David Houle World Renowned Futurist and Speaker

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to David Houle, a renowned futurist and speaker. We discuss machine learning, the future of programming, and the integration of technology with humanity. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) I was really pumped to get to listen to you speak.

(David Houle at 00:00:34) I was obviously glad to have you in the room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) That was an interesting crowd.

(David Houle at 00:00:40) Well, it's a typical crowd in Sarasota that's old enough to have entrenched beliefs that they use mainstream media to support. You know? And that's the problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Well, you handled this super well, and it was a very interesting talk on the future. Did you catch the space shuttle launch Elon Musk launched the other day?

(David Houle at 00:01:02) I didn't see it. I mean, I've seen it subsequently. I mean, you know, the guy just operates at a different level. I mean, he's in Technicolor and everyone else is in black and white.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) Oh, I fully agree with that. So you didn't set out time to sit down and watch a launch. You're like, I'm gonna watch it on my time.

(David Houle at 00:01:22) Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you know, I'm obviously a lot older than you, and I've seen, you know, 20 rocket launches. I mean, a rocket launch is a rocket launch. Right?

(David Houle at 00:01:32) And, you know, they look the same. This is a bigger one, I understand. But no, I've been slammed work-wise is the problem. So what can I say?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) You've given lots of talks?

(David Houle at 00:01:44) Yes. And I'm also, I found out about three weeks ago that something I'm involved with is doing an ICO. So I'm on a vertical learning curve of cryptocurrencies as well. You know? So that, in addition to landing some really big, significant speaking gigs and looking for funding for this Spaceship Earth, my nonprofit, you know? So it's like, okay, how can I figure out to be totally rested and not sleep? Right? You know? That's the situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) I'm on a similar path. I just am constantly moving all day like the Energizer Bunny, trying to catch sleep when I can.

(David Houle at 00:02:22) Yeah. Well, I'm really impressed. You know, either you're accomplished beyond your years or you have shaped a brand of yourself that does that. You know? So congratulations to you. You live in Sarasota. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) Oh, I'm a native. Yes. I do.

(David Houle at 00:02:43) So, you know, people at your age who get what you get are far and few between in this part of the world. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) Yeah, I don't know many people that are my age that act like me.

(David Houle at 00:03:00) Right. Exactly. You know? I mean, I know people your age who act like you elsewhere, but they're in Silicon Valley. They're, you know, they're in some startup in Chicago or something. Right? You know? So that's why it was so nice to have you there. Because it's like, see, you know, the analogy I use is that when something happens that people think won't happen, it changes consciousness. You know? So people, for 30 years, believed that a man could never run a four-minute mile. And when Roger Bannister ran it, I think in 1953, '54, '59, he broke that. And within six months, five other people had done it because the perception was, oh, it's doable. Right? And so that's what kind of you were to me in that room. You know, they don't think I'm right? Ask somebody who goes, oh, yeah, he's totally right. You know? So I appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) If I could go back and give myself advice, it would essentially be this podcast. Right? Like, here's the mistakes to avoid, and here's what to look for. And so what I realized is that technology isn't slowing down. It's speeding up. So while there was maybe one in a thousand or one in 10,000 of me then, you know, 20 years ago, there is probably a hundred in a thousand or 200 in a thousand now. So there's a lot more of those individuals looking to get into technology and do business and stuff like that at a younger age.

(David Houle at 00:04:31) Okay. So I have a question for you, if I could, before I forget. As a futurist, you know, I've been doing a deep dive the last few years into what is currently called artificial intelligence. And I certainly want to talk about that. But, you know, the developing view is that machines will self-code within ten years or less. I am getting asked the question—you know, in fact, I just did a long interview yesterday with a media outlet in Canada, and the question was, you know, the Canadian government's gonna invest $50 million to teach young people how to code, and what do I think of that? My comment was, they're not preparing. By the time these kids get out of high school or college, coding will not be a profession that they can make money. Rather, it will be a skill they can use on their own for their own websites, similar to in the fifties and sixties. If you were a woman then and you learned how to type, you could make a living typing. But, you know, now it's a skill. Do you, so am I correct in that, that increasingly machine learning will self-code itself so that the number of coders will go down relative to a professional job?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) So I had Peter Cooper on yesterday, and he's Peter Cooper of Cooper Press. So they have the largest publication of developers, and it's developers read their newsletters, their email newsletters. And so he's really bright. And we had this conversation that it's gonna be like that. Programming is going to be a skill in your tool belt of a thing you can do built around something else larger. To answer your first question about the machine learning or the artificial intelligence, we are every single day, we take one step closer towards the machines writing their own code autonomously.

(David Houle at 00:06:34) So for example, if you were at the age now that you were then when you started coding, you would be learning to code not so much, as you said, to make money, but to learn a skill that is a movable feast that you can take with you wherever you go to do what you want, if not necessarily be well paid to do it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:00) Correct. It'll be commoditized and more like a construction worker where, as you know, it's the person laying the blocks. We have machines building buildings now, and we also have people still building buildings. And I think code will look a lot like that too. You'll have code writing code, and you'll have people writing code, but it won't be the same glamorous thing it was the past 20 years.

(David Houle at 00:07:25) Right. Okay. Good. That and so I've been right. In other words, it's just kind of like politicians talking about STEM education. And we don't need STEM anymore. We need education to teach young people to think creatively in a design manner. You know, graduates today are told, you know, college graduates, in your lifetime, you're gonna have three to five careers, two or three of which have yet to be invented. So how can you possibly teach somebody a career any longer? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) Well, that's actually on my notes here of one of the things that stuck with me the most about listening to your talk. It's so backwards that we say we're gonna go through K through 12, and we have the information that you're gonna need for the rest of your life mapped out in these 12 years, when we turn around and our analysts, our best technology people in the world, cannot even accurately predict out five to eight years. You can do the macro. Right? You can do macro predictions, but you can't predict super micro things.

(David Houle at 00:08:24) Yeah. No. The smaller you get, the higher the variable for the outcome. Right? So, I don't know if, did you ever read the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) No. I haven't.

(David Houle at 00:08:35) You should. It's the foundation of modern science fiction, really. And the whole concept was psychohistory, that this mathematician using masses, you know, at the time, billions of people, as an aggregate, he could mathematically predict what would happen, but take it down to an individual and he couldn't. Right? So, for example, I am very proud, and I stand on this statement that my job is to be extremely accurate up to five years out and directionally fairly accurate ten to 15 years out. So that's what I do, and all my forecasts are on my website. I'm one of the only futurists I know that has put up what I forecast and when I did it. And then I'm writing a column that I posted this week about 2018, and I had to say, you know, what I just said to you, and that, but when you come closer in, there's more variability. You know, Donald Trump could do one thing, or somebody could do one thing that would change an equation. But over ten years, 10 million people, I'll be accurate. So you're exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) And isn't that how data works, period?

(David Houle at 00:09:48) Yes. And that's the other thing. I don't know who's interviewing who here. Do you want me to set that up and start over? What do you wanna do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:56) No. Just keep going.

(David Houle at 00:09:57) Okay. So I want to get into the conversation of artificial intelligence in a big way. But the transition to that, I say that in the future, from this point on, data will rule because data is available in a way and in a magnitude that has never been before, so that what humans are, you know, when somebody says, when the CEO says to the VP of a company, just give me the facts, that would be a human with all the subjectivity, with points of view, providing what they think are the facts. If the machine learning is initially programmed correctly, it will just give you that data, you know, which is the fundamental underpinnings of what is perceived as facts. So we've taken away a layer of interpretation just by moving to machine intelligence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:52) Yeah. I loved your graph about the data explosion.

(David Houle at 00:10:55) Oh, yeah. Right. So, that's insane. Just to say it, in 2010, humanity created 1.8 zettabytes of data, a zettabyte being a billion terabytes. And in 2040, it will be 12,000. So moving from 1.8 to 12,000 in 30 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) Wow. It was interesting when you were talking about the data and how the book, the Asimov book, about how you could predict things with large sets of data. What ran through my mind was, this is, I was blown away when I found this out. I have a friend who is a fire chief locally. Right? And he was talking to me. We were, he was showing me their systems that the emergency services use. It's really, really cool. They're custom systems they built. And we were talking. It's very predictable to emergency services, whether it's police and crime or fires and firefighters or accidents and ambulances, on a scale of a city, of when there's going to be, when these things are going to happen. Like, this is something that's been around for them for a long time. They've always been able to predict and staff based on the time of year and days and everything about how many incidents occur.

(David Houle at 00:12:10) Exactly. I mean, as a futurist and as a CTO, you and I tend to use movies, for example. So what you just said is what is the current reality to what Minority Report was all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:25) Right. You know? We're moving towards that every day.

(David Houle at 00:12:28) Absolutely. And, you know, so can I go off on a big thought?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:40) Yes.

(David Houle at 00:12:40) Okay. So, you know, here we are in February 2018. Just about two years ago, I really got frustrated by the stupidity and the oversimple dual conversation about artificial intelligence. Oh, robotic overlords or not. It's good or it's bad. And it was such a, for something that's so transformative to me, it was the ultimately stupid conversation. So here's what I did. And I do this in every presentation, and I think I probably did it in the one that you saw. I went to five dictionaries and I looked up the definition of the word intelligence. And in none of the dictionaries was the word human part of the definition, which means that intelligence is intelligence. Dolphins are intelligent. Whales are intelligent. People always tell me how intelligent their pets are. So I've said that the next 20 years is the age of intelligence. So the reason I think, and I'm using the word AI and you use the word AI because it has become the name of this loose thing, but I believe that the reason we, humanity, has started using the phrase artificial intelligence is that artificial diminishes the intelligence. Like, it's not human. It's artificial as compared to us. And yet intelligence is never defined as being of humanness. Therefore, the reason we use artificial intelligence is that we, humanity—and you being younger and much more adaptive, you know, have to look to the people who are in that room. Right?—that humanity, we are the first iteration of humanity to have to psychologically adapt to an equal or superior intelligence cohabiting the planet with us. And because that is so psychologically disturbing, because it's never happened in history, we have to diminish it by calling it artificial. So what I say is that within a few years, the word artificial is going to drop away. I'm going to try to lead that. It is machine learning. It is deep learning. It doesn't have anything to do with artificial because this intelligence, this intelligence, is not artificial. It's intelligence. It may be at a low level, but it's nevertheless intelligence. It's not artificial. So the whole phrase artificial intelligence to me represents the deep, deep psychological disturbance in many people that there will be an intelligence smarter than them that is not of a carbon life form.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:25) Well, that's really important because we're, you know, anthropomorphic by nature. So we're imagining that these aliens would be these other breathing carbon life forms that are strutting around.

(David Houle at 00:15:40) In humanoid figures. Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:42) Yeah. In humanoid figures. Right? Similar to us. Right? Because that's how, that's what that means. So the act of shifting it, actually, I just did it in my head and it made me feel a little uncomfortable, because it's like if you shift that same thought to just replace those aliens with the technology and just imagine that the silicon, the computer systems, the electronics, are the invasion, then it's really kind of creepy because you just feel almost a little gross 'cause you look around your room and you're like, oh. You look at how you spend your time. I always like to think of an alien species that was carbon that came and was hovering over Earth, right, over Earth watching us, they would think that these screens are our gods because we look like we worship them 24 hours a day.

(David Houle at 00:16:26) Well, okay. So one thing about that, ever since I was a teenager, I have said this and I still say it, and it's like, I'm surprised that people have never heard this before. Right? I said the other night at a lecture I was giving, I said, if an alien form flew across the United States at 10,000 feet and they didn't know anything about Earth, they would assume that the car is the dominant life form because the whole landscape was created around the car. Right? So here are, so people say to me as a futurist, Joel, that I connect the dots that other people can't see. So let me connect three dots for you to come up with a punch line. Dot number one is the book Origin, which is Dan Brown's latest book. You probably haven't read it. Have you read any of Dan Brown's works?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:17) No.

(David Houle at 00:17:17) Okay. So, the reason I had to read it, the protagonist is a futurist, and one of the main characters is an artificial intelligence.

(David Houle at 00:17:30) And the end of that book basically shows that entropy is the law of the universe. So humanity is going to give over to technology, which is in ascendancy. So I'm reading that book, then I'm a huge—I just blanked on the name—a Blade Runner fan. And Blade Runner 2049, I saw around the same time I was reading the book.

(David Houle at 00:18:00) And Blade Runner 2049, the plot is based on Blade Runner, where a human made love to a replicant, and evidently the replicant gave birth. So that means, oh, so we may have robots that we can breed with in the future. And then the third data point comes from my having written the book The Spaceship Earth about climate change. 150 species a day right now on the planet are becoming extinct. A lot of that being insects and plants.

(David Houle at 00:18:39) Nevertheless, 150 species a day are becoming extinct. That is a rate that is 10,000 times the average norm of the last few centuries. So we are creating our sixth extinction. So we don't seem to care, right?

(David Houle at 00:18:53) Humans don't seem to care that the tigers have gone away, the giraffes are going away, the condors. You know, we don't care. So my joke is, so what if artificial intelligence takes over our species? Karma's a bitch, you know?

(David Houle at 00:19:09) So I mean, I say that in jest, but in reality, if that happens—and I always say the other thing I want to say, this is really important to anybody listening. I always get asked the question about whether this technology, this handheld, you know, iPhone or whatever technology is good or bad. The bottom line is technology is always morally neutral. Technology is never good or bad, with the possible exception of creating weapons for warfare.

(David Houle at 00:19:45) It's how people use it. A plane shortens distance, but a plane can drop bombs. So the real danger in machine learning is the manipulation of humans by other humans, not in the intelligence itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:00) Yeah. It's like, oh, yes. Yeah. I don't know what to say to that.

(David Houle at 00:20:05) Yeah, right. Well, but I think a lot of people don't understand that, right? They think that, you know, when I—I'm a baby boomer, so I was of the TV generation.

(David Houle at 00:20:18) And at that time, my parents were of the radio and newspaper generation. So it was called the boob tube. So I could only watch an hour a day and after I had my homework done. Any baby boomer will tell you a similar story. And now what are we having?

(David Houle at 00:20:34) We're having parents saying there's too much screen time on your phone, right? So whenever there's a new technology, people look at it from a historical point of view, right? So ever since the boob tube came into being in the fifties, the average IQ of America has gone up.

(David Houle at 00:20:53) Right? So that's always the issue. The other thing I think is whatever technology did you grow up with? The computer, right?

(David Houle at 00:21:02) Okay. So David's personal theory is that the dominant technology in your life, in anyone's life, will be the technology that most impacted you up to the age of 21. So for boomers, it's TV. For my 31-year-old son, it's the computer and the laptop. For younger people, like I see it wrangling, it's the handheld device.

(David Houle at 00:21:26) So each generation has its new primary technology. And obviously, now that the millennials and digital natives are in the workforce, the handheld device has won. It is the dominant screen in the world today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:42) It's interesting too because now you can subdivide on the physical devices, and now it allows them to actually subdivide the generations through the apps so they can actually do it faster. Like before, you know, you'd have the TV or the radio and then the computer and then the handheld computer. But now you can actually do it by apps. You can say, okay, well, Instagram is this generation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) Snapchat is this generation. So it allows them to actually—they don't have to go—you know, a 13-year-old can actually write the platform for their generation. Because they can distribute it, they've solved the problem of distribution. You can just put it on the App Store. All you have to do—you could basically do it free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:24) You just have to have a device and an account, and you put the app on the App Store, and then the market gets to speak. So you can generate those platforms now without having to go actually manufacture all the machines like Apple and Microsoft did.

(David Houle at 00:22:39) Right. That's exactly right. And, you know, I give speeches around the world to different groups—manufacturing or service organizations or medical or education. And whenever I'm speaking to an industry that is sales-oriented and distribution channel-oriented, you know, our sales distribution channels, I kind of say to them, I hold up my iPhone 6 Plus, and I go, this is the only channel. You know?

(David Houle at 00:23:12) You talked about these constructed channels. If you're not interfacing with your customer on this, you're not embracing the present, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:21) I fully agree. And then I'm going to assign a task for you. Okay? Just because you're a futurist, you've got to go bump the upgrade to the X, you know?

(David Houle at 00:23:29) Sure. No problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:30) Right. I actually did that two days ago because everyone—it's weird. Now that I have the show and I'm talking to people, everyone's like, oh, you don't have the X yet? Oh, you don't have the X yet? And I'm—they're—all my friends and family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:42) I had a birthday party, and everyone's like, how do you not have the X? You're Joel. You're the technology guy.

(David Houle at 00:23:47) I get the same thing, so I want to hear how you answer that because I have a clear answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:51) Oh, well, I say that I don't waste my money. Like, the software upgrades and I have essentially the same features, so I don't need to spend the money.

(David Houle at 00:23:59) So my history is I always buy one generation behind, right? So when the 7 came out, I then bought the 6. Why?

(David Houle at 00:24:09) The functionality isn't that different, and the price is much less. So that's number one. Number two, with the possible exception of you and some of the people who listen to podcasts, most people in the world do not use all the functionality that they carry in their hands. You know, they're doing email and they're doing a limited number of things, you know? And so therefore, if you have a piece of technology that is more than good enough for whatever you want to use it, or it is better than what you use it for, why would you buy something new?

(David Houle at 00:24:45) It doesn't make any sense. And the problem I have with Apple—on the one hand, they're a dynamic company, and they're going to be carbon neutral relative to their whole footprint on earth. On the other hand, they've brought back planned obsolescence. Like in the fifties, you had to buy a car every two years.

(David Houle at 00:25:03) Why do you have to get a phone? I am never going to get the 10. And the reason I'm never going to get the 10, because the 10 has already failed. They've come out with cheaper versions. You know this.

(David Houle at 00:25:12) And so when people say, why don't you have the newest technology? Because I don't need it. Do you? You know? I mean, in other words, I'd say from iPhone 1 through iPhone 7, there was distinct improvement.

(David Houle at 00:25:27) At this point in time, any improvement on smartphones is diminished. You know, each generation had a lot of features worth doing. I don't—at this point in time. The one thing I will say is the large screen is one. I have a 6 Plus.

(David Houle at 00:25:43) I always ask somebody who has a smaller screen, why do you have a smaller screen? Well, it's big enough. I go, you know, the 6 Plus. The only reason I wondered if it was too big is it wouldn't fit in my blue jeans pocket.

(David Houle at 00:25:55) And it did. So it wasn't too big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) Oh, nice.

(David Houle at 00:25:58) Yeah, right. What do you do on a phone? Now, I'm talking to an older generation, not necessarily to someone your age, but somebody, say, certainly over the age of 40. You know, what do you do on your phone?

(David Houle at 00:26:09) You read, you watch videos, and you text, all three of which are improved by having a larger surface. Why would you not have a larger surface, right? And, you know, that's the only thing that I would argue anybody who doesn't have a lot—yeah.

(David Houle at 00:26:24) I went to China in 2015. Not only do they have our asses whooped in terms of high speed—I mean, I was on the Shanghai subway just to take it, and people were watching high-def movies, live streaming in the subway, right?

(David Houle at 00:26:38) And the other thing was they all had large phones. They had phones that are bigger than the 6, right? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:45) Right.

(David Houle at 00:26:45) Some of the Chinese phones are, like, you know, seven inches. They're almost as big as the iPad mini.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:51) Yeah. My sister just moved back to Sarasota from Shenzhen, China.

(David Houle at 00:26:55) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:55) Yeah. She was there teaching English for four or five years.

(David Houle at 00:26:58) Yeah. And what did she have to say upon her return? Thank God I'm home, or what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:06) No. She adapted pretty well. She kind of explained the differences. And I mean, she was happy to be home because all our family's in Sarasota.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) So she was happy from that, but she definitely enjoyed China. It's very different over there. Like, for example, one day she was telling me there's like a neighborhood rioting, and the government controls the building. So because they were like protesting in the streets or whatever the situation was, they just shut off all the power and water to their homes until they went back and stopped bothering the government.

(David Houle at 00:27:45) Well, you know, that's like getting in a hotel room and you log on to the Wi-Fi in a hotel, and the first thing that comes up is you may not be able to get Google, Facebook, Twitter. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) Oh.

(David Houle at 00:27:58) But here's the thing that's odd about the Chinese. You know, they have one foot in the past and one foot in the future. I was at the Shanghai Train Station, ready to take a high-speed train down to Beijing, you know, with the person who was my handler there because I was giving speeches and a book tour. And so it's the biggest, most modern train station I have ever seen. 240 trains go in and out of there a day, and 75% of them go 300 kilometers an hour.

(David Houle at 00:28:28) Right? So then, you know, because of some need, I say to my traveling companion, let me go to the bathroom one more time. You know? So I go from this—I go into the men's room to go into a stall, and it's one of these stalls circa 200 years ago with two places to put your feet in a hole, right?

(David Houle at 00:28:51) So you pull your pants down and you squat. And this is—I mean, and this is a simultaneous occurrence. And then I walk back out into the most modern train station I've ever seen. That's China, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:05) Right. That's super interesting. Yeah. Because that's their culture. Like, it's okay.

(David Houle at 00:29:10) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:11) Right? Like, that's that's how it would work. My sister would tell me that's the thing she likes the most about here is that all the restaurants have bathrooms that are bathrooms.

(David Houle at 00:29:22) Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's odd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:23) So what's your view on voice and Alexa? Do you have one? Do you have a—

(David Houle at 00:29:28) Yeah. Yeah. Again, I'm a high-level trend guy. So ever since—so I've been speaking about what I'm about to tell you for ten years.

(David Houle at 00:29:39) The human-computer interface first began when the computer was in a big air-conditioned room, and there are people who wear lab coats, white lab coats. They're called computer operators. And there are people sitting in cubicles right outside who are programmers, and then there are systems analysts. And that obviously morphed with the personal computer to us keyboarding as the interface with our computers. We use a keyboard.

(David Houle at 00:30:04) And then the next thing was touch when the iPhone came out. So touchscreen interface, and then Alexa and, you know, Siri and all the ones like that is voice interface, which has yet to be fully mastered with the computer, but it's almost there, as you know. And what I've been talking about for ten years is brainwave-computer interface because that's the next thing. It's still in research laboratories. But basically, you know, you put on a cap, the sensors of which pick up your brainwaves, and you give intentional thought to the computer, and it performs.

(David Houle at 00:30:49) So by 2025, that'll be out into the marketplace easily, brainwave-computer interface.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) I can buy an SDK right now that lets me do it.

(David Houle at 00:30:57) SDK. What's it called? What does SDK stand for?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) Software development kit. Okay. So I can buy—it's a device that goes onto your head, right? And it comes with an SDK, which is basically, I sit there and I've got meters on the screen, and I'm thinking jump, jump, jump, jump, and it's showing me the activations of my brain that are jump.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) And then I kind of group that data, and I make that my jump command. Then I think run, run, run. And I group that data, I make my run command. Then I can go build a little game where I have a character on the screen. And as I'm thinking jump, the character is jumping. And as I'm thinking run, the character is running.

(David Houle at 00:31:32) Hey, dude. Could I do this without having any of your coding skills?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:36) There's a company that gave a TED talk that actually has a TED talk of this happening. They just pick a person out of the audience and they have them do this. They go up on stage, they put the thing on their head, and they have the video game set up, and they—

(David Houle at 00:31:46) Is there a way that you could send me a link to get one of the things?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:51) Yeah. I think they're like—I think they're like $5,700. You can get a basic one, and then it might even come with that game I was describing.

(David Houle at 00:31:59) Yeah. Well, the reason I want to do it is because since I've been talking about it for ten years, I'd like to experience it, number one. I'd like to develop the capability in my mind to do it. And number three, of course, how powerful would that be if I did that during the presentation that we met at, right? I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:20) That would be insane.

(David Houle at 00:32:21) It would be a presentational thing. Now I'm going to do this. And there isn't anybody except people who are of your ill-developed sense of awareness in technology and computers that wouldn't be blown away by that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:35) No. When I saw it, I was just absolutely floored and pumped at the same time.

(David Houle at 00:32:39) Yeah. No. So sometime in the fall, please send me anything. I mean, I can go search, but I'm not exactly sure what I'm searching for. So if you could send me an email that has links or you might want to look at this, I'm all in.

(David Houle at 00:32:53) Thank you, sir.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) What you should do is I gave the company—you should go out and take time to go meet with them because they would love to have guests come in and, like, all program—like, all technology people. Like, a fun day. Would it be cool to have this person come in that's going to then put on our device for our company and go around and talk around the world? I mean, that's value to both parties involved, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:16) So you go there, and then you would talk with them. They would set you up with the device and the game, and you guys would learn how to use it. Then you just integrate it into your talks, and they would be super pumped for that, I'm sure.

(David Houle at 00:33:25) That's great. You know, I mean, so, you know, I use props when I speak. And here's another concept I think you heard me talk about. You know, I've talked about this since 2008 once the iPhone was out. And I said that everybody now, for the first time in history, has two realities—a physical reality based on atoms and a screen reality based on digits.

(David Houle at 00:33:52) And that because the screen reality based on digits, digits can morph more quickly than atoms can. The change that comes in the future starts on the screen. So, you know, then I walk to one side of the stage and I hold up my phone. I go, or I don't hold up my phone and I say, why is it over here in physical retail that malls are closing one a week, the big box stores are shutting down, the strip malls are empty? And I go over to the other side of the stage and I hold up because of something on the screen reality called Amazon.com.

(David Houle at 00:34:24) And then you go to Uber, and then you go to Airbnb. So the reality that's being created on the screen is rearranging the physical reality. And when people get that concept, it blows their mind. Normally, they just think, okay, your physical reality is that you're listening to me. Your screen reality is what's going on in your world outside this room where you're listening to me.

(David Houle at 00:34:46) And we're the first iteration that that didn't exist until ten years ago. There was only the singular reality. Now there's the dual reality. And the other thing is this, because there's 7,500,000,000 people on the planet, 6,200,000,000 have cell phones.

(David Houle at 00:35:03) So more people have cell phones than have indoor plumbing or indoor electricity, which means there's cell phone ubiquity, which means there is no time, distance, or place limiting human communication. So the whole concept of communication, which was entirely place based. When your parents were growing up, they had a phone in the office and a phone at home. So you had to be in a place to take a phone call.

(David Houle at 00:35:27) Now you don't. So the concept of place has been totally separated from the concept of communication, which is a fundamental change in consciousness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:38) Oh, man. This is so good.

(David Houle at 00:35:40) We can do this again. I'm having much fun as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:43) So here's a few points that cropped up that you might be able to integrate in your stuff or might find interesting. So having actually written some machine learning code, I have some experience with this. One of the things that we are actually lacking on right now, everyone says, you know, oh, the AI concept or what the general public imagines AI as, like, a human that can just be a human, which is so interesting to me. But anyways, they say it's so far, so far out until that happens. It's gonna be forever until that happens. And then they don't realize that what the machine learning algorithms can do today are severely limited by processing power. So we actually, we're sitting around waiting for processing power. For me to train a machine learning model on something ultra basic right now could take a couple days, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:34) I have to run it, it could take a couple days on a normal computer. If I pay for a cloud system where I can have multiple processing and multiple computers at the same time, it still takes a long time for me to train on a relatively simple task. Those same principles, we could train it on larger tasks, but the life cycle of the training is so drawn out right now because of the limitations of the processor. So what's going to happen is we're actually ahead of the hardware right now and what we can do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) And when we start getting to that point where the hardware is catching up, we're going to be able to do insane things with machine learning.

(David Houle at 00:37:15) Well, I have a question there. You know, I give talks with a guy who used to be at IBM called The AI Guys. And, you know, I'd love for anybody who's listening to book us. I mean, we basically take the high level, high conceptual levels of AI and translate it into the business community. What you need to know about this, and here's the context, right? But so we reference Watson a lot. Watson is different. Is the Watson and supercomputers like that, is that an exception to what you just said or not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:48) Oh, it's not an exception to what I'm, they're still...

(David Houle at 00:37:51) Well, okay. So let me ask you a question. I'm connecting two things. What you just said, we're ahead of the hardware. That's a brilliant statement. So sometime within five years, maybe ten years for absolutely sure, quantum computing will really take hold. And the way I've researched it, I'm told that quantum computing can increase computer speed by 100,000 times. Is that, and so, one, is that correct? Two, will that be the transformative moment relative to machine learning?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:26) I don't know about the specifics of the hardware and if the quantum computers will be the big, the big change. But here's what I do know. I do know that I have been a geek about this type of stuff my whole life about how people learn and also technology. And now that I have a five-month-old daughter, so now I'm watching her, and I'm thinking about life, and I'm thinking about all the technology. And what I'm seeing is something very, very, very clear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) All you can do in life is really try things, take the best things that work, learn from them, have that experience, move forward, try something else, and then pay attention to what's happening in your environment. So it's all these, like, we do, we're very basic humans, and everything is very basic and simple on one perspective. So when you think about a machine learning system, you think, well, if you had the processing, the same processing power as a brain, right, and you could accept all the input and accept as the brain as a whole, both conscious and unconscious, if you had that processing power, all you would really have to do is make a machine learning algorithm that's try things, takes what it's like, learns from it, processes it, creates a experience, understands the experience, moves. I mean, it's not that difficult. What's difficult is the scale of data and input that you need and the processing power you need.

(David Houle at 00:39:42) So the apps, the apps of programming is not, it's the programming and funneling enough data in is what you're saying, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) It's all, it's all coming down to processing power.

(David Houle at 00:39:55) So okay, okay. And what do you think is when will there be a processing breakthrough and what will it be?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) Well, I think we're inside of an exponential processing breakthrough because every time we, we have very fast computers compared to twenty years ago, clearly. And then every, it's our fast computers that then learn with us and that can create the faster computers. Like, you couldn't create a microchip in 1980s with, you know, basic tools, right? Or the 70s with basic tools, but now they're like these high performance lasers that only these highly programmed, very exact machines can create, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:33) So as our technology gets better, we can create better performing technology. It's like we're basically rapidly iterating through technology generations inside of technology way faster than humans iterate. I mean, we take, you know, a whole human generation to iterate and we can iterate technology very, very fast. As we, now that we've started to build these machine learning tools that are very intelligent or, it's very, we have the processing power at the rate we do right now, then we're gonna be able to create better electronics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:03) And I think it's just gonna happen exponentially in small iterative cycles. And there'll be a little breakthrough here. There'll be a little breakthrough there. There'll be a little, and it'll just stack up just like everything else in life, you know?

(David Houle at 00:41:13) So, you know, what I've said is that even though the underpinnings of artificial intelligence, staying with that term, have been around for decades, it's only really in the last three years that the possibilities have started to manifest themselves. And what you just said means that within another three to five years, it will become absolutely unstoppable on almost any metric. So I want to come back briefly, real quickly. The quote of machine learning that I always use that relates to your daughter, the definition of machine learning, quote, the ability of a machine to improve its performance based on previous results. And then I turn to the audience and I say, how does a one-year-old learn how to walk?

(David Houle at 00:42:03) Same thing, right? So here's the big, here's the big concept. Artificial intelligence is the single greatest technological invention since electricity in terms of how it will transform how humanity lives. Obviously, when electricity came in, it ended up lighting up the night. It air conditioned the desert. It made something other than the stove able to cook things in the kitchen, whether it be toast, coffee, or microwave popcorn, right?

(David Houle at 00:42:29) But so accept that as a parallel. I think it's very valid because there's no, I mean, all of a sudden there were cities. All of a sudden there was night. All of a sudden there was air conditioning. But all those things were invented after electricity was discovered or invented, right? Right. So when electricity was invented, the smartest people following it probably said, oh, that means I'll be able to work or do things at night because it will light up the night. They didn't see air conditioning. They didn't see global electronic communications because it only developed afterwards. So the issue I try to get through to people today is right now, we see artificial intelligence as solving problems more quickly and putting people out of work.

(David Houle at 00:43:27) But we have no idea what might happen to humanity and technology and the world after artificial intelligence fully, you know, becomes as dominant and influential as it will be in the twenty-twenties. So I ask people to think about that. When electricity was invented, nobody even had the concept of air conditioning. When electricity was invented, nobody had the concept of a television set. When electricity was invented, nobody had a concept of electric transportation.

(David Houle at 00:44:02) So we don't know what artificial intelligence is gonna provide us after we've assimilated it or we've assimilated with it going forward. So there is no real way to talk about artificial intelligence and its consequences except to imagine. In other words, there's no, oh, artificial intelligence could get rid of jobs, right? You know?

(David Houle at 00:44:29) Yeah. It's like saying, oh, electricity is gonna get rid of candles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:33) Right.

(David Houle at 00:44:33) I love this. I'm sorry I went over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:37) No worries at all. It was a fantastic conversation. I super appreciate your time and talking with us about the future. You're awesome, David.

(David Houle at 00:44:47) Well, you're awesome too as well. And particularly, when I know that you're really only seven years old, it's amazing. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:01) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.