Let us welcome Kevin Ashton. Thank you. Everybody smile now. I'm going to put this on Twitter.
later on this morning, so if you're not paying attention, everybody will know. Smile now. I will put that on Twitter. I'm teasing a little bit.
But I just did something that maybe 10 years ago would have seemed quite miraculous. I took this tiny wireless device out of my pocket and took a photograph of everybody here in Seoul. And in a matter of moments, I can share it with the world.
And that's something we're very used to today. but we were completely unused to maybe even five years ago, certainly ten years ago. So one of the things I would like to have you keep in mind as we talk this morning is not just how quickly things change but how quickly we adapt to the fact that things have changed.
The future, as I hope to show you, is actually very predictable, at least with respect to information computing technology. The part that is hard is not predicting the future. The part that is hard is believing it. So as we talk this morning, please remember all the changes you have seen in the last few years in your lifetime, both in the world and in Korea. I love Korea.
I come here regularly. It's always great to be here. One of the things as a foreigner that I notice is to the rest of the world, Korea is this amazing economic miracle.
And whenever I come here, you're all very humble and modest about what you have achieved together. So sort of from the rest of the world to you, if I may, there's so much to be amazed about here in Korea. And I think there will be even more to be amazed about. amazed about in the future. And the area that I'd like to talk about this morning is the Internet of Things, which has already been mentioned in a very excellent speech by the Vice Minister.
I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. This picture on my first slide here with Seoul kind of in the middle there. This is one of the oldest networks in the world.
This shows all the major shipping lanes on the planet. So when we think about networks, we tend to think about computer networks, but what you're actually looking at here is much older and much more important, and this is the movement of things around the world. This is what global trade actually looks like. Thank you. So you have these oceans that are really covered in ships moving goods around, and what is in those ships is occasionally raw materials, but normally things that people have added creativity and therefore value to.
It's a really amazing thing. In contrast, this is what the internet looks like. Each dot on this heat map is a cluster of active IP addresses.
And again, you can look at this. for a long time and it's kind of interesting to see, for example, India now has not a massively intense amount of internet activity but a very broadly distributed amount of internet activity, which is amazing to me because when I first visited India in 1990, it was difficult to even place a phone call and there were regular blackouts. Korea is very bright on this map, and so is Western Europe, and so on. Now, we have these two networks. We had these two networks.
There's this network of trade and this network of computers. And the interesting thing is, if we try to overlay them a little bit, what you notice is all the trade activity. is happening in the oceans and all the internet activity is happening in the land. And that's because obviously ships can't travel on land and there aren't any internet addresses in the sea.
But what this also symbolizes is the fact that that until recently the network of trade, our network of things, and the internet of information and data and people communicating with one another were very separate. And what the internet of things does is take kind of reality and the internet, which has traditionally been about abstract data. and brings them together. So when we talk about the Internet of Things, we're not just talking about smartphones that happen to be on the internet. It's really not the Internet of Things when I send a text message to a friend.
That's kind of just the internet. It happens to be smaller in my pocket. The Internet of Things is when we have computers that can sense the real world. for themselves and by themselves and therefore information about the things in the world can be made available via the internet automatically.
So the difference between what some people call ubiquitous computing or embedded computing and the Internet of Things is this additional layer of sensing. And that's really important because if the internet stopped working today, it would be inconvenient. If the global shipping lanes stopped working today, we would all die.
You can't eat bits. You can't drink bits. You can't put bits in the gas tank of your car.
So we're dependent on things to survive and having better information about our things is a better way to survive. So that's what the Internet of Things is all about. Now I said everything is very predictable.
And I want to sort of show you why a little bit. And this is predictable in a familiar way. I'm really not going to tell you anything you don't know right now. When computing got started around the... the 1950s computers were big.
And then a few decades later they became small enough to put in our homes. And then a few decades after that they became small enough that we could put them in our briefcases. So computers get smaller. We know this. And this carried on into the 21st century.
We went from computers in briefcases to computers in pockets. And now we have computers on. on eyeglasses and that you can wear and that can potentially sort of become part of your body.
And this is where we are today. So when we ask ourselves what's next, it's really not hard to predict. Computers are going to keep getting smaller. Now how much smaller can you get when you've got something as small as Google Glass here?
Well computers are basically going to become invisible. That's really nothing controversial. That's a fairly boring, safe prediction.
It would be harder to predict how Korea is going to do in the World Cup, after their fantastic 1-1 draw yesterday. That's a harder prediction to make than this one. And what's driving that, this is very familiar, this is Moore's Law, which basically says the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.
Now, if you imagine we could turn this... chart kind of the other way around because what this is showing is computers getting more complicated in the same amount of space. But it's also true that you can make the same amount of computing smaller every two years.
And this is part of what's driving this trend towards invisible computers. computers. Now there's another law which is probably more important for the 21st century and probably more important for the Internet of Things which is less well known and that is Kumi's Law.
Now what Kumi's Law says... is the amount of energy, electrical energy, needed to perform a computation halves every one and a half years. And this is the reason that you're... your smartphone today has better battery life than your smartphone five years ago. It is not because battery technology has improved.
It has. But that's really a small part of the reason. The main reason we get better battery life from our devices today is Cumi's law.
It's partly related to Moore's law, but the amount of energy we need to do computation is dropping rapidly. And note, the amount of energy needed to do computation drops faster than Moore's Law predicts computers will get smaller. So this is not just because smaller computers use less energy. There are other factors at play here. And so again, we can turn this upside down.
What this chart shows us is... The computations per kilowatt hour get greater and greater over time, but you can turn it around and say the amount of energy needed to do one computation drops rapidly. And this is one of the sort of secret driving forces behind the Internet of Things. You don't have to put batteries into these tiny computers anymore.
So one of the first Internet of Things technologies is RFID or radio frequency identification. And one of the interesting things about RFID is it's a microchip. An RFID tag is a microchip.
chip with an antenna and no battery. Where does the energy come from? The energy comes from the radio wave that is talking to the microchip. That chip needs so little energy because of Kumi's law that we can turn it on and off simply by communicating with it.
So the other prediction we can make is in addition to computers becoming invisible, a lot of computers will not need any apparent electricity whatsoever. They will get their energy from the radio waves communicating with them. They will get their energy from ambient light.
They will harvest their energy from vibrations in the air. So if you think back to the computer of the 1950s, this big thing in a room that needed lots and lots of electricity, now that becomes an invisible device that needs no electricity at all, or at least no dedicated internal electricity. And that is the most boring prediction any technologist can make. That is as certain as anything will ever be about the future. We are moving quickly to an age of invisible computers without batteries.
So to summarize... I can pretty much promise you that over the next few years, computers are going to get smaller. They're going to become more energy efficient.
They're going to be networked because everything is networked now. kind of goes without saying, and they're going to contain sensors. And when I say sensors, I do not mean sensors like keyboards or other devices that you use so you can communicate with your computer.
computer. I mean sensors that enable the machine to understand the world around it in some way by itself. And those two trends have also been happening over the last few years and are also really easy predictions to make. You know, the first one, networking, even if we look at that laptop photograph from the 1990s, after the mid 1990s it was it was very unlikely that you were going to buy a computer that didn't go on the network somehow. There was a little bit of time when you went and bought a separate modem or a separate modem card, but now this is just built in and we just expect it to be there.
So networking is an easy prediction. And sensing as well. If you look at... What happened with smartphones and what is now happening with wearable computing, we expect sensors to be built in.
They may be fairly basic. It's a camera in your smartphone. It's some GPS sensing. There's an accelerometer.
in your smartphone. Some of them kind of know what temperature it is. But they're becoming sensor platforms.
And as we move to wearable computing, that will be more true. So again, this is all very easy to predict. Maybe hard to believe, but it's easy to predict. And really just to... To emphasize and underline this point before we move on to what do you need to do to get ready, this shows the remarkable growth in smartphone shipments over the last few years.
Billions and billions of smartphones. smartphones have been sold. That's not very surprising.
But when people ask me, will the Internet of Things be real? Is the Internet of Things real? When will the Internet of Things be real?
This is the simple answer that I often give them. Every year for the last three years, we have shipped a billion more RFID tags than smartphones. So asking, and RFID is just one example of an Internet of Things technology. So asking whether the Internet of Things is real or will happen makes as much sense to me as asking whether smartphones will become popular. The big difference is you can see smartphones.
I just took a picture of you with my smartphone. You all know I own a smartphone. Some of you are sending emails and text messages right now.
I can see you have smartphones. RFID tags... are kind of invisible. And that's an interesting caution, by the way, as we move to the future.
Some companies, some nations, are going to get left behind simply because the Internet of Things is invisible. So don't be fooled by the fact that you see smartphones everywhere or video games everywhere, but you don't see the Internet of Things everywhere. The reason you don't see it is because it is so small.
If you look closely, you will find it. So a few examples of where we are right now, and really this is to explain what we need to do next. So this is a technology I developed when I worked at Belkin, which is an electronics technology company in Los Angeles.
Angeles. We did this a few years ago. This is a technology called Wemo, W-E-M-O.
You can buy this product in various retailers around the world. It is very simple. It allows you to...
control your electrical outlets using your smartphone. So the product on one side is just a wirelessly controlled electrical outfit. You plug in a lamp or something and then you can turn the lamp on and off using your phone.
You can program the outlet to come on and off at certain times. The product on the other side is a motion sensor. You plug it into your outlet.
If somebody walks by the outlet, you can see that the light is on. So you can the motion sensor detects that. Those two products alone enable you to do very interesting things. You can have the lights come on when you walk into the room.
You can see whether somebody is going into a place that they're not supposed to go into. You could connect that to a camera and take a photograph of them. The application that saved my life when I invented this technology was actually, I have young children and they like to play video games and watch the television and when they're bored with that, they leave the room and they leave everything on. And it used to drive me crazy.
And now everything is plugged in to an outlet and if there is no motion in the room after a few minutes, the outlet shuts down. This has two advantages. First of all, it means all the electronics get turned off when they leave. Secondly, it means they have to get up once in a while and move around. Otherwise, they know everything's going to get turned off.
Very Very simple, very basic, it's like 50 US dollars, the app is free, very simple. Now, hundreds of thousands of these have been sold. This is probably one of the most widely used home automation systems in the world. Enormously popular. Very simple.
And it started, this is a photograph of the actual whiteboard where I first had the idea to do Wemo. This is from 2011. Don't worry if you can't read the handwriting. I can't read the handwriting either.
I sort of remember what I was saying, but it all happened very quickly. But one of the design decisions here is actually around standards. How do you have the phone communicate with the motion sensor?
And there are all these different wireless standards that people like. And the decision I made, and I think probably the most important decision I made, was we were going to use Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is not the best way to communicate with the Internet of Things, except for the fact that everybody already has it. And so one of the things when we think about standards, just as an aside, is if you can use the thing you've already got, that's the thing you should do. should use.
And if there's some other new thing that's better, it has to be many orders of magnitude better to overcome the fact that nobody has it. If you can use, for example, Wi-Fi or the cell phone network or something that's already ubiquitous, much better. But that's a very simple example of an Internet of Things technology.
And the system is now grown. We started with the motion sensor and the outlet, and now they've This is a Wemo light bulb. You can turn your lights on and off from your phone. You can use the light bulb as a kind of a communications node in the network to extend your Wi-Fi and various other things. There's light switches.
There's baby monitors and cameras. And it's a system. And people do amazing things with it. This is another example. This is a very simple product called...
called Linket, L-I-N-Q-U-E-T, which is from a startup. It's just a little Bluetooth alarm that you put on your purse or in your wallet or on your car keys. And if you get too far away from your cell phone, your cell phone makes a noise. And if you can't find your keys, you push a button on an app on your cell phone, and the alarm rings, and you find your keys again. This is trivial, very useful.
Every once in a while, I can't find my keys. keys and I use this and I love it. But with Kumi's law bringing energy requirements down and Moore's law bringing computing size down, this is trivial. And we will look back at this in a few years and laugh because it's so big. Soon this will be just a tiny thing that you can barely see.
And another example of the Internet of Things in action, and I think this is an important product. an important concept to be aware of. This is the Nest thermostat. It's an intelligent networked thermostat.
It has sensors that sense more than just temperature built into it. Nest Labs was a start-up about three or four years ago. A few months ago, they were acquired by Google for $3.2 billion.
So far, they have two products, and they haven't sold that many of them. They have a thermostat and a carbon monoxide. a smoke detector.
But the significant thing about this, I think, is Google. I do a lot of work with big technology companies. I get asked about big technology companies.
And another thing that is a fairly safe prediction is big technology companies usually die when you technology happens. There are very few big technology companies that survive transitions in technology. Very few.
And so when you look at Apple today or Cisco today or Sony today and you look at what they're doing in the Internet of Things, the answer is nothing much. The exception right now seems to be Google. They actually look to me like they understand what's going on. But there are very few big technology companies that survive technology changes.
The Internet of Things will be no different. So when we reconvene in 10 years to talk about technology, we're going to be talking talk about how Korea has become an economic powerhouse in the world of the Internet of Things, the companies we are talking about may not be companies we have heard of today. But I think Google may be an interesting exception.
And this is the other reason why. Here's another Internet of Things technology. This is the Google self-driving car.
And it's a prototype. They've made about 10 so far. But this is a product and a product category that is coming. Google are not the only people working in this space.
And I think that, you know, just as the idea of a computer that's not on the market, the internet will seem strange today. I think for our children, the idea of cars that people drive will seem strange. My eight-year-old son asked me if there would ever be cars that you didn't have to drive.
And I explained that there was this Google car. And his reaction was, great, that means I can text. For the younger generation, driving does not seem like a fun thing to do. It seems like something that's going to interrupt their texting and their Facebooking and their video games and everything else. They really don't want to have to do it.
Now, this is a really nice experience. of a very advanced Internet of Things technology. This car is loaded with sensors, but the main one is the one you see on the top there. It's a type of sensor called LIDAR, L-I-D-A-R, which is not actually an acronym.
It's just a combination of the words light and radar. And this is a visualization of what a LIDAR system sees. And what you notice here is the car is able to sense and detect objects that would not be visible to a human driver.
It can see things that are behind other things. And this is part of the power of Internet of Things sensor technology. We are able to sense things using technology that we cannot sense ourselves.
So there's a tremendous amount of information available to a sensor system like this. It is very important that it is networked, because by being networked it has access, first of all, to processing capability that is perhaps too elaborate to actually... build into a car, but it can share information with other systems and other vehicles and understand things that it cannot sense directly itself, such as three miles down the road there is a traffic jam, it's better to go another way.
So, you know, the self-driving car is a very interesting example of a very powerful emerging Internet of Things technology. And this will be profoundly disruptive. I seriously doubt that many of us will be driving our own cars 20 years from now.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt that any of us will regret the fact that we are not driving our own cars. We will want. wonder what on earth we were thinking all those years we spent sitting in traffic jams and trying to avoid people who were bad drivers. Another area for Internet of Things, this is a little fitness sensor that you can wear on your wrist.
There are many of these available right now. So health and it's called personal quantification sometimes, which is a horrible name. But little sensors. you have on your body that help you understand how active you are, whether you've run five miles or four, that kind of thing. Now, I want to use this as an example of where the opportunity is. for education and where the opportunity is for the Korean economy.
Because all that you find in that little wristband there, all that you have is an accelerometer and all it can do is measure movement in three dimensions, up and down, left and right, backwards and forwards. And what this chart shows, each coloured line is one of the dimensions. So as you weigh of your wristband, you can measure movement in three dimensions.
So you can measure around the sensor will detect movement in one, two, or three dimensions. Now, that's it. That's all the sensor will do for you.
The problem and the opportunity in the Internet of Things economy is not in building sensors like this. The problem and the opportunity is in building systems that take data like this and figure out automatically what it is happening. So what kind of movement is this person running, walking, cycling, sleeping?
What is the sensor telling us here? That is the challenge and that is the opportunity. And this is how data flows in the Internet of Things. We sense things. We transmit that data somewhere.
We store it in a database somewhere. Where we then have to analyze it to understand what it means. And having done that, we then have to send what we conclude to some person or system who can make a difference in the world because of what we've discovered. And the problem with that wrist sensor and understanding is that person waving or weightlifting?
That is this analysis problem. And this is really one of the two golden opportunities. opportunities in the Internet of Things economy. And this is where I would direct my children and this is where I would direct my economy. And I'll give you a quick example.
This is real sensor data from a product I developed. This is energy consumption in a home in Illinois one Saturday. We put three sensors into this home.
The sensor that's generating that colored heat map in the background is actually sensing voltage noise. in the home. Every time you turn something on or off in your home it sends a little kind of noise onto your electrical circuit in the voltage domain. And we are sensing voltage here millions of times a second over a very broad frequency band. So that's the colored part.
It shows you when the voltage noise occurred, how loud it was, and what wavelength it was at. The purple zigzag line there, that's just how much energy the home is consuming in total, although we measure that tens of thousands of times a second. And then the red dotted line is the ambient temperature in the neighborhood. So this is a classic problem in Internet of Things analysis. We have three sensors.
The things they are sensing are really a proxy for... human behavior. What is going on in the home? And keep in mind, it's not enough to look at this visualization and have a human being understand what is going on in the home.
We have to write algorithms that can automatically figure out what is going on in the home. That's the problem. And analyzing data like this on a massive scale, accurately, in real time, all the time, that is...
is the big frontier in the Internet of Things today. Now, just to give you an example, just by looking at this, we can figure out a few things. It's a Saturday.
You'll see that the activity between midnight and 9 a.m. is pretty steady. The power consumption in the home kind of goes up and down, but it's a fairly steady state. The ambient temperature outside the home stays about the same, and there's very little...
little going on in the heat map. This family are asleep. The spiking of the power consumption is the refrigerator cycling.
Actually, they have more than one refrigerator, and so the spikes are a little irregular. The little decrease in energy consumption you see between about 7.30 and 9 o'clock, well, that coincides with the temperature outside rising. So I can tell you this home has heating set on a thermostat when it gets warmer outside.
outside, the amount of energy they need to keep the temperature in the home constant goes down. And then what time did they wake up? Well, that's not hard. You don't need to know very much about the system at all to guess that they woke up around 9 o'clock. Because the power consumption spikes.
Suddenly the heat map gets very busy. They're turning on their electronic devices. That spike in power consumption is probably someone making toast or a cup of coffee. One of the interesting things, we've got a lot of homes installed with these systems, is people tend to wake up at very precise times because they have alarm clocks. So this home almost certainly had an alarm clock set for 9 o'clock.
And they stayed awake past midnight. If you look right at the other end, the 23 and 24 end of the scale, a lot of activity. And again, as the temperature outside goes down, the energy consumption goes up.
So the challenge is to... to build an automated system that looks at this kind of data and makes these kind of conclusions and does it very accurately. So when I talk about the analysis problem, that really takes you to this point. So we built an automated system that took that data and broke it down into, well, what are the devices consuming the energy?
So this is kind of the kind of conclusion that automatic analysis can draw for you. And this is very nice, but the problem still is what do you do with it? You show a chart like this to the average homeowner, and they might find it interesting the first time, maybe. But they don't do anything differently.
So what if you want them to save energy? You know, that takes me to the other area of opportunity, which we don't have a word for today, really, but I've called it present. It's how do you share the information either with a machine or with a person?
person in such a way that something happens in the world that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Because if nothing changes, there is no point. You know, we've done a lot of work in trying to understand how to give a regular person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person who is not a regular person, a person very busy, the right information based on the sensor data to have them get some benefit, to have them reduce their electricity bill in this case.
And, you know, the conclusions we have so far are that you don't want to give them very much information. So all that data that I just showed you, and that was just one day's worth, we take a month of that, we do all that analysis, and we identify the one thing. that they can do to have the biggest impact on their electric bill. And then we try and show them that information in a way that is motivating. So this is another thing to watch out for with the Internet of Things.
You are generating a tremendous amount of data. You are doing lots of very advanced analysis to draw lots of very rich conclusions. And then you have to take it all the way back down and simplify it to one or two simple actions.
And that's true whether you're communicating with a human. human being looking to save electricity, or whether you are the Google smart car deciding whether to stop or go. At the end of the day, all that data gets boiled down into something very simple.
Now, the interesting thing about these two areas, this analyze area and this present area, is you don't need lots of land. You don't need access to fast-flowing rivers. It doesn't matter. what kind of vegetables you can grow.
All that matters is you have computer and access to the internet, and possibly, if you're doing research on how to present information to human beings, some people that you can study. So to win in this area, you need to be a nation that has internet access, computers, and people. And that is all.
So this is an opportunity for the whole world. This is not an opportunity that has to be clustered in a particular area with particular geographic advantages. The people who win in this space will be the people with the most ingenious, brains, which is lovely.
The whole world can compete. Now just briefly before we have a discussion, some comments about education and particularly education in the age of the Internet of Things. You really don't want to teach your children the thing that would have been useful for them to know yesterday.
You don't want to teach your children the thing it would be useful for them to know today. We need to teach our children the things they will need tomorrow. And as I hope I've just shown you, tomorrow is very predictable when it comes to information technology.
So, to me, it is obvious that you want to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs and Nobel Prize winners and workers and PhDs for this analyze problem and this present problem, because the people who have the best solutions to those problems are going to rule the world. This analysis problem is not just math. One of the interesting things about math education is that it has not changed for centuries and it is based on Isaac Newton and classical physics.
We learn simple equations in linear systems, very steady variables, there's generally one right answer. If you want to do the kind of data science that you need to analyze data like that electricity data I just showed you, that doesn't work. You need to understand... And how to build algorithms.
Algorithms are like equations, but they have ifs, and they have thens, and they have buts in them. It's something we sometimes call Boolean Algebra. Another thing that is incredibly important which is practically untaught today is the mathematics of probability. In the age of the Internet of Things there is not one right answer, there is the most probable answer.
And that's something we call Bayesian analysis. And I can't emphasize enough that data science and machine learning is not the same as programming. There is a lot of interest in countries around the world and how do they educate their children in coding and programming.
And I'm here to tell you that I think coding and programming is the thing you wanted to teach your kids yesterday. Data science is the thing you want to teach your kids for tomorrow. Thank you. not the same. And then in terms of presentation, there are really two things.
You may be presenting information to human beings. Getting this right is also very powerful. And I think there are aspects of psychology, there are aspects of design, there's understand how people using systems think, sort of operations science, if you will, how to write things clearly. And above all, another thing I think we don't teach very well today is how to make things simple. A lot of educators prize complexity.
The longer essay is better, for example. And I think understanding the science of simplicity will be very powerful when we come to present data to human beings. It will also be very powerful when we do the other thing that we need to know how to do, which is how to present. data to machines, robots, and so on. And this is just a whole other set of disciplines.
Robotics involves mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. There's a very interesting field which is... is resurging right now, which was popular in about the 1950s, which is called cybernetics, kind of how information works within systems, complex systems.
So those are some of the areas that whether you are teaching pre-teenagers, teenagers, college students, I think these need to be more dominant in the syllabus because these are the skills we will need in the future. If we get it right. these shipping lanes will not just be carrying physical goods.
They will be carrying human ideas. So thank you very much, Kevin. So we have about 15 minutes left for our dialogue, and I'd like to thank you again on behalf of a big audience for your excellent talk. even highlighted the importance of education and what to educate, including patient statistics and analytics and putting more focus on the future rather than the past.
So I think the main theme of today's conference is how do we educate our future workforce who can be creative and then bold enough to take big challenges. You are the role model. In 1999, you coined the word IoT, Internet of Things. So I'd like to ask you, what made you that?
sort of a motivation for you to come up with the Internet of Things and also at the same time What has made you creative and bold enough to challenge a lot of things? So first of all, I think everybody is creative We don't We don't need to be encouraged to be creative. We need to be discouraged from being creative. And so if you...
I've never, ever seen a child with a box of crayons who didn't want to make a drawing. We're all born with this urge to create. It's the most human thing I can think of.
The thing that distinguishes us from every other species is we like to make things better. You know, one of the interesting things is... Birds build nests.
Well, nests are kind of tools, but the difference is... The nest that the bird was building 10,000 years ago is exactly the same as the nest that the bird was building today. That's just instinct.
We have a different instinct. We don't only have an instinct to build tools, we have an instinct to keep improving them. And that's all of us. So, you know, for me the question is not what made me successful at being creative, but why wasn't I inhibited from being creative? And I think...
Um... I've always had a bit of a problem with arrogance. That's the first thing.
I'm not polite enough to not do something because somebody tells me not to do it, which is sometimes a bad thing, but it's a good thing. in this case. And like most of us, I get annoyed when things don't seem to be working right.
And I was led to the idea of the Internet of Things because I had a very mundane job. I was working for Procter & Gamble. I was running a color cosmetics business, so lipstick and eye makeup and stuff.
And we had this very popular lipstick color, and I couldn't find it in the stores. And it was selling faster than the stores could put it back on the shelf. But they didn't know. And they didn't know because they didn't have any kind of information system that could sense what was happening in the real world. So my impetus for this whole thing, everything around the internet, Internet of Things would have happened without me.
It may have had a different name, I suppose. But, you know, this was something that was happening. I just happened to kind of stumble upon it early. But I was kind of frustrated at something that wasn't working well. And that's really, I think, always the impetus for creative success is you have a problem you really want to solve and for whatever reason you won't believe people who tell you it can't be solved.
You know, the biggest... So if we think of creation as the urge to make things better, the easiest way to discourage that urge is to tell somebody that this is just the way things are. That's the force that we are fighting against.
Right. Also, you did mention that big companies can hardly survive technological changes. So what advice would you give to big companies?
We have big groups in Korea. Yes. Thank you.
Samsung, LG, and in the U.S., Cisco, and even Google is now a big company. And how do they survive technological changes? Is that M&A, or what is the key to success?
Wow. So, I mean, the fact is that they typically don't survive. And it's an interesting thing that I think big companies get very comfortable, and often the people who started them aren't the people who finish them. You know, the people change as well. And so I think the...
And they forget that they started 15, 20 years ago as a small company. I mean, even Samsung or LG or anybody like that, there was a time when there was no Samsung. And there was a time when the idea of Samsung was crazy.
And there were other companies that were going to be successful and who was Samsung to think they were going to succeed. So, you know, you have to remember your roots. And you have to be profoundly uncomfortable because the odds are actually against you.
That is something that I'm always amazed about when I work with big companies, that they don't, a lot of executives don't have a good sense of history. And history says you are probably not going to survive this technology transition. And the reason you're not going to survive is you're going to be so comfortable and confident that the thing you are doing today is going to help you tomorrow.
and so focused on the last 5% of market share in the VHS video cassette market, or whatever it is that's actually about to die, that you will fall down. And also... There's a kind of confidence, a false confidence you can have in a big company.
That because you were successful yesterday, you'll be successful today. And because you've been at the successful company for 10 years, you know more than the kid that's just arrived from Keist. Right now, there is...
a big company in Korea, and I promise you there is a graduate from KAIST who has the next big idea on a PowerPoint presentation or something, and they this morning are showing it to their boss, who is telling them no. Here are all the reasons why you will fail. And that kid is either going to put that presentation away and never think about it again, or hopefully they will go start their own company. talk about Moore's law and the miniaturization and my field is integrated circuit, VLSI, and if you look at the history, when Jack Kilby showed that idea to his boss at Texas Instruments, boss said, don't work on it. It wouldn't work.
And he went against his boss. And that, for Korean culture, may be no-no, and we need to encourage young people to gently go against their boss'advice once in a while. What do you think? I want to I mean, that's true.
And that's I just wrote a book about this. It's coming out in Korea next year. The English title is How to Fly a Horse.
But almost every time you look at a major innovation, if you can uncover the truth there's a lot of propaganda that gets written about innovations afterwards. But if you can find the truth, you find that story. The one thing I would like to to leave you with is there are many, many things special about Korea, but saying no to good ideas is not especially Korean.
That is just human nature. We are not in a country right now here in Korea where I think there's a lot of mythology around certain cultures have more hierarchical traditions and it's harder and maybe in America it's easier. I just don't see any evidence of that.
I think that's a an assumption that needs to be challenged right there's a tendency everywhere to say no to new ideas and there's a good reason why most new ideas are terrible most new ideas are bad probably the best way to find out whether they're good or bad is to try them at least a little bit thank you and this uh... maybe as you said under the sky not many things are new uh... back in the nineteen twenty eight uh... nicola tesla was a great engineer. He predicted that with a wireless connection, the whole world will become like a brain and everything will be part of a brain with a rhythmic structure and so on.
And you earlier talked about the intelligence of all the systems, components and so on. Recently I watched a movie. The movie's title is Her. Have you ever watched watched that movie? H?
No, I don't think so. Her. Oh, her. Yes, I have.
Yes. Yes, I love that movie. Her.
It's a very interesting story. Joaquin Phoenix. Yes. You create even wife through intelligent operating system.
Yes. So what do you think of that movie? And then maybe other things in the future, things will they have more smartness in it?
Every man who has a wife has an intelligent wife. Yeah, I think that, you see, it's interesting to see. I like watch.
I love science fiction movies, and it's always interesting to see the things that the movie makers think are easy. And whenever they do intelligence, it seems to be trivial to have like a natural language conversation or to make inferences based on very little data. And these things are phenomenally hard.
And so this frontier, this 21st century frontier in technology is definitely how do you get all these arbitrary, uncertain inputs and then respond in a meaningful and relevant way? And it's incredibly... So in that movie, you have this character that is automatically able to do that, right? But then I don't know if you guys have, like, Netflix here or something, but you look at what Netflix recommends for the movie you should watch next or what Amazon thinks. the book you should buy is, and it's normally horrible.
It's terrible. And so that's the gap right now between reality and imagination. Yes, thank you. So just the last couple of minutes, I'd like to ask you, I don't know whether you understand the Korean structure as a society. Everybody wants to live in Seoul because a lot of things are happening in Seoul.
Of course, I want to live in Seoul. The government wants to create the... sort of a creative economy and innovation centers, 17 of them throughout Korea.
And we have one in Daejeon and then another one in Daegu and there will be 15 more. I noticed that you moved from LA, which is very nice, a big city, to Austin, Texas. Not many Koreans may move from LA to Texas. What motivated you to move to Texas?
We have lots of Koreans in LA, by the way. I think it's the biggest Korea town outside of Korea is in Los Angeles. Very good food there. So it's interesting that you can do that now. The benefits, so, you know, L.A.
is on one edge of the United States, and before that I lived in Boston, which is on the other edge. And that's really how the U.S. has evolved. evolved, by the way.
If you ever go to America, everything's happening on one coast or the other, and there's kind of nothing in the middle. And that's changing, and Austin, Texas is kind of in the middle. And it's because of the internet.
It really, I mean, I'm as connected to anything I need to be in the world now. I don't have to wait for the mail to bring me things. I don't have to go to the library to get information.
to write my books, everything is there in my office at home. The only thing that has to move physically now is me. And being in the middle of the United States is much better than being on one side or the other if you have to travel because you're just a few hours away from any place in the country.
So this is a really interesting question, and I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens to cities as we... see more and more knowledge work dominate the economy. Because you don't need to be where everybody else is all the time anymore, for anything. And I think that just as we've moved to distributed computing systems, we are going to move to distributed nations. And that's a good thing, because you can only get so many people into Seoul.
Thank you so much. Now our time is up. What last advice would you give to Korea for the future? Send your children to Keist, obviously. Honestly, I think you have every reason to be confident.
The Korean miracle of the last 10 or 20 years does not need to end here. And If you want to change anything, you know, recognize that there's another Samsung waiting to be built. There's some kid who is getting his PhD right now who has the potential to build a company which is, you know, the biggest.
company in Korea 10 or 15 years from now. In fact, there's many, many kids like that. And everything you can do to enable them, if you bet on 20 and one succeeds, you will be repaid many, many times.
Thank you so much. Let us give a big round of applause.