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My name is Rich Bradbury and this is Matt SBLAINED. Landmarks don't mean much to someone who spends his life in quantum space, but we have managed to convince Matt to mark the 200th episode of Matt SBLAINED with some kind of ceremony. Matt, what have we in fact learned, if anything, in these 200 episodes? Hey Rich, can't believe 200 in, but I guess what we've learned is that it's probably not a good idea to pay much attention to anything I say.
We've been doing the show as Matt's blamed for, obviously, 200 episodes, that's about four years, but I've been doing it a variation of whatever this thing is for over 10 years now. So I thought it would be fun to look back over that decade, decade plus, just to see what's changed and also to have a look at how our attitudes to technology have developed. And maybe look at some of the things that we love and hate the most about technology, but before we do that, I do have some changes to announce. We are going to be shaking up the format a bit.
In the past 200 episodes, it's been me and you or me and Jeff talking, so we're going to add some interviews with other people to the format. Don't forget the robots. Don't forget the robots. Oh, yeah, and we had the robots too.
Yeah, we'll have more of those later in the year for sure. But yeah, we will be doing interviews, so I'll talk to people and then you and I will discuss that broader topic that was discussed in the interview. I will also be putting longer versions of those interviews on the all new CulturePop Substack newsletter. At the moment, I'm publishing exclusive audio and actual written content.
I'm actually writing again about four times a week. And that will work as sort of companions to and expansions of these shows. You can find the newsletter at Substack.com, just search for CulturePop. That's where the cave course or just my name, Madamantige.
And once you subscribe, I'll pop into your inbox every few days. Yeah, what interviews have you got lined up? Well, I'm not going to go into too much detail about who we're going to talk to, but we've got stuff coming about female startup founders and stuff about crypto, virtual reality. And hopefully our world as a simulation, obviously, there'll be some stuff about 3D printing.
Now, it won't be in every episode, but I'll drop the interviews in as often as scheduling allows. And hopefully the first one will be out in the next couple of weeks as long as it passes the quality control of a certain perfectionist producer. I don't know what you're talking about. Absolutely no idea.
Get on with it. Right. OK, so technology is one of those things that we get used to really fast. We incorporate it into our daily lives really quickly.
And we can't imagine living without it. We can't really remember a time before it. So this is just a minor example. But can you imagine buying a new car today that doesn't have some kind of touchscreen in it?
Not just that. It's becoming increasingly common for all the instruments in the cars to be mounted on displays, often touch screens, rather than to have dials and gauges and all that seemingly analog equipment. It hasn't been analog for years. It's all an analog viewing unit that you see that's connected to digital equipment.
But I don't want to comment on whether any of this is good or bad. But when I started doing this shows a decade or so ago, that kind of equipment in a car, the car would have been a unicorn. And in fact, Tesla, I think, only released its first fully in-house designed and produced car, which was the Model S back in 2012. And the SUV, the Model X, that followed, of course, in 2015.
EVs would have been a rarity in general in 2012. Yeah. Even as little as four years ago, a lot of the media coverage on electric vehicles was about how impractical they are. That they're really only for urban rights because of range issues and spotty charging networks.
And that's changed an enormous amount in a lot of countries. There are even targets to face out petrol and diesel passenger vehicles by the end of this decade and a number of European countries. And of course, China is leading in hybrid and EV sales as well as in that charging infrastructure, just in terms of sheer numbers. Now, we haven't seen so many of those changes here in Malaysia yet.
And despite government subsidies, prices for electric and hybrid cars are still relatively high. Although protons entry into those markets selling cars under the Smart Badge could change that and make electric vehicles more affordable. And of course, the infrastructure here is improving. The number of charging stations is growing.
But the biggest change, I think, is the vehicles themselves. You know, ranges of up to 500 kilometres on a single charge are now quite common. And there are some, you know, absolutely mind-boggling performance stats with even some of the mid-range electric vehicles able to hit 0-100 kilometres an hour in under five seconds. And of course, the top end Tesla's hitting it in about two seconds, which is as fast as an F1 car.
Absolutely. And for more information on vehicles, please take out the show that I also do on a Wednesday night called Cruise Control. I'm teaching Ramita's like eggs right now. Good stuff though.
But yeah, with that in mind, there's other touchscreen devices. Of course, we have to talk about. We use them every day. Our life would be for some people meaningless without them.
Yeah, absolutely. So we're on this cusp of what's supposed to be the 5G revolution. And this is, you know, a technology that will allow us to adopt of the other incoming technologies or to use a lot of the incoming technologies of what people are calling the web 3. Now, we'll have more of an exploratory episode on Web 3 in an upcoming show.
But over the past 10 years, we have become a touchscreen world. In fact, we've gone beyond being a touchscreen world. Thanks to improvements in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. We can now speak to our devices and get them to search for information for us instead of having to look at those screens.
Now, it's hard to put a name on how many voice-activated Internet of Things devices or smart speakers and, you know, all these other connected devices there are in the world. But it has to be in the billions. If you know the answer, do tweet me the answer. But according to research by the radical group published last year, there are estimated to be around 16 billion mobile devices or there will be estimated to be around 16 million mobile devices by the end of this year.
And I know, and other estimates I've seen suggest that of that 16 billion, around 6 billion are smartphones. And that means that over 80% of the world's population, just in raw numbers, has some kind of smartphone or access to some kind of smartphone. Let me ask you a question. About smart devices, wearable smart devices.
Are you disappointed by the progress in that market? Yeah, I guess a little bit. You know, devices like Google Glass have come and gone. But the idea of wearable screens is still being pushed.
Obviously, when we talk about an immersive metaverse, there's that virtual reality component. But I'm less interested in that in this context because the screens in those worlds are, you know, walled off. I saw a story just this week actually about an Indian startup called Nemo Planet, which is developing a wearable computer called Nemo. It doesn't have a VR type experience.
The screens are mounted as overlays on the transparent lenses. And you can access up to six screens, individual monitors at any one time, which makes it great for multitasking. Now, it's in a demo stage rather than a retail stage at the moment, and it uses a custom mod of Android to power the glasses. But it does work with productivity suites like Microsoft Office.
And of course, at the more mainstream under the market, Lenovo has its Think Reality A3 wearable screens, which of course is a convoluted web saying that, you know, I don't think this technology is done or dead. We're still in that development phase. And I think it will be another part of our new hybrid work and entertainment experience that we'll see as transitioning, you know, pretty seamlessly between using no screens, that verbal computing, using wearable screens, and then going on to those more immersive, full virtual reality style experiences. Okay.
I'm not going to ask you about the metaverse. I know that's something about a developing topic for Matt's plane later this year. Can we talk about some of the more cultural implications, maybe of the changes that we've seen in technology? Well, I mean, if you're talking about cultural changes, obviously one place to start is with streaming media, the Netflix and chill phenomenon.
And you know, there are other streaming services available, of course, but Netflix is the poster child when it comes to streaming media. And it's, you know, it's hard to go back to that point, but the original Netflix was one of those subscription DVD by mail companies. You ordered your movie online and a physical rental DVD would be mailed out to you, which you then watched and returned. So you could even say that the company's launch of a streaming service back in 2007 in the US was an early startup pivot.
And, you know, it was a risk for the company, you know, don't forget that in the early North TV and film companies were still in that mindset that anything online leads to piracy. Now they built this kind of entente cordial with Apple in its iTunes store, but there wasn't much sort of beyond that really. And the industry hope or it seemed that the industry hope was very much that digital was just a fad, that it would go away and that these companies could sell the same films to the same people in new formats every few years. Which was the business model that, you know, they'd been adopting for the last sort of 20 years.
And obviously having that power to decide in which countries their content could and couldn't be released and when people couldn't watch it. Was Netflix an instant success? Well, by 2011, I think it was reported that some periods of the day the company was accounting for up to a third of web traffic in the US. So, you know, it had a pretty amazing entry into the market.
Again, given its global impact, it's hard to believe that it was only in 2012 that the company actually moved to the market. And that phrase Netflix and chill. It was only, I think, 2014 that it started to be commonly used. And of course, in Malaysia, we didn't have Netflix until 2016.
I mean, I can't believe that in order to watch Lili Hammer, the US Norwegian comedy crime show, I had to set up a US Netflix account and use a VPN just to watch that show. And now we have these subscription streaming services coming out of our ears. I mean, there are too many of them, if truth be told. I mean, a question for you, including music, how many streaming services are you currently paying for?
I'm not going to embarrass you by asking you to name them, but how many are you currently paying for? 6, 6. Yeah, exactly. I think for me, it's about 8, although some of them are packaged deals like Apple TV and Apple music, and that doesn't include the subscriptions to VPNs and storage bunkers and everything else that goes with it.
But without going into getting into that whole golden age of content argument, which of course this is, you know, there's more stuff worth watching than there is time to watch right now. Sometimes I think that the watch lists on these services are like a countdown to my eventual death. I'm definitely sure that some of them are going to outlive me. And, you know, with the rise of Netflix and its cousins, the way we consume TV type content has changed.
You know, the last decade has been all about the binge with Netflix, especially dropping entire series in one go. I mean, I gorged on the latest season of the British crime drama Top Boy over the weekend. That was just released last weekend. And I waded through the reality docu-thing bad vegan a couple of nights ago, you know, just fully immersed.
Yep. I watched Man of Vegan 2 more on that later, I think, offline. But anyway, have we reached peak binge, you think, Matt? Certainly, I think there's an argument that early in the pandemic, lockdowns, people binge themselves out.
You know, they got bored with binging and we're certainly seeing a lot more shows now that drop episodes weekly. Now, sometimes it's because those shows partner with a terrestrial broadcaster that still uses the weekly format. But platforms like Apple TV and Disney routinely use weekly drops for their shows. So to address the question, I think we're happy to do a mixture of the two.
It's nice to be able to dive into something and just escape. But equally, having that anticipation for some shows is great too. I mean, I look forward to Mondays because on Monday night, I sit down and I watch the new episodes of The Walking Dead and Piki Blinders. So that is something that has changed the nature of Monday for me.
Let me ask you a question that's kind of, I guess, close to out hearts. Do you think maybe we might be falling out of love with podcasts? I don't think so. Otherwise, of course, the show would be in a love troll.
But certainly, you know, early on in the pandemic, there was a decline in the number of people listening to podcasts because a lot of people listen on things like their commutes when they're moving around, at home, you know, a lot of people were furloughed. And, you know, they would binge in shows, hence that peak binge. And you can't watch them at the same time. But that proved, I think, largely temporary.
What we saw over the past couple of years was especially an explosion in the number of podcasts. You know, I think I said at the time, we started to call the show Matt's Blaine again, because we shifted to NSP, because there were suddenly a whole bunch of shows using the initials MSP. You know, all of these businesses, suddenly cut off from clients, people at home with time on my hands. And of course, podcasting is cheap to do, it's relatively accessible.
So what we're seeing more of is that there's this increasing fragmentation of what is still a growing audience. So it's simply more shows, limited time, fewer listeners per show. As a recent Bloomberg article points out, I think it was January this year, most of the top 10 podcasts are now more than 7 years old. Now, you know, having those small audiences, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
You know, a small, devoted audience like the one we have, that can be fantastic. And podcasting or whatever it is that radio becomes fits into our lives in ways that other media just don't. So pulling the circle around before the break, the reason screen was computing the so-called viewers, because talking is that most natural setting for us to communicate. So audio and content still fits into a lot of spaces in our lives, but other forms of entertainment don't.
Excellent news. Okay. When we come back, AI, human-machine hybrids and our slow walk into crypto, you tuned into Matt's Blaine here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Building future Malaysia, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.
BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury. This is Matt's Blaine. Welcome back.
And to celebrate the 200th episode, we're talking about some of the changes that we've seen in technology over the life of Matt's Blaine today. What happened to your obsession with human-machine hybrids? There was a lot of that. Seems to have died off a little bit.
Well, I mean, it hasn't, you know, I don't talk about it so often or so implicitly because we approach it in different ways. So work is still going on with things like brain-computer interfaces. And as we saw with the example before the break of Nemo Glasses, developers are creating external hardware that would and could work with multiple chips. Good old Elan is still working on his mirror-link technology.
And he's promised that Tesla will create a humanoid robot for the end of this year. And all of this goes hand-in-hand with cloud computing, you know, increasingly used low-energy processors that offload a lot of the raw computing to remote servers. So all of those ingredients for these kind of human-machine hybrids are still coming together. Coupled in with advances in CRISPR and gene editing techniques.
Oh, I mean, CRISPR is so amazing. I mean, it's one of those things that we accept but don't necessarily understand. I mean, maybe we should do a show on how CRISPR works and revisit that for another effort. For sure.
Yeah. But it's incredible that this thing that has only been widely used for a decade is now commonplace technology and terminology. And that people are editing and hacking their own genes at home, you know, the biohackers. This isn't a suggestion that you try doing that, by the way, but we're already along that path to human augmentation.
Howard in no small part by advances in artificial intelligence. Yeah. That was the flip side of your man-machine argument. Sentient machines.
Yeah. So at that time, my argument was that we shouldn't fear sentient machines. I still believe that to a large degree, although I'm increasingly doubtful that the machines will have been programmed with data sets that are actually good enough to enable them to make those good or positive decisions. And the arguments that I made and continue to make about dumb AI, you know, the algorithms that determine so much of our lives now, you know, things like what content we see on social and streaming media platforms.
My argument is still that those are far more dangerous. I think there were reports this week that in the US at least TikTok's algorithms were not working well enough to differentiate Ukraine news from Ukraine disinformation. And the promotion of disinformation and its ability to polarize sections of societies has been disheartening to watch, especially over the course of the pandemic, the last couple of years. But there are positive steps being made.
You know, lawmakers across the world do look determined to increase the regulation of big tech companies. But again, that's dependent on those lawmakers coming up with sensible solutions. And that certainly isn't any kind of a dumb deal. But are we having those discussions about machine sentience?
Increasingly, I think we are maybe not at the same kind of level that we're having discussions about football or, you know, that kind of thing. But I think it's something that people are increasingly aware of. More people work alongside AI powered machinery now, whether it's overseeing chatbots and customer services and intervening when a more nuanced or more in-depth approach is needed, you know, that human touch. And I think that actually happened to me last week.
I mean, I can't tell for sure, because the experience that bigger companies is supposed to be seeing this, but it was a query I had with a global payments company. I got the initial rope responses from the chat with links to articles in the community help section. But as soon as I couldn't find the answer, I think I would seamlessly switch to a person who incidentally did a great and really time consuming job of solving my query. Beyond that, we've seen the rise of telework.
So, for example, in the US, a shortage of forklift and other types of commercial drivers has led companies to recruit remote control operators from other parts of the company. Now, some of those systems are enhanced with AI. Some of them aren't. But we're seeing this increasing integration.
And as we've said on previous episodes, where the AI is doing the kind of basic grunt work in everything from chemistry labs to loading docks and the human workers come in to make those sort of more important or final decisions. I guess that's kind of the point, though, you know, getting to the stage where the machines know enough to make the decisions for themselves. Yeah. So those are the conversations that I think are happening more often and not just at that kind of esoteric or esoteric rather philosophical level, which is where a lot of the conversation has been for the last few years.
It's that understanding that machine intelligence isn't like human intelligence and that machine sentience wouldn't necessarily be comparable to the kind of sentience that we have where we need to go next is to have those difficult conversations about how far we're willing to go in terms of giving machines autonomy. My guess is that we'll fall on the side of not allowing machines to become completely self-aware, although there is that danger of the machine's designing a machine that is sentient simply because they believe it to be more efficient. But I don't think that's a conversation that we need to have today. Could we coexist with these sentient machines?
Well, I mean, we can coexist with pretty much anything as a species. We're resilient and we're really adaptable. But how we do that is another matter. So part of the discussions that we had about machine sentience was the issue of rights.
What rights would we accord to a machine and what rights would the machine want to be accorded? If it's sentient and self-aware, we can't allow it to be a slave to become a slave. But if we acknowledge that machine intelligence and the sentience that could emerge from within that sphere are very different to our own. What are those rights going to look like?
Because we don't really know what machines would want. Would their idea of a bill of rights be permanent access to power and no off switch? We already have the issue of criminal liability coming to the fort with systems in autonomous vehicles or self-driving modes in electric vehicles. Sometimes these modes malfunction.
They can cause property damage or injury and death. So who bears that responsibility? It's an issue now, even when it's obvious because the machine system originates from a manufacturer. But how does that change when we start talking about machines that have and can deviate from their original programming that can make their own decisions?
How do we then explain and justify those actions? That's probably a good place to stop you in fact and force you to jump into crypto. Yeah, sure. I mean, there was an announcement this week in Malaysia that the communications ministry is urging back Nagara to accept cryptocurrencies as official tender.
I'm not going to weigh in on that now, partly because I'm not a crypto expert. And I haven't seen any details of what this would actually entail. But just at the surface level, I can't see that country with the capital and financial controls that Malaysia has going forward to adopt external cryptocurrencies as they exist right now. What I think we're probably more likely to see is a liberalization of the exchanges.
But certainly, I think back Nagara will still want to be able to see those money trails as they enter and leave the economy. But, you know, and this fact is astonishing to me. But back in 2012, the average price for a Bitcoin was $5. Today, it's what?
A smidge over $42,000. Even that is on a downward trend. And I mean, I keep myself. If only I bought 200 of them back then.
What would that be? $8 million? But I didn't. So, you know, I better shut up.
But the last two years, especially has seen this enormous interest in anything with crypto attached to it. And blockchain back currencies are definitely, I think, the future of money. Our monetary authorities are likely to seed control, then, do you think, to these decentralized currencies? Well, that's the thing that I have my doubts about.
You know, while the situation remains as it is where they're mostly being used and traded as speculative assets rather than a means of exchange that are then traded back into traditional currencies in order to realize that. That's that profit that you've made. I think they will be tolerated until, of course, they pose too much of a risk to wider economic instruments. Similarly, if we see a particular, a particular currency stabilize and emerge as an alternative payment system, I think then they will step into closely regulate it.
I mean, don't forget, I mean, the ideas of that Facebook had with Libra to launch cryptocurrency were quickly stepped on by regulators in the US. And of course, don't forget that PayPal was launched with the idea of free and orderless movements of money and national Treas quickly made sure that that wasn't the case and that PayPal, adhered to international regulations that lawmakers laid down. Well, let's talk about that thing that everybody's talking about right now. Do you see more potential in tokens like NFTs, for example?
As alternative drivers and income sources, yes, I do. I mean, we're still in that Wild West phase and I'm glad that a lot of content creators are making money. I think it will calm down in a few years as much as everyone always tries to pretend they don't. All markets self-correct eventually.
We live in an increasingly digital world, but our systems, especially when we talk about sort of a content creation, the systems are set up to reward those who can be able to make money. So NFTs have enormous potential to individualize and identify digital works so that they do have that transferable value. And it's also great that there's a royalty trail for those creators. They earn a cut of every transaction as their work changes hands.
What I would like to see is a mechanism where larger numbers of content creators can a stable living using NFTs. At the moment, there's a small group making a lot of money and there's everybody else who is really just picking up the crumbs. So I don't want to take away anything from anyone at the top of the pyramid, but a more mature market might make it broader and widen the number of people who can make a living working from the creation of digital content. So what's your opinion on whether or not we'll see NFTs being extended to real world applications?
I think that's definitely going to happen. I think first of all, we need to look at that whole process of creating the tokens, creating NFTs. There's no reason for it to be so energy intensive. And of course, making that easier would help to bring those token prices down.
I think it will eventually be routine to watermark physical items with NFTs. You can imagine the use for contracts, for example, for land ownership, for verifying news items. That's something we talked about before. So I think we're currently looking at 1% of the use case scenarios for this kind of technology with what we have now.
Compared to what I think we'll see 10 years from now, I think NFTs will or their success will be ubiquitous. I guess we're going to have to wait until the 500th episode anniversary to see if these predictions come true, by which term, probably speaking direct to you via the chip in your head. That's a scary thought. Anyway, thanks for that, Matt.
Great show. Thanks a lot. 200. Got you.
200 indeed indeed. Anyway, folks, if you missed any of these shows, including the previous 199 shows, if you download the podcast, whatever you download your podcast from, we recommend you use the BFM app. It's available on the Apple App Store or Google Play. And of course, you can find Matt on Instagram, Twitter, at CultureMack, or subscribe to the CulturePop newsletter on Substepstep.
More information about these shows. My name is Rich Gregory for 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.