Cost 219ter
Proceedings of
Extending Horizons
16th January 2007
Conference organised by COST 219ter
Accessibility to Next Generation Networks
MR IAN PEARSON: You’re wondering what on earth is a futurologist! I track new technology as it is coming over the horizon. Sometimes, the horizon is not very far away. Sometimes, some guy invents something tomorrow morning. I’ve never heard of it, not taken account of it yet, and it might affect the world in six months. It is kind of like looking through fairly thick fog.
You will see big features coming a long way away. Some things you can see when they are right in front of your face, and some things you cannot see until they hit you. It is better than no vision at all. It is not a precise art. I don’t pretend to tell you exactly what tomorrow will look like.
I wouldn’t disagree with anything I’ve heard today. It all seems very good sense to me. I will not disagree with any of that. We are going into the long term. By “long term”, I mean we should be able to do this in 10 years in the lab, certainly 15 years on the high street. We are doing the Star Trek Holodeck. I know that a lot of you are not familiar with the concept – but you should watch more Star Trek!
It is about taking every fantasy in your head and making it real using computer-generated graphics and shoving those into your eyeballs using interactive technology – direct links to your nervous system. Basically, IT, we will get there!
We can do all of this stuff in the 2020 timeframe, quite comfortably. In 2015, we will probably be doing most of this in the lab. If you don’t believe that, during the coffee break explore the stuff that we are already doing in BT, with a demonstration. See how we can transmit sensations of a kind across a network using Haptix technology and so on. See what we are doing.
Take it forward ten years. Bear in mind, with technology accelerating, the next ten years will see at least as much change as the last 20 years, and then you are getting there.
We are hoping to do communication in the future - kind of by putting you in somebody else’s office. Oh, the office is boring! Why not a Caribbean beach! Walk hand-in-hand down the sand; or see each other in the distance and charge together across the sand and transmit the sensation of the sand and the waves and the sun and ultimately making love under the sunset. And we are working towards orgasm by email!
If you can imagine – if we get there; I don’t think it is a big if – all of this technology, it is all do-able. There is no magic in there. We understand pretty well how the nervous system transmits sensations between your fingertips and brain. We think we can get there ultimately. We think that with a very large screen, full DVD wrap-around screens, using contact lens projection systems, we can do a fully convincing version of you essentially being somewhere else.
If we can do that, we will make a dent in loneliness. We are not going to suggest that it will substitute you seeing somebody in real life. We don’t believe that at all.
We believe that after you have been to see somebody, until you go to see them again, instead of just using emails – or just using phone calls, or just using a video phone, camcorder link on the net or a webcam link – you build a sensory communication, improving the quality of that immensely.
We think that loneliness will continue to increase as it is at the moment in society. Around about three or four years from now, it will start reversing as we start to see people having 42-inch plasmas hanging on to the wall. Into the side of that plasma goes a whopping great broadband link. It will be completely wireless. You will be able to sit beside your mother, even though she lives 300 miles away, have a cup of coffee with her. She will have to make her own coffee – we cannot do the teleport bit just yet! You will have the full life-size images, fairly high quality, probably 3D in the far future.
A five-year time frame? No, but a 15-year time frame. Ultimately, even the sensations too. We will make a big dent in loneliness.
One of the big tasks we are facing is solving the problems created by the last round of technology, which was really the invention of the motorcar. It allowed us to reconstruct society. We can live 300 miles away from our close friends and relatives. We can now put you back in touch with those close friends and relatives as if you had not moved away at all.
We have a fragmenting society. Deal with it. It is not going to reverse. We have to live with that. We can introduce technology to alleviate the problems and put people back in touch. I think there is a great deal that can be done. I see a lot of old people who have little social contact. I think included, by definition necessarily, is the disability area. They might be fully functional in some ways, but the best friends have died of old age, kids have moved 300 miles away, even thousands of miles away. Quite a lot of old people in this country are short of social contact. Really, their social contact is the district nurse or checkout assistant at Tesco. It is a bad reflection of today’s society.
We can fix that to some degree with technology. We have technology which can identify that if you like this particular pop group, it will tell you all sorts of other pop groups that you have never heard of that you will probably quite like. If I like this particular person, and the computer knows what their profile is, the computer can introduce me to other people kind of like that, or in the same sort of basket in the nearby area, or people I can communicate with across the net. I can make new friends.
I can use broadband and very large displays. It is difficult to get a display smaller than 42 inches at the moment. That seems to be the standard. All of them come with some sort of way of connecting with your PC.
We are starting to see the convergence between the TV set and the PC, at last. Linking that to your webcam will not be a problem. Broadband will allow you to see your friends on a very large screen, almost life-size – even bigger than life-size, if you have a 70-inch plasma.
Artificial intelligence. A lot of people belittle that. People say they told us we would have it in the ‘60s, we haven’t got it yet, so it is not going to happen. That logic is full of holes. It takes time. Some people underestimated the time scales.
We don’t need to mess about with weasel words here. As you think of consciousness and self-awareness, I would expect that we would have conscious computers capable of being friends in the 2015 - 2020 time frame.
Interactive TV. We started talking about this 15 years ago. It didn’t happen straight away. It still didn’t happen. It is gradually coming about. We are starting to see the convergence at last between web technology and TV. We are not just talking about participating in a phone-in, who to kick off Big Brother. We are talking about choosing what view you want, using that virtual environment of that soap opera.
Think of that as second life. There is a complete convergence between second life and Coronation Street. One is populated by real people pretending to be something slightly different, one is populated by people pretending to be slightly different. Coronation Street is a soap opera scripted by people. Second life is another kind of soap opera scripted by ordinary everyday people. There is not any real difference here. We will see a complete convergence between the virtual environments on the internet and soap operas. You will participate in these virtual environments in your TV set in a few years’ time. That applies to socialisation; it applies to work; it applies to shopping; it applies to banking; it applies to everything you can do on the internet. Just about everything you can do in life plus some other things that we have invented since.
This convergence of the TV and PC: we have been talking about it for a long time. It is now finally starting to happen. Most of the 42-inch, 50 inches have a DVI port or something like that. You can connect your Dell to your TV. You can use that with any bog standard webcam to communicate and put those images, large as life, on to that screen. So you can meet these people across the network.
It is not rocket science any more. It is an incentive to hundreds of other new channels of television and video-on-demand and stuff like that. That is how we are going to make our profit from this sort of service as the video-on-demand things. All the other side issues that it can do because all that technology exists anyway. Those are the important things in terms of your quality of life.
We expect major implications for your everyday life, regardless of whether you are disabled or not. We heard imminently from the floor that it is not just disabled people who gain from people making things fully compliant with disabled people. All of us gain. I cannot read the Sunday Times without reading glasses, or the text on my wristwatch, apart from the time, without reading glasses. Some of the notes are small these days. It is ridiculous, you need a microscope. We need to reverse those trends.
This interactive TV goes all the way. We think about what we can do with it: we can do web-shopping, explore eBay, buy stuff from Amazon as well as socialise. Why not participate in local politics?
Now the Disability Council might be lobbying local authorities and threatening with legal actions if they don’t do X, Y and Z, if they don’t make things conformant. That is reasonable. From the ground-up, this can be powerful. We suggested this as a way of getting people involved in the global skill politics from the ground up.
In terms of environmentalism, there are two or three billion environmentalists in the world. Half the world’s population are enthusiastic about protecting the environment. They want to do that. They see various culprits, people who really don’t care about it very much, refusing to sign up to various treaties to protect the environment. We don’t have to go to our politicians to ask them to deal with it any more. The technology is coming out to organise other people of like mind. You can send off an email to everybody, it will go to everybody interested in that issue. They can vote, just simply by clicking a button.
Email can contain scripts and stuff which configure your computer, and you’re buying 25% of your stuff online already. Just by a simple mouse-click, you can stop that 25% of your purchasing from going to the USA or anything to do with the USA if they don’t conform with the Kyoto Treaty, for example.
It could be another issue: it could be that we are not going to buy any services from this company unless they make everything compliant with various disability issues. It doesn’t matter what the issue is. This technology allows you to do that from the comfort of your living room, and to get everybody, right round the world – not just your local community – involved in that issue. So web-based politics and interactive TV-based politics is tremendously powerful. We think that is the way it is going to go.
A negative perspective is that it might be more … we don’t have to have the auditability and accountability in that. We wouldn’t necessarily agree with what they are doing sometimes. There is a downside and upside for this. It might be that the ideal way to push whatever thing you are trying to push – it might be somebody else pushing something that you really do not agree with. It goes either way.
Other technologies are moving on tremendously fast now. We will see some major transitions. We are seeing transition in terms of the TV linking to the PC. That is a really big one.
Another really big one, happening at more or less the same time, is the movement towards memory sticks. You think, well, so what; we have memory sticks in our pockets.
I’ve taken mine out of my brief case so that it would not interfere here. It has the capacity to carry most of your everyday files. By the end of this year, next year, it will carry all your everyday files. Throw away any concept of “your PC”, “my PC”, “her PC”. That doesn’t matter any more. Every PC is your PC.
It has access to your memory stick via short wave wireless technology and access to all your files. It has access to your secure email. All you need to do is sit down at any terminal and start using it. It totally transforms the way we do things. You can encode all of your personal environments, whatever they might be. When you go to somebody else’s PC, whatever those requirements are, those are imposed on that PC and it becomes yours.
It might take you a couple of days of tweaking your personal PC at home until it has all the requirements you have for accessing all the websites online because of your particular personal needs. When you go to another terminal, it will know all of that instantaneously.
We are going to replace podcasting with this. Memory sticks will communicate with each other. You have walked past a few hundred people this morning. One of those people is bound to have the information you require on their memory stick, it will absorb that as you walk past.
It is transforming the way you work. It will become much more seamless. I can talk for an hour about the implications of that. What we are moving to, this is the end stop, whatever you can think of, in terms of electronics – MP3 player, mobile phone, full laptop with all the trimmings – all of that can be condensed because it merges into an earring, tongue stud, part of the wristwatch band. It is so small that it has no impact in the future on the form of what you are buying.
Electronics becomes almost completely invisible. You can conceal it in anything at all. A button on your shirt is big enough to contain almost all the electronics that you can think of today.
When you get all the electronics, you start finding whole new ways of doing things and whole new ways of interacting and dealing with the intelligence world of having chips all round you. The food that you eat, the packaging full of food, replacing the bar codes on your jacket, things like that. All of that stuff gradually starts changing.
I’ve sat opposite somebody on the train and thought, “Wow, she looks nice, is she free?” I’m going through a divorce, starting to get on the dating circuit again. I’m thinking that way. Is this woman free? I’m an IT person. Is she desperate enough? Sympathetic enough? Exactly what criteria here? The technology is there for me to put a completely wireless website on a lapel pen and have that radiate, with all my criteria. If we are compatible and she is free – and desperate, all of that stuff! – we could be electronically introduced.
Maybe my lapel pen will burst into flames and a scent of roses is injected into a nearby area. I’m talking to someone about electronics which can eject perfumes into the nearby surroundings on request according to what emotions we are feeling – emotionally reactive perfume and make-up. It doesn’t stop. The technology is going far faster than you can imagine.
This digital bubble stuff – radiating everything, interacting with everybody else – is everything. IT gurus can find it. Digital bubbles are about shielding all of that stuff. This is the most important thing that BT contribute to the future. Because everybody’s radiating all this stuff and every company and every shop is radiating this stuff, we need somewhere protecting you against it. We all know email is useful. But, of course, not everybody out there is a nice guy. Once you have email, you start getting junk mail. We predicted – I’m pleased to say way back we had a thorough assessment of email versus junk mail – that 89% of your email would be junk mail. I get 300 junk mails every day. It is of that order. Digital bubbles shield you from all of the crap. It stops all of the stuff that you don’t want getting to you.
The really nice thing is that what you are interested in is not the same as what I’m interested in. You might be wheel-chair bound, might have this particular disability, that particular disability. But it doesn’t matter. Your computer knows you perfectly. It knows what form you want the information in, what kind of information you want. Exactly what you do not want, which is even more important. We can trickle-feed you in whichever medium you want, with the right information for you personally, regardless of what anybody else is getting.
We can do that by video, by audio or tactile. It doesn’t make any difference. The computer can cope with all of those different things and translate it using various interfaces to your body in any way that you need.
That's a brave new world to head towards. I do have perfectly good vision, once I'm wearing my glasses, most of us do. I don't like the idea of contact lenses I like having glasses because I do, it makes me look more intelligent and that sort of stuff I like having glasses. I could replace these with contact lenses today but I can't be bothered really. But in the future, I know that we can get the microelectronic miniaturisation down to the point where we can do direct retinal projection in a contact lens in the lab by 2010 and on the high street by 2015. You don't buy one contact lens you buy two and slightly different image on both of them and do a full 3D immersive overlay on everything you see in the real world.
I'm walking down Oxford Street and all the ugly people are taken out of the field of view and replaced with Claudia Schiffer lookalikes and you can replace me with Brad Pitt I don't care. People spend hours online and my daughter spends hour on chat groups and she is only 12 and only started to discover it and goodness knows how long she will spend once familiar with it.
People are spending hours every day in totally virtual environments and they don't appear in those virtual environments as they are and know in that aspect of their personality people don't find attractive. Online they can pretend it doesn't exist and project a totally different personality and visual image if they so desire of who they are.
So you could be dealing with some guy in New York, he is never going to meet you and you can present whatever visual version of yourself that you want across that link. He doesn't have to see that you look the way you are. In my case my hairline is receding, and because it's winter my hair is growing a little and it's concealing it a little, but come spring I will be bald again.
And, I could conceal that if I'm dealing with some guy in the US and hair cover seems to be more important an issue over there and I could appear with a full head of hair like I used to have ten years ago. If you have expanded around the waistline you could reduce the waist by a few kilograms. You don't have to be truthful in the network communication.
You can in fact go the whole hog and use a digital bathroom mirror and men don't generally use make-up. I only use it on Wednesdays, and for this sort of stuff! And men are not very conversant with this, once it starts becoming techy to use electronic make-up that you put on with the bathroom mirror. It's video compatible and you put it all over your face and press a button and it realises what's on the computer screen, which is the mirror in front of you, and it changes during the day according to who you are, who you are meeting and, this is tricky and men will start using it as well as women. And I explained this to my daughter expecting her to be impressed with my great new idea. She said basically yawn, yawn, why on earth would I want to change my appearance a few dozen times day? I want video make up and continuous video TV picture playing across the make up it's a computer display so I can do all of that. Where does the IT stop and ordinary everyday life begin? It just doesn't and the boundaries disappear, and the accessibility issues go all away into every areas of our lives.
How do you want to appear on the high street? You may look like this but you can project how you like to appear and what your personality says and you can cheat and do whatever you like. So people will have multiple identities and they already do in chatrooms and multiple visual identities, and audio identities, and is it perfectly normal, I don't know, I will play with it anyway.
It goes the whole way we can start linking electronics into your body and start printing electronics onto the skin surface and sticking it on that and pulling membranes first off plastic sheets you buy from electronic shops and start using ink jet printers with electronic printing capability and printing electronics onto the skin's surface. You can go into that using ten micron electronic capsules and that's one hundredth of a millimetre too small for you to see and that's huge compared to the transistors in your PC which is down to 0.7 microns and you can get 14 of those across the screen. If my maths isn't rusty that's 196 already and then 14 deep as well. So, we are already 10,000 transistors in the volume of a skin cell which is more transistors than my first PC had that I was doing missile simulations on back in 1981 when I started work.
We can do all of that in the volume of a skin cell today. And the Moore's Law and ten years and you have got another factor of 1,000 or 10,000 on top of that. We can connect to your nervous system and record the signals going between nerves and your brain, and record those, and store them on the hard drive, and stick them on the network. And when you are in a computer game, reliving that exact same sensation or replaying that bungee jump you did on holiday to your friends, and you can upload those off the network and inject them into other people's nervous systems and experience those same sensations.
So, sensation is just one more thing we can do across the network in the not very far future, ten years in the lab and 15 years on the high street. If we can do that and take the nerve signals or acoustic signals or video using all sorts of video or audio capture technology we can use the computer to translate that into whatever you need. Now blind people are already well used to having websites and translation of that into you know compressed Braille or whatever, so they can access websites. There are all sorts of ways people with various disabilities accessing stuff that everybody else takes for granted by changing the medium in which they receive it. If you are walking down the street and can't see things, there are already lots of different ways of translating that video information into things that you can feel or hear in your ears so you can avoid bumping into things. We can go the whole way, and basically do anything to anything translution using high powered PCs in the future. Assuming there's some way of electronically measuring what it is that you want to perceive and even for a fully-abled people, you are still not capable of understanding magnetic fields and things or is there radiation in this area, and with a few more years of terrorism maybe it would be useful to be able to detect whether there's radiation in that field and feel some pain so you get out of that area before you get a lethal dose of radiation. All of us can benefit it isn't just disabled people, even fully able-bodied people can benefit from this kind of sensory translation technology.
We are rapidly heading towards a duality of existence where we have the virtual world online, the internet if you like, the second life, the age of war craft, online computer games, and we are merging that with what's happening in the physical world which we are already familiar with from decades of experience. You can merge these things together. You don't have to go home and log onto a PC to experience the virtual reality world, the internet world, we are talking about overlaying computer games on an ordinary physical shopping mall.
So when I'm waiting for my wife or girlfriend, I shouldn't really say those in the same sentence, but I'm going through a divorce, and if I'm waiting for either one of those two ladies and that really is the ultimate nightmare for any man in the audience, to pick the latest dress, I can do that or enjoy my e-mail and interact with virtual environments and stuff while she's doing the half hour choice of which dress does she need. For men it's an interesting experience and you walk in and find the first one that fits and walk out again. Women seem to care what they actually wear, I never understand that.
There's an awful lot happening on the web and it's very easy to get diverted by various opinions of what's coming along and what's important. And one of the particular ones you might be exposed to right at the moment is web 2.0. You have all heard of the web and some are trying to make you believe it's all changing and becoming different, I think that really misses the point of what they are saying. What's really happened on the internet and only thing that's really happened when you look at it is it has now reached critical mass and enough people are now using the internet to make what it is that you were thinking of doing with it worthwhile. Yesterday there weren't very many people using it and you could launch the site and the market was too small and you could go bankrupt. Now you launch the same idea and everybody is using it so it might take off. If it's a crap idea it will still fail. If it's a good idea it will now succeed and web 2.0 misses the point.
Everything on the net is taking off exponentially and the more people that use the net the more valuable it is for you to put stuff on the net therefore the more companies there are putting stuff on there and the more people there are thinking about putting stuff on there. So it's a positive feedback loop.
And as they would say the law of accelerating returns and everything is taking off and the web will reach maturity by 2010. Everything on the net will probably be achieved by 2010 and easy to use and cuddly computing and AI will make up for your deficiencies and link that with natural language processing, and a nice warm cuddly human interface in the shape of a visual personality on screen for you to interact with. Dealing with the PC or searching the net will be like talking to a very capable and friendly executive assistant. That's how we want it to appear. Robotics will help to deal with the physical side in the ten year time frame and amazing how fast robotics are developing and we are going already towards the robots that Honda and Sony are making and have them working as receptionists in buildings and stuff and that's really going ahead in leaps and bounds at the moment.
Other people are working on polymer muscles and things more life like, they are happening the same. Almost in a five or ten year time frame we will jump from a robot being like something you see on Robot Wars and will move far beyond to what you have seen on the film I-Robot and it will look more human than that with polymer muscles and silicon coverings and human like and the ultimate sci-fi dream and we will get there in 15 years. A lot will happen in a ten year time frame, it's going to happen and it's very exciting.
The artificial intelligence side is almost as important. We are seeing the situation that makes people laugh at the idea of AI because your brain is still 100 times faster than the fastest computer you can buy even with your entire salary. People say that AI hasn't happened well if we took all of the AI off the internet it would become almost unusable. You can't do almost anything today without using an element of AI and it is out there in large scale, tomorrow the AI is catching up with you, by 2015 in raw processing terms your PC will be as smart as you are. By 2010 it will have emotions just like yours and will be about a million times smarter than you are, and you have to then start worrying whether it's a productivity aid or your boss, that's the real question we have to ask in the 15 year time frame no whether it's real or what relationship they have, and that's a strange one. And one of my projects, a white paper on this year how exactly might we achieve the human level of subconsciousness inside the machine world with trillions of neurons working millions of times faster than yours linked to the other ones around the world and looking at concepts like smart bacteria and yogurt and stuff, and all sorts of whacky stuff and we don't have prejudice on how to do this and we are looking at all of these things.
When you go down this road it becomes more inclusive and intricate links between the computers and your nervous system and don't have to go via your physical dexterity to see how good your eyesight is we can almost go right down to the neuron level inside your body and interpret signals from what you are thinking and interpret that, and this inclusiveness issue when we couple the technology becomes a more rosy future than it is today. It's absolutely right that the law should force us to provide things which are accessible, but ultimately the technology will make that so easy that there's really no reason for not doing it anyway even if the law didn't force us, so the law forcing people to do things is a short-term issue.
We will head towards the world of smart machines, taking away an awful lot of jobs which are currently done by people and people think of redundancies I'm not worried about that. If I can find a computer which can do my job and I can sit at home and relax and watch TV or DVDs or read poetry.
I'm happy as long as the economy doesn't suffer and I still get the pay cheques, and the way that we could do this, those pay cheques would still come in. What we can do is use this technology to upskill people and force people to concentrate on the human skills in life which we want to concentrate on, and the being a cog in a big machine can frankly be better done by being a machine. The machines can be the cogs in the machines, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be a guy on a production line doing a very mundane job which could be replaced by a machine. I want to be a human being dealing with other human beings, offering them a nice warm personality and interactive human skills, and stuff, that's really what being a human is about ultimately. We will go down that road and call this the care economy.
In today's society, the professions which are in that sector are caring professions like nursing and stuff where they provide caring skills to the patient. The doctor is basically an expert system and the surgeons are robots coupled with an expert system, we can automate those roles, and the nurse provides caring, I can't automate that. There's no way I can automate that caring skill which requires them to be a human being, and R2D2 can't do it, that skill will become more valuable and intellectual skills and physical skills become less valuable as they move into the physical world.
We then start seeing a big drop in the gulf between the disability people, and the able bodied people in the sense that a lot of jobs that people couldn't do because they were disabled were because they had to do that physical dexterity job, or you know someone's mentally handicapped and maybe didn't have quite the right level of education those things don't matter in the future all that matters is how warm is your personality and cuddly are you? How nice a person are you? It's a very different kind of a world.
That's what the machines do for us, even globalisation, one of the biggest trends we see around us today will start reversing, you can't outsource a nurse or childcare worker or you know an elderly care worker for that matter to India. They have to be physically close to the person to deliver that care. And we will see a reversal of globalisation in terms of the nature of work, some things you can still globalise but the machine intelligence mostly takes over the value of those things the physical day-to-day stuff that most of us will do is a person-to-person interaction which you can do to some degree across the network. It really has to be done face to face in most cases, so we will see a reversal of globalisation.
I will finish with this one on hippy revival. I think in the next five years all of the social background, all of the things happening in society point towards the fact that society is now ripe for a revival of the hippy movement. The same basic foundations exist as existed allegedly in the 60s when I was a boy.
It's happening again we are just waiting for the right celebrity to push the right buttons and society will start doing hippy stuff all over again. And I have got no idea what the implications of hippydom are going to be for disability rights issues but it will be an interesting decade all over again.
So, that's enough from me, I will open to questions, thank you.
DR JOHN GILL: Thank you very much, any questions? Over there...
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you for that Ian, I'm Jeff Bashton I'm a social care consultant. I guess my background is in sociology and always interested in the unintended consequences of social change. And not a techy really, but with all these potential transformations that you talk about, will people lose a sense of who they are? And what will be the consequences for their mental well-being you have talked about things going terribly fast, and will people lose a sense of who they are?
MR IAN PEARSON: I like that question. I'm worried about that, I think you are absolutely right. People are already in chat groups, you know I used to play about when chat groups were new in the mid-90s and, even back then, people used to mess about with 10 or 15 or 20 different identities and exploring different aspects and portraying themselves in different ways and it's interacting 24-7 and always acting, and they never come back to who they really are. They start wondering who they really are themselves? And I think it's quite likely that with all this high quality interaction online, because you can pretend, and because you can produce a different image of yourself, then the reality your reality through practice becomes actually different. Now I think we need a lot of psychologists and people like that to look at this in more detail because to me it's obvious that that will be an issue and you are quite right to raise that problem.
I have no idea how big a problem that will be. But I think it will be one, and I think it's one that we should really encourage people to look at and maybe another Cost project in the future should be doing exactly that.
Time for one question...
MR IAN PEARSON: I will be around for coffee by the way.
RUTH MYERS: I'm Ruth Myers from TAG and my question or comment is along similar lines to the previous speaker. My concern is that already today you cannot overcome loneliness by technology. Old people who are on their own tell me, we want to see people physically, we want to touch them, we want to react with them individually. Not even online, or through e-mail as a replacement. My second concern is I think by the time 2020 comes we won't be human beings any more. We are just going to sit at home and be replaced by all these robots, and nobody will think about who is going to have control over the world? And where are the ethics and morals? Who is thinking of the other side of it and the stages here, and I just hope somebody is looking after them.
MR IAN PEARSON: On the first side of that I recognise and hope that in my talk we are not hoping to compete with the physical being. It's always going to be better for somebody to be there physically with you but I already have a relationship with my mother, she lives 400 miles away up in Cumbria I only see her once or twice a year. What I was really suggesting is that since that relationship exists I can keep it at a much higher quality using really good communications in between. It doesn't give me an excuse not to physically visit her once or twice a year as I can during my holidays. We are thinking of producing stuff alongside the physical stuff not trying to replace that. I think that allowing that on-going relationship to be maintained will make an impact on loneliness. It isn't a substitute for physically being there, it never will be but it's one heck of a lot better than not having any contact and better than a phone call link.
As to the second side of the things. I think it is tremendously important that people are involved in deciding which way the future is going, BT takes a large number of people who are looking at Corporate Social Responsibility, and I think that's the wider issue here which is how do we involve people in making these decisions because surely they shouldn't be made just be engineers like myself. And you know as a company we are trying to involve more people in it and collaborate with all sorts of groups like that, I don't think engineers should dictate the future. What we can do is invent toys and you should decide as an individual whether we should have these as part of our future life. That's the wider political process and I have hinted as to how we might use that at a grass-roots level if things don't go the way you like. How you can tweak it in different directions. It has to be an interactive process where everybody is involved and I hope that BT is well involved in that and I hope we are at least in part. And we need to be even more, and it has to be an interaction between the engineer and the person on the street.
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