easy for you.

Sony is also celebrating its 25 years of the PlayStation. The first PlayStation was released on the 3rd of December 1994. The question is, who was the first PlayStation mascot in North America? Is it A, Crash from Crash Bandicoot, B, Spyro from Spyro the Dragon, C, the Polygon Man or D, Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank?

So, again, who was the first PlayStation mascot in North America? Let us know why you deserve to win this PS4 party bundle in less than 20 words. And then you just have to email your name, IC number, phone number, to tech-talk at bfm.my along with your answers. Very easy.

Very easy. I'm socking because Jeff turned down my question, which was, what will I be thinking about when I read your answer to my question? Yeah, so that's not the question that we went for. We are going with who was the first PlayStation mascot in North America.

Also, you've got to give me an answer on why you deserve to win this PS4 in less than 20 words. Name IC number, phone number and email it to tech-talk at bfm.my along with your answers. So, this party bundle is worth 1,500 ringgit. And it could be yours.

The contest ends on Monday the 60th of December at 12 p.m. So, remember you have the weekend to think about it. Monday the 16th of December at 12 p.m. is the deadline.

Tech-talk at bfm.my is the email address that you need to send in your answers. And there can only be one winner. We'll have more after this with a GeeksBox B.M.89.9.