WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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I’ve always wanted to share the stage with
a creepy skull mannequin, by the way.

2
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That’s just fantastic.

3
00:00:05.069 --> 00:00:07.609
When I was younger,

4
00:00:07.609 --> 00:00:11.800
although not quite so young that I should
really not have known better,

5
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I sent one of the most harsh messages I've
ever sent in my life.

6
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I'm going to share it with you now.

7
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I'm not proud of it, but here it is:

8
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“I've blocked you everywhere else,

9
00:00:21.189 --> 00:00:23.980
“and now I'm going to block you here too.

10
00:00:23.980 --> 00:00:28.940
“My only regret is that I can’t
block you in real life.”

11
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Past me was a dick.

12
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I couldn’t block them in real life, right?

13
00:00:34.290 --> 00:00:36.580
Because they were still in the
same social circles,

14
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They were still going to get invited to the
same events,

15
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still going to be part of the same things,

16
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and it’s going to be awkward,

17
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particularly after I send a message like that.

18
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And some folks would say that I should just
get used to it,

19
00:00:48.290 --> 00:00:52.120
that I should just be at the peace
with the fact that some people are just jerks,

20
00:00:52.120 --> 00:00:54.450
and some personalities clash, but I thought,

21
00:00:54.450 --> 00:00:58.940
what if instead:
we use technology to fix that.

22
00:00:58.940 --> 00:01:05.590
So my proposal for you tonight is:
blocking in real life.

23
00:01:05.590 --> 00:01:07.200
Which has been done in science fiction, right?

24
00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:08.870
This is from Black Mirror.

25
00:01:08.870 --> 00:01:11.060
But the trouble with science fiction blocking

26
00:01:11.060 --> 00:01:12.890
is that they have to make it work on camera,

27
00:01:12.890 --> 00:01:18.360
and that means inevitably it’s a messy fuzz
of pixels or something like that,

28
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and that’s not useful, that’s not helpful.

29
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Because a messy block of pixels can still
see you,

30
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and you can still see it,

31
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and it can still punch you in the face.

32
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So that’s not great.

33
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But we do have an algorithm for this that
will already work,

34
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and Photoshop has it, it’s called
content-aware fill,

35
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and it’s the…

36
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“Woo!” from a Photoshop user there!

37
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Although given this audience,

38
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possibly the man who created the feature,
we don’t know.

39
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I was actually originally in that photograph.

40
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There I am, that’s the original.

41
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But nowadays it’s trivial to just find an
object,

42
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paint it out, and there you go.

43
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And if you didn’t have those
two identical bushes

44
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right there in the middle,

45
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you might not even spot that I was never there
in the first place.

46
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Now, Facebook already has facial recognition
for people, right?

47
00:02:01.619 --> 00:02:04.929
So in theory, you get a photo… here’s
one of me and some friends.

48
00:02:04.929 --> 00:02:06.009
You get a photo,

49
00:02:06.009 --> 00:02:07.819
you could highlight the person,

50
00:02:07.819 --> 00:02:08.909
and you could paint them…

51
00:02:08.909 --> 00:02:10.830
Yes, well it doesn’t…

52
00:02:10.830 --> 00:02:14.080
It does go a little bit Cronenberg sometimes.

53
00:02:16.380 --> 00:02:20.140
But in the next few decades we’re going
to figure out how to make

54
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much, much deeper connections into the brain.

55
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We’re already starting to see some things
like this.

56
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We've been using deep brain stimulation for
Parkinson’s patients since 2006,

57
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that’s when that paper was from,

58
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and spoiler, or as they insist
on calling it here,

59
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“abstract”…

60
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Abstract: it works.

61
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And we've already got people controlling
robot arms with brain implants,

62
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and exoskeletons with EEG caps.

63
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Okay, so no-one is actually working
on a neural lace yet…

64
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No, of course Elon Musk is working
on a neural lace,

65
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because Elon Musk is working on everything
that Iain M Banks ever wrote about.

66
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So let’s say that it works.

67
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Let’s say that in the next few decades,

68
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over the rest of the century,

69
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we get something that starts to make deeper
and deeper connections into the brain.

70
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And to start off with it’s going to help

71
00:03:14.420 --> 00:03:17.489
an increasingly-aging population to deal with
senescence,

72
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but eventually it will trickle out to the
rest of us.

73
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And I'm willing to bet that humanity won’t
regress into virtual worlds,

74
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because virtual worlds are good
for gimmicky games, but they're not real.

75
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There’s no real human interaction there.

76
00:03:29.870 --> 00:03:32.569
And sure, the uncanny valley has pretty much
been solved, right?

77
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That is Johnny Depp playing young Johnny Depp
in the latest Pirates movie.

78
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But you can’t have that for human interaction.

79
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I'm willing to bet there’s the same
uncanny valley effect for talking to someone.

80
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You can’t simulate a human without simulating
something that’s very close to human,

81
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and that would be unethical,
even if it was possible.

82
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But you could hijack the vision centre.

83
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You could use all those same
little tips and tricks

84
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that the brain has been using for,
well, millions of years of evolution,

85
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to just quietly make you not notice things.

86
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If you walked here like this,

87
00:04:10.480 --> 00:04:13.600
and quietly routed yourself around an obstacle
without even seeing it,

88
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you're already using those tricks.

89
00:04:15.750 --> 00:04:17.520
And yes, I have footnotes.

90
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You could just tell your vision centre to
quietly remove things, or add things in.

91
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You could teleport to a remote office by saying
to your implant,

92
00:04:26.760 --> 00:04:29.530
or whatever it is, you want to go there.

93
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It’d paint your vision with that,

94
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and it would paint you into the vision of
the people there.

95
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But if you can do that,

96
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then you can start to remove things as well.

97
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Those implants could use the sort of hacks
that we've talked about

98
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to quietly remove objects,
and people, and anything.

99
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To start off with, this would just be used
on annoyances.

100
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It'd be used on the baby that’s crying on
the plane,

101
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it'd be used on the jerk who keeps leering
at you at the bus stop every day.

102
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But eventually it'd start
to roll out and roll out,

103
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you’d be able to block someone.

104
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You won’t appear in their perceptions,

105
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and they won’t appear in yours.

106
00:05:03.610 --> 00:05:06.630
And sure, there are going to be people
out there without implants,

107
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but increasingly, as it becomes more and more
normalised,

108
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like smartphones are today,

109
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they're going to find themselves in a kind
of a twilight zone

110
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where a lot of people are ignoring them.

111
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The same way that people get better
customer service by tweeting someone

112
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than they do by calling on a landline.

113
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And okay, there are people who are going to
try and get around this, right?

114
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There are going to be moments of
human ingenuity that…

115
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It was really expensive to get that photo
made, by the way,

116
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just the skywriting costs alone.

117
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But in general,
people would be okay with this,

118
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because no-one here could tell me the last
person who unfriended them on Facebook,

119
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not with certainty.

120
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Because you can’t remember everyone you’re
friends with,

121
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and you don’t check every day,
and it doesn’t notify you,

122
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and it’s not particularly offensive
when it happens.

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They're just not appearing anymore,

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you’ve just forgotten about them.

125
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So once we’re happy with that,

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the technology can start getting
better, and better, and better.

127
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It can start blocking objects and concepts
and ideas,

128
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and it can start to just
automatically work out the things

129
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that your brain flinches away from
and automatically start to block them.

130
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And people will start sharing block lists,
right?

131
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It won’t be monolithic,

132
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it won’t be brought in from on high,

133
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but you will just tend to block the same things
your friends block,

134
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because if you don’t, you keep noticing
the elephant in the room,

135
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and you keep being the awkward one at the
dinner party

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who keeps talking about things that people
don’t understand.

137
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Or alternatively your friend is,

138
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and will you please shut up about that, Dave,

139
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we don’t know what you mean!

140
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Literally, we don’t know what you mean.

141
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People, shops, homes, offices, entire cities
just quietly erased.

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Imagine crowds of people just sliding past
each other on the street,

143
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just by unspoken, unknown, mutual consensus,
just removing each other.

144
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I mean, China Miéville talked about this
in his book ‘The City & the City’, right?

145
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But those two cities were divided by tradition,
and etiquette,

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and occasional violent retribution,

147
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and tourists just had to fit in – there’d
be none of that.

148
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Instead of going to war,

149
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feuding nations could just block each other.

150
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And their citizens’ implants
would be legally mandated

151
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to just quietly edit the other country out.

152
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Maybe it gets to the point where you don’t
know the other world exists

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until you're an adult.

154
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Maybe children are just kept from it,

155
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because you don’t want to
talk to those people.

156
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Until then it’s just a rumour,

157
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it’s just bumps in the night and explanations
for ghost stories.

158
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And then you get to being 18, or 21, or whatever,

159
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and you have a look in the other world to
see what it’s like,

160
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and it’s terrible.

161
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Never ever want to go back there.

162
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They’ll say there are people
who've blocked everyone,

163
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and we’ll never know for sure.

164
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But I could look out at a
full house like this

165
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and not know if my eyes are gliding over the
people from another world.

166
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Maybe there’s someone else on stage and
I'm just walking and talking around them,

167
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because that’s what my implant lets me do.

168
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Which means there is
one little question left over:

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what happens when you edit out the idea of
implants from people who have implants?

170
00:08:03.980 --> 00:08:05.480
Because there are going to be people who hate
the idea.

171
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Maybe they were fitted with them from birth.

172
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Maybe they were given them for work and have
to have them, but they hate the idea

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that the thing that is heading through their
eyes into their brain isn’t reality.

174
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And how would that be any different from me
being on this stage right now

175
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telling a story and you immediately dismissing
this as science fiction?

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Ignore that itch behind your ear,
it’s probably nothing.

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My name’s Tom Scott, have a good night.

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MATT PARKER: All right!

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There's your camera...

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Tom Scott, ladies and gentlemen!

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My goodness.