I often wonder why journalism is needed in the technology industry. At worst moments, it seems meaningless to me - just an appendix in the PR guts of large companies and thousands of meaningless startups. In ordinary moments - for me this is another channel where people can kill time a little more useful than for match-3 games and turning over tapes with memes.
At the best of times, it seems to me that journalism needs IT just as science fiction does to scientific progress or a lot of politics literature. It comprehends the context in the sea of people who pass off personal interests as common, and helps to stay in a better direction.
I managed to talk about this with David Rowan, the founder and former chief editor of the British Wired , when he came to the opening of the Moscow Innovation Cluster in late October. Now David travels around the world, makes presentations, writes books, communicates with the tops of the world's leading IT companies and explores the question of how engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs prepare for a fast-moving future. Below, his monologues.
At the age of eight, I was already a journalist - I wrote articles for my sister during the school holidays. Then he began to make his own magazine. At school, they called me to the head teacher because of him, and lectured me for disrespect for teachers. At seventeen I went to work on the radio. In the nineties he worked for the Guardian newspaper. I have always been inspired by new things that change the world. When the Internet began to develop, I became the editor of the newspaper’s website. This was in 1998 - at the earliest stage of the consumer Internet and the appearance of the first news media on the network.
Then I had the opportunity to open in the UK edition of Wired, which until then was only in America. I was not interested in the technologies themselves - rather, how they affect culture, politics, society, and how the business works.
You see how investors invest in crazy ideas like 3D printers, in early versions of augmented and virtual reality, AI - for a journalist these are all great stories. But for me, these were not stories about technology, but about how they would affect everything around.
I like the way people think about new technologies. At first everyone says "this makes no sense," and then - suddenly - "this can no longer be ignored." So, for example, it happened with face recognition. Underestimate him no longer. Or autopilots - they can change the whole transport industry, the entire delivery industry. AI personalizes training, medical diagnosis, and treatment. For me, all this is striking new ideas with unpredictable political consequences.
And journalists love stories.
Why did so many useless startups appear
I always try to find out the founders who are behind the companies with new ideas. I’m trying to understand their motivation, to learn the character, the history of childhood. What still drives them all to overcome? Often interesting are their relationships with their fathers. Perhaps they did not receive approval, so now they are trying their best to create something important. After all, why take away the opportunity to live comfortably, earn so much money, just enough. Why instead do things that don’t make money at all, but take sixteen hours a day? Why create things that don't exist yet? You need a special mindset to do this.
Nine out of ten startups fail, but usually those who want to solve real problems shoot out. Not “let's make money quick”, but those who think “something is wrong with this world, and I know how to fix it.” They have a goal that is more than building a successful business; they have faith in themselves and flexibility. When you develop a startup, thousands of things go wrong. Success lies in not giving up. And of course, luck.
Do not invest in those who are just looking for a way to make money quickly - you will lose money. When I speak with experienced investors, or invest myself, I understand that you need to look for people who do not look at the rules, do not want to play in ready-made systems, but who see something that others do not see.
If startups are hoping for a quick profit, they are unlikely to dream of changing the market. Many of the most well-known companies did not have a business model at the start and received investments before they started earning. Google did not immediately find the right model for Adwords. Amazon spent billions of dollars for a decade, until it built a whole customer relationship system to capture the market.
I think now for young people, startups are an element of a lifestyle. Making a startup is considered cool and fashionable. But in reality it is a dark forest. LinkedIn founder said, "starting a startup is like jumping out of an airplane and making a parachute on the fly." Many startups simply have no reason to exist; many ignore attraction. And at best, ten percent will do it. So this should not be just a lifestyle. Startups are desperate, bordering on obsession, attempts to solve important problems of the world.
Why big companies resist progress
I just wrote a book Non-bullshit innovation, it will soon be translated into Russian. The idea came to me when I talked a lot with the leaders of large companies that have existed in the market for many years - banks, media, manufacturing. Almost all the leaders were aware of the digital revolution, but did not want to adapt to it, because they earn money in the old way. They invested in fake innovations, built entire buildings full of startups, but this did not lead to the emergence of new products that would reinvent their business.
And I thought - there should be people in the world who took advantage of their experience and advantage to find a way to prepare their business for the future. So I went on a journey to find them. Over the past year, I visited twenty countries, and having found such people, I saw the same processes in their companies.
It all comes down to expanding the powers of your team at all levels, collecting different opinions in one place. The people inside must push each other to use emerging technologies. A company is built in companies ready for the future where it is normal and comfortable to think “what if our business stops working under the pressure of new digital challenges and new competitors? What is our advantage? What can we use in the business of tomorrow? ”
First of all, this should come from the tops, from the leaders of the highest level. They should be aware that a strict hierarchy, where everyone submits to someone higher, does not lead to new ideas. It is necessary to attract talents and give them real powers, to allow experimenting and building startups within large organizations.
Who will own personal data in the future
States and international organizations create a legal framework around personal data, and this is the only protection that consumers have. We cannot reserve the rights to this data to large technology companies. They have one motivation - to maximize profits. Mark Zuckerberg recently justified the opportunity to lie in political advertising, because he said "we are for real freedom of speech." This is nonsense. In fact, he cares only about maximizing profits for his investors. Therefore, it is necessary for the state to come and say "it is not in the interests of society or the economy as a whole."
There is a problem in disputes about privacy - large platforms do not benefit from an honest and open dialogue, they do not need consumers to know what data about themselves and to whom they give. And you need to tell about this to children from school, teach at universities, convey to people - in your personal data there is a huge value.
Already conducted some experiments that allowed consumers to profit by sharing their data. There are several startups on the blockchain. All of them are very small, but already show - there are new ways to evaluate what we say to the Internet about ourselves. And this data should not get to the company monopolist, so that it uses them solely for its own benefit.
Is virtual reality the future of entertainment?
I have never seen anything especially in augmented or virtual reality. They have very limited user cases. In the early stages of new technologies, adult content is ahead of everyone, but this is beyond my personal interests.
In my ordinary life there is no need - “oh, for this I definitely need virtual reality”. I have a need for communication, I need to know, for example, when I have the next train, or what happens in the world. And what problem does virtual reality solve? You need to start with the problem, and then think about how to solve it.
Our free time is limited, and to fill it, there is already a sea of entertainment. I can’t listen to Spotify, watch Netflix, play Fortnite and sit in VR at the same time. I will try it once, because it is funny, but then I still return to what came before her.
We forget one thing - sometimes it's interesting to just talk with people.
What technologies, invisible so far, will change the world
There are a couple of things that interest me in energy. Moore's trend of increasing power exponentially affects the search for alternative ways to receive and store energy. In some places, solar energy is already cheaper than traditional. Storage is reduced in price. For example, the price of car batteries has fallen several times over a decade.
It seems to me that there is no problem more serious than heating our planet. How will this affect geopolitics, crop production, our ability to preserve species. When you let real-life entrepreneurs think outside the box, they offer solutions that no one has thought of before. From talented entrepreneurs with a scientific and engineering background, we see real attempts to influence this.
I am very interested in following up on quantum computing. Technology is just beginning its journey from laboratories to products. Quantum computers will force us to rewrite all the rules around security and cryptography, medical diagnosis. We do not have specialists yet, there are no business models, but this will be a very significant phenomenon.
I think the next ten years will be the golden era for health tech and biotechnology. Because now, when we can turn biology into data, new fields are opening up. We can begin to understand the signals and needs of our body at a level that human physicians can never reach. Personalize microbiomes, diets, predict how we will respond to certain environmental conditions. And all this in order to maintain their performance and health, and not to correct what has already broken.
It seems to me much more interesting than regular entrepreneurs who make an application that does not forget to turn off the washing machine for you.