#222 - David Wood - We are The Last Generation Of Normal Humans

David Wood (0:00)

Almost certainly, yes.

Might be the last decade of so-called normal humans, might be the last few years of almost normal humans. Almost everybody who's alive today might in principle be able to take advantage of treatments. We could, within a short while, change from ever be needing to die to ever be having the option to stay alive.

Peter McCormack (0:20)

Could we choose our age?

David Wood (0:22)

We might be able to reverse. Yeah, sure. You and I probably will spend years or decades or even centuries inside remarkably fascinating, fertile, vibrant, simulated worlds. That's what we like to do. We like to get lost in books. We like to get lost in music. We like to get lost in opera. We like to get lost in watching every episode of a series. We binge watch it. Well, in the future, we'll be part of the action. I'm very optimistic about technology. If we do it safely, I'm thoughtfully.

Peter McCormack (0:58)

This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, IRON, the AI cloud for the next big thing. IRON builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is iren.com.

David, good morning.

David Wood (1:24)

Great to be here.

Peter McCormack (1:25)

Yeah, thanks for coming. And a short notice, we appear to be fortunate enough to live in the most interesting of times.

David Wood (1:33)

It's the most interesting of times so far.

Peter McCormack (1:36)

So far with a little bit of scary potential. Do you think this is the last generation of normal humans?

David Wood (1:46)

Almost certainly, yes. Might be the last decade of so-called normal humans, might be the last few years of almost normal humans.

Peter McCormack (1:55)

So what do you worry about?

David Wood (1:56)

Where are we going to get it all wrong? I worry that we're going to get on a shiny train, headlined to the amazing future, how are we going to get there? It's going to be horrible.

Peter McCormack (2:06)

Do you think some of that is baked in? I mean, we should probably talk about what you worked on with Symbian.

David Wood (2:11)

Yeah.

Peter McCormack (2:12)

Yeah. Do you want to explain that first? Because I think that's a helpful context.

David Wood (2:15)

So I've had a smartphone in my shut pocket, not the same smartphone, not the same shut pocket since 1999

Ericsson R38 prototype, R380 prototype. And before that, I was part of the team at a UK company called Scion, PSION, who made handheld computers, invented the concept of an organizer, electronic organizer. And we dared to be futurists in the sense of thinking what technological possibilities will the next generation of hardware, the next generation of software enable. And we thought, you know, it's good for people to have mobile computers. You can keep track of your contacts. It's a remarkable thing. You didn't have to cross out names and addresses in an old-fashioned book anymore. You didn't have to remember whether you put the plumber under P or you put him under J, J because his name was Joe. You know, you could search for it. That was remarkable.

But then we realized our wonderful world of handheld computing was going to be steamrolled by a very powerful force called the mobile phone industry. Because mobile phones were slowly getting smarter, and there was a lot of money there. And eventually we had a strategy off-site and we realized, you know, we're not going to try and hide from this. We're going to adapt our software from science, science software into what could become the world's first successful smartphones. And we imagined how big that market could be.

And we were hopelessly wrong. It was much, much, much larger than we initially thought. I've got the documents from 1995 when we started thinking that maybe this is the category we should go for. And turns out that these devices are everywhere. By 2001, we had enough of a vision to set our corporate informal mission as everybody carrying a smartphone running our Symbian OS. We got the first part of it right. We didn't quite get the second part of it right because, though, most of the first half of the year, we had a million smartphones from companies like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Ericsson, Sony, most of them were running Symbian OS. Eventually, we were out sprinted by companies that were much more powerful than us. They're once in Silicon Valley. There's another story there. But the basic principle is we saw the potential for a small disruption. It took a long time to happen, I have to say. It was until about 2005 that we were profitable. A funny thing happened on the way to profitability. It was much harder than we expected.