From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world...it's going to be a game changer.
It took Jesus 2000 years to reach a billion people. It took Larry Page, I think, around 12 or 10. It took Facebook around 7. And it's not unthinkable that something will happen today that will reach a billion users by the end of the year.
In humanity's relentless drive for convenience and economic growth we have developed a dangerous level of dependency on networked systems in a very short space of time: in less than two decades, huge parts of the so-called 'critical national infrastructure' in most countries have come under the control of ever more complex computer systems.
What analysts mean by 'game changing' is, in fact, the level of naturalisation of technology. This is the degree to which a technology becomes an intuitive part of human life.
You are only ever one click away from looking at another alternative… The ability for the consumer to shop-around has made it difficult for some operators to realise the need for transparency in pricing… particularly when your product is built around opacity.
we are moving towards a global theatre where even though each actor (country) may be at different levels of economic growth, the technologies which exist to enable the globalisation stimulate high levels of transparency, meaning that each agent (companies, customers, suppliers, politicians, etc) will be accountable for their practices, and so must act with greater consideration (and less arrogance!)
For instance, while AI can generate images that appear real, it cannot create convincing backgrounds that can be geolocated, since they do not correspond to actual places.
In the multi-agent model, if you feed in the real price of the market, they show that before the large dives in market prices you could see the crowding that was beginning to happen behind the scenes, even though you couldn't see it in the price.
We're no longer just measuring ourselves against the 120 members of our local community. Instead, with our devices, we're exposed to global icons like Bill Gates, Oprah, or LeBron James, setting standards for our intelligence, beauty, and self-worth. This expanded comparison can be detrimental.
In a certain sense, when things become ubiquitous, they also become 'invisible'. The process of connection has become much less visible, so that the feeling of 'my computer' 'connecting' to 'the Internet' has changed to a feeling that my computer is the Internet.
I remember one particular interview with a boy, Peter, aged just 14. He told me how he posted on Instagram and then waited and waited for someone to like his posts. When they didn't' it made him feel awful and invisible. It's so heart-wrenching to think of that.
If you make it easy to steal from you, someone will. Every breach I've been involved with comes down to the fact that someone in the company did something they weren't supposed to or failed to do something they should have done.