This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. The FM89.9, other Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury, and I'm sitting in for Jeff Sandu. Now, where is humanity heading?
It's been questioned, and it's one of the philosophers throughout the ages have struggled to define. As the pace of technology continues to accelerate, culture pops, Matt Armitage thinks the questions are too big to leave in the hands of our technological visionaries. Cheerily, it's time to Matt's plane. Welcome, Matt.
Hey Rich, how are you doing? Good. Right. So, who's vision exactly we're talking about today?
Yours? Wouldn't it be simpler to get an eye test and bother all the nice people at home? Luckily for you and the listeners, I'm actually long-sighted, and that's what makes me so good at looking into the future. So you consider yourself a bit of a visionary then?
I think anyone who considers him or herself to be a visionary probably isn't. It's one of those things where saying it doesn't make it so I actually checked on someone's Instagram profile yesterday, and she described herself as a visionary artist. Now, I would describe her as derivative and hack need, but possibly not visionary. Just say what you think, Matt.
No, no, no. No, no, no. This show isn't about being a visionary, it's about all of the things that visionary people do, and we're trying to thread them together. So I guess if I see myself as anything, it's probably as more of a quilt maker, I guess, but it's a fairly messy quilt suited to somebody who's kind of short and fat like me.
Is this another excuse to bash Elon Musk, the visionary Elon Musk? Yes. Okay. Or no, or maybe...
I think it's more about what the word visionary has come to mean. And with Steve Jobs out of the way, Elon Musk is kind of the world's resident visionary piñada, these days. We have a major preoccupation with the technology sector, and that's kind of understandable. You look at the ways that all kinds of technology have developed over the last couple of decades.
Consumer tech has undergone this incredible transformation, and it's a transformation that is still ongoing. So we really do need visionary people, but we need them in every part of society. Have we been too uncritical then? Well, whenever you see things that are innovative or novel, they tend to grab your imagination.
When you look at traditional international conglomerates, say someone that's a global food manufacturer, the breakfast cereals they make tend to stay the same over time. Right. It's really just the packaging and the additives that change. Apart from the introduction of genetically modified ingredients, which is something we discussed a couple of shows ago, the biggest technological innovation in food in recent years seems to be coffee machines with proprietary pods.
And that's not to belittle that innovation. Coffee seems to be the new domestic chemistry battleground, but it's hard for it to stand its ground in the face of the expansion of say broadband internet, the development of the smartphone, commercial space travel, artificial intelligence, or self-driving vehicles versus coffee maker. Right. And you think our fascination with innovation has turned into an obsession with technology business?
Completely, absolutely. I mean, we seem to be focused almost entirely on the CEOs, and I do wonder if they are the people that we should be focused on. You often hear this phrase that such and such is a real-life Tony Stark. But then you think, well, is he really?
Is he really? You know, what sets Tony Stark apart is not his incredible wealth. It's actually his talent as an engineer and a scientist. He's an inventor in that true sense.
He's the guy tinkering in his garage. Exactly. He's a tingra. He is.
Yeah. And he's not afraid to put his finger in the light socket to see what happens. You know, it's just that he happens to have a really fancy garage and his light socket is a plasma cannon. So when you look at a lot of technology startups, the people at the top are very often experienced, enabled business people.
Running a successful company doesn't automatically make you a thought leader. It makes you a great and successful business person. So then you start to ask yourself, why are we so interested in the CEOs? Inventors aren't necessarily the same as innovators.
Exactly. But that's not saying that we shouldn't be looking at the broadest possible range of visionaries. You know, I'm not saying that people like Musk and Steve Jobs aren't visionaries, quite the contrary. I'm trying to say that we're narrowing our definition of visionary to actually mirror their vision.
So in the case of Steve Jobs, his vision was pretty narrow. It was all about creating incredible products for his company. His vision wasn't about creating cost-effective health solutions for the elderly or finding solutions to the growing global housing crisis. They make a lot of money.
And that's one of the pitfalls I think we keep falling into. We've confused making money with being a thought leader. You know, we give more airtime to the thoughts of Mark Zuckerberg than we do to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Mark Zuckerberg repackaged my space and friendster.
He did it very, very well. So that's not a criticism. I can't even tell you most of what Neil deGrasse Tyson does because I don't even understand 1% of what he's done. You know, you look at these people and Stephen Hawking was one of the rare exceptions of a contemporary scientist whose views weren't marginalized in this way.
He was one of the few people who wasn't in business, but his views on a huge range of topics were sought out and respected. And I think that's quite saddening for us to be in that situation. It shows that we're kind of wasting all those other high-powered brains. You want to see us giving more weight to the views of experts then?
Which is a really unfashionable view. You know, experts, whether they're scientists or good old fashioned philosophers and intellectuals, have kind of been downgraded in our current society. It's part and parcel of the fake news epidemic. And this is my opinion, not the stations' opinion.
But I think it's also down to the damage that the climate changed in our lobby has done to people of knowledge. We offhandedly label people who have knowledge as being part of an elite. We sneer at people with PhDs, but we applaud people with MBAs. And we forget that in most instances, the lone ranger approach to human development really doesn't work.
You know, we're back to learning from Tony Stark. Stark has an army of Ironmen at his fingertips, but he doesn't go it alone. He knows he needs the support of the Avengers whenever he gets in a jam. So do you see some invisible hand behind all of this?
No, we'll get to all conspiracy stuff later, I think. Obviously there are some lobbies that have a vested interest in damaging the reputation of experts. You only have to look at the political situation in the US or the UK to see examples of that going on right now. But I think it's much broader than that.
We've seen an actual shift. Scientists were the superheroes of that post-World War II era. And now technology entrepreneurs have become our heroes. And we're narrowing that definition.
Science is a really broad spectrum. Entrepreneurs are looking at a much narrower range of interests and opportunities. And of course, when we look at all of this, the media of which you and I are apart also bear quite a lot of responsibility for this. And we haven't been critical enough.
Because we get overexcited as well. You know, we get carried away with shiny trinkets and super-fast messaging apps. Look at a station like BFM. It is a business station.
It's supposed to talk to business leaders. And a healthy bottom line and a unique or differentiated product line generates better talking points than a scientist's patent book or a philosopher's latest attempts to reshape morality. Not that BFM ignores or overlooks those things unlike a lot of media outlets, but it's not the station's primary focus. And I can hear most of the listeners saying, thank heavens.
But that doesn't mean the listeners get to escape me. Those boring patents and the ideas they contain will probably have a lot more influence on the way society develops than the bottom line of a single company that probably won't exist in 10 years time. Because I think that's something that we're not always clear on. The speed with which technology moves, winks companies into existence and then leaves them behind in the blink of an eye.
Alright, let's take a short break. When we get back, we'll try and figure out exactly why Matt is having this little brain burp. You are, of course, listening to Matt Slainte here on Enterprise on BFM 89.9. VFM 89.9 at the business station.
You're listening to Enterprise. My name is Rich Bradbury. I'm sitting in for Jeff Sand, of course. With me right now, I have a culture pops of very own Matt Armitage.
We are Matt Slainte. Right. So, before the break, you were talking about how quickly technology moves, winks companies into existence and then leaves them behind in the blink of an eye. Right.
Why do you think that we and you especially are having this crisis of confidence? I think there's a lot of reasons. It's not a simple discussion. Obviously, one of the things is our previously unshakable trust in technology companies has taken a beating over the last couple of years.
Not going to go into that. We've covered that so many times. The media is now looking into the technology sector far more critically and some of the supposed visionaries are not reacting well to the harsher glow of this new spotlight. It's a bit like we've turned off their selfie filter and we're finally seeing what these people really look like.
Those form-meter tall lizards. No more conspiracies and we're certainly not going to illuminate that particular discussion. Oh, I see what you did. Yeah.
Another reason is that we've seen some pretty high profile cases of tech companies failing to deliver on their promises. Now, I've just finished reading a book called Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley startup by a Wall Street journalist called John Kerry-Rue, which is about a company called Theranos. Now, we've covered Theranos, which is a blood testing startup on the show before. It's founder Elizabeth Holmes, who idolized Steve Jobs, had a world-changing idea.
She came up with the idea for a sleek blood testing machine that could quickly, easily and cheaply take a tiny sample of blood from a pinprick and simultaneously conduct around 200 tests on it. A genuinely revolutionary idea. Some blood tests can take weeks and cost the fortune. Yeah, as I said, I mean, absolutely groundbreaking, but it would have meant sophisticated testing technology would be available in general practitioners, surgeries, refugee camps, field hospitals and in Elizabeth Holmes vision, even people's homes.
And that's both the positive about it, but it's also the problem. Blood tests don't take a long time because labs are slow or the people who work there are lazy. It's because the procedures are incredibly complex. They require massive machines and a lot of time.
Some require larger volumes of blood than others. And the machinery and modes of testing for different illnesses and markers are not universal. You have different modes of testing for different conditions. So to make the Theranos vision a reality, it actually required a reordering of the science and the technology.
I think we can let people read the book or the Wall Street Journal for the full story there. Sure. I don't want to repeat it all here. I mean, it's a fantastic story.
But it does seem that unlike Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes didn't surround herself with the best minds in biomedicine and engineering to bring that vision to life. And the company relied on the culture of secrecy that we've grown used to in tech companies to obscure their progress. So they were able to sign multi-million dollar deals or agreements with retail chains like Safeway and Wargreens in the States who trusted in homes and they bought into the vision, even though they hadn't seen any fully working machinery. In fact, at one point, Theranos was such a venture capital darling that it was worth nine billion US dollars despite never manufacturing and demonstrating a fully operational prototype.
I mean, didn't their board like this stellar castle? It's like the ultimate guide to Elder Statesman or something. I mean, it was a dream list. You couldn't make it up.
They had George Schultz who served under Bill Clinton. You had Henry Kissinger. Everyone knows Henry Kissinger. They have current US defense secretary and retired forester, General James Mattis.
All of these people bought into the company's vision, even though they never saw the product. It's thought that the association with Theranos contributed to Safeway CEO Steve Bird stepping down from his role in 2013. Even with its investors, it had incredible investors. We're used to seeing people knock the media for its commitment to the truth.
Now Rupert Murdoch made a personal investment of more than $100 million in Theranos and Murdoch editorial integrity of the Wall Street Journal more than his enormous stake in the company because it was the journal in Kerry Roode that broke the story that Theranos was basically a highly funded house of cards. I can see that you're working your way eventually, somehow towards a point here. That it's really easy to have an idea. Now, one of the ideas I had this week was for frozen smoothies that use mushy peas instead of froyo.
Now, that's a freebie to listeners, by the way, if you can monetize the world's most disgusting food, then you deserve it. I won't even ask for free shakes. But that just goes to show you that ideas on their own are useless. Bringing them to life and making them work is the important thing.
Elizabeth Holmes idea for Theranos was a great one, but she wasn't able to bring it to life. Now, we rate Elon Musk as an ideas machine. But if you read the science fiction of Philip K. Dick or Asimov or Ian M.
Banks or countless other writers, they're full to the brim with ideas waiting to be brought to life. And there are actually numerous scientists who were brought up on those books who are trying to bring these concepts to life and make them a reality. But we don't talk about these people half as loudly as we do our business leaders. In our startup culture, we're hyper focused on the ideas that come from entrepreneurs.
So, vision re-seems to have become this shorthand for someone who is a great salesperson. And that is sad and quite demeaning to all of us. Okay, I might be tempting fate with this question, but at the other day, who cares? Well, I think we all should care because it goes back to that comment I made about technology putting companies out of business as quickly as it creates them.
Technology is transforming the way the world operates and develops at an incredible rate, whether that's for federal works is a completely different debate, but technology is changing the way we work. More specifically, it's reducing the number of people that are needed to produce the same amount of work. In some industries, it's replacing people completely. In developed countries, people are living longer, birth rates are falling, housing, food, health costs are all increasing, tax revenues are falling, the pillars that hold up our economic systems are changing, and income inequalities, war and social instability are fueling these kind of unprecedented level of population migrations at a scale that might one day rival what happened during the last night's age.
And you haven't even mentioned artificial intelligence yet? Without that, yeah, advancement in biotechnology and prosthetics combined with implantable neural networks may even alter definitions of humanity within a generation or two. And don't expect Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to have the answers to questions like that. It's possible that Bill Gates does, and if my vision of the future scares you, then Gates lays a light focus on dispassionate statistics will probably put you on heart medication for the rest of a very short life.
So do we need the experts? We need more experts, lots more experts, probably more than any time in recent history, at exactly the time that we've beaten them into retreat. Our economic and political orders are changing far more rapidly and uncontrollably and wildly than anyone could have imagined. In Malaysia, we've seen the upside of this uncertainty and instability.
In other countries, we've seen a pivot towards authoritarianism. So we really do need proper vision reasons, thought leaders, to help us chart a path towards a kind of brighter future. We need visionaries who don't have shareholders and quarterly profit targets to meet people who are willing to take real risks, not people who take fake financial risks with other people's money. There isn't a cabal of billionaires trying to cover up the world then?
Well, I said we get to the conspiracies, but no, I genuinely don't think so. Those guys have as much and in their opinion more to lose than we do, which is why they're all trying to buy up southern New Zealand at the moment in case the world goes bad. Their companies need consumers. They need people who have money in the bank or at least money in the blockchain.
What they most definitely is right now is jockeying for position and prominence. These guys are much more likely to have their own self-interest or at least the interest of the companies they represent. They're probably not going to be looking towards the greater good, which is why I said I find it frightening that our current definition of visionary is so narrow. But isn't it human nature to want to have a single source to digest?
What like that? I guess so. Yes, and those are the traits in us that tend to lead us towards following demagogues. We forget that organisations can be just as visionary as individuals.
Look at one of my favourite institutions, which is NASA. Look at all the fantastic things that NASA has achieved for the world. Now we don't know specific personalities in NASA. We just know what they do as a group.
And it's not just in terms of space exploration, all of the associated technological accomplishments that have come with those extraterrestrial advances. Who would have thought of gravity independent ink so that pens would work in space? Russia's cosmonauts just use pencils. You'd like to see a big role for independent or publicly funded institutions?
Well, I've said this on the show before. We've allowed history to be whitewashed when we look at technology. The private tech sector seems to have ceded this implacable belief that the market will deliver the advances that we need. It's rewriting the critical role that publicly funded innovation has played in creating much of the technology that this new generation of visionaries is trying to commercialise.
I love Elon Musk's SpaceX. But where would that company be without the knowledge and the patents that NASA developed? We owe huge numbers of the vaccines and medical procedures that keep us alive to research done by publicly funded universities and science institutes. Look at things like the telescopes that scan the universe.
There's not much commercial potential in application for those. But how do you calculate its value in terms of the importance in understanding how our universe and human life has evolved? Or how those same discoveries find their way into the concepts of things that we use like quantum computing? So where do the philosophers fit in there?
Well, we need the philosophers and the economists and the behaviourists and the architects and all these other so-called intellectuals to help us rewrite the rules of the societies we're living in. I mentioned the challenges of employment and income. So we need to have an idea of how the machinery of society will function in a world where machines do all of the work and only the humans that own the machines make any money. Obviously, we don't want to allow the humans who own the machines to be writing all of those rules.
We can't just bumble along and figure things out as they come along. I mean, that's the way we've generally handled things. And it's been a great solution. The big difference is speed.
You're right, because normally we can just bodge your jury rig it because the human experience hasn't changed much from generation to the net. We could make ivory. Yeah, we could make ivory. But you get the odd technological leap in human history, some natural disasters and of course a liberal sprinkling of wars and pestilence.
Plus, you know, you get a nice rainbow after a rainstorm. Your children are going to live and suffer much the way you did and history continues horribly from one day to the next. That's how human history has been. But modern technology has ended that slow and gradual evolution.
So we have to ask ourselves how everything fits together as technology increases the pace of development. Yeah, exactly. How does the world fit together as populations bloom? Architects and planners will have to work with engineers and scientists to devise sustainable and affordable living environments.
You have to ask yourself, you know, how does a population that has more old people than young people continue to function because that's an entirely new model in terms of the human experience. And what rules are going to need changing once artificial intelligence becomes self determining? We'll need ethicists and lawyers and philosophers, not to mention the mathematicians and coders responsible for those machines to put their heads together to come up with an answer from that one. Okay, where does that leave the business visionaries?
Well, look, it's fine if our vision of the future starts with people at Elon Musk. It's about having the right ideas not about where they came from, but it's also about being able to do something with those ideas. So other people have to jump in to broaden that vision. And I think that's the biggest issue for a lot of the business guys.
They don't understand that the future isn't an iPhone. It's not something that Johnny Ive can design in a lab and, you know, she or a couple of buttons off. Reality is Linux, not iOS. So you mean it's big?
It's messy? It's full of parts that just don't work very well. Yeah, because it's been put together by a bunch of people who all want it to do different things. And that's the issue with our world and our societies.
We all have a different vision of them, even though we're inside the same societies. We all want different things out of them. If you ask the current generation, their priority might be to geo engineer the sun to give their selfies a softer and more diffused light. And you think that this is where the technopreneurs get left behind?
Yeah, because the things that are messy and don't work are the bits that irritate them. Those are the bits they want to edit out. But the messy bits are the things that get biochemists and engineers excited. Those are the things that give philosophers a launchpad for insight and imagination.
The mess is the cue that fires the imaginations of artists and writers to design their own utopias and dystopias. You know, how the world wasn't built by business people, it was built by thinkers and activists. Not always well, not always coherently. But if you look at ancient Rome, it's the philosophers and the inventors and the comteries that we remember, not the shopkeepers.
Are we looking at a future of Matt's book? No, and you can thank whatever deity you believe in for that, Ramen. We don't need more people like me. I think there's probably one too many as it is.
But I do hope we will start trusting in experts and other informed voices again very soon. Progress demands more than a slick PowerPoint presentation and a TED talk. So in the really near future, we're going to have to start making some hard decisions and negotiating some very far-reaching compromises. So people like me are useful for making noise on radio stations like this and pulling the different threads of the quilt together.
But we need the people who can imagine and actually engineer solutions to our problems. We may not need the privileged billionaires who can afford to give it all up and relocate their offshore companies to another planet. Ramen. Hello to culturepop.com for transcripts of these shows and info on how to bring a little Matt's planing to the place you work.
You are listening to Enterprise on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. 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.