Will ChatGPT change the world? Lessons from previous waves of automation software

Will ChatGPT change the world? To answer that we need to look at the adoption of previous generations of automation technology. How fast have they been adopted? And by whom?

Getting Paid

I've had trouble with late payers recently. More than usual. Sadly, after 17 years running my own businesses, I've come to expect a few invoices to be overdue here and there. But this was a lot of invoices, very overdue. It was stressful. For both me, and my clients.The people I work with in client organisations rarely have much control over what gets paid and when. Even if they are senior leadership. They can chivvy and chase, but they can't make it happen. It's embarrassing for them.By way of explanation or apology, clients have sometimes let me in on the internal machinations preventing me from getting paid. These stories are no longer shocking, but the interminable bureaucracy of large organisations* is always disappointing.The conversations bounce between time zones and departments. Finance, IT, operations, marketing, procurement, HR. Many people are involved. Ultimately, the problem is usually simple. Two digits are transposed in my bank details and somehow IT have to get involved to deal with a change request. Someone just missed an email, or was dealing with a backlog of work and holding up everyone else.There are no good excuses for late payment. But occasionally I have a little empathy. How much must these failures cost the business? How many hours of time? Across how many people? How much lost hair and how many sleepless nights?

Bug or feature?

You won't always see it as a supplier, but most companies now have some sort of process automation wrapped around their procurement. In fact, around most of their processes. The idea of these systems is to streamline things, make them more efficient, and avoid errors. Or is it?The evidence would suggest they're not very good at getting suppliers paid on time. Judging by the feedback from Twitter followers when I whine about late payments, my experience is pretty universal. And failures seem to create enormous inefficiency at the client end, costing them time and money.So what are these systems really for? And why do companies keep using them?One reason is to control spending. Leaders naturally want to know where their company's money is going and who is spending it. Another reason is fraud prevention - or at least ensuring that there is a good paper trail to prosecute those who do commit it. But couldn't they do these things and make things more efficient? Certainly, that would have been the promise of whoever sold them the system.

Humans failing the technology

The answer is that of course the system could be more efficient, as well as creating the appropriate controls and paper trail. But it's not (usually) the system that prevents that from happening. It's the people.Who benefits if the system is more streamlined? Headcount can go down. Fewer people are needed in finance and IT. The business might benefit but those people don't.Bosses would have more time on their hands. But they would manage fewer people. Have a smaller budget. They would lose prestige. They don't feel like they would benefit.This isn't to say that people are consciously sabotaging the system. They're not. They're doing their job. The same job they did yesterday, and the day before. Things that feel right, good and rewarding. They are making sure the processes are followed. Making sure no bad transactions get through. That's what they're there for, right?What they are rarely incentivised to do is fix the broken bits of the process and do themselves out of a job. And so, they don't.In fact, even when a new system comes in, they tend to keep doing what they did before. They bend the system to their old behaviours. Without enormous and often disruptive interventions in changing behaviours - and sometimes people - as well as technology, things largely stay the same, just with new software.

Is ChatGPT any different?

While all this late payment shenanigans was going on, my timeline was filling up with examples of the latest iteration of OpenAI's work, ChatGPT. A machine learning system trained on a sea of data to create new things based on simple text instructions. It can write a story, a press release, code or even a multiple-choice adventure game.At first glance it looks like some kind of doomsday device that will destroy employment in a variety of sectors. But analysed in the context of my experiences trying to get paid, I'm not so sure.Process automation technologies like the ones that should have seen me paid on time with the minimum of fuss are not new. And yet years - decades - after their introduction, human beings are still stopping them from delivering on their promise**. Out of self-interest, lack of interest, lack of incentive or support, we've stymied much of the promise of efficiency.Why should ChatGPT be any different? In many corporate contexts, I suspect it won't.

Beyond the corporation

Outside the walls of the corporation or other large bodies though, the situation looks very different. ChatGPT and its brethren are weapons of wicked efficiency for the lean - and the potentially unscrupulous.Twenty-something years ago I was working on the marketing efforts of a large US software firm. Let's just say they were involved in video, for fear of upsetting any old clients. The company's revenues always seemed slightly out of kilter with the small number of case studies we were ever able to offer. A few high profile sports leagues and a couple of broadcasters didn't seem like a significant enough customer base to justify the numbers they were doing. The reason, we all knew, was that the biggest chunk of revenue came from the adult industry. And no-one wanted to talk about that.Who was the earliest to latch on to the potential for streaming media? It was the adult content providers***. The same group were very early to the potential for the tablet. I heard an anecdote from someone in the adult industry that the day the iPad launched, the wholesalers (yes, pornography has wholesalers) were ready with all their content refactored to the appropriate screen sizes.Translate this behaviour to the here and now. Who will be the companies making the most out of ChatGPT?

High volume, tight personalisation, low quality

ChatGPT doesn't turn out amazing quality writing. Yes, it's better than a lot of first drafts I've seen from many writers. But it's not going to win a Pulitzer, or even get past any decent newspaper editor. If you have high standards for quality control, you're not going to be using it. Or at the very least, you will be doing a lot of editing before you publish.But there are a lot of places where quality is much less important than volume, and tailoring. Anywhere you want a lot of words about a particular niche, ChatGPT will be useful. As will equivalent platforms: while OpenAI might have content moderation, other platforms do not.Two industries spring to mind. The adult industry first of all, just like in the old days of streaming media. Sure enough, there is apparently a thriving community of people using large language models (the generic term for tech like this) to write niche erotic fiction. Whatever your particular peccadillo, you can now get an endless supply of tailored fiction to meet your needs. The web will be awash with it soon enough, as it will with its image, video, or interactive equivalent. Combine an AI-written script with deepfake tech and you have generative pornography.Then there is the search engine optimisation industry, and the web content industry more broadly. Tech-savvy people who are trying to maximise the return on investment of their time. Want to create a website that looks like the authority on any particular topic? ChatGPT could be your answer. Of course, Google's algorithm could be tweaked to spot AI-generated content (read enough and it has a noticeably idiosyncratic style). But that's just the latest round in an ongoing battle between those building websites and the businesses trying to help us navigate them.

Many niches

These aren't the only applications where ChatGPT will be successful. There are likely many more niches where cost and tailoring are more important than outright quality. But I think they are representative. And in every niche, this generative technology presents the same problem: navigation.We are already struggling to navigate the digital world. There's too much of it. Too much content. we struggle to choose the best use of our time, facing constant FOMO. What happens when there is a 10x, 100x, 10000000x increase in the volume of content out there? Without a meaningfully better way to filter and navigate, we will be lost, swamped by it.Technologies like ChatGPT will not just swamp us in content, they will drive us into ever smaller niches. Arguably the reason that so much investment goes into franchises like Marvel and Star Wars these days is that they are some of the few brands that can still attract a mass audience. With so much choice in front of us, it will be easier and easier to sink into a niche of one. That might sound appealing but it's not always healthy. We need content that connects us and creates a shared conversation. And I'm not sure a robot is going to deliver that any time soon.##*A journalist on Twitter asked for a good book about 'business' the other day. I pointed out that there's often very little difference between the internal workings of large organisations and the state organisations with which he is more familiar. This is more true than many in the 'dynamic, efficient' private sector would like to admit.** Note, it's not just humans. Some of the software is just crap.*** They weren't the only ones obviously, but they were operating at enormous scale very early. See also, online gambling.

What would you do if you could clone yourself? Meet my personal AI.

Imagine you could clone yourself. What could you achieve?What if there was a digital you, that knew what you knew. Knew everything you said or wrote. That was intimately familiar with your style. And that could respond to questions on your behalf. Or even help you to crystallise your own thoughts.I’ve been lucky to be one of the first people to get such a machine. Meet tom.personal.ai. Or tom for short.tom is a virtual me, primed with hundreds of thousands of words of my writing, from my books, my blog, and my social media. It’s learning more about me every day, feeding on my creative output from the last ten years. It’s beginning to absorb my podcasts, my presentations, and more.Now you can ask tom questions, just like my clients do.As an applied futurist I work with some of the largest companies in the world – brands like Pepsi, Mars, Google, Meta, Ford and BMW. They commission me to explore the future or to teach them to do it for themselves. But I only have so much time.With tom, I can open up my work to a huge new audience, not as static blogposts or ageing presentations, but as dynamic content. tom can be a virtual collaborator for a new range of clients, offering insight and inspiration on the topics that are relevant to them.What would you want to ask a futurist?This is just the beginning for personal AIs. It is a huge privilege to be part of the first wave of these robots hitting the internet, because it is a concept I have been talking about for over five years.I strongly believe that in the age of the metaverse we will need a machine that knows us. One that can help us to navigate the complexity of a world where the boundaries between physical and digital have fallen. And one that can help us to maximise our own cognitive capabilities – and our time.The company, Personal AI, that has built tom, is starting us down a road to where AI technologies can be really useful. Not for big companies but for us as individuals, releasing us to do more, create more, and have more fun.You can interact with tom now, over at metaverse.personal.ai. It’s early days so it’s still learning. Ask it some questions and see what it says. Share the answers!

Entering the Metaverse

What comes after the Internet? This is not so much about replacement as evolution, at least in a Pokémon sense. What is the evolved form of the Internet? The Metaverse. The coming together - or collision - of the physical and digital worlds.I have written about this a lot in various forms over recent years, but I was inspired to address it again after speaking to fellow futurist Cathy Hackl for an episode of my podcast, Talk About Tomorrow. This episode rather accidentally became part of a trilogy of interviews on the subject of the metaverse, bookended by conversations with Steve Sinclair of Mojo Vision, maker of smart contact lenses, and John Keefe, co-founder and director of Draw and Code, one of the world's premier immersive content studios.I return to this topic again and again because I don't think I can stress enough just how important it is that all of us get our heads around the Metaverse concept. So here's a bit of an overview to compliment those three podcast episodes. I strongly recommend having a listen.

Technologies powering the Metaverse

There are multiple definitions of the Metaverse, but it was first laid out in Neal Stephenson's book, Snowcrash. Here, Stephenson described a virtual reality patterned after the real world. Somewhere that your avatar could walk around. Imagine Fortnite or more accurately, Population One - a virtual world projected into your vision through a set of goggles.Today, we talk about the Metaverse as the blending of the physical and digital worlds. What does that mean? Well, multiple technologies are shattering the sheet of glass - your phone or computer screen - that has historically held the two worlds apart. These include:

Voice Assistants

Alexa and Google Home allow us to interact with the internet, ecommerce and other digital sources of data (e.g. music streaming) with our voices rather than our fingers on a keyboard or touchscreen. In doing so, voice assistants have become one of the first and most prominent ways in which the digital world has started to bleed into the physical.

Internet of Things (IoT)

It now costs just a few pence to add intelligence to an every day object: a lightbulb, power socket, wristband etc. The result is that millions of objects are now being equipped with an internet connection and computing power. This allows them to do two things:

• feed information from the physical world back into the digital
• control the physical world from the digital

Again, this leads to the blurring of the lines between physical and digital, when information is common between the two and control can flow from one to the other.

Computer Vision

The rising power of computers combined with the ubiquity of cheap cameras means that machines are getting better and better at interpreting our physical world. They can recognise people, objects, locations and even emotions. The result is that computers and artificial intelligences need less and less explicit input in order to make things happen. For example, autonomous vehicles can 'see' obstructions.

AI

As ever, I use this term in its broadest rather than its most specific sense, to mean software that is configured to take on cognitive loads that would formerly have been shouldered by humans. AI is a critical part of the metaverse because it gives objects and virtual entities the smarts to usefully interact with us, either in the physical or digital realm. Information drawn from voice assistants, computer vision, or any number of sensors can be interpreted into action. And that action can be wrapped in an interface, be it a digital avatar or a change in the environment, that is meaningful to us.Some of this can be done by much simpler code than can be usefully called 'AI'. But the added power means that each interaction doesn't need to be coded manually. The system can learn, interpret, experiment and adapt.

VR

Virtual Reality allows us to experience digital content as if it were a physical environment. Even in the state of the art, it is a long way from perfect. For example, moving around an environment beyond ducks and lunges has to be done with a joystick rather than your legs. But it is nonetheless compelling. Games engage. Virtual cinemas allow us to escape the four walls in which we've been cooped up. And as John Keefe pointed out, people are even (finally) turning to VR as a collaboration tool.

AR

Augmented Reality, or Mixed Reality, is our primary interface with the Metaverse because it too blends the physical and digital worlds. If you have ever used a filter on Snapchat or Facebook Messenger, or played Pokémon Go, then you have experienced rudimentary AR. But it can be so much more. Some time in the next decade, probably in the next five years, we will begin the transition from handsets to headsets, giving us the opportunity to overlay digital items on to the physical world at any time. Virtual people, creatures, aliens, displays, interfaces and objects. There is a huge amount of design work to be done in order to create an experience that is natural, engaging and desirable. In many ways, this design challenge is much greater than the complexities of condensing the hardware. But I believe we will overcome it.

Impacts of the Metaverse

The Metaverse will be all pervasive. It will be our primary interface to just about every form of transaction and probably much more:

Society

Today, we worry about the amount of time people spend behind a screen, lost in a digital world. I suspect that within a few years, most people will spend ten hours a day in mixed reality. This will amplify today's difficulties but also help to resolve them. With the Metaverse you never leave the physical world, but you can twist it. You can repaint the world to meet your preferences, changing your surroundings and even the people who inhabit them.

Shopping

You will never have to ask "How much is that?" Your integral AI will know what you are looking at and seek out the answer. The shop may beam a virtual assistant into your field of view, so that everyone gets a personal shopper. Maybe it will negotiate behind the scenes with your own AI for discounts based on your loyalty.

Banks

Imagine a sixth sense for your spending and credit limit. A subtle colour overlay on products telling you what you can afford, or which is the best use of your limited funds. Imagine your credit score represented in three dimensions, a monument you need to rebuild.

Government services

A personal advisor for everyone, powered by AI? No more language barriers and hard to navigate websites, just conversations. The trade-off being that they might know so much more about you.

Property

Virtual tours available instantly, captured by the agent's glasses and streamed to yours. High definition capture of any issues in the home. Three dimensional guides to any DIY job, from assembling furniture to fixing a leaking tap.

Dating

Who is that? Are the available? Are they a match? This one is fraught with risk.

Ubiquitous technology

I could go on and on because the Metaverse will touch every aspect of life. It might be the lens through which we work and study. It will be so ubiquitous that we will rapidly start to assume that everyone can access it, as we have with the smartphone.The location of the access hardware is important here. Because it is on your head, interactions can be much more subtle. A headset can see what you see, hear what you hear, and answer the questions that those sensory inputs throw up before you even verbalise them. The AI that sits behind your AR experience, personalising your environment and picking up on you needs, will become very much a co-pilot. The shift to the Metaverse will mean the cognitive augmentation of every human who engages with it. That has implications for inequality, but also for health: imagine the help it could be to those suffering with dementia.In summary, whatever your field you should be contemplating what this shift will do to your sector. Because I am more certain than ever that it is coming. And more than ever that it will touch just about everything. 

When the flame goes out

A bit of a different approach this week. Thought I'd try my hand at a little future fiction. A short story. It's a bit 'on the nose' but I think you'll get the idea.This story was inspired by those questions we all get from our kids about old technology: "What's a record?", "Why is the save button that funny square?" etc. It got me thinking: what abandoned technology might kids be curious about in the near future?##The pop of the cork, then the wail of the smoke alarm. The two sounds followed one another so closely, I felt it must be cause and effect. It took me a few seconds to realise that my wine hadn't triggered the alarm. Nor was dinner burning. I hadn't got past chopping vegetables.Instead, the noise was coming from upstairs. That meant the kids.I dropped the bottle on the surface, and started to turn. Then instinctively turned back when I saw it wobbling in the corner of my eye. Having saved the wine, I raced up the stairs seeking the source of the smoke.What I found was just wisps. Barely visible. And my eldest daughter, standing on the landing, hands clamped over her ears, looking shocked and sheepish. Her younger sister hadn't even opened her door.Satisfied we weren't in imminent danger, I turned my attention to the alarm. "Move out of the way" I shouted over the noise. I grabbed a child-sized chair from the eldest's bedroom, giving me just enough extra height to reach the reset button.The silence brought relief. The adrenaline quickly started to subside. As quiet returned, the 8-year-old removed her hands from her ears."Do you know where the smoke came from?" I asked. She instantly dissolved into tears. "I'm sorry!" she pleaded.I pulled her into a hug and settled her. "It's OK. I just need to know what happened. You're not in trouble." She continued to sob, albeit less energetically."Did one of your farts set your room on fire?""DAAAD!!" she shouted. But she couldn't help herself. She laughed. And the tears stopped.She wiped her face on her sleeve. "Come and see." she said.I followed her into her room.There, on the floor, was a log. More of a small branch really. Two feet long and about the same diameter as her arm, but twisted and gnarled. It was old, bark-less and so dry it was almost white. She had brought it back from a walk a few weeks earlier and insisted on keeping it, lugging it up the stairs and nearly taking a number of pictures down along the way.One of the hollows in the log was dark and sooty. Next to it lay a straight stick, around which was wrapped the string of a plastic kids bow. The sort that fires darts with large suckers on the end. The straight stick was also blackened at one end.I was stunned. I felt anger rising. But I was also curious. And impressed. I knew what she had been doing. I had learned about this trick on a survivalist YouTube channel as a kid. The bow allows you to spin the stick to create friction on the larger piece, starting a fire. I had tried this trick many times and barely got the stick warm before I gave up, arm aching. Without the interruption of the alarm, she would have succeeded where I failed."Were you trying to start a fire?""I just wanted to see what it looked like!"This stunned me again. I was speechless as I tried to turn back through eight years of memories. Surely she had seen fire?Slowly I ticked off the many ways she might have experienced it.No gas hob. That had gone in the early thirties when we refurbished the kitchen. All domestic gas had been phased out a few years earlier and it didn't make much sense to cling to the dead technology.We had a wood burner in the living room. But those had been all but outlawed in the twenties. Actually, the laws banning them didn't come in until the thirties but you risked social censure from the local clean air campaigners if they saw smoke rising from your rooftop. And the stats weren't good on what they did to people inside the house either. So the only light in ours now came from a big string of fairy lights stuffed inside the cast iron casing.But she must have seen fire somewhere, surely?Bonfires? Maybe not. Bonfire night had increasingly been 'fireworks night' until those were banned after a series of accidents, including the high profile injuries to a popular influencer. With drone displays, laser shows and holograms taking over from the fireworks as the main attraction, people just stopped building bonfires either at home or for big displays. The risk - and the insurance - just wasn't worth it. I'm sure we went and saw a real bonfire when she was young. But maybe she was only two? She wouldn't remember now.Candles then. Sure she must have seen birthday candles? But no, I realised. We'd had the same set of LED ones for probably ten years now with their archaic little USB charger.No-one smoked actual cigarettes any more. At least, no-one we knew. And the clean air rules meant no-one burned garden waste. Not here in the city.So no. At eight years old, our daughter had probably never seen a flame. Not that she could recall."Dad?"I snapped out of my reverie."Do you still want to see fire?""Won't the alarm go off again?""Not in here!! Please tell me you will never, ever try to start a fire in here again. There's a reason we have alarms for that. It's incredibly dangerous.""Okay, okay!"She looks like she will cry again."But I think you should see fire. Come outside?""But it's bedtime!""That didn't stop you trying to burn the house down."At this point the younger child pokes her head around the door. A smoke alarm couldn't pull her out of her cosy bed, but the promise of being up after bed time is clearly too good to miss.The three of us head downstairs and put on shoes and coats. I head down into the cellar and find my father's old blowtorch - still miraculously with a little propane in the tank. I'm not messing around with rubbing sticks together.We head out to the back yard and I place the gnarled log on an old paving slab. The girls squeal and recoil as the blowtorch ignites. As they look on, I point the torch at the log. Under this assault it bursts rapidly into flames.The three of us stand there, transfixed and silent, as it is consumed.

Long read: 5G and Mixed Reality

I am taking part in two roundtable discussions this week, each focused on a specific technology or set of technologies that stands to have a major impact on our world over the next few years. Though I now spend more time talking about business and culture than I do technology, I remain convinced that it has been one of the biggest drivers of change in our world over recent years and will continue to play a primary role in shifting our future. Understanding the potential impact of these technologies – positive and negative – is therefore critical.Here then – in part as an exercise to organise my own thoughts in advance of these discussions – are my thoughts on two questions:

• What is the role of 5G in the future economic success (or otherwise) of the UK?
• What is the potential of AR and VR technologies, particularly in the property realm, and how/when will this potential be realised?

5G: poor marketing

I doubt I am the first to make this analogy, but 5G is a lot like HS2. OK, no-one mistakenly believes that 5G is responsible for causing pandemics. But each is a large-scale infrastructure project, the motivations for which are widely misunderstood.The naming of HS2 is one of the worst marketing decisions ever. Because HS2 is not about speed. It is about capacity. We just do not have the tracks available to move enough trains up and down the country – or across it for that matter. HS2 does not greatly accelerate the journey from London to Manchester (the most pertinent route to me). But it does put high speed trains on a separate track from local stopping services, allowing more of those to operate at a more consistent rhythm. It adds capacity.Most of the headlines about 5G have been about speed of one form or another. How fast you can download a film. The low latency connections that will apparently be critical to self-driving cars (something about which I am a little sceptical). It is understandable that this has been the message as this is what might sell it to individual users keen to be ahead of the curve. But really, 5G is also about capacity of one kind or another.

Increasing efficiency

The first kind of efficiency that matters, is spectral efficiency. There are only so many frequencies on which you can usefully carry information from point A to point B. A subset of these are suitable for mobile devices. With demand for connectivity growing constantly((OpenReach recorded 10 PetaBytes per hour flowing over its network in May, a large leap in a constantly growing figure driven by lockdown - https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/05/openreach-records-10-petabyte-peak-in-uk-internet-traffic.html)), the challenge is on to carry more and more data over the available spectrum. 5G uses new spectrum but it also makes much better use of it, topping out at 30 bits per second (bps) per Hertz (Hz) according to the CTIA ((https://www.telecompetitor.com/ctia-5g-will-provide-big-spectral-efficiency-gains/#:~:text=5G%20networks%20will%20provide%20major,%2DAdvanced%20technology%2C%20CTIA%20said.)) versus the 15 bps/Hz limit of 4G.This is closely connected to the second kind of efficiency: simultaneous connections. We keep adding more and more devices to the network. The compound annual growth rate of the number of smartphones averaged 93% from the early 80s through 2017. There are now an estimated 22bn connected devices – predicted to be 50bn by 2030. 4G is seriously limited in the number of devices it can connect in a given area, its so-called connection density. While 4G networks can connect around 2000 devices per square kilometre, 5G devices can theoretically connect up to a million. If we want to add more smart devices to the network (and some examples of where we might are below), then we need a more efficient network.Of course, all this data must go somewhere once it reaches the base station from your devices. This is called backhaul. As part of the 5G rollout, operators will be looking at how they deal with your data, introducing more computing at the edge of networks for example, and caching copies of popular content so your request doesn’t need to flow across the network.

Too much juice

Then there is the issue of energy efficiency. 4G networks consume a *lot* of juice. Speaking to LightReading((https://www.lightreading.com/asia-pacific/operators-starting-to-face-up-to-5g-power-cost-/d/d-id/755255)), Jake Saunders, the managing director at ABI Research, said a typical 4G cell might draw six kilowatts in power, rising to perhaps nine kilowatts at peak periods. Multiply that by the roughly 23,000 base stations in the UK((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_towers_in_the_United_Kingdom)) and you get a draw on the grid somewhere between 138 and 207 megawatts.Huawei estimates a 5G base station might consume 300% to 350% of a 4G base station, once operating across all the available frequencies. This sounds bad, until you consider the alternative. Even if 4G could support the continuing growth in demand, its power consumption would be orders of magnitude greater than 5G. According to Orange((https://hellofuture.orange.com/en/5g-energy-efficiency-by-design/)), more efficient 5G technologies are expected to divide the energy consumption per gigabit transported by a factor of 10 compared to 4G once they reach maturity by 2025, and then by a factor of 20 by 2030 .So, if we want to keep expanding the number of devices on the network, and the richness of the media we consume, we need to move to 5G.

Slowing progress

The obvious rejoinder from some will be: do we really need these increases? Or should we stick with 4G? While I think there are technological avenues we ought to avoid (for example, some geo-engineering responses to climate change, certain weapons technologies), I don’t think there is a very strong argument for suppressing the development of general purpose technologies like networks. Just like roads and rail before them, networks are not without their risks and challenges. But they are the platform for other forms of progress: scientific, economic, medical and social. Stopping our move to 5G would not only undermine these efforts, it would place us at a global disadvantage.

Delays on the line

Which leads neatly to one of the issues under discussion at the roundtable event: the delay in our 5G rollout caused by the UK government’s decision to prevent Huawei supplying new equipment, and forcing operators to remove what they had already deployed.Personally, I have always been deeply sceptical about the specific threat presented by Huawei’s technology. The telecoms equipment industry, like all high-tech industries, has long and complex supply chains. There are many opportunities for hostile entities to try to interfere with the equipment before or when it is in place. And it is so complex that maintaining security is a constant battle. Do I believe that Chinese government agencies would try to access UK networks through Huawei’s technology? It seems likely. That’s what spies do. But is there any greater risk from us using Huawei’s technology to anyone else’s? That, I find hard to believe.I have been saying this publicly for a couple of years now, though until the last few months have had no actual relationship with Huawei aside from going to a phone launch about five years ago where I walked away with a free device (as did everyone else in the room). Huawei are paying me to be part of this roundtable event, as any other company would have to. But my opinions are fairly well documented long before this point and haven’t changed at all.

GDP impact

Whether or not you believe Huawei’s equipment presents a material risk to our network security, we now have another issue to contend with. Back in 2017, the UK government predicted that once rolled out, 5G would play a key role in 5-6% of UK GDP((https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/582640/FCCG_Interim_Report.pdf)). If its rollout is delayed, what effect will that have on the economy?Research commissioned by Huawei from Assembly Research has attempted to quantify that effect. It suggests the economic hit will be around £18.2bn. The delay could also “jeopardise £108bn of economic benefit to the UK and the creation of 350,000 jobs in regions outside London and the South-East over the next decade, putting at risk the Government's 'levelling up' agenda.”If you want to understand where those figures come from, then I recommend reading the research (not available to link to as I write this). But I have my own take on this, particularly with regards to where the economic benefits of 5G come from. For me there are two distinct drivers to look at, one of productivity, one of growth.

Hello? Can you hear me?

While our broadband providers have coped admirably through lockdown, I think most people would acknowledge now that our connectivity problems are far from solved. How many calls have you been on over the last few months where people’s video and audio were disrupted, or they dropped in and out of the conversation because of poor connectivity? People are still wandering around their houses trying to get a better signal or working from strange locations because their Wi-Fi or 4G just does not give them a reliable connection elsewhere.Lots of people have tried to quantify the cost of this poor connectivity. In January, Zen Internet suggested SMEs could be losing 72 minutes per day((https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476441/Poor-UK-internet-connectivity-and-technology-cited-as-hampering-UK-SME-productivity)). Clearly, Zen has something to gain from such statements. But I do not think they are probably that far out. Even if Zen’s estimate is out by a factor of ten, that is half an hour of lost productivity each week, for each employee. That adds up.We need connectivity that stops being a question. You should never, ever, need to think about whether you are connected, only about the application.

Tech-driven growth

The question of growth is more interesting perhaps, but also more speculative. What future applications does 5G support that we do not have today? The simplest answer is just more: as noted above there are hard limits on the number of things we can connect via 4G. But the more fun answer comes from thinking about how you might use the specific characteristics of 5G: ubiquity, latency, bandwidth as required.The first obvious answer is things. Right now, connecting things to the network – particularly remote or mobile things – is still a bit fiddly. Imagine if you could take a thing out of its box and it just worked, with no configuration, for maybe five years before it needed recharging. Think of the applications in manufacturing, fitness, care, logistics, security, entertainment, toys. 5G combined with new battery technologies, passive energy harvesting, and low energy computing should finally open up the potential of the so-called Internet of Things market by stripping away the hassle and fuss and making it easier to deploy connected stuff in the field((Note, early 5G devices have been very power hungry because they are maintaining simultaneous connections to 3 and 4G networks to sustain coverage. This situation will improve dramatically with future generations of the technology and improved 5G coverage.)).The second answer is mixed reality. I have long argued that it is likely we will make a shift from smart phones to smart glasses or headsets. These devices will need ubiquitous rich connectivity, and low latency. Which makes for a neat segue to the second part of this very long blog post.

Living in mixed reality

Right now, we live in two discrete worlds: physical and digital. They touch in various places, like crossing points between dimensions. But they are fundamentally separate. We interact in different ways with these two worlds, one directly and the other indirectly, mediated by a mouse, keyboard, games controller or touchscreen. Or perhaps a voice assistant. We behave differently, communicating online sentiments and in styles we would not dream of replicating in the physical world.These two worlds are separate and distinct, but they are moving closer together. Sixty years ago, the digital world was alien, unintuitive, and required deep expertise to navigate. Those who visited the digital realm were like astronauts exploring an alien space. Today, we can feel our way through the digital world, a space that is more and more familiar. Tomorrow, I think the two worlds begin to truly merge.

Alternatives to dystopia

There are many dystopian visions for this future. Of humans separated from each other by screens spread across their field of vision. Of flashing pop-ups and garish neon interruptions to our field of vision. Notifications pinging endlessly in our ears. But while I think this is a risk in the interim stage, ultimately I can see a much more positive vision for our future cyborg selves.Human senses are incredibly plastic. We can learn to process all sorts of data coming through as sound, touch, taste, sight and smell. You can see this in the work on sensory substitution of the celebrity neuroscientist David Eagleman((https://www.eagleman.com/www/www/research/sensory-substitution)). Or you can see it in the way we learn not just to drive cars, but to sense them. After a while driving a car you stop being conscious of most of your actions. They become automatic. But for them to become automatic, your brain must be unconsciously processing sensory inputs: it’s the tone of the engine and the change in acceleration that tells you when to change up a gear, not the numbers on the rev counter.As we start to live in a permanent mixed reality environment, I think the same thing will happen. We’ll start to ignore the dashboard analogue: the pop-ups, notifications and formal interfaces, and start to rely on more subtle signals. I think the future of mixed reality is like having super powers, or what the original Book of the Future called ‘Extra Sensory Perception’.Imagine all the rich information to which a smart headset might have access translated into streams of sensory information that your brain can interpret subconsciously. Subtle hues of colour, vibrations, sounds, temperatures, electrical stimulation perhaps. A sixth sense for what is happening in your social circle or the stock market. Subtle indicators to point out bargains, risks, or potential dates.The digital world in this scenario becomes translucent: something that colours our interactions with the physical world but does not block them. I think it has the potential to make us more human, not less.There is a huge amount of technological development and interaction design to be done here. But I see this as a more likely outcome than the dystopian futures so often presented.VR, by contrast, will always be an escape from reality. Or at the least, a vehicle into other realities: someone else’s or perhaps our own future. In lockdown, all of those options sound more appealing than ever. But as an escape, they are only somewhere we could, or should, spend a small amount of time. Most of the time we have to face reality, however moderated.So, bringing this back to today and the topic of the roundtable event: how will these technologies, VR and AR, affect the property sector.Right now, I still think the advantage conferred by VR in exploring a property is marginal. It is a very solitary experience, which buying a property rarely is. That is not to say it cannot add value – particularly when the property is not yet built. But the core of the decision making is still likely to be made based on data, photographs, discussion, and a good measure of gut feel.AR has a much greater role to play, though perhaps less immediately. AR will be a critical tool for everyone in the property value chain. It will be used to capture images and plans of land, overlay existing properties with virtual remodels, highlight critical information from utilities to crime, inform contractors etc. We are just not there yet with the hardware, the interaction design, or frankly, the network.It is perhaps fitting that it is in a property industry context – a business that deals specifically with the built environment – that we have this conversation. But tomorrow’s world is one where physical and digital are largely indistinguishable.

The internet of the future is a quest to close the gap between physical and digital

There’s something funny about 20,000 people gathering in a city to talk about a technology that promises to make the distance between them irrelevant. But that is what they did for Cisco Live! Europe, and I attended as a guest of the company. These are my big takeaways from the event about the internet of the future.

Face to face

Today there’s still no substitute for getting together face to face. The best digital experiences today cannot come close to recreating the incredible bandwidth of the full range of human senses: not just sight and sound but touch, smell and that hard to describe sense of the people all around you. There are social and chemical signals passing between us that we barely understand consciously, let alone can capture and transmit.I strongly believe that physical interaction will remain the premium experience for the foreseeable future. We want to grasp hands, kiss cheeks, and feel what people are thinking, not just hear their words. We want to feel the reaction in the room. But the internet of the future will get closer and closer to closing this gap. Indeed, one day, technology will offer experiences that supersede the physical in ways we cannot yet imagine.But this is still some way off. In the near term, the goal is to narrow the margin between the physical and the digital. The internet of the near future is one that addresses three critical aspects of connectivity. What you might, with my love of threes and alliteration, call the three Ss: seamlessness, speed and simplicity. Changing our experience of connectivity across these three dimensions has direct implications for every aspect of the way we live and work.

Seamless connectivity

With the internet of the future, we need never think about whether we are online. It won’t be a question. Wherever we or our things are, they will be connected, reliably, and with sufficient bandwidth that there is never any disruption to the services that rely on this connectivity. “Flawlessness”, as Cisco’s Danny Winokur, general manager for AppDynamics described it, will be the expectation in all our technological interactions.Getting to this point requires a combination of technologies. The fifth-generation mobile network we have all heard so much about, but also many less obvious technologies behind the scenes. Every component of the network “must be a sensor” as Cisco’s Scott Harrell, general manager for enterprise networking, put it. It must be able to monitor its own performance and flag issues before they affect service. The network itself must be smart, able to allocate bandwidth appropriately to ensure the robustness of different services. And we will need a layer of intelligence beyond human to oversee it in all its complexity.What does this mean for us as humans? The conversations we have today about any potential over-reliance on technology will look positively quaint in the future, when we have come to accept knowledge as largely a commodity available on demand and often served up without even a conscious enquiry. Truly seamless connectivity changes what it is to be human, removes some our limitations and equips us with the potential for extreme cognitive enhancement. The change will be gradual rather than dramatic. We won’t face this as a shock. Rather, the slow process of human augmentation will continue.For businesses, this presents a growing pressure to perform. Expectations of service will continue rise. Customers expect to be served 24/7/365, and served quickly. The drive will be to lower friction at every point of interaction with the customer ensuring that their seamless connectivity enables a seamless interaction. The threat is the loss of ‘good friction’ along with the bad, as I have written about before.

Speed: extreme bandwidth

Michael Bay revealed in one video shown at the event that he doesn’t know what a terabit is, suggesting it sounds like a dinosaur. But the film director knows that he needs a lot of bandwidth to do his job, shuttling high resolution clips around the world from multiple locations.Backed by clips from his latest big bang blockbuster, Six Underground, Bay gave what is a flashy example of what is a very real phenomenon: bandwidth has shrunk the world. Higher bandwidth shrinks the world even more. Each time we widen the digital pipes connecting us, we enable new services and allow simpler global collaboration. We can work with remote partners without issue on complex, rich endeavours like 3D design, construction, or films. We enable services like streaming video to the home, cloud-based gaming, and who knows what next (my guess is that mixed reality will consume a lot of the new bandwidth being built out with 5G and fibre).At Cisco Live! Europe the most prominent technical development towards greater speed was the company’s new silicon chips, capable of switching 10.8 terabits (not dinosaurs) per second. They do this with 80% lower energy consumption – a critical consideration given that the internet now consumes an estimated 10% of the world’s electricity supply.Of course, for some people, any connection at all is a massive step. Only half the world is yet online and this was another big topic for the show: what technologies will connect the next four billion people?

Simplified interaction

The internet has always been a heterogeneous domain, assembled from a wide array of devices from different manufacturers (albeit with Cisco having a dominant position in many of its critical sub-domains), and encompassing networks and services owned and operated by a huge number of organisations. The complexity, variety and sheer number of these devices, companies and services continues to grow, making their management increasingly difficult.The third key theme I took away from the conversations about the future internet at Cisco Live! Europe was about abstraction: how can we use computing intelligence to simplify the management of complex networks? And how can such machine-based systems augment the capabilities of those using the networks as well?From the network perspective this took the form of distributed sensors and computing power (‘edge computing’) collecting data about performance and then using machine learning to translate that data into meaning for operators. Rather than overwhelming humans with reams of numbers, the systems present them with clear exceptions where things are failing or not optimal, and even offer them solutions in a single click. This might be about saving money or energy by downgrading a needlessly over-specified virtual server, or it might be about reallocating memory to speed the throughput of ecommerce orders.This intelligence doesn’t stop in the traditional domain of the IT manager. Increasingly it looks like from a single dashboard, users might be able to get a view of what is happening across the business, right down into the chips that control every production line robot, automated warehouse, or delivery drone.From a user perspective, this is about taking further friction out of your working life. Sri Srinavasan, senior vice president and general manager for the Team Collaboration Group at Cisco, demonstrated real time translation to/from Spanish in a live video chat in Webex Teams, Cisco’s collaboration product. Again, technology shrinks the world.

The vortex of digital disruption

Two clear messages undercut the prevailing sense of techno-optimism at the conference. First was what Cisco EMEAR president Wendy Mars called the “vortex of digital disruption”. Businesses will continue to be disrupted by technology, by its shrinking of the world, augmentation of human capability, and undercutting of legacy business models. There’s a sales message concealed in here: ‘we can help you’. But not every business can be saved.The second was about security, likely to remain the number one or two concern for most chief information officers over the next few years according to Cisco’s David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Networking and Security business, in the opening keynote session. The more we connect, the greater the range of threats and targets in the network and the more impact an attacker can have in the physical world.But ultimately these are problems to be solved rather than insurmountable barriers. As Wendy Mars put it, “We believe in technology. We believe it provides answers to many of the challenges we face today.”Many of those answers will be underpinned by tomorrow’s internet, increasingly the universal platform for our communications, media and business operations. This places an enormous burden on its robustness. But the scale of its import means there are equally large efforts to maintain it.

The internet of the future

The internet of the future will be seamless and fast. It will be managed with systems that simplify its extreme complexity, and serve applications that strip further friction from our world. This will do little to assuage the fears of those who feel we have become too reliant on technology. But ultimately, I believe they will be forced to relent. In a hundred years, 10 terabit switches will seem no more advanced to us than combustion engines do today.Tomorrow’s internet compresses the world but more importantly it closes the gap between the physical and the digital. In a hundred years that gap will likely still be marked, but a hundred years after that, we may be completely rethinking what it means to be human in a world where the digital experience supersedes the physical.

Betamax was not better than VHS

There is a frequently-told story in the tech and marketing industries about the "format war" between Betamax (Sony's video recorder technology, based on the systems used for broadcast), and the alternative from Matsushita/JVC, Video Home System (VHS). This happened back in the late 1970s, but it has passed into lore and so still gets brought up in lots of conversations and conference presentations.The story goes that VHS won the format war for video recorders in spite of Betamax being technologically superior. This is true *only* for a narrow and marginal set of performance claims that were largely irrelevant to consumers.In the US, early Betamax units could only record one hour of video. A film is around two hours, one of their games of ‘football’, more like four hours. The supposed quality advantage over VHS? 250 lines of resolution versus 240, plus a few other metrics 90% of consumers would never understand. All available in a better-built unit, but at a much higher price.This is not what technologically superiority looks like to me. It’s a total failure to understand the customer.VHS, by contrast, could record two hours from day one, and this was very quickly extended to four hours by RCA, whose people understood what the American customer wanted. By the time the format war came to Europe, the volumes of VHS recorders being produced for the US market meant the price could be lowered further.VHS didn’t win because of the porn industry (one story) or because of better marketing campaigns (the most common story). These factors may have contributed to its ultimate success. But mostly it won because it was the technologically superior product in the ways that actually mattered to the customer.

Securing the Extended Human: Script & Slide Deck

Five years ago I gave a brief talk at a security conference at the Centre for Security at Lancaster University. It was early in my speaking career and I confess I was a little nervous. I don't think it was my greatest performance. But I'm still a huge believer in the content I shared that day. As I start to prepare a new talk on future security for an event in Paris in a couple of weeks' time, I went back to this slide deck and script and figured it would be a good time to share it.Below you will find my original script, and a link to the slide deck in PDF format (this was before I started to write slides in HTML using the Impress framework).The presentation starts with a reading from the 2005 novel by Charles Stross, Accelerando. This remains one of my favourite pieces of science fiction and I would strongly urge you to read the  - now free - eBook, available for download here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.htmlDownload the slide deck in PDF format here.###Securing the Extended Human"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant.  Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality.  Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner – Manfred – has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already.In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head – except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots – dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town.##This is an excerpt from Accelerando by Charles Stross, for my money one of the finest pieces of science fiction writing and certainly one of the most coherent visions of a technology-driven future ever written.It highlights a challenge that we will be facing in the near future. How we secure the aspects of our humanity that are increasingly being handed off to, and enhanced by, machines.##We are already bionic. I have a terrible memory and a hopeless sense of direction. My smartphone and the cloud behind it ensure that I don't forget my wife's birthday and I can find the shop where I want to buy her present. Because of the constant access to these capabilities I no longer try to remember things I can store, and I no longer worry about finding directions or reading a map. These pieces of technology are functionally part of my make-up and while I am not incapable without them I am certainly impaired.##As the lines between technology and humanity are further blurred with the next generation of wearables, this issue will become more acute. Much has been made of the privacy and performance issues surrounding always-on, camera equipped human beings. But what about the challenges that the removal of this technology will present. Challenges that will concern not just individuals but employers, law enforcers, health professionals and the state.I want to suggest just a few examples today.##“I can't come in today. My customer service co-processor has been hacked.”Imagine a salesman equipped with a real-time deal calculator that enabled him to juggle margins in order to close. Imagine a call centre full of enhanced humans guided through customer service enquiries not by a script on the screen but a dynamic set of suggestions whispered in their ears. Imagine a surgeon guided by enhanced sight and overlaid MRI data.These scenarios present a number of issues. Who supplies the hardware? Is it a BYOD environment or will corporates compete to offer the best upgrades? If they use learning software and the software learns alongside the human, who owns that data? Is it part of the human's skills? Do they take it with them to their next job, list it on their CVs?What happens when it fails? This could be the sick note of the future.##“A man today was sentenced to life imprisonment for the memory-murder of pensioner”My wife has an incredible memory. Not just for the birthdays and anniversaries but for the memories created on those occasions. I have a terrible memory. For all these things. I write letters to my children every few months as a way of storing some memories. I am reliant on our photo collection to fill in the blanks.If someone deleted all these things I would be distraught.Imagine I had been wearing a life logging camera for half my life and capturing thoughts on an audio diary. These things were with me constantly, archived, searchable and retrievable in microseconds like an extension of my mind.Now imagine someone deleted those records. That's more of a crime than simple vandalism. That's excising part of someone's humanity. How would the law and society treat that situation?##“MPs today introduced emergency legislation to place high profile court cases under a complete media blackout. The move follows a spate of collapsed trials costing the taxpayer millions.”I was up at the BBC last week talking about Peaches Geldof's Twitter gaffe. She is under investigation for contempt of court after she named the mothers of the children involved in the Ian Watkins trial.In order to commit this crime Peaches Geldof had to read a foreign website, copy the names into a few tweets and hit send. The whole process probably took less than a couple of minutes but there were multiple opportunities to stop and think 'Hang on, would my editor at the Telegraph let me submit something like this?'Imagine if the names had been thrown up by a dynamic search agent, auto-composed into a tweet and sent with the raise of an eyebrow or a word. How much damage could she do then?When judges, jurors, solicitors, witnesses and defendants are used to being permanently connected, we are going to need some serious revisions to the law.##These are just a few of the many issues that we will face as a society and as a security community in the coming years.It's now roughly ten years since the advent of mainstream social media in its current form – Friendster, LinkedIn and MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter and the myriad other networks now gaining popularity. We are still working out the etiquette of social media and it will be ten years before the law catches up.This year technology came one step closer to melting into the background, changing from being visible, discrete devices to being an invisible piece of the fabric of reality. It is going to take at least a decade for society to get its head around this, and likewise a decade beyond that for the law to catch up.Maybe at conferences like this we can begin to tackle these challenges ahead of time.

Why I Hated the iPhone, and What Amazon Can Learn from It

Ten years ago, Apple launched the iPhone. Not long after, Apple offered to loan me an iPhone for review. I hated it.

By this point, I was a few years into smartphone ownership. Not only that, I had helped to launch a smartphone that was pretty revolutionary in its own right.

Working on the marketing campaigns of a range of tech firms, I had attended the enormous Mobile World Congress conference for probably five or six consecutive years. One of our clients there provided the OS for a new smartphone from a Finnish start-up. This phone combined a full touch display, gyroscopic controls, and a browser that neatly handled full web pages. So many of the things that would go on to form part of the iPhone story.

This was 2003.

For all our efforts, the MyOrigo MyDevice, as it was called, flopped. It couldn’t get approval to run on enough mobile networks (a slow and painful process then) before the start-up ran out of cash. But it set my expectations for what a smartphone should be.

Without this device, I stuck with Handspring Treos. Bulky, but very effective business tools. There were even a few games for them thanks to their extensive Palm heritage.

Then the iPhone arrived.

By 2007 I was used to having two key features on my smartphones: 3G connectivity and the ability to add new apps. The iPhone I tested had some clear benefits. The touch screen was great, the software was slick and the design was slim. But no apps? No 3G? This seemed like a massive retrograde step. I was happy to stick with my chunky Treo, and later chose a SonyEricsson P1 over the iPhone because of the lack of these — to me, at least — core features.

Of course, eighteen months after the launch of the first iPhone, Apple had introduced the 3G version and the App Store, not just addressing my objections but crushing them. The App Store particularly has been revolutionary, giving anyone a simple, trustable experience in installing additional software.

Steve Jobs initial assertion of ‘desktop class’ apps may have been slightly overselling it. But from that point the iPhone became a serious productivity tool and entertainment device. And now the smartphone, that has always followed this initial template, is the primary platform for all our computing interactions.

What’s next?

It’s interesting to examine Amazon’s Echo/Alexa in the light of these objections. What needs to be added to take Echo from an interesting and clearly popular product, to the template for a class of device that may reach smartphone scale?

I think there are three problems to solve.

1. Connectivity

This time it’s not about data, it’s about interaction. The smart home is a very clunky construct at the moment. If Amazon can smooth the interactions with a wider range of devices, it would be welcome. This is not unconnected to…

2. Apps

Alexa seems to be reaching the scale where everyone will want/need to be part of its app/skill store. This would be hugely beneficial to users. Finally, there will be one interface to unite the disparate devices around the home. And the many services we have become used to accessing through distinct apps.

3. Discovery

Of course, none of these capabilities have any value unless people know they are there. How do you discover skills and interconnection options on a screenless device? It feels to me like there is an Alexa-initiated conversational element missing here. It would need to know who is in the room, not just that someone is there. But imagine a conversation like: “Hi Tom, I’ve detected a Fibaro home automation system on your network. Would you like me to connect?” That would be much more satisfying than the current app-driven controls.

Four Fears for the Future of Drones

I’m talking to Sky News later today about the future of drones — the domestic variety rather than the military ones. I think there are four areas we really need to consider: safety, security, privacy and pollution.

Safety

Put simply, what goes up, must come down. Let’s do some very rough maths. The highest you can legally fly a drone in the UK is 400ft or about 122 metres. A drone like a DJI Phantom 3 weighs around 1.2kg. I don’t have one to measure but I’m guessing it’s cross sectional area when flat is around 0.2sqm — though it would likely tumble as it fell.I’m going to suggest it’s like to be travelling around 110mph or 50m/s at the point it lands on someone’s head, delivering 14KN of force, assuming their head moves by about 0.1m as the drone comes to rest on it. Or rather in it: that’s plenty to crack your skull. At least I think it is: there’s a reason I never became an engineer.Drones have all sorts of safety measures built in to stop this happening. Like returning to base when their battery is low. But people tinker and tamper all the time. And go way beyond the technical and legal limits. Drones don’t need to fall to cause damage. They could interfere with a driver’s concentration, or get sucked through the engine of an aircraft. And that’s all before...

Security

...people choose to use them to cause harm. The payload of a drone is more than enough to carry explosives. Explosives are fairly easy to make. And even if you can’t, you might only need a naked flame to cause some serious harm. As our military has shown, drones can be used as weapons and consumer grade drones almost certainly will be re-purposed as such at some point in this country.Even if they’re not blowing things up, many drones have high-grade cameras built in as standard. More than high enough resolution to capture secrets, though they are noisy enough that it might be hard to do stealthily (see below).

Privacy

It’s not just state secrets that we will need to be concerned about. We are already the most photographed age in history by many orders of magnitude. Drones allow people to put cameras where maybe we don’t want them: over fences and up to first floor windows. Frankly even in the high street: we all have a right to privacy and drones are a spectacular way to breach that right. I doubt your average user flying a drone over a park is collecting consent forms from everyone.

Pollution

Though drones are yet another disposable collection of heavy metals and oil-based plastics, my concern here is not primarily about thousands of drones filling up landfill. It’s about noise.Drones make one hell of an irritating noise. This is good in some ways: it makes it harder to use them to breach security and privacy. But when drones become a fact of every day life it is going to be seriously problematic.There are moves to address this with clever changes to the rotor design and the number and performance of engines.But for now, drones? They drone.