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Hello and welcome back to Tech TV. Uh Pete and I are here today to talk about a whole host of different topics from uh data sovereignty to addiction to robots that might be uh friends or foes, who knows? Um Pete um starting first of all looking at the state of uh technology in Europe and um uh whether data sovereignty or even technology sovereignty is important. We’ve heard a big announcement from France. Tell us a little bit about what the French are up to. >> Well, the French are following through
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on what I suppose you could call a trend. Uh Sweden did announce uh several months ago that it was not going to use Microsoft any longer and that it was going to use Linux. Uh but what we’re actually seeing now is a reaction to Donald Trump. Donald Trump has faced off lots and lots of people in Europe. He’s antagonized people in Europe. He’s actually pushed for Europe to up its defense budgets. And one of the consequences of what he’s been saying, he’s annoyed people so much that they’ve
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been saying, “Right, we can’t have the Americans running our technological infrastructure. We’ve got to be in control not only of our own infrastructure, we’ve got to be in control of our data.” What they’ve been saying is this is a national security issue that even if you are in control of your data if it is work sorry if it is moving across American technological infrastructure you can’t be certain that you are in control of your data. Now, France, which has always been uh, shall
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we say, um, a little confrontation. >> Yeah. Independent, but and probably lordably so. They’re very, very keen on being in control of their own things. They don’t like, for instance, Brlaze. They don’t like the fact that English has been creeping into their language. They don’t like that. I suppose you could call it linguistic pollution. They don’t want data pollution. So that’s what it’s about. And it’s highly likely that other European states will follow suit. It’s
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possible also that what we will see is the growth of a European equivalent of Microsoft a uh something that at one stage some well back going back to 1996 so probably about 30 years ago we saw companies like Bull that still existed. ICL was beginning to rock at that time, but there were other companies in Europe that used to be technology champions for their particular nations. The Germans had Nick Stof, I think they had Seammens as well, didn’t they? Yeah. But we also in the UK, we had companies like ICL.
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Um, but I think this is goes far further than just having the the technology champions. Um I I I myself worked for IBM um in the days when IBM had a massive presence in Europe. IBM employed something like um 40 or 50,000 um staff in the UK. It had a manufacturing in Green. It had a research establishment in Hersley and therefore although it was an American technology company, a lot of the jobs and a lot of the IP were to be being developed in this uh country and therefore we had the skills and we had a
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lot of those benefits. But the problem we have with um some of the cloud and the AI giants which are the technology leaders in this particular wave of technology is that Amazon uh may have a presence in countries but it’s largely large marketing uh warehouses where they’re selling um a whole load of things and uh doing all the logistics here and maybe a bit of marketing but that’s about it. all of the high value odd ad jobs are back in the states and therefore it’s nothing like the
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situation that we had with IBM and others um over many decades before this. Um and obviously there’s also the concern that Trump has brought to the four where we could be very concerned about the potential for a a kill switch or uh being bullied or or having um some of these platforms withheld from us if we don’t conform to some of their demands. Um, so I think the the the game has changed here. Uh, and we need to wake up to this and um uh there’s potentially a big problem ahead as we
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struggle um against um uh what we see as uh tech donuts in the US at a time when Trump is very likely to um simply turn around and and throw large tariffs at us if we do anything to hinder or impede what he sees as his technology giants. Yeah, but that’s the issue. We’ve moved on from that time of IBM. We’ve we’re now in the internet. There is now the very real possibility of a kill switch. Only yesterday the news emerged of a professor who had been using chat GPT who had put all of his
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information into chat GPT for the last two years and then suddenly he changed the setting and it vanished overnight. Apparently the person’s distraught. Now there was an Austrian academic Victor Schamburgger who did something similar and he actually had to undergo almost therapy and self therapy to recover from that and he did a very good job and he wrote a book about it. The problem is if you do that with governments one of the ways that the UK government has sought to try to reduce costs has been by
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putting information in the cloud. What happens to it then if it has a professorial moment? That’s the issue that you’re facing. We have to be in control of our own infrastructure, our own data, and our own cloud. We also, and this is very, very important, we have to be aware of the statement that Donald Trump made where he said that he wanted all of the world’s data to run on American infrastructure. Why? Well, one of the reasons that people want data to run on their infrastructure is so they
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can use it to train their AIS. Now, if we wish to have a technology industry that is sustaining to the UK in terms of jobs, that’s something that we have to be aware of. We have to have our own clouds. We have to have our own infrastructure. We should have our own AI systems. We can’t allow all of this to go to America otherwise we become I suppose what is the phrase technologically disembowled. Well, it’s interesting that the um uh uh senior leader at Zoho, which is another cloud firm based um out of India, um has
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been quite amused at uh uh Europe’s response here and described um the big tech firms as the latest East India company um actually uh sucking a lot of value and wealth from the whole of Europe just as Europe did to India and others in the past. um and that potentially we’re getting a touch of our own medicine here. Um but to a large extent um the thing that the French have done in um trying to change uh the rules and ditch US platforms um because of sovereignty concerns, because of economic concerns and because of other
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um major issues um is very ludable, but is it going to be successful? I mean I can see governments potentially doing it and the French government seem uh very uh focused on doing that. Now the uh Swedish and Danish government have have have talked about it. The the British government has rather failed in the past to actually get its act together. Um but even if the public sector do this, is the private sector going to follow? Um and as long as um uh the big cloud giants uh um especially AWS uh Azure and
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Google Cloud remain dominant um it’s not going to change. And we saw that with Gaia X which was the European attempt to uh try and create a European competitor to those cloud giants which failed miserably because there simply wasn’t enough enough unity within the commercial sector. Um and the governments may um provide a good lead here but it’s going to be um another thing for the um private sector to follow. What do you think the chances are of the private sector actually being ready to take this seriously to be
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willing to potentially pay more for European products and services? Well, you know as well as I do, this is an issue of commitment. If a government is committed, if it shows that it is going to continue and make something happen, then it will happen. One of the things that occurred with companies like ICL for example was they suddenly pulled the plug. If a government wants to do this, if it wants that infrastructure, it has to be committed to it. Now, one of the things that we’re seeing with defense, for
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example, we we we had this meshing of all of these different companies. So, British aerospace, French companies involved in defense and these coalitions with other American technology companies in defense. I’m afraid those would also have to be separated. If you want to have independence, if you want to have security, then that’s what you have to do. So, it means that the government has to say no, we are going to do this. Now you say, would business follow through on that? Well, you’ve got to make it
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attractive for businesses to do. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Denmark, given the amount of bullying that it’s been suffering over Greenland, 90% of businesses in Denmark use American technological infrastructure. You’ve got to give an alternative if you’re going to do that. Now the one thing that I will say though is at the moment there has been such antagonism generated by the American position that I think it’s highly likely that Europe will lead an initiative where it will encourage the development
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of these tech these firms and of these alternatives and I could see that America that Europe will be providing grants in particular areas is looking to pick champions, maybe in France, maybe in the UK, and saying, “We want you to develop an infrastructure that we will use Europewide.” >> You might say, “Hang on a moment. The UK isn’t in Europe.” But, uh, in terms of science and a lot of those things, it is to all intents and purposes still in Europe. I know that’s
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a slightly provocative statement. However, um I could see that we would develop a euroide alternative and that that would be a very attractive thing for Europe to do for all sorts of different reasons. I’m I’m afraid I remain cynical. I can see that there is more impetus here now than ever before because of some of the recent moves with Greenland and other things uh for us to uh assert our independence and I see the uh governments and the public sectors and many of the European countries taking
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the lead here. I I just don’t think that the uh uh uh economic follow-through uh certainly in the uh private sector is actually going to happen. Um we’ve already seen that I mean the Deep Mind was a a leading AI company really all of it um intellectual property and its um uh startup uh uh uh entity was based in the UK um and it just couldn’t get um capital markets in the UK behind it and therefore it ended up being sold out to to Google and and becoming an American company. And I just don’t see that the
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capital markets, the infrastructure, the momentum I is sufficiently behind um many of the European tech startups and the European uh uh champions because so much of the critical mass mass at this time is is with the Americans. Um I I I remain hopeful that may change but somewhat cynical. >> I think you’re absolutely wrong. I think that one of the wakeup calls in all of this is that there has to be a conccommittent development of the underlying finance infrastructure that we’ve been lacking. We’ve seen this over
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and over and over again. If there there is a wakeup call, it’s not just in terms of technology. It’s the wake up is also in terms of the financing of the development of that technology. We’ve seen that in Silicon Valley and at the moment we have a situation where in Silicon Valley almost all of the venture capital is being sucked into AI which could have potentially catastrophic uh results. So it’s this is an area where we have to wake up right the way across the board. Now I know we’re running out
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because there’s a lot of things that we have to talk about. So >> well as I say I mean we we will see over time whether you or I are right I’m I’m a little cynical you’re more optimistic um but one of the things not only on the economic side that may force our hands uh might be the fact that there is going to be regulation that is going to step out and one of the things where regulation is currently making a really big change and an attempt to challenge the US tech giants is in the area of
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addiction. Um and we we have a very big trial um about to start in California at the moment. Now Tik Tok uh notably has settled I its uh the charges against it immediately before jury selection um just living it really to the last minute. Um but this is almost an admission of guilt on the behalf of Tik Tok that there is serious admission but but of serious addiction but Meta and YouTube and others are continuing to the trial. It’s going to be very very interesting to see exactly how this unfolds. I mean we’ve had research in
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the UK that something like half of all um young people in the UK feel that they’re addicted to social media. Um, and and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I don’t know what your thoughts are either on the the nature of the addiction, whether it’s good or bad, and what the chances are of this trial having any effect. >> I think this trial will have an effect. I think it will have an impact. I think it is part of a trend. We’re already seeing a road back against technology in
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Australia. We’re seeing that replicated. There are moves here in the UK to ban technology used by children under the age of 16. The technology is deliberately made to be addictive. One of the things that you’ve seen, well, I mean, here’s a good exercise. Turn off notifications on WhatsApp. Turn off notifications on other social media. And you see how often the system tries to alert you to the fact that you’ve got them turned off and how often it tries to tell you that it’s so much better if
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those notifications are turned on. The problem with this is is that people are making money out of your participation. They want you to be addicted because they want you to be permanently in front of something that is the equivalent of the sucker on the arm of a um very big octopus. I I I agree entirely and and I think uh we’re going to look back at the the sort of growth of social media and the fact that it wasn’t regulated uh with real horror in the future a bit like smoking which um at one point in the past was
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done by an enormous amount of the population without any real concern. Um and I think we will learn that they are serious um emotional um uh uh uh implications of too much technology use. Certainly the sort of uh attention uh grabbing stuff where it is actually uh uh rage infused um uh uh uh Tik Tok and and other stuff that grabs the attention which is exactly what the algorithms are tuned to actually funnel into our uh homes and onto our screens which is a real concern. Now thankfully the Australians have taken the lead here and
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notably the French are one of the first to follow suit. Um I hope that the the UK we’ve been discussing it will will follow it and obviously um this um trial uh will bring a lot of information uh to the four and and hopefully during the discovery phase and and a lot of what will come out during the trial will actually I think bring some of these problems to light for people in a way that they’re not yet aware. Um and I think it will be something really fascinating for us to follow. Well, if it goes ahead, you look at the
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risks that exist for the technology companies in not settling. Okay, they they’re facing this real conundrum at the moment. The conundrum is if we settle, we admit it’s there and we open the gates for more lawsuits to occur. If they don’t settle and they start going through the discovery phase and they start going through other uh examinations then people are going to start saying we want to look at your code and if they find in those algorithms that they are actually being made deliberately
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addictive then that will ping off some other legal suits that will then start about the deliberation of that exercise about the fact that That means then that they knew it would be addictive and they were trying to exploit it. That’s one thing. The other thing that could also occur is that they would discover that some of this technology was made to be addictive in psychological terms. That they were using psychological research to actually try to make sure that people would respond to the technology. If
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those two things start to come through, then the technology companies will be in a terrible amount of trouble. Now, where we go in the future on this, I don’t know. But if you think about that, if those details were to emerge, if you’ve got 50% of the children in the UK saying that they are addicted to technology, then the lawsuits are potentially massive because you’ve also got other psychological damage that could be occurring as we go further into this. And when that starts to happen, then the
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lawsuits will again increase because the class actions from 50% of the children in the UK could be huge. They could say that this has affected their life forever. So this is an extremely important and very very difficult uh decision that’s currently confronting social media. Uh again, we seem to be >> I think the example here that we’re following is tobacco and and very much so. And uh I think the lawsuits that followed um once uh a lot of the addiction and the deliberate um focus on
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it came out from uh a lot of the tobacco uh uh lawsuits. I think we’ll see the same thing here. Uh and in addition and and I think the uh talk about uh agegating and not allowing children onto uh these platforms I think is entirely positive. We we don’t let our our our young people smoke before they’re 16 in this country, drive before they’re 17 and drink before they’re 18. And I don’t think we should be letting them onto social media um at any age. I think the the threshold the the moment of 13 is
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far too low. And I think inevitably that is going to change as some of these regulations come in. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Maybe as adults we can make an educated decision on our use of these platforms, but that’s a different thing. Well, you try telling that to children. You then these are the children who have already had a taste of social media. That’s one thing. You you you say that smoking is analogous. It’s not. The amount of people who are dying from as a result of smoking is nothing
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like 50% of children. If you’ve got 50% of children saying that they are suffering from addiction and if you also factor into that this push to try to use AI in a similar fashion then you have some real problems for the technology companies. I think that there are a series of cusps that technology is actually hitting now. For a long time, we weren’t actually thinking about this. Now, we’ve got, as we’ve already been discussing, data sovereignty. We’ve got data ownership is beginning to emerge. We
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have these issues about technology, addiction, social media, the internet itself, and how we’re going to move forward into the future. All of these are being challenged now. And and I think that this challenge on addiction is very very very crucial in that it’s a milestone. Yeah. I I think you need to make a distinction between deaths and addiction. Um, smoking had a lot of addiction and quite a lot of deaths. Um, I I think social media has as much addiction. Um, and we’re starting to see some deaths and and
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therefore we need to take them both seriously. And it’s going to be interesting to see how this uh lawsuit unfolds. But but moving on to >> there’s a difference, Bill, between uh being addicted to nicotine and smoking and being addicted to a a mobile phone and attention deficit and so many other factors. But anyway, >> exactly. And I think some of the the evidence of some of the harms if not already uh being suppressed by these social media companies will will uh come to the four over the years as we move
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forward and we realize what the harms exactly are. But I do think that during the discovery phase of and during the early um uh uh hearing of this trial, a lot will be um uncovered and I’m going to be following it with great interest as I assure are you and we’ll see what happens. But on a on a slightly lighter note, there are we’ve seen CES in in the US with a whole load of uh robots that have been coming out. Some are cute, some are creepy, crafty, confusing, whatever. Um what are your thoughts on
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uh uh robots? I I for one am somebody who has every kitchen gadget under the sun. In fact, my dinner this evening has been um cooked for me by a really smart kitchen appliance because I was so busy working on other things at the moment. Um I will quite happily embrace um uh some more sophisticated technology in the kitchen. I’m not sure quite how ready robots are for this. How ready pet are you for robots? Uh, I’m not massively. I I I did have a robot vacuum cleaner. Uh, I didn’t mind
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that. Uh, I also had a robot lawn mower which uh used to amuse me because of the way it used to torment the dogs and the chickens. However, uh, I actually think that that’s about as far as you want to go because I I I think robots are the robots that have been envisaged. I think they’re very duplicitous. I don’t think you can trust them. How do I know that this robot that is walking around looking so sort of uh cute and flicking its eyebrows at me? How do I know it’s not sending pictures of me off to somewhere?
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How do I know it’s not being hacked by hackers or the intelligence agencies? Well, I I think there I think there we’re already being spied onto an an extent by Alexa and and there have been cases in the US where um uh people have been prosecuted for what they said in their own homes because it was heard by Alexa where in reality your Miranda rights uh guarantee you the the right to remain silent. Um, but you you kind of given up your Miranda rights and your remain right to remain silent if you’ve
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got an Alexa in the room. So, I think inevitably there are um uh uh CCTV cameras, there are microphones, there are things tracking a lot of what we do. Now, good, bad, whatever. I don’t think a few kitchen robots or kitchen gadgets are actually going to make an enormous difference here. And if something can do my ironing for me, a a chore that I absolutely loathe, then I’m all for it. No, but the point about this is already when I look at my computer, I now see a interface to the world. It’s almost a
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public interface that sits on my desk and I sit there and think uh I I I feel a mixture of uh attraction and repulsion. I think uh this device is probably listening to me. It can quite easily be turned into a listening device. I can quite easily be monitored via this system. Uh it’s almost like the uh the palunteer of Lord of the Rings that you’re dragged towards to be examined in front of. And I don’t think that that’s right. I in in my book on uh AI AI on trial, I wrote that you your
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device should be loyal to you. I think if I’m going to have a robot in my house that it should sign a declaration saying that it’s loyal to me, that I I I it gives me device sanctity and that um it it will fight to the death for me and repulse any incomers. Um, it will it will stand by the door and and demand obesience for anybody who comes through. >> Well, I’ll have to uh announce my arrival when I come and visit you next in order to ensure that the uh uh robots do not attack me um in your defense. But
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um I I I’m I’m a believer that um uh these gadgets are going to become more and more um uh uh uh uh uh widespread. Um, I’ve already got uh every, as I say, every kitchen gadget imaginable, and I’m I’m going to be buying more. Now, I’m all for having data controls in place to actually limit the amount that they spy on you. And and hopefully with GDPR in here in Europe, we will have better protections in place when some of these these technologies are rolled out. And I I am, as you well know, a real privacy
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champion in that respect. Um but again um it’s going to be um uh uh how this happens and we’ll watch it as it unfolds. Um so Pete, thank yeah Bill this is the central tenate of all of this. The central core of all of this and again I mean this this program is quite interesting in so far as there is a theme running through it and that is the it’s an issue with technology. There has to be transparency. You know, you should know what it’s doing. As with the Americans, you don’t want to have a
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technology with a kill switch that will disempower you. I If a robot is going to be in my house, then I want that robot to be loyal to me. If the technology is in my house, I want it to be loyal to to me. Yeah. There there was an old Norse saying about fire and which is where the name of the Norse fire god Loki comes from that he’s a good servant but a bad master and that is the relationship that we’ve let get out of control with technology and and I think fundamentally it comes down not just to trust in tech
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but trust in the people behind the tech those that program them that have some of these controls and at the moment uh that trust is in short reply. Anyway, thank you Pete for for joining us again. >> Actually, just just one last point um which is a was a very good and interesting point that was made in our program about ID cards and digital ID cards. The point was made by Aleandro which was that uh any technology can be perverted. It is the motivation of the people behind it and that is the issue. That’s what we
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have to overcome. But anyway, I will I will leave you there. I will I could talk forever as you know >> and and there will be plenty of other opportunities. Anyway, uh thank you very much, Pete, and thank you everyone who’s tuned in. Um we look forward to sharing more with you in the future, uh which we most certainly will do. So, please like, follow, and subscribe to this channel, and we’ll be sharing more with you in the near future. Heat. Heat. N.
