2030: Privacy's Dead. What happens next?

ladies and gentlemen please give thunders applause to Tom Scott very much so in the very first talk today Warren Ellis said that predicting the future was a mug's game so there's been enough history today let's try and predict the future you don't really notice change happening um Google was incorporated 16 years ago yesterday 1998 um the easy access to information that it uh sure did changed the world and sure if it hadn't been Brin and page it would have been someone else with a similar algorithm but can you imagine taking someone from 1996 never mind Victorian times with Hillary just 1996 and showing them today a small little magical device in your pocket that can answer 99% of all your questions about the world and 99% of all your requests for media but that reports your location to the police constantly says they can look you up if you need to and then you've you know you've got any number of instant ways of communicating with people around the world nearly anyone in the world all of which is monitored all the time by shadowy government agencies what they think we're in a dystopia would they think we're in some sort of each other whether it would be somewhere in the middle so let's plot a line let's plot line all the way over here all the way over here is 1998 the founding of Google right here in the middle is where we are now 2014 let's see what someone from 1998 would think about today because what I'm going to do is go about 16 years into the future into 2030 and let's say that we have roughly the same orders of magnitude increase in access to information let's propose some slightly fanciful technology that is about as fanciful as Google would have been all the way back over there let's do a talk from deconstruct 2030 and it would start a look at something like this teenagers are becoming telepathic privacy is dead and we're in another tech bubble welcome to 2030 or at least one possible 2030 for the best technical folks in the audience it might be a little bit difficult to work out what is in the heads of 30s teenagers walking down the street earbuds in throat mics on muttering to themselves constantly emotions flashing across their face faster than seems reasonable and anyone who joins an engine network right now with no prior experience will find it overwhelming it takes about four or five days of constant access before your brain starts to get used to the enormous tidal wave of data that hits it every single second most people particularly those over the age of about 30 will give up within about four or five minutes but there's a reason you hear testimonials from the people who've stuck around about slowly becoming telepathic what we have today is a confluence of two things first and foremost engines Lynn and xiaoning's paper now legendary in computer science it's difficult to remember now just how difficult it was to get information before Ganymede came along in the early days of Google the same as the early days of Ganymede it wasn't intuitive it was a difficult process you forget now that originally you had to actually type you had to spell things correctly you had to load the right data you have to give it the right hints and ease it through the first stage of the process so Ganymede and the other engines could go work out what you were asking for it wasn't intuitive it was something that like typing that you just had to learn okay you don't learn typing anymore but once more time that was important but it was still a Lightspeed leap forward before Ganymede if you if you want to go out with your friends to a restaurant you want to find somewhere you would have to open one app to find a restaurant and then you would open a second app to see if it was any good and see if it let you die for requirements and your budget and then you open a third app to see if there was a table I mean more than that you might actually have to use an old-school webpage for anyone remembers those well you could try and wing it of course plenty of people did but if you wing it too you were likely to be disappointed and no one's disappointed anymore Ganymede and later the other engines ability to take petabytes of images text video anything and to infer truths to infer partners to infer faces and dialogue and anything from them in real time that was a that was a jump on the scale of the mass printing press on the scale of Google no one believed in the mid-90s that a search engine could could realistically pull in results from the entire web and send them out in real time not realistically couldn't be done in the mid tens no one thought that a search engine can realistically answer questions like where should we eat tonight not pulling the meaning of we and and eat and work out what you're actually asking and yet here we are Ganymede aloud the orders of magnitude increase in access to information lemon jamming had the perfect combination of philanthropy and business acumen they released the engine algorithm as open source that's what sparked the engine explosion that's why throat mics actually started working but they tempt there then incredible exabyte of structured data of inferences of patterns to themselves and to their company but that on its own doesn't explain the muttering teenagers the second part of what we have today is it's more a social change really one of the key points about engines is that the more open you are the more information you give them then the better they are that's why those of us who remember privacy don't really get as much out of them I mean yes okay we keep throat mics on at work we take them off when we get home but the idea of allowing any third party access to everything we say everything everyone we meet everything we do every where we are is is abhorrent the idea that we should do that it's just wrong I remember clearing my cookies every day ask your parents um now most of us we we suck it up we deal with it because the results are worth it but the payoff that we get from being open is worth what we perceive as a cost um but we still take a throat mics off when we get home I mean how I still use a keyboard every now and again to write code some of us still have to even as typing becomes a more and more niche skill the only way to stay connected to everyone in your social circle right now no matter which engine you use no matter which particular company runs yours the only way to stay connected to everyone is to be entirely open that's the only way that the engines know which of your thoughts to send to other people and which should come back if you remember the Facebook newsfeed and later the Twitter newsfeed remember the fuss that caused you remember how it prioritizes information that was more important to you well I'm offline right now at a conference but as soon as I walked off and put my earbud back in then my engine will start catching me up at 800 words a minute faster but faster than anyone could possibly speak of but that's still slow enough for people to understand for the brain to understand and it will start catching me up just on the important things just on the things that matter to me that's what those mushroom teenagers are doing as they walk down the street they are talking to a thousand people at a time mediated not by an artificial intelligence just by algorithms they talk to the world and the world listens and they listen back they are taking part in and now a giant 20th century chat room 18th century coffee shop it's something much greater than the sum of its parts certainly I was I was telling the worst case scenario scare stories about flash mobs buckin back in the tens and we haven't seen the start of it that's the crucial part of entrance you give and they give back all of those engines all those engines talk to each other one talks but ok now the companies that control the engines have data sharing agreements between each other because it's not a good idea to run for more finds these things if if it needs to the little engine on my phone that I carry in my pocket it can access the down links from the military drums hovering over Brighton circling 30,000 feet ok the outsourced privatized military drones hovering over Brighton at 30,000 feet um maybe it needs to guide me past an obstruction maybe more likely it wants to magically route me towards a friend or maybe wants to magically route me away from a cluster of people with as bones or whatever our bones are called now or maybe it just wants to answer my question about finding a pub where I can see the Sun setting no one's asked that question yet in exchange for me knowing that right now then other engines from the government and the police can see what I am Who I am what I'm doing and what I'm gonna be up to and they know everything about me but I also know everything about them those of us who weren't able to make that sacrifice don't get to use engines that's not a choice that's the same way having a smartphone wasn't an option neither is not having an engine connection I mentioned people with as opposed by the way we've we've seen a lot of press about those excluded by the algorithms Cory Doctorow who is is up next talked about Wafi in his book down out in the Magic Kingdom a magical currency based on reputation score now he wrote about neural implants and brain backups and essentially an automated system that worked out what other people thought of you and used that as an actual currency ruse telling me we heard this referenced earlier maneki-neko it was it was used an example plausible deniability early but it was it was artificial intelligence that was mediating that a network that actively attacked people who were trying to bring it down and made their lives very difficult what we have is so much more mundane than either of those options so much less explicit your engine notices the time that it takes you to to respond to things notices the reactions you have to people notices whom you avoid and your biases start to get taken on by the engine and it was designed by engineers in Silicon Valley in John one can so as Fox News so delicately put it and I apologize for the accent well as some folks it just don't work so well on give member the racist webcam they don't see that from 2009 there's an HP laptop with an automatic tracking camera which and it wouldn't follow you unless and I'm quoting here you had enough difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and upper cheek yeah it's that but worse because all the all the implicit associations all the hidden biases that study after study after study after study have shown art in everyone's heads they get picked up by engines the fact that college professors are more likely to respond to inquiries from men picked up by the engines it's not clear enough to quantify it's not clear enough to defend against it's not one thing you can pull out of the enormous web of connections and patterns that the engines pick up and you should have seen the fury when one CEO said well that's the way it should be engines should reflect the biases of the people who own them and then what about the people on the other end of the scale the people who were the people who want to be popular or don't want to be popular we were starting to see sponsored lives back in 2014 just the very start of it the people who were yeah I hated the word back then the people will blogging the people are talking into their webcam once a day and uploading their lives and their thoughts and their experiences and kids teenagers kids younger than that but flocking to these people and old media television in particular couldn't understand it why why would you want to just watch someone talk into a webcam and they were trying to ask that even as they were updating their antiquated reality show formats to be ever more and more artificial Saturday night entertainment 2014 BBC one celebrities during acrobatics now wonder the kids flocked off to YouTube nits successes and now one of the advertisers went with them straining life logs of course have been tried for years back in 1996 was arguably the first one the first real-time feed that was pre Google but the trouble was with the exception of some obsessives and folks who were happy to watch people play video games 24 hours a day you still need an editor no one has time to watch lots of people's entire lives so he still needed an editor to package up the highlights tell a story work out the details and put it together for consumption well engines can do that powered by measuring attention responses constant automated a be testing and all its successors they can do that they did it almost everyone born after 2010 is now providing a life log for their friends and if they're good at it if they're popular they providing it for an audience beyond that as well no wonder they they're the ones getting sponsorship and product placement and for advertisers there are no limits on how sneakily or subtly you can start putting product placement into there the regulation hasn't caught up with it yet at all it's notable that there are people folks in the news folks folks who really don't want to be there they have that audience even though they really don't want it there used to be that concept of the a-list celebrity and the zedla celebrity of course the idea that Hollywood and movies and television and gossip magazines they were the arbiters of who was a celebrity and who the public cared about that was the idea right you know you you appear in a movie you appear on television you are in you are part of that celebrity that's not how it works now celebrity doesn't work celebrity works like the music industry used to I'm sure everyone knows that a folk rock sea shanty band is not going to make the top of the radio on playlist the friends of mine that played Glastonbury they're really good but that's fine because they know that a folk rock sea shanty band isn't going to be there they're not aiming for that they're aiming for the portion of their audience that likes folk rock sea shanty bands they're aspiring to be the greatest folk rock sea shanty band they can be that's what they're aiming for that's what their audience wants and as the music industry always was they can talk directly to those people who can get the fans they can target and niche that's how celebrity works now you can target a niche doesn't matter you may never be Hollywood a-list celebrity but doesn't matter maybe you're more interested in it's always videogames some form of videogames some specific form you can aspire to be the celebrity player of that particular genre and you will find an audience and they will know where you are and the advertisers will follow those have seen the dangers of this haven't we it's cardinal richelieu is quote suppose you'd quote give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world and I'll find something in them to hang him which has never been more true we've seen modern engine technology used by oppressive governments just as often as we've seen it used to take them down yes knowing the identity of every protester in a mob he's devastating knowledge but it will not stop that mob storming the gates of your palace if they're already there it's a little too late we've also seen what a mob of angry bitter keyboard vigilantes will do to someone that's offended them when they really do have access to every aspect of your life hiding from abusers from stalkers is significantly more difficult than it ever was there is no off button no block button for face recognition technology despite the use ham-fisted attempt to force one into law politicians politicians positon found that that not only other current lives open to detailed analysis but that previous ones are to Facebook survive long enough to get its data hooked into engines just long enough and of course your privacy settings don't matter all that much when every tourist photo you've ever appeared in is now available for download as well doesn't matter whether you tagged that as removed elites in this photo because that doesn't really apply anymore when all of your users have blanket access and just give it over well your life from the advent of smartphones onwards is perfectly searchable Tom even claimed I was young I was like mid-20s at that point and even if somehow you managed to come through all that squeaky-clean without a stain on your character without a bad picture anywhere can you claim that for every one you were ever associated with everyone you've ever appeared next year can you can you say for every word you ever anonymously wrote on every web forum anywhere that all of those were fine when IP address logs which are in the engines and throws analysis which is pretty easy to do can trace it back to you with 95% accuracy we're at panopticon now where they're placed for everyone who lives in a city or uses anything other than the postal service and that's 85 percent of the UK population and rising have you seen the crime statistics pretty much every type of crime is down in the last 10 years it's not a statistical blip it's not under reporting the percentage of crimes being underreported so the percentage of crimes going unreported has gone down too and yes as a methodology for that you can look it up I know correlation is not causation I know that the two don't go together but if you go out into the street and just ask people people who grew up post Google if they would trade everything that the last the last 16 the last 32 years has given them for some nebulous concept of privacy you are gonna wait a long time before you find someone who thinks that's a good idea and if you talk to the kids who grew up post engines then privacy's this strange thing that their grandparents believed in why wouldn't you share exactly what you're doing does it's just the right thing to do imagine for a minute that you are sitting back here in 2014 the day before Lennon jamming released that paper nothing seems to have changed for a little while the last big revolution back in 2014 the last big revolution was Twitter and that was eight years old it's ancient history there was just enough complacency just enough thought of stability as they came out of a recession that they'd gone and got themselves into another bubble apse this time smartphone mouse previously back then it was the dot-com bubble but now perhaps there were companies investing billions in just little little toys on phones they never get their money back they knew somewhere they must have known they were never going to get their money back but it meant that their competitors weren't getting that little toy on the phone and maybe maybe they make enough money back with advertising or whatever idea they had that they could start to make something out of it that's exactly what's going on now engines one bit the engine I used the engine those muttering teenagers news has just been bought for twenty billion dollars it'll last what a couple of years the investors are banking they can make that money back in that time and they won't make their money back just like last time and just like the time before that but my point is not to complain about people being people and making some poor investment choices and my point is not to mourn my old-fashioned ideas of privacy because even back in 2014 that ship was sailing and it would have taken an incredible effort to stop it forever sea was already dead it's just that not everyone agreed with it yet my point is not to be someone from the previous generation complaining about muttering kids and their damned distractions of course they're distracted they are part of what may be the greatest thing ever to happen to this planet my point is this the dot-com crash all the way back then did not kill comms the app crash did not kill apps not the concept and killed a lot of individual workers but we're still using them the engine crash won't kill engines but you're sitting here and you think the world is always going to be like this everyone does I do we've always had engines the same time we've always had smartphones back in 2014 if I think back to my time in university I had a smartphone then I just remembered no I didn't and I'll brick of a Nokia because that's when I went to universe but my brains kind of casually edited in that of course we always have smartphones but here's the thing it might not have been engines might have been anything might have been nanotech or biotech or some weird thing I can't think of even now predictions of the future never ever turn out to be true but that next thing whatever it is it is right around the corner it always is no matter what year it is whatever that next thing is will change the world and it will arrive so fast faster than anyone can think but it won't be shocking it won't be startling it won't plunges into a horribleness taupe your elevators to a glorious Technicolor future world the same way that our world right now isn't really either of those things whatever comes next will change our lives and we have the choice to shape how it'll change our lives but it will change them and those lives will by and large get a little bit better just like they usually do so whatever that next thing is and whatever year it actually turns out to be hope and whether you to see it my name is Tom Scott enjoy the rest of the show you you

Channel: Tom Scott

Views: 1,496,101

Rating: 4.9449186 out of 5

Keywords: tomscott, tom scott, Privacy (Legal Subject), 2030, Prediction (Quotation Subject), facebook, twitter, privacy, Cardinal Richelieu (Military Commander)

Id: _kBlH-DQsEg

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 06 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/jokoon]

why is that guy standing like jesus ?

[u/[deleted]]

The derivation of meaningful information from your data. Data obfuscation.

Does your online persona imply anything about you in real life? To me it's almost like thought privacy. A conversation with others is one side of what it means to think.

If you want to stop people from being creative, intelligent, and innovative, make them believe they have no privacy. They won't have any room to experiment or find out who they are, who they want to be, or who they like being.

I personally consider my online personalities to be artistic sociological commentaries, as they often reflect the values of the environments I live in.