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The United Nations expects that by 2050, we have 2 billion more people. I mean, how are we going to feed them? How are we going to make sure they have an economic future? How are we going to make sure they have healthcare? Those kinds of problems are the ones that I mostly focus on today. On one hand - you know, by the... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, 21 years is a long time... And there's that old quote, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." You've spent 21 years with your teams, creating in many ways the future that we're currently living in, but you're also out there predicting it. This is the fifth year perhaps you're writi... |
**Werner Vogels:** There's a long history by large technology companies, and if you think about IBMs and the locals and whatever, to sort of -- or McKinsey, or whatever, the consulting companies... About kind of predicting the future. And always when I read them, I always felt that they were a bit self-serving. And the... |
\[12:02\] And then, you know, I write these predictions about things I see around me. I have the fortune to travel the world. I was just in - or just... In spring I was in Sub-Saharan Africa. So Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya. Now in Kenya, we were in Nairobi, and of course, you stay in the center of Nairobi; beautiful buildin... |
And so there's a young company called Coco Networks, that built a sort of ATM where you can go with a canister, you plop the canister in and you say "Give me 15 cents of gas." And then you can take that home, you can cook your food. Now, this is not a world shocking problem, but it is solving really hard problems that ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You could have, yeah. |
**Werner Vogels:** but that doesn't work that fairly well. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Five's the magic number... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Three's the magic number, but five's better. |
**Werner Vogels:** yeah, but... Was it two years ago? An example, a topic that has become more and more openly discussable is menopause for women. It's a major problem for them. But even mothers don't talk to their daughters about it. However, that is slowly changing. What kind of things do we see in the startup commun... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's talk about one. Companionship, loneliness... Robots. I do not have any disagreement whatsoever with your casting of the problem, which is that loneliness is on the rise, especially amongst elderly, but even across all demographics we see an increase in loneliness, which has all kinds of hea... |
**Werner Vogels:** Well, it's one of these problems... So I did this documentary series called "Now Go Build", a TV series. Probably two, three years ago, I was in Japan for that, and that's where I first really dove deep in this particular topic. So Japan really was a society where kids take care of the elderly. The g... |
\[16:34\] One of the things -- and loneliness is something we'll get to, but anything we can do as technologists to keep people longer out of hospitals, or care homes, or whatever, the better it is. If that means that -- a company in Japan that I met called Z-Works - they try to do all these innovations around these el... |
Well, I think more and more people -- I mean, becoming 100 years old is actually not that strange anymore, is it? And getting to that particular age. Many of these people may have lost their partner if they had a partner. Or live far away from their other family. I mean, especially in the U.S. -- I mean, after high sch... |
And I love the work that is happening around sort of companion robots. Why? Because I always thought that people would treat a robot like a piece of metal mechanics, you know? It turns out it's not at all the case. They treat them like pets. Really. Kate Darling, MIT - she's done all the research around here. I can tel... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Really? They want the old one, because they're attached to it. |
**Werner Vogels:** \[19:51\] Or Kate tells this story where at some moment she divides two groups of people, and each get a dinosaur, a sort of baby dinosaur. And they really fall in love with it, they give it a name, they play with it, blah, blah, blah... And then she gives them a hammer, and she tells them "Kill the ... |
So why do I tell these stories? It's that while these things are technology, we treat them as living beings. And especially, I've always -- of course, because before I was in computer science I was in healthcare, the application of these kind of tools, toys in hospitals are incredible. If you're a young kid, a doctor i... |
And so those kind of things, I think, are crucial for us as technologists to think about. We see a problem, not necessarily a problem that is going to make us a ton of money, but we see a problem that is really important for people's psyche, for people's feelings, for loneliness... Who wants to be lonely? Nobody. And i... |
And actually, what way predates this is early on when we launched Alexa, I got a story from a man who was suffering from early dementia. And he knew what was coming. |
**Jerod Santo:** Speaking of Alexa... |
**Werner Vogels:** That's her. |
**Jerod Santo:** And there she is. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's her. |
**Werner Vogels:** You can't help me with that. No, no, no... \[laughter\] So the only thing he had to do was put a post-it note on the devices that's called Alexa. Because one of the things that he'd noticed was that during the day his caregivers were getting more and more irritated with him. Why? Because he was askin... |
So there are technologies that we can develop to help people have a good life. And I think if you can do that... Spam filters - fine. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[24:13\] Sure. Yeah, right? What I find interesting with this experiment is - and something I don't think I heard you say here or in your post - we're actually, to some degree, programmed. I mean, I know I had a lovey of sorts when I grew up as a child. I know that I've got two boys that are growin... |
**Werner Vogels:** I mean, how many kids don't you see walk around with a little rabbit after 10 years? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And you mentioned the dinosaur... I mean, my kids would no way ever destroy that thing. It's their lovey, it's their prized friend/companion that has no humanity whatsoever, no ability to speak, no true reciprocal affection even, but it's theirs and it has been theirs, and it's their affection point... |
**Werner Vogels:** Well, I don't think it's an \[unintelligible 00:25:47.02\] to loneliness. It is an assistant. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I said, antidote. |
**Werner Vogels:** But people are still lonely. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Werner Vogels:** I have seen elderly ladies with a fake cat next to them, stroking the cat, and the cat meows... And the elderly lady is extremely happy about that. And so why not? And the fact that we have had our phase in our existence where we think "Oh no, all relationships need to be human to human..." Well, may... |
**Break**: \[27:13\] |
**Jerod Santo:** I think we leave it right there and turn to Adam's favorite topic, quantum. Quantum. Quantum. I'll say it three times. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Jerod. |
**Jerod Santo:** The headline for this particular prediction is "Quantum safe becomes the only safe." Now, we've covered quantum computing here in the past, and it's always been right around the corner... It seems like it's always around the corner... But your contention, with some data to back it up, is that corner is... |
**Werner Vogels:** The most important thing is that I don't necessarily want to put a timeline on it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Werner Vogels:** \[unintelligible 00:29:38.00\] two years ago, three years ago I think I said 5 to 10... I think five is now more realistic... But I've seen a number of problems arising that I think we need to be aware of and take action on before that. I mean, we were \[unintelligible 00:30:00.21\] with Caltech, whi... |
Now, there is a ton of other problems to solve. How do you program these beasts? I mean, how do you do that? How do you do with something that is not necessarily 100% reliable? So how do you do that? So there's a ton of things that still have to be solved before we have production quantum machinery. But one of the thin... |
\[32:06\] So the reason for the prediction, actually, is to put in people's minds that we need to start taking action now, if we want to be protected five years from now, from, let's say, the ability to decrypt anything that we have now. Now, all the hyperscalers - Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whatever - we all have been... |
The other thing is that you can't just lean back right now, because a lot of the break-ins, or data stealing, or whatever you call it, is basically data harvesting. Nobody is interested. Basically, encrypted data is being retrieved, and people don't try to decrypt it. They'll wait till the machinery is there to be able... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's not cool... \[laughs\] |
**Werner Vogels:** And with that, I don't necessarily mean script kiddies, or whatever. It's really state actors, it might be commercial actors, who are interested in that kind of data, even if it's five years old. It might have all the relevant data for them to take action on. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the scary part, really... The famous TV show - you may have heard of this, Werner; it's called Silicon Valley. And in season six - I'm going to spoil it for some folks, just a little tiny bit, let's just say... And you may know this, because you may be a fan, or maybe you're not, because it's... |
**Werner Vogels:** Well, there's of course different types of encryption. You have lattice-based encryption, and you have that... So there are types of encryption that you will be safe from sort of these type of decryption. But you need to start installing that now. |
\[35:56\] LibSSS was 500,000, 600,000 lines of code, or something like that. I mean, you can imagine that it had to have all sorts of different types of encryption in it. At some moment, we started realizing at Amazon that running all of our frontends with LibSSS was a major vulnerability, and so we reimplemented TLS, ... |
So the most important part -- I mean, now you hear more and more about automatic reasoning, but people like Byron Cook, who have been working at Amazon for the past 15 years on these kind of problems, proving to ourselves that we are protecting our customers. That's not a press release that is going out, or something l... |
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