I should really start off by singing that Bachman Turner song
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet,
but everyone who's heard me sing advises me not to do that.
So what I want to do today is I want to not tell you about the future.
I want to talk to you about what might be possible in the future
and give you my view of what the future might look like.
But to do that, really, you've got to go backwards.
So I always use my rear-view vision to understand going forward
and today we live in what I call BROMOSCL technology.
Now, it sounds like something you'd take for a hangover
but in fact stands for broadband, mobile, social and cloud.
That's what's transformed our world.
And if you think about those 42 years since I graduated
that Glen mentioned, in 1973, I programmed my first computer,
which wasn't actually the thing in the top right
which I found in HP's archives but was exactly like it.
You had 16 switches on the front panel,
you put in a binary number into those 16 switches,
you pressed a button.
That loaded the first word.
You did that 16 times.
That set up a bootstrap loader, you put in paper tape,
that loaded up the equivalent of today's bias
except very rudimentary,
and then you could start programming the thing.
Now we get to 2015 and we've got...
..each one of us has got in our pockets...
In fact, the collected computing power in this room in our pockets
is equivalent to the global computing power
that existed in 1973.
And not only that
but we're connected to this massive cloud infrastructure,
this huge web of knowledge, information and processing.
That's 42 years.
That's an incredible transition.
But as I say, I don't think we've seen anything yet
because the next 10 years are gonna bring us a change
which is gonna have a profound effect
on absolutely everyone in our economy.
And I've put that cyborg up there deliberately
and hopefully you will understand why when I'm done here.
So, what happens?
When we got this BROMOSCL world,
we ended up with a new set of business rules.
Things like the sharing economy and the crowd-sourced economy.
And you'll notice I've put Bitcoin on the right there
because that's just the tip of an iceberg
that we're about to start seeing.
But I won't cover that because there's too much going forward.
But let's just take one thing, which is mobile.
So, if you look at our smartphones today,
10 years ago, none of us had one.
We had semi-smartphones, basically email machines.
Today we have these things in our pockets
on which we rely more and more and they're evolving very rapidly.
So one of the major applications coming up
are various forms of proximity solution.
And there are a whole lot of technologies
that you can use for that but people have tended to focus on NFC
just because of its convenience and because you can build it in easily.
When you've got that, you can start changing all sorts of things
and the one that's got everyone interested,
which is a bit like the abominable snowman -
it's much talked about but never seen,
but we're just about there.
We're just about there.
Mind you, I've said that every year for the last five years
and I'm sure Stuart will remind me.
But we are just about there.
So think of it like this -
today, 300 billion paper coupons are issued in the United States
every year,
and about a few tens of millions of those are actually redeemed
because people don't have the time to cut them out, organise them,
keep them in their wallet, know when to use them.
The future looks like you get a coupon in an email,
you decide you may want a blue T-shirt at some point,
you click 'add to wallet' and you forget about it.
Then you are out and about somewhere and a proximity solution,
this time based on a Bluetooth beacon,
says, "Hey, that blue T-shirt you wanted
"is in the shop you're walking past."
You go in, you choose your blue T-shirt, you walk to the front,
you take out your mobile phone,
you decide which payment instrument you want to use,
you choose it and you redeem your coupon
and you tap it on the terminal and it's all done for you.
From then, you've got your discount applied, your credit card is debited
and you've got your loyalty points are credited, and as you walk out,
you get an email with the full detailed receipt.
So that is the world of mobile wallets.
So it looks pretty good. It's very convenient.
Why hasn't it happened?
Well, it turns out it's a bit like elephants mating.
You know, you've got all these huge things trying to get together
and it takes a long time with a lot of huffing and puffing
and the gestation period is endless.
So you've got to be in a situation where you can have any phone
with any carrier with any bank and with any card
and we're miles away from that.
I have one phone with one bank with one card
that I can actually create a mobile wallet out of and that's...
No-one's going to bother with that.
Everyone looks at me as though I'm stupid, which I probably am.
The other big problem is that when you lose your phone,
who are you gonna call - us or the bank?
And that support issue is a major issue
because if you're gonna call us,
you've got to make it worth our while to do so
and that business model is actually quite hard to achieve.
So the technology is there, the business is not there to support it.
But let me move on now to the future
because this is the part where I think things get weird,
and I call this info-telligence,
which hopefully will become obvious to you.
And there are basically three big things gonna happen now
and it's all about relationships.
So the first thing is
our relationship with each other,
mediated by technology.
The second thing is our relationship
with technology.
So the last 25 years
of the 20th century
were the age of the geek.
Only we used to know how to use this stuff
because humans had to adapt to the technology.
The first 25 years of this century are all about
technology adapting itself to humans and becoming invisible to humans
so it's totally intuitive.
And the third thing is our
relationship with the real world,
our ability to measure that world,
to analyse that world
and to control that world
and to predict its future.
So those three relationships
are going to define the next 10 years of technology change.
So let's start off with that relationship with each other.
People to people.
So the big word here is immersive communications
because if you're gonna have fully immersive communications,
you've got to have the full audiovisual spectrum around you
and you've got to have ubiquity.
So the ubiquity, it turns out, comes from this very surprising fact
that our kids said to the content providers,
"We don't want broadcast media.
"We want broadband media."
And hence the whole discussion around media-centric broadband -
aka NBN in this country.
But the notion that you can create broadband
that delivers media on demand.
So that's an important step and at the same time,
we have the confluence of new screen technology.
And between the two of them,
you now start getting that ubiquity of immersive communications
because you can create audiovisual communications across the world.
But you can go further
because you can now actually start putting wearable devices onto you
that give you a much more immersive experience.
So on the far right,
you've got the Microsoft HoloLens
which is an augmented reality display.
And the particular example
which they've got there
is a father helping his daughter
do some plumbing in her flat.
She's remote
but he's sitting with his iPad.
He can see what she's seeing
and he can draw on the iPad
and show her
and she can see in front of her,
overlaid on that physical world what she needs to do,
which knobs she needs to turn and which buttons she needs to press.
So that's a very handy way of doing this augmented reality.
Of course, on the left, Google tried it with Google Glass.
Didn't succeed as a consumer proposition
but is very much an enterprise proposition.
And then in the middle,
there's a project from the University of Washington
which I love and in fact Google bought the whole team.
But it's a heads up display as a contact lens.
So you put this thing in your eye, it's a proper optical contact lens.
It does all the compensations of your eyesight,
but it's also got an LCD display in it and the cool thing about it is
you obviously can't stick a wire into your eye
or a battery into your eye,
so it scavenges RF power out of the atmosphere
and it actually powers itself that way.
But we can go even further.
We can almost do the
'beam me up, Scotty' thing now
because people are working on
360 degree cameras.
So the thing on the top left
is actually a Samsung 360 degree camera.
It's fully stereoscopic,
so it's 3-D,
and you can then transmit that to a virtual reality headset,
which the thing on the right is an Oculus Rift,
and that then enables you to actually walk around
an immersive environment as though you're there.
So literally you can,
by having someone plonk this 360 degree camera in a position,
you can actually walk around that environment and experience it.
So as I say, not quite teleportation, but getting there.
So the second big relationship is our relationship with technology
and the first thing you've got to notice is something very strange
and significant happened with voice recognition
in the last five years.
And I'll come back to that curve because you'll notice in 2010,
voice recognition was plodding along
at unusable rates,
around about 60, 70% recognition,
which no-one will tolerate.
And suddenly in 2010, it kicked up,
and it's now, in 2015, almost better than human recognition
and it's about to sail past our human capabilities.
So we're increasingly talking to the environment.
But thanks to Microsoft Connect,
we're also gesturing at the environment
and then there's a third thing
which is coming like gangbusters
which is truly weird and wonderful
and I'll come back to it
in a moment,
but a brain machine interface.
So you can talk to your home.
I don't know...
Has anyone here got an Amazon Echo?
One person. Do you like it?
Good, 'cause I've just ordered one for my wife
because I actually think it's...
She wanted a Sonos system and I know she won't be able to use it
but this thing, she can talk to it, tell it to do what she needs.
So, play the BBC, play the ABC, play a particular song.
So you literally can now talk to your house -
not the trees, perhaps, but the house at least will respond to you.
VOICEOVER: Shopping will become more social,
more interactive, more engaging.
In fact, the whole way that we transact will be revolutionised.
So when you start putting these technology experiences together,
you get something that looks like that.
Now, that particular thing was a marketing mock-up that we did.
In fact, we did try the technology
because as you can see by looking at me, I hate clothes shopping.
So I figured that this was the right answer for people like me.
I would just never go to a store again.
But in fact, it doesn't work today, but it will.
And you know, the interesting thing about that,
there's no way in the world I can tell you,
extrapolating from personal experience,
that she's gonna drag that guy along
to give an answer about what she is looking at on the clothes
because he's gonna do what I say - "Yeah, you look great."
You know, it doesn't matter whether it's a sack or a Chanel dress.
It's all the same, as far as I'm concerned.
"You look great" is the answer.
So she's gonna do that socially with her friends,
the people who can give her real advice.
But that ability to actually do style and size fit on clothes
will transform clothes shopping
and that means that, you know,
the whole direct from designer to customer will start to take place.
Now, the brain interface is something truly weird and wonderful.
So people are working on bionic eyes
and one method to do it is to actually take a camera
and tap its signal into the optic nerve,
but there is a group at Monash University
and this guy spoke recently and got me all inspired,
Professor Jeffrey Rosenfeld, who talked about the fact that
they are putting a chip into the visual cortex of the brain.
And it turns out that
you can actually put chips into the visual cortex
and the brain will attach itself to these chips
and you can start measuring and influencing brainwaves.
So there's an experiment where they took a rat,
they stuck him in a cage,
they gave him two levers and a light,
and when the light goes on, he has to choose the correct lever.
If he chooses the correct lever, he gets a reward.
They then attached his brain to one of these chips,
sent it through a computer across the world to another rat
in a similar cage, except there was no light in it.
There were the two levers.
And the guy with the light would press a lever
and the guy without the light would press the same lever,
so they had literally connected these things' brains together.
Now, that starts to get truly interesting
because you can actually start doing augmented intelligence
and that just takes us into realms that are undreamed of.
The third area, as I said,
is being able to interact with the real world.
So it turns out we can do all sorts of measurements
and I won't go into detail about this because I haven't got time.
But you can actually get sensors now
that you can attach to just about anything you can think of.
And once you've got those sensors
combined with all the human information that we're producing,
you have abundant data.
So you take abundant computing in the cloud, abundant data
and you apply it to
big data technologies
and then you have the ability
to do new analytics,
new forms of analytics,
of which the most interesting
is machine learning
because machine learning
is exactly like human learning.
You have no idea what the causal relationships are
but you feed it a whole lot of data
and it says, "Yes, I recognise this data
"and therefore I predict the outcome will be that."
So, people are now starting to...
This is an exploding field,
so you take all the data and the machine learning
and then you can apply it to things like speech recognition.
So in 2010, Google applied machine learning to speech recognition
and that's why that curve ticked up like that.
But there is some even more
interesting things going on.
Like, IBM have got a machine
they call Watson which is...
They call it cognitive computing
'cause it's not entirely
machine learning.
It combines
a number of AI technologies.
But Watson has been sent
to medical school.
It's literally doing the same course
at the Cleveland Clinic
that a human student is doing.
The difference between Watson and a human is that every year,
there are a quarter of a million journal publications in medicine.
A human being can absorb about 300 journal publications per year,
maximum.
Watson can absorb all quarter of a million.
Now, IBM are very careful to position it
as giving advice to the human doctor
and that it's not replacing the human doctor,
but it's not gonna take long when you want a diagnosis,
before you're gonna go and ask Watson
and forget about the human doctor
because Watson's gonna be far more reliable and accurate.
So that is changing and coming very fast.
Now, if you can do that, think what you can do for customer service.
So there's gonna be an arms race for customer service
for the people who are gonna produce who have the best data
to produce the best outcomes
for the customer who calls in
when you combine that all together.
Now, if you're gonna do that,
you've also got to be able to do it at scale in real time
and that means you need new computing architectures
and I wish I had time to go into this
because the quantum computing stuff is truly magnificent.
It's the next wave of the future and it just so happens that
the University of New South Wales is a world leader in this technology.
So who knows?
Australia may own the next generation of technology.
But of course, we're thinking of it in terms of
when we offer cloud services,
that's what our customers are gonna be asking for,
so we've got to be able to provide these new computer architectures,
which require a whole different way of operating, by the way.
So let me end off with my last few minutes
with just a couple of examples of how the economy can be digitised
in this new world.
If we take transport.
I love this example because in 2004,
the academic opinion was that you can't create a self-driving car.
By 2012, Google had not only created one
but had driven over a million kilometres without incident.
So everyone now knows you can create self-driving cars,
every car manufacturer is actually starting to build self-driving cars.
They're introducing it incrementally.
But there is no reason why, by 2030,
every car should not be self-driving.
So we're gonna have to change human behaviour
because you've really got to trust the technology.
But...
But the pay-off is so enormous
because 90% of road deaths are human error.
1,200 people a year die on our roads.
We could save 1,000 lives per year
and 45,000 hospitalisation injuries.
I won't go through the curve on the right
but that's just some work that we did
which actually shows that
when you introduce this technology,
instead of having to increase our road capacity
for our burgeoning population,
we can actually reduce our road capacity,
and that's going to have a huge impact all over the place.
There's just many things it'll do.
Second point I want to make is,
once we've got networks
and solar plus battery,
we can digitise power.
Now, that curve
is really interesting
because if you look at the top right,
by the end of the decade,
it'll be cheaper to produce
a kilowatt hour
with solar plus battery -
that's including the battery -
than it will be with coal.
So if you've got coal shares, my advice is get out of them soon
because there is no future in that and again, I think by 2030,
there is no reason why every house in Australia shouldn't be off-grid.
The technology curve is just taking us in that direction,
purely from a cost and effectiveness point of view.
And then the last thing I want to talk about is
the digitisation of people.
This absolutely fascinates me.
There's a thing called a Robocup World Challenge
where it's not to produce a little robotic machines playing soccer.
It's to produce a team of robots
that challenges the world's soccer champions,
the human world soccer champions,
and beats them by 2050.
Now, if you can do that, you can do all sorts of things.
Just think of healthcare, for example.
If you've got a robot that's that capable,
we can replace a whole lot of unpleasant jobs
in the healthcare industry with robots,
which will make a huge difference to the future of our ageing population.