 Welcome to the session number one. I'm glad everyone could stave off hangovers and what not to out to be here Hopefully this time hopefully the talk is working while Luke and I here today to talk about the future No already Already in the future. There are never any tech problems Cool, all right. No, we're okay. This song. Yes, so I know we kind of got introduced Luke and I we work with XWP That's a like a wordpress agency that kind of here in Australia around the world and we do sort of large-scale WordPress things And and yeah, like we are when we say we want to talk about the future today We're not necessarily talking about the hundred years from now into spell interstellar space travel site fire kind of stuff That you're probably much more interested in You know, we're talking like the the 2020s and like the near future and some aspects of technology that are that far away I mean 2020 Sounds so distant, doesn't it? But really it's just over a year away one year away It's it's like a year and a couple months away 2020 So we're really just here to talk about the next five 10 15 max years so that we're not trying to make these crazy forecasts about AI Working collaboratively with humanity to create a beautiful shed blissful utopia, but actually just looking at the Stones that are already rolling and being able to predict where they're gonna land and then just the next few years Yeah, I think it's important We start with like just a little thought experiment to help shape any conversations that we have about the future Think with me for a second if the if we were to go back in time in a 200 years to say 1818 and and take sort of a random person off the cobblestone streets and bring them forward in time And to to this day and age and for them to encounter the amount of technological development that we live in Breed every single day and for them to see these metal boxes hurling at hundreds of kilometers up the road huge Metal things shooting through the sky across continents You know speaking to screens with people talking back from the other side of the world in real time I mean then they're not even the cool ones I mean that we have an international space station and someone recently shot a car into space and you know And music that plays wirelessly from things sitting around I mean all the things that we you know We probably just tend to take for granted but if for someone to come from the context of 1818 to 2018 The experience will be so jarring That you can probably suggest this person would actually have a mental breakdown Trying to comprehend the current nature of of what we're able to do I mean I have a mental breakdown when I try to comprehend it and I'm not even from 18 there you go Maybe you are Whatever think think this right? Let's say we go back to 1818 We go back 200 more years to like 1618 and we find someone and bring them forward to 1818 Now the rate of change over that time You know they might be mildly impressed by some of the you know some aspects of technology Maybe some in early industrialization is happening Maybe some more commerce maybe some more travel exposure to other cultures and ideas But certainly not to the level that this person is going to have a mental breakdown They might be just mildly impressed because you see our mistake often is to think that Technological development is is linear that happens in a straight line rather than exponential and you see Technology changes over time You know in this in this exponential way and as you know futurist Maybe if you've heard of Ray Kurzwell, you know He talks about this the the concept of accelerated returns that the more we advance The faster we get at advancing and that from the year the rate of change in the year 2000 was like five times the rate of change for the entire Hundred years before that in fact that he would suggest that at the rate of change of the year 2000 it would only take about 20 years to accomplish an entire centuries worth of change But as we get faster he suggests that then it drops down to about five and about seven years and he's suggesting that By about he kind of suggested by about now by 2020 We couldn't see an entire centuries worth of change several times in a year and Our mistake would be to think that the future looks like the past I mean we don't think that about mistake would really be to think that the future will change in the same rate as the past We're heading into a future ten and fifteen years away from us It could be so radically different. It could be like pulling you from 200 years ago to now The same change to go from now to 2030 right maybe 2025 We could be being wild, but there's no reason to not think that's the case now all that said though Brendan. Oh, yeah, yeah we're even though Exponential change should be expected what we're doing today is looking at a couple of pieces of key technology That we can see progression in over time and just forecasting that out at a regular rate of change So even though some of the things that we're going to be talking about might even seem a little fantastical to you They should be considered as more conservative guesses And the whole point of this is that if we if we fail to plan we we plan to fail in the year 2000 You know read Hastings the CEO of Netflix at the time went to the CEO of blockbuster and said hey I'd like to kind of handle your your online division and what you're doing here got laughed out of the room I mean we know the story ten years later net blockbuster is bankrupt and Netflix is worth ten times the amount blockbuster was ever worth You know the reason we're here talking about this is so that we can kind of just identify some areas that are least interesting and think well What could we be doing to prepare? for the future and Unfortunately you have to listen to us talk about that in the next little while these are the four areas that we might We're just going to dance through these really quickly and you could spend a whole talk on any one of them So please let's we're just going to dance very quickly through self-sovereign identity social data AR and VR and internet things Luke kick us off with Self-sovereign identity those might be three words. You've never heard put together before has anybody heard of that concept Very very few people and some of them only because I've talked to you about it before But I think this this is going to be an idea that we see Come up more and more and even become a really important part of culture over the next 10 years or so So you might be thinking what the heck is self-sovereign identity? Well, let me explain it with another term you might be more familiar with is the word blockchain Who's out of that word? Well, you might be thinking what the heck is the blockchain and that's a whole talking itself I won't dive too much into it except to say that you can think of the blockchain as a way of securely storing data in a distributed way So you probably Think of when you think of the blockchain you probably think of cryptocurrencies, right? It's synonymous with Bitcoin and Ethereum, but although These crypto currencies they are built on the blockchain technology The blockchain isn't limited to only servicing these financial technologies We can use the blockchain for other things. So what if you took all of your personal data All of the information about yourself your name your address your passport your driver's license your email address your phone number all of that personal information and stored it safely and securely on a blockchain Distributed in a distributed manner so we're not doing that right now and Instead we have a different sort of system. It's more centralized and also at the same time more scattered So we've got three kind of big problems at the moment one is security Google and Facebook in the just the last couple of months have revealed massive data breaches So our data that is stored in these centralized places. It's not secure at all Another one is that it's so inconvenient if you change your email address or if you change your name You've got to update it on every single platform that that you're a part of and that It becomes extremely onerous and probably next to impossible in a lot of cases and The third thing is you don't own any of that data that online store that you visited two years ago to buy some fiddly is a fidget cube or a spinner and They probably still have your name your email address your address stored on their servers ready to be hacked and That's not a good system So self-sovereign identity solves this by using the blockchain because the blockchain is secure It means that you can Take that data and a sign you can see this piece and this piece and you third party You can see that piece and that piece and I might even be able to set an expiry so that Yes word camp you can see my name and my Twitter handle for the next three months and then no longer Will you be able to have access to that information? All right, and it's owned by you which means that all of that data It's it's yours you take it with you around the web Where you don't have all of these usernames and passwords for every single site that you visit but instead you just prove that you're you and You can assign bits and pieces of information to be read by any third party website you visit So no more usernames and passwords and they don't have to store any information about you and So we've got this sort of system in place where you control your data It's safe. It's secure and it's sort of a huge big win for privacy This might seem like a big dream that would be really difficult to imagine But actually there was an organization instituted last year called the distributed I can't remember but Basically centered around this idea It contains parties like IBM and Microsoft so big players and they've already got a draft proposal for the format to the W3C So you can go to the W3C now and look at how this system might be formatted what it would be structured like and in addition to that there's another group called ID 2020 who's Organizing a huge conference at the UN Specifically to bring this issue of self-solven identity to the United Nations So I think that by 2023 by 2024 maybe we'll start to see this idea of self-solven identity Enter our vocabularies more it might we might start to see early versions of it and Hopefully by the end of the 2020s it becomes much more prevalent around the Internet Oh Let's change tax here for a little bit similar bit connected You know data collection big data these kind of terms they you know they're going around a lot right now I would I would suggest everyone in this room has been hearing about this kind of being branded especially by The marketing companies out there doing this stuff But it's it's really worth our consideration for for what's happening right now See social data is is the change you know that that data essentially up until quite recently was kind of these items of information That were collected about people in general But you see so much of data now is actually collected in relation to an IP address or a device or a social media account And so on and that data now It's generated is actually attributed to individuals and so data is becoming Socialized in the way that the data doesn't represent a group of people it represents a group of individuals and You know think about even 10 or 15 years ago the kind of data points that you were giving off for people to harvest or to understand about you were Probably relatively minimal so maybe some of what you were buying and think The use of cash and society obviously allowed people to make anonymous purchases but by and large We you know we tend not to do that so much anymore, but just in any given day where you are What you're doing what you like everything you're buying who you're hanging out with and where you're working Where you're living all these kind of things like you constantly constantly You know and especially when you know if you think about the services you engage like for travel for with Airbnb and Uber and Uber Eats What you're eating what you're doing where you're flying where you're staying what your preferences aren't for you with I mean all these things are now they're getting mapped and Data is being collected now really more than ever if you put it this way like out of the say billion or so food people right now Generating data on that scale. They're generating thousands of data points each per year So that's a per day. So it's trillions of data points per day and all together the amount of social data collected doubles every 18 months So what was collected in an entire year in about? 2001 now is collected in a single day and We expected in just a couple years the amount of data collected over the entire year of 2001 will be collected in under an hour And we have to kind of start thinking about the implications of this because not only is the data being able to be collected, you know Computation learning smart learning, you know the machine learning and so on When you couple these activities together that data is being collected at a rate and an expense that is far greater than ever computational power is getting far beyond what we'd ever imagined and then and machines are able to actually intelligently learn and understand you and understand us You know, we have to think about what that means for us and for our future now I won't go on and on. I think you kind of get this idea But I think that there's a couple of things that we do need to be aware of looking forward and and mostly like we think about the price that we pay for all this convenience We do I mean to use services like Google Maps. Yeah, this is amazing. I love it I mean I can just look and it tells me like yes, there's traffic here Don't go that way go this way. I look at that service to me is like amazing and I'm definitely okay with giving up my My location for that service But you know when you start to multiply that out and beyond we have to think about you know, the the price we pay when companies When when profile aggregators like PayPal ad sense I don't know you start to think about the aggregation companies that are getting just vast amounts of your not only your internet data But they combine that with perhaps medical data perhaps genetic data one day Perhaps location data family data what your children are doing and really profiling you down the price that you know You pay I think for much of that can consumer level data will be the ability to me to be manipulated easily Like to do to an extent that we don't understand what's even happening and there while we're unable to even cope with and to To react to that I know I think about my kids and what they're going to go through just because of my stupid behaviors online They're going to be these amazing profiles of my boys by the time they turn 12 or 13 just from the data I generate on them nothing that they've done and and that they will be right for manipulation by companies Who know they're everything about them and what they should be doing. You know, we have to think about that I mean, there's another realm for security and surveillance. I mean the price you pay for security in order to be you know To lose your privacy. That's another piece of this that we we don't need to go into but but I don't want to remain all doom and gloom You know the problems that we'll be able to solve I mean humanity is a long way off of what we'll touch this later a long way off from solving the problems that we can I'm living the kind of lives that we we should as people and the processing of data The collection of it and the use the use of it intelligently and let's hope ethically I think will be you know, Ken paper of a beautiful experience for many of us into the future We just have to kind of be a be aware of this I think where it's headed and we want probably two main things that I tend to think of things that we should be looking for And for many of us in the room perhaps giving I mean if you are if you are a site owner or product owner a Service giver, you know, you fall into the category of people probably doing this, right? That we we seek transparency of what we're doing and Choice for people to participate and be involved in things that they probably aren't Understanding or equipped to deal with Okay, the same way we were hand wavy about the future we can also do it virtual reality so in the same way that Personal computers transformed the entire globe in the 1990s and in the same way that the internet Just changed the world in the naughties and in the 2010 smartphones Completely transformed society how we communicate to each other. I really believe that the 2020s is the decade of virtual and augmented reality Virtual and augmented reality are already, you know have come quite a long way In fact, I'd hesitate to guess that there's a good number in this of people in this room who have tried You know modern day VR put your hand up if you've you've tried VR already so Around 50% of people here and of course everyone's tried augmented reality. Put your hands up if you've not played Pokemon Go Oh, what? No, you're lying. Come on. You're lying. Don't be ashamed. I Know some people who still play Pokemon good. Anyway would see So actually actually VR isn't a new technology it was invented in the 1960s and Really heavily studied in American universities alongside other reality bending reality building ideas like nanotechnology lucid dreaming and of course Everyone's favorite psychedelics And so there's a little bit of a connection there, but these days VR has really progressed to the point where it's consumer ready you can go and buy a VR headset off the shelf and Granted right now. It's Still a little bit out of reach in terms of finances for most people this one here is a Standalone AR headset so you see through the lenses and it puts things back into your eye add ads to the world And you can buy these in the United States right now for about two and a half thousand dollars My home VR set up which is sort of state-of-the-art consumer VR costs about three hundred Sorry, three and a half thousand dollars and that was a little bit over a year ago So it's a little bit out of reach for most people But the technology is continuing to advance it at a quite a fast pace And the price is continuing to come down to the point where next year Oculus are releasing a headset the quest you should look out for it which has full room scale tracking so you can walk around your environment full hand presence so you can see your hands in VR and State-of-the-art optics, you know like high resolution displays for four hundred US dollars You don't need a computer to power it standalone So I think this product in and of itself will be pretty world-changing But you can really imagine that by 2021 2022 VR and AR will have their iPhone moment where they start to really enter common use in society, right and It's going to start influencing the way we educate the way we entertain and I mean what better way to learn about the planets I sat with my son and we sat together in a Rocket ship and we're surrounded by the stars and we traveled through the planets at the speed of light We could change our scale So we were as big as the Sun and we experienced this together while we learned about the planets What better way to learn about the planets than to experience it So when we start to think about how is this going to influence the web? There is one thing that I think that we need to keep in mind to ground us And that is that the thousands of years humans have communicated in 2d with the written word with pictures Paintings and so I don't think that in the next 10 20 years We're going to suddenly transform the way we communicate Mathematics mathematics or or poetry into some weird 3d art form but Instead of you know making Wikipedia in 3d I think what we'll start to see instead is VR and AR providing additional context to the content on the web So if you're a web developer here, maybe you want to start thinking about what sort of space would my content best Be presented in how could I set the mood with the environment around the viewer or around the person who's Experiencing this website And you can really start to think out of the box in terms of how is my 2d information displayed? It doesn't have to be in a square window. It can be in any Particular place in 3d space So that's something that's that's really interesting. It's always about providing context and the other thing as a web developer You can start to think about is providing Embeddable 3d objects, so you've got images you got videos and maybe you have a 3d embed with this magically Thing that that I showed you earlier you can put this thing on read a news article in a virtual monitor and the Right now like this is present day You can see you're reading about a flood and on the New York Times website And it shows you the water level in the room to give you an idea right giving you all of this extra context So that's how we should think about how AR and VR is like the web Over to you. Yeah, sure The the the IOT I mean this is some you know once again a concept that I think from you know Most people are fairly well aware of we're watching it happen and certainly not anything particularly New but I think the thing to be aware of here much like that the data piece is actually you know kind of the scale of projection and and the scale of where this is headed you know international research firm Gartner You know they suggest that they were about 3.8 billion devices, you know online and 2016 that by you know into early 2020 suggesting it'll be as much as 25 billion the outgoing CEO of Cisco might have a vested in interest in projecting this high But you know he's he's believing that by around you know 2030 50 50 billion mid 2020's You know 50 billion devices a 19 trillion dollar industry You know it's it's it's worth considering I think the way that we we conduct ourselves and live our lives and what it means for devices everywhere we go To be connected. I mean can you know think about like You know from from every aspect of your home from a toaster to the thermostat to the front door To your car to your phone to your watch to every activity that your car will will do as you move through Your daily lives, I mean cars, you know becoming You know connected devices that you know are also driverless as well if you combine the two things become an entirely different experience I mean when you don't need to drive in a car. It just becomes like it this transportation method Why wouldn't you have a desk in the car and work on the way to work? Why wouldn't you have a treadmill or a bike and get some exercise or yet? While you're heading there if you needed to head to Sydney Why wouldn't you just sleep in the sleep at a bed in the car on the way to on the way to Sydney? And then on the way back home again You know the way that this will transform our experiences and the hotel industry in Trent You know these kind of things is it's really significant, but it's not even those really significant things It's also the insignificant things that have a huge impact as well I mean in Philadelphia right now they have like these so-called smart bins that are measuring the amount of waste in their bins right now and Communicating that back to the other council as it were But if you think about the way we do garbage collection right now We just run around every week and collect all the bins Regardless of how full or empty they are but they're they're seeing enormous efficiency here savings and wages and I mean thinking that you know There's also environmental impact as well But the fuel and wages and and trucks you know in knowing the specific bins that need changing in Israel right now They have so-called smart highways that have sensors built into the road that scan the number plates of people who move into the fast lane and Charge them that are at a higher rate to use The highways by scanning the number plates and charging their credit cards There are startups for for drones that are connected that guide you to a car park and obviously I don't know if you spend any time in New York They're pretty sophisticated public transport system where every piece of public transport is connected again And you get this incredible experience of understanding where you are and where every vehicle is in relation to you But I mean aside from the consumer experiences the efficiency that can be brought into the world because of this and the The reduction of cost a reduction of environment and mental impact you can see because of these things I mean, you know the efficiency for the New York community system was to see that trains went from an average of roughly 15 per hour to 26 per hour just by bringing them on to the grid and bringing some intelligence to that system so You know I It's it's you know one of those things that I think Really takes us to to think about the day in the life of what you experienced and to look at every possible thing That could be connected in your home and what that would mean for those things to be to be speaking to each other And then you mix that with with data collection and learning and to think that those things are learning about you And the way that you live your life and as providers as web providers that we are we really need to think about Not so much. You know, I mean AR and VR. We might think about how we experience the internet How we experience the web but where we experience it as well and what it will mean for for all these All these devices, you know billions and billions and everything we touch to be to be connected to be learning And to be adapting to the way that we you know live our lives Let me just close in a in a thought here I gave a talk just recently on the future of work to a bunch of great great 12 students And I in obviously giving the talk like you know when you think about the future all the time Like it's you know You kind of get used to thinking about some of the possible dystopian concepts and and the onslaught of what's kind of coming And I and I could see to them it was quite a jarring experience Especially when you combine some of these concepts with automation with artificial intelligence and robotics and what that will possibly do to The state of the world in the next 15 and 20 years and a student the young girl came up to me afterwards and she was like well What's gonna happen to us like what are we what are we gonna do? What are the weirdest people gonna do? And I was like well look You know, it's not the first Revolution that humanity has been through it's possible that this one is very different and we don't want to be naive about this I mean we saw you know what happened to horses during you know The motor motor vehicle revolution, you know, we didn't find a new new useful horses They actually just became completely redone a horse population are peaked in 1912 and is now never recovered right but But I think it's important to think that that I quote the words of futurist Goode Leonard in saying that the future is more exciting than we think That there's so much for us as people to do so, you know You think about the way we experience medical care around the world The what we're doing to our environment the kind of lives that we leave there are so many problems to solve There are so many places that we can go and we can improve as a as a people that I Choose to take the perspective that technology will lead us on to solve bigger and better problems in a way That is is great for for all of us and I'm not I don't believe in being naive about the future I believe that we aren't blockbusters being ill prepared for the future But I'm not out there to you know to be scared of the future to be frightened I choose to think like that we can be optimistic about the future of our world and that you know If I even think about what wordpress represents and who we are in this community You know being partakers and and owners of a third of the web You know our responsibility for the peace of the future that we are projecting towards as well And what all of our personal responsibilities are in seeing the future for us and our children that we want to see exist cool Anything you want to add to that? Well, I would say in your words cool beans cool beans cool beans all right cool. That's um, that's the talk