 Dwi gweithio gweithio'r cyfnodd yn gweithio'r cyfnodd yw gwell yn fwy gan ein gweithio'n gwneud. Dwi'n fawr, dwi'n meddylad yn bobl o'r ffordd. Rwy'n ddechrau'n ddechrau'n ddechrau a'r ddechrau er oedol yn ddelchau'n ddechrau. Mae'r ddau gwneud o'r ddau'r llyfrnodd Mheirredu Shoredich, yn ddefnyddio'r Llyfrin. Rwy'n credu yn gweithio'n ddau'r llyfrnodd Siligon, ac mae'n ymdyn nhw i'r hynwedig ac mae'n bwysig yng ngyfyrdd, ac mae'n rhan o'r gwaith yma i gyfraith o'r Gwysig Europea, gyda'r cyfrifion hibol, gwahanol, ystodon gwahanol, ac ydw i'n cyfraith, ac mae'n gweithio'r cymdeithasol yng Nghymru, a'r cyflwyno cymdeithasol ymolwg, ac nid o ddaw iawn, felly ddim yn ddigonio gwybod, a'r gwasanaeth o'r ymwneud. As the editor-at-large of Wired magazine, I'm paid to live six months in the future and many of you won't know this because obviously we're not there yet, but in about five months time we will find that PowerPoint is going to be made illegal, so I don't actually have any slides to show you, but I'm sure you'll be quite glad of that. I've been asked to talk about innovation and policy makers, and I think the word innovation and innovators is kind of the bane of my life, to be honest with you, because innovation is the thing that all policy makers and politicians are really striving for. They are continually talking about people to innovate, you have to innovate. If you read any business magazine, it's all about innovating, it's all about the top 50 most innovative companies and all this sort of stuff. It's almost a meaningless word. Everybody is striving to be innovative, and the reason it's a meaningless word is because basically it's what everybody does naturally. It's what you do anyway. Anybody with any form of employability, anybody who isn't basically rubbish, is going to be naturally innovative all the time, because everybody continually is a part of a natural process, sees something that doesn't quite work and tries to think of another way of doing it. You are continually trying to make your life more efficient, trying to find new and easier ways of doing stuff, usually based around the idea of being a little bit lazy. Most innovation comes from not really wanting to do as much work today as you did yesterday. So innovation is something that people talk about, can we promote innovation? The answer to that is no, not really, because you don't need to. That's like promoting romance or something like that. We don't kind of need to do that. The major problem for policymakers isn't promoting innovation, but removing the barriers to it. One of the bits of imagery I quite like to use for this is the idea that in modern political thought, and certainly in modern physics for example, modern political thought is kind of Newtonian. The idea is that something remains the same until you push it. So we have a society which sits like this, and you have to apply some force to it in order to get it to move somewhere. But that's really not true because the universe is consistently in a state of change, consistently in a state of flux. The interesting question you should look at isn't why is this thing, what can we do to this thing that isn't moving in order to let it move? But you have to look at it and ask yourself why is it that this thing isn't moving when the natural state is movement? It's not that a non-innovative company is in a state of inertia, it's in a state of being held back, and that's the fundamental policy issues is what can we do to get out of the way? Now this really comes down I think to two or three things. There is of course a series of legal issues, there are some industries which have legislation which protects people from competing with them. Legislation which may have made a lot of sense ten or twenty or thirty or fifty or a hundred years ago, which today doesn't make any sense anymore. That's a very very difficult thing to address because those incumbent industries are always going to be trying to protect themselves. Copyright reform is the most obvious one. The entertainment industries will lobby until they're dying breath to retain the current copyright legislation around the world, whether or not it's a good thing for society. The other aspect is a cultural one, both a national cultural one and a corporate cultural one, the spirit within the organisations that are attempting to innovate. The answer to both of those types of problems, whether it's a legal barrier or a cultural barrier, is to understand exactly what the internet and its surrounding digital technologies mean. This is where we have a very grave social and political problem in every democracy around the world. In fact it's kind of one of those problems that is less of a problem in the more dubious dictatorial regimes around the world than it is in a liberal democracy. That is that senior policy makers and senior politicians and senior members of industry don't understand the fundamental technical truths of the engineering principles of the internet. I'm going to explain two of them to you and from which we can really extrapolate everything else. The first one is Moore's Law, which is a very famous engineering rule of thumb. For those of you who don't know it, Gordon Moore was the founder of Intel, the microprocessor company. Intel, in about I think it was 1967, sometime around there, Gordon Moore said, he looked at his engineering and he looked at the products they were making. He said this is interesting. Every 18 months or so the number of components on the integrated circuits that we're making seems to double for the price that we're making on that. He extrapolated that out and he published it as a maxim, which was that every 18 months to two years, the number of components on a microchip for the same price would double, which was then taken to be the power for a given amount of money would double every two years. This seems to have held true and is predicted to hold true for the next 20 or 30 years up into the very limits of subatomic physics. What does that mean? Well, imagine you've just become Prime Minister of Great Britain and you're in your David Cameron and you're walking to Downing Street last year and you've got an iPhone in your pocket. He may or may not, I don't know. iPhone in your pocket. Say you get two terms. If you get two terms, eight years, that means the iPhone in your pocket when you leave office and go into private life will be 64 times as powerful as the one as you have in your pocket when you started work. Or a phone, the equivalent power of the iPhone in your pocket when you started will be 164th the price, which basically makes them free with complex, which means that any technology policy that you make today that you foresee as being on the statute books for the next 20 or 30 years has to deal with the fact that the technology it will be addressing will be hundreds of thousands if not millions of times more powerful at the end of the legislation's life than it is during the time when you're actually writing out legislation. The same thing for building buildings. How old is this building? 100, 200 years old? Roughly? So if you're building a new building today, the shard in London, for example, which I can see on the horizon from my house, the tallest building in the tallest office building because apparently the Eiffel Tower is bigger. Much to everybody's great distress. Huge, big building on the South Bank of the Thames. That's being built as a skeleton on which technology is going to be hung. The practicalities of building an enormous office buildings are that you're going to hang technology inside it, but that building is being built with the idea it's going to be there for 100 years. Which means that as an architect and as a builder you have got to deal with the fact that the technology that's going to be hung inside that building will be tens of millions of times as powerful than the technology we can currently think of today. Never in the field of human history have we ever had to make medium to long term decisions based on technologies that we can't possibly even imagine. When this building was built you could possibly imagine a slightly better suspension on your horse and cart. You might have imagined having a slightly nicer horse, maybe better glass, something like that. But it would have been a very simple decision to make. But Moore's Law and the equivalent ones for bandwidth and for storage and all of the other things really do mean that you have to think through policy on the basis that the stuff that's possible, the stuff that you can think of today, even if it's impossible, will be possible very soon. Many many many mistakes have been made by industry specifically. Discounting the ideas of certain technologies on the basis that the first version of those technologies were a little bit rubbish. Digital photography is a very good example of this. The first digital cameras were very very rubbish. And so Kodak looked at them and said nobody's ever going to want a digital camera because they're rubbish and we make amazing slide film. And Kodak went bust and Instagram is worth a billion dollars. It doesn't even make cameras in the same week. If anybody is ever coming to you with a technology which exists but is a little bit crap, it's going to be really really amazing in a few years time. Simply through force of processing. If you ever find yourself ever doing a bit of social science or something that requires doing say six years of sums. You only need to do something that requires six years of computation. The best thing you could possibly do is go and sit on a beach for a year. Because if you sit on a beach for a year and you then buy your computers, those computers will be able to do it in the sum in three years. And one year on the beach plus three years is four years, which is two years shorter than the six years would have taken you a year before. The fact that people don't understand that fundamental thing of the speed of technology or the halving of price every year is a major problem. The second major problem is the fundamental non-understanding of the inability to censor the internet. Perhaps more hours, minutes, days, more billions of euros have been wasted on new and entertaining attempts to prevent data from being copied from place to place, unfettered. Whether you're talking about digital rights management and the idea that you shouldn't be able to copy a DVD or a piece of music, or whether you're talking about a censorship regime to prevent people from looking at a particular type of information online, or a particular type of imagery, or accessing a particular information source. The fundamental nature of the way the internet is engineered means that you are wasting your time. You can argue for the moral or ethical or legal right to attempt to do it. You can instantly destroy the argument by raising the spectra of child pornography. You can instantly have a plea to what about the terrorists. You can have all of those things, but the fundamental issue is that the internet is based specifically around the idea that you can't do this. There isn't anything that a nation state can do to prevent people in that nation state from accessing information that they want to access without that nation state becoming North Korea. Technically, it's just not possible for very good mathematical reasons. Until we get to a point where policymakers and politicians can accept those two fundamental truths, those fundamental truths of Moore's Law and the fundamental truth of the uncensorability of the internet, then we will forever spend our time railing against the tide instead of riding it like a glorious surfer. Once you've got that though, and indeed, well actually as an aside, I think one of the reasons why there has been an increasing lack of respect for the political culture across Europe from people under the age of about 35 and certainly under the age of 25 is because those people are fundamentally, I don't want to use the phrase digital natives, but fundamentally at ease with these sorts of technological truths and whenever they see a major political figure stand up and say the opposite, they instantly lose respect, not just for their technological policies but for any other policies. It's like when you read a newspaper and you've been reading a newspaper for a while and then you find an article in it that's about something that you understand very deeply and you realise that actually journalists are kind of a bit rubbish and it makes you then doubt everything else you read in the paper. It's very similar to that but at a broad cultural level. That age gap is going to become a major problem over the next couple of years, I think. What we're really talking about is a cultural mismatch and this really leads me to my next thing in terms of policy and innovation which is a cultural mismatch between the individual nations and cities in which we're talking about innovation and the models of innovation which the political class and policy makers are attempting to import from elsewhere. It's very tempting for an awful lot of people around the world to look to what appears to be the most successful examples of innovation and the most successful examples of business via Silicon Valley and San Francisco and attempt to bring that model over here whether it's to Dublin or whether it's to Hackney in London or whether it's to Berlin or Brussels or Copenhagen or wherever. I would posit that actually that is a fundamentally bad thing to do for various reasons. One, the Silicon Valley culture was built tabula rasa on nothing. There was nothing there before. In fact, if you ever go to Silicon Valley you'll find there's not much there now. It's kind of rubbish. It's a long strip mall suburban estate that goes on for 100 miles. It's not the cultural capital of Europe. It's not a great multinational city of 11 million people like London is. It's not Berlin. It's at very best Slough. It's rubbish there. But that's cool because their culture is building these big companies. But they've decided to maximise their economy based on numbers based on targets which are culturally right for Northern California and for Northern California Bay Area small towns. But attempting to bring those cultural values into cities which already exist and have already existed for thousands of years with their very deep cultures whether it's Dublin or London or wherever else creates a fundamental mismatch, creates a lot of noise but that noise are two cultures rubbing up against each other. Instead what I think is necessary is to work out exactly what it is we should be measuring first. But I mean by this it's quite interesting. You've heard the phrase about smart cities, capital S, capital C. As if you haven't smart cities is a technological idea where if you take a city and you fill it full of sensors and internet connected devices that can measure stuff whether that's air quality or traffic flow or pedestrian pavement density or any of these things and you make that data freely available to anybody to access via their mobiles usually then that will give people the ability to optimise their own behaviour. So it's a Friday night and you're here in Dublin and you want to have a particular type of night out. Say you want to go where everybody else is then the smart city ideal would be that you could fire up the Dublin pavement density app and you'll be able to see a map of the local area, a sort of a heat map and you can see oh well there's a whole load of people on the pavements here, here and here so that must be where the party's at. Or you might decide that actually the last thing you want to do is hang out with a load of drunk people and so you look on the map and you find where it's quiet. Or you want to get home early, you want to get home quickly and so you look in London and you look on the map and you see the real-time data coming from the tube and the bus network and that enables you to change your plans. That's the smart city ideal. Very compelling and it has lots and lots of vendors, mostly American vendors who are selling this stuff but if you read their advertising bump what's really interesting is the stuff that they think you should be optimising. So IBM for example who are really big into smart cities are very much in their advertising stuff. They're all about transit, they're all about getting you to your cubicle from your suburban home as fast and as sufficiently as possible and back again. Whereas actually the thing you might want to be optimising as a community is meandering to work or going to work the pretty way or cycling or pavement cafes or pretty girls on bicycles or whatever it is that you want to optimise as your city, as your community. And the fundamental issue you have there is that the cultural values that the smart city type projects wanting to set up to optimise are the cultural values of the vendors that sell the technology and not the cultural values of the community within which they are set. And this is the same thing with inward investment and innovation management. Is that there is a grand temptation to look for something which has a big number around it, San Francisco for example, and take their system and plonk it on top of your existing community. Without asking that existing community what sort of community do you want to live in in 10 or 15 or 20 years time. And it's not enough to say it doesn't matter what you want to live in, we just need the money. Because with that money comes a lot of additional cultural baggage which may or may not be harmful but certainly isn't particularly democratic and won't be absorbed into the fundamental, you know, the fundamental sort of innards of the city, the culture of the city. So just to take me on to the last thing before we go into questions and you can tell me I'm wrong and we can argue it out. Innovation really comes from getting out of people's way and allowing them to continue forward. And the most common ways of getting into people's way as policy makers is to fundamentally not understand the implications of this sort of technology. Because the implications are terrifying. There isn't an industry that the internet has touched which hasn't been utterly destroyed by that contact and completely rebuilt. Everything from the travel industry to the music industry to journalism to politics itself is just eaten by the internet and spat out the other side. Completely, completely changed. But that's going to happen and as soon as you relax into that and allow it to happen then the quicker all of the pain will be over. But that has to happen as part of an introspective exercise of asking as a community what is it that we want from life in the future. Because technological innovation, digital innovation touches every aspect of our lives I think it's very important that we start to address this as everybody and not just as the technology community or the policy community. Tech City in London is not just the design firms and the programmers it's also the kebab shops and the knitwear factories and the mosques and everything else. And that leads me to my final thing which I think is also worth deeper investigation is my next project release where I have nothing really to report on it. But we're also now finding that digital communications technologies are fundamentally affecting the way we act as people and the way that we are able to concentrate and the way that we are able to interrelate. And we have to be very careful I think that we don't promote an industry specifically one whose finances are based on a slightly bubbly or very bubbly unsubstantiated set of potential profits. We've done that before and it didn't leave us into a good place. We shouldn't be promoting that until we have also come to terms with the personal effects of this technology. But we can talk about that in the questions and answers. Thank you very much for putting up with me. Has anybody got anything to ask?