I think we know that we are the custodians
of huge amounts of private data.
We have to take our ethics seriously.
We have to ensure the world knows.
So we have to be as open and honest as we
can about who we are, what we do and why we
are doing it.
The driverless car.
We’re going to be at the driverless car,
faster than you can imagine.
The only thing that is going to hold back
the driverless car, is regulation and the
failure of regulators to act quick enough.
But it is going to be proven so clearly that
the driverless car is safer and better than
a driver car.
So what do you have in a driverless car?
You have a black  box that tells you where you are.
You have a GPS system that has to connect to satellites.
The car itself is checking in to its manufacturer
to let it know that it exists.
The driver is probably going to have one or
more social devices which are also going to
be GPS enabled and connected to a WiFi device.
Or to a wireless network.
You are going to have your music delivered
by iTunes or some form of digital audio broadcast.
The car is going to be checking in 200-300
different components from tyre pressure to
engine temperature, to oil level and communicating
all of this information back.
I’ve listed 300-400 different applications
in a driverless car.
None of which are owned by one person.
And all of them are connected by different
ways;
satellite to GPS, WiFi, Broadband.
Who knows maybe even radio links when you’re
in the city.
All of this data and all of these applications
are owned by hundreds of different players
and they all have to come together to make
the driverless car work.
The internet of things, the connected house,
the car.
That will converge even more. Everything will
be connected to the internet in some way or
other.
More and more devices outside of what humans
are doing send traffic over the internet also.
Today you know the data centre industry is
about half of our bandwidth and Iceland, the
population, 330,000 people using the other
half.
We are constantly seeing more devices at home
with a better picture quality.
So probably after five years, everyone will
be looking at Ultra High Definition.
Next step will be 4K television.
That’s the large load on the Internet at the moment
A lot of the planning now is how do we make
round corners on displays on websites!
It’s all about the next fancy, flashy thing
and they’re not thinking about that this
is a 100 year, 1,000 year repository for information.
How can we make it so that information can
stick around and will still be readable in
100 years?
Right from the beginning, information has
been doubling at a fixed rate.
The mistake we are making at the moment is
that people are not aware enough about how
important it is to keep the information around.
Libraries understand because we’ve got hundreds
of years of history, they understand their
responsibility for keeping information around.
And now that the role of libraries has been
spread over the whole of society in a way,
that information is being lost about the responsibility
about keeping knowledge around.
I organised some workshops at the first web
conference in 1994 at CERN. I got talking
to Tim Berners-Lee who along with Robert Cailliau
were the creators of the world wide web.
When I joined W3C I imagined that we had all
these people with great technical knowledge
who would understand that we were looking
for the best technical solution and we just
had to do find the best technical solution and
that was it.
We’d all be agreeing and building the next
great thing.
The W3C gets its money from companies, which
means that the companies get to have a lot
of influence on the design of the web and
the direction that it has to go
And that in a sense is a shame that those
people have such a disproportionate influence.
I was shocked and disappointed about how political
it was, and how you had to be a politician.
If you don’t know you’re designing the
infrastructure to the future, then you’re
going to make some assumptions that in the
end haven’t panned out.
You can see that there is a threat that maybe
the Internet will be those big companies.
Maybe the Internet is Facebook or Google.
Everyone knew that there was a danger that
some company would move in and sort of grab
the web.
They’d all do their best to make the web
theirs.
In a way that’s still happening.
I mean Facebook, has its good sides, I mean
socially at least it’s an amazing way of
getting in contact with people but it is a
terribly un-web like, a terrible closed garden
which is very bad for the web.
Facebook as the Internet.
Maybe they have 30% of all traffic!
So what is the Internet in the end?
Yeah, it’s a business about you. Your service,
being sold, your personal information is the business.
The thoughts in our life here was that we
would all be a distributor of things.
Everyone would be a publisher of data.
Maybe we’ll see some new ideas coming that
will be smarter than what is offered today?
The strength of the human brain is the ability
to instantly dig into its deep memory and
pull out information and often times a smell
leads to a memory or a sound leads to a memory.
When you hear the first two notes in a song
and you not only know the song and artist
and the album but also when you bought where
you bought it and when you listened to it.
All of that comes right back to you as fast
as you can.
Effectively our brain is something akin to
a quantum computer in that we’re able to
associate and move quickly from one idea to
the next without having to go through a series
of basic steps which is what a computer is
ultimately forced to do.
