Speaker 1: Get technology with tech Stuff from stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here at how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: And if you are a long time listener to tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, every year, for for almost ten years now,
Speaker 1: at the end of a calendar year, we make predictions
Speaker 1: about what is going to happen in technology for the
Speaker 1: following year. And every year I try to go back
Speaker 1: and look at those predictions and see how well they
Speaker 1: matched up to what actually happened. And usually, if I'm
Speaker 1: being really generous, I get about fift right. Uh. But
Speaker 1: it's always fun to try and make those predictions. And
Speaker 1: sometimes you're making predictions you don't want to come true
Speaker 1: and you hope that you end up being wrong. There
Speaker 1: were a few of those in the seventeen predictions. We'll
Speaker 1: have to see whether they ended up being the ones
Speaker 1: that turned out to be wrong or not. Last year
Speaker 1: I also had the good fortune to call upon some
Speaker 1: of my friends in the tech journalism space and they
Speaker 1: joined me for the show and gave me a prediction
Speaker 1: or two about what they thought was going to happen
Speaker 1: the following year. So we'll talk about what their predictions
Speaker 1: were as they, you know, came out through the show.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna tackle this by order of the predictions
Speaker 1: we made in the episode, So we're not going chronologically
Speaker 1: through seen again. We just did that, but instead we're
Speaker 1: going to look at these predictions and kind of try
Speaker 1: and guess how well they did. Uh So, the first
Speaker 1: prediction that I made was that we would see a
Speaker 1: lot of VR and a R everywhere at c e S.
Speaker 1: In fact, these first few predictions are all c e
Speaker 1: S related because c e S takes place in January
Speaker 1: every year. That's the Sumer Electronics Show. It's a big
Speaker 1: trade show that happens in Las Vegas every year. And
Speaker 1: we were getting ready to go, and I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of the things that we're going to be
Speaker 1: a big deal at c e SEN, and I said
Speaker 1: that VR and a R would definitely be up there,
Speaker 1: and that was true. V R and a R were huge,
Speaker 1: huge types of technology, categories of technology that were on
Speaker 1: display at c e S. Although these days we tend
Speaker 1: to use the term mixed reality instead of just virtual
Speaker 1: reality or augmented reality. However, would not see all of
Speaker 1: the products and concepts that were on display at c
Speaker 1: e S make it through to the end of the year.
Speaker 1: Some of those ended up fizzling out. For example, Intel
Speaker 1: came to c e S and showed off a cool
Speaker 1: mixed reality headset concept called Project Alloy. Though the implementation
Speaker 1: needed some refinement, it was pretty big and clunky. It
Speaker 1: didn't create a smooth experience that people were hoping for either,
Speaker 1: because it was using a different metho, the doology for
Speaker 1: head tracking external head tracking. As it stands, Intel would
Speaker 1: end up shelving Project Alloy at some point over the
Speaker 1: summer of sev UH. It didn't really make the news initially.
Speaker 1: It was only afterwards that the company came forward and
Speaker 1: said it was having trouble finding partners interested in making
Speaker 1: the device. So while they had developed the internal technology
Speaker 1: for Project Alloy, they were having trouble finding anyone that
Speaker 1: would actually produce the hardware. Now, part of this issue
Speaker 1: probably stemmed from the fact that Microsoft was launching its
Speaker 1: own mixed reality headset platform and they were attracting a
Speaker 1: lot of interest from various partners, and so all these
Speaker 1: companies that might have worked on Project Alloy were instead
Speaker 1: kind of hitching their wagons to Microsoft. Intel continues to
Speaker 1: invest in technologies that either played directly or indirectly into
Speaker 1: mixed reality technology. So it's not all a loss. It's
Speaker 1: not like Intel got out of the game Intel early.
Speaker 1: They just said, well, Project Alloy as it stands doesn't
Speaker 1: make a whole lot of sense. I also said that
Speaker 1: there would be a lot of smart home and automation
Speaker 1: stuff on display at c e S, which is kind
Speaker 1: of a no brainer. Some of these predictions, I admit
Speaker 1: are are kind of lame because anyone could have said this.
Speaker 1: It's like saying, if you jump into the ocean, you're
Speaker 1: gonna get wet. Well, the Internet of Things continued its
Speaker 1: journey into becoming part of everything we can imagine, whether
Speaker 1: you can make a good case for it to be
Speaker 1: there or not. For example, Cara Stace loreal And with
Speaker 1: Things or We Things, if you prefer, partnered to create
Speaker 1: the Carras Stas Hair Coach hair brush, which sends information
Speaker 1: from the brush to a smart device like a smartphone
Speaker 1: or a tablet, to give you feedback on how well
Speaker 1: you're brushing your hair. I see no point in this,
Speaker 1: but then I have no hair, so brushes are sort
Speaker 1: of not my bag to begin with. But other devices
Speaker 1: like coffee makers, connected displays, things like that, they fit
Speaker 1: more into what we come to expect from connected smart devices.
Speaker 1: So there was a mixture. There was stuff that we
Speaker 1: could see a practical application for right away, and other
Speaker 1: stuff that seemed more frivolous or just absurd. I also
Speaker 1: said that there would be a lot more driver less
Speaker 1: car technology on display at the e S Show, and
Speaker 1: that was for sure the case. Everyone seemed to have
Speaker 1: connected cars, or autonomous cars, or both. Chrysler showed off
Speaker 1: an electric minivan with autonomous capabilities called the Portal Faraday Future,
Speaker 1: the automotive startup company that we talked about back in
Speaker 1: It still seems weird to say automotive startup company, although
Speaker 1: you could argue Tesla did the same thing. They showed
Speaker 1: off their FF nine one concept, and this one was
Speaker 1: a slightly less futuristic looking vehicle than their sports car
Speaker 1: concept they showed off the year earlier. Still pretty sleek
Speaker 1: and sexy, just more in a utilitarian approach than sports car.
Speaker 1: The f f n one is supposed to be able
Speaker 1: to park itself, so it's semi autonomous. Toyota showed off
Speaker 1: a concept of a vehicle that would be able to
Speaker 1: monitor the conditions and moods of the people inside the car,
Speaker 1: dynamically adjusting conditions and even the route based on that feedback.
Speaker 1: It could also take over if you wanted to, so
Speaker 1: that was another concept that had this semi autonomous approach.
Speaker 1: There seemed to be a lot of of concepts that
Speaker 1: would allow for human control and then handing off that
Speaker 1: control to a computer if you wanted to. I also
Speaker 1: said there'd be a lot more drone stuff at CS,
Speaker 1: and there were tons of them. One drone was the
Speaker 1: hover camera Passport, which can hold a position around you
Speaker 1: and take photos of you, just in case you wanted
Speaker 1: some robo paparazzi treating you like a Hollywood superstar. I guess.
Speaker 1: There were tons of other flying drones from various manufacturers,
Speaker 1: many equipped with high definition cameras, and just a few
Speaker 1: years ago, just the cameras would have cost tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars. Now you can find these style cameras
Speaker 1: on flying machines that you can control by remote control
Speaker 1: for less than a grand It's kind of crazy. These
Speaker 1: devices really serve as evidence of how an emerging technology
Speaker 1: can become commonplace in just a few years. There was
Speaker 1: also an underwater drone called the power Vision power Ray
Speaker 1: that is a fish finder and a fish hunter all
Speaker 1: in one. It can carry baited lures and help you
Speaker 1: snag a fish. This drone is a tethered drone. It
Speaker 1: has to be connected to its power source, and that
Speaker 1: makes sense because it also helps prevent it from drifting
Speaker 1: too far away and then sleeping with the fish. Ees
Speaker 1: I also said there'd be a lot of three sixty
Speaker 1: degree cameras, and there were quite a few of those
Speaker 1: on display at c e S. But this is also
Speaker 1: where things get a little confusing, because there's no real
Speaker 1: standardized format for three six cameras. In my mind, if
Speaker 1: you say three sixty camera, I think of a camera
Speaker 1: that's capable of taking an image in a three hundred
Speaker 1: sixty degree arc, so a full circle around the the
Speaker 1: the axis of the photographer. In other words, it would
Speaker 1: be like if you were standing in a place, took
Speaker 1: a photo, turned to the right, took another photo, and
Speaker 1: just did like a panoramic photo in a full circle.
Speaker 1: That's what I think of a three sixty degree cameras.
Speaker 1: And then you would use some other device like a
Speaker 1: phone or a headset to view the image and you
Speaker 1: could turn around in place and see the complete image
Speaker 1: as you turn in a physical space. That's what I
Speaker 1: think of. But some companies capture only on eight degrees
Speaker 1: of arc. Some are capable of capturing three D images,
Speaker 1: some are only two D. Some people refer to these
Speaker 1: as VR cameras. I don't really like that term. I
Speaker 1: don't think of it as VR. To me, virtual reality
Speaker 1: requires a computer generated environment. It needs to be a
Speaker 1: virtual environment, not just a video overlay. Otherwise I would
Speaker 1: argue any movie as a virtual reality film. Uh, grant it.
Speaker 1: Typically you can control the point of view because you
Speaker 1: could turn your head and you can change the perspective
Speaker 1: you're looking at. But that's the extent of interactivity for
Speaker 1: most of these computers, and I don't really think of
Speaker 1: that as being true virtual reality. I feel like you
Speaker 1: have to be able to affect your environment in some way,
Speaker 1: apart from just being able to change your perspective. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there were a ton of these at c E S.
Speaker 1: There was the views VR camera, the Hublo four K
Speaker 1: thirty frames per second three D video camera, the lucid
Speaker 1: Cam one degree three D personal camera, the Insta three
Speaker 1: sixty pro. The list goes on and on. There were
Speaker 1: just tons of them. There were drones with three degree
Speaker 1: camera capabilities. It was just really popular technology on the floor.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure that that popularity has translated to
Speaker 1: great commercial success. I don't know that there have been
Speaker 1: a run on these sort of cameras. I don't think
Speaker 1: they've received like huge sales figures. And I haven't seen
Speaker 1: very many implementations that managed to get beyond the sort
Speaker 1: of gimmicky feel for the technology. But it's very early,
Speaker 1: so it may be that someone is really working on
Speaker 1: a really cool implementation that's going to be the killer app.
Speaker 1: In other words, I did not predict all the voice
Speaker 1: activation stuff, however, and there was a lot of that
Speaker 1: on the show floor as well. You could find voice
Speaker 1: activated assistants incorporated into tons of different products, particularly in
Speaker 1: the automotive sections of the show floor, and you could
Speaker 1: also find the technology incorporated into other gadgets, such as
Speaker 1: Amazon's Alexa being included as a feature on LGS smart
Speaker 1: instabuw refrigerator, so you can ask your refrigerator if it's
Speaker 1: running and until it jokes. I also didn't predict that
Speaker 1: smart watches would have a less prominent space at c S,
Speaker 1: though I really should have seen that one coming. Smart
Speaker 1: Watches are a category that have never really taken off,
Speaker 1: with the possible exception of Apple's Watch, and there were
Speaker 1: some notable departures in the field the year before, particularly
Speaker 1: Pebble once it got a quired by Fitbit. But while
Speaker 1: smart watches were mostly a no show, fitness trackers were
Speaker 1: everywhere at CE seen and they continue to be really popular.
Speaker 1: And I like the concept of fitness trackers, but I
Speaker 1: honestly wonder how viable the category is for growth. After all,
Speaker 1: I have a tracker that works just fine, so I
Speaker 1: don't anticipate needing to replace it for a while, even
Speaker 1: if another one comes out that has more features than
Speaker 1: mine has. Unless those features are just incredibly compelling, there's
Speaker 1: just not really any incentive on my part to upgrade.
Speaker 1: So my feel is that once you hit market saturation,
Speaker 1: where all the people who want one of these essentially
Speaker 1: have one, your your market drives up. You don't really
Speaker 1: I mean, how do you sell another fitness tracker to
Speaker 1: someone who already has one unless they just happened to
Speaker 1: have this kind of obsessive collection mentality. But at CES
Speaker 1: it was clear that many companies feel strongly that we've
Speaker 1: not yet reached this point. Now we'll move out out
Speaker 1: of the ce S predictions into some of the other
Speaker 1: ones I did. I made this prediction about Apple. I said,
Speaker 1: the new iPhone will be a bigger and boulder departure
Speaker 1: from the traditional design. I was thinking this because it
Speaker 1: was the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, so I thought, well,
Speaker 1: Apple is going to have to do something to set
Speaker 1: it apart, because this is you know, we we set
Speaker 1: great importance on these things like ten year marks. Even
Speaker 1: though you could argue that's just completely arbitrary, we make
Speaker 1: it very important. That being said, the tenth anniversary of
Speaker 1: tech stuff is coming up pretty soon, I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to start thinking about that. Well, the prediction ended
Speaker 1: up being true in some ways. At least, Apple introduced
Speaker 1: two phones at the same time. In case you don't remember,
Speaker 1: there was the iPhone eight, which was more of an
Speaker 1: evolutionary product. It was kind of following in the same
Speaker 1: sort of design footsteps as its predecessors. And then there
Speaker 1: was the iPhone ten or iPhone X, which was a
Speaker 1: more dramatic departure from earlier iPhone designs. Now as Apple says, quote,
Speaker 1: our vision has always been to create an iPhone that
Speaker 1: is entirely screen end quote. It's actually from the Apple Store,
Speaker 1: and the iPhone ten incorporates features like voice commands and
Speaker 1: facial recognition more than earlier iPhones, though the eight has
Speaker 1: a few of those features as well, and some of
Speaker 1: the differences between the eight and the ten once you
Speaker 1: get past the screen are really not that dramatic. So
Speaker 1: while the physical design might be a bit of a departure,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's really that bold of a change
Speaker 1: in design. And while both phones have more powerful processors
Speaker 1: and even more impressive photography algorithms and processing abilities, I
Speaker 1: don't know that I would call this prediction a total win,
Speaker 1: because it wasn't quite as dramatic as I was hoping for.
Speaker 1: I also said we'd get a sneak peek at Apple's
Speaker 1: autonomous car technology, which we did, but only because some
Speaker 1: people in San Francisco have snapped photos of it. It's
Speaker 1: not because of Apple. McAlister Higgins, who has worked on
Speaker 1: autonomous car technology for a while, referred to the images
Speaker 1: of the car as the thing. But the code name
Speaker 1: for Apple's project is called Project Tighten the Cars have
Speaker 1: these big roof mounted sensor arrays that are all cased
Speaker 1: in white plastic. It's very typical Apple approach, but they
Speaker 1: are extremely bulky looking and conspicuous. They also seem to
Speaker 1: contain a ton of sensors, including six Linar sensors, which
Speaker 1: is a bit of overkill. Apple applied for and received
Speaker 1: a permit to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in
Speaker 1: California in according to anonymous sources, so take this with
Speaker 1: a grain of salt. Apple shifted its strategy from building
Speaker 1: an entirely new vehicle to developing software that will power
Speaker 1: other manufacturers autonomous cars. So there's been no official sneak
Speaker 1: peak from the company yet, just people spying on it
Speaker 1: from AFAR and then taking photos and uploading them to
Speaker 1: various social networking sites. I also said that more states
Speaker 1: would create formalized rules for autonomous cars operating on state roads,
Speaker 1: which is true. In twenty states introduced self driving car legislation.
Speaker 1: In thirty three states had car legislation for autonomous cars there,
Speaker 1: so we've seen more movement on that front. Twenty one
Speaker 1: states Georgia among them, have enacted that legislation. Others it's
Speaker 1: still kind of in the process of that. In addition,
Speaker 1: the US federal government is weighing in. On September twelve,
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration
Speaker 1: released federal guidelines for automated driving systems. So that one
Speaker 1: was correct. Yea. I said that Uber will test an
Speaker 1: autonomous car with no one in the driver's seat in
Speaker 1: a major market before the end of and I haven't
Speaker 1: found any reports of that actually happening. I think perhaps
Speaker 1: Uber's seventeen was so rough that it may have slowed
Speaker 1: down their bullish adoption of driverless vehicle technolog GEZ. The
Speaker 1: company is still enthusiastically pursuing this technology, but perhaps with
Speaker 1: a bit less gusto than they were at the end
Speaker 1: of twenty six before all of their legal troubles began.
Speaker 1: Part of that may be due to a crash that
Speaker 1: happened in Arizona that put the brakes literally on their
Speaker 1: self driving tests in Phoenix, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. Police
Speaker 1: later determined the crash was not the Uber vehicle's fault,
Speaker 1: it was the fault of the other driver, and Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: residents have since become less enchanted with Uber overtime as
Speaker 1: the company has seemingly failed to follow through on many
Speaker 1: of the promises it made. When the original negotiations were
Speaker 1: taking place to use Pittsburgh as a test city, there
Speaker 1: were all these different promises Uber was making that it
Speaker 1: seems to not have made good on. For example, there
Speaker 1: were reports that Uber was beginning to charge money for
Speaker 1: driverless car trips, when initially the agreement was that all
Speaker 1: these test drives would be provided free of charge to passengers.
Speaker 1: So I have to call this one a miss, because
Speaker 1: as far as I could tell, there was no case
Speaker 1: where there was no one in the driver's seat. There
Speaker 1: was always an operator standing by from all the reports
Speaker 1: I could find. Keeping in mind that I'm recording this December,
Speaker 1: so I still have a few days for that one
Speaker 1: to come true. Maybe I said that hyperlop tests would
Speaker 1: prove to be sound from an engineering perspective, but would
Speaker 1: find the real challenge to be in the economics of
Speaker 1: laying out a hyper loop, and this one I think
Speaker 1: I nailed pretty well. There were several tests of hyperloop
Speaker 1: like technology in twenty seen. Most of them used mag
Speaker 1: lev methodologies magnetic levitation to provide for transportation pods to
Speaker 1: float above tracks. This is different from the original design
Speaker 1: Elon Musk had in mind, which was to use what
Speaker 1: he called air skis, which the transportation pods would expel
Speaker 1: air downward against the track and that would create lift,
Speaker 1: kind of like an uh air hockey table turned upside
Speaker 1: down and juiced up a whole bunch. But we did
Speaker 1: see several examples of the hyperlop technology working, including a
Speaker 1: test that saw a pod accelerate to more than two
Speaker 1: hundred miles per hour. So this is still far below
Speaker 1: what Musk's design originally proposed. And as for economic challenges,
Speaker 1: I wasn't the only person to suggest this. Timo matin
Speaker 1: in A, an engineer from Finland, and I apologize for
Speaker 1: completely butchering his name, conducted a study about the potential
Speaker 1: for hyperloop concluded that the billions of dollars that would
Speaker 1: be necessary to make a working system meant the project
Speaker 1: had a chance of success that hovered somewhere around six percent.
Speaker 1: That being said, Hyperloop one held a round of funding
Speaker 1: in the fall of seventeen and raised another eighty five
Speaker 1: million dollars, so we haven't exactly hit that barrier just
Speaker 1: yet still, until we see a real construction project connecting
Speaker 1: two distant cities together the hyper It remains an interesting proposition,
Speaker 1: but still is a long shot in my opinion. Now
Speaker 1: I have a lot more predictions to talk about, but
Speaker 1: before I get into all of those, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsor. So in that predictions
Speaker 1: episode in seen my friend I as actar, a guy
Speaker 1: who works for c net came on and he made
Speaker 1: a prediction. He said that Alphabet will get into wireless
Speaker 1: internet service in a big way in ten and I
Speaker 1: would say, who's mostly right about this? It's still pretty
Speaker 1: early days all things considered, but clearly the momentum at
Speaker 1: Google is in wireless service. Alphabet is the parent company
Speaker 1: for Google, so I often will use the two interchangeably.
Speaker 1: We saw an early seventeen that the company began to
Speaker 1: downsize employees working in the Google Fiber division, and it
Speaker 1: was abundantly clear that the company was scaling way back
Speaker 1: on its plans to connect cities with fiber and compete
Speaker 1: against entrenched Internet service providers. For one thing, Google had
Speaker 1: to continuously fight with various regulations that gave preferential treatment
Speaker 1: to traditional I s p s for stuff like access
Speaker 1: to utility polls. So it's hard to supply cable to
Speaker 1: customers if you're not allowed to access the existing infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And while Project five remains a phone plan alternative that
Speaker 1: you can use if you so wish, Google's push is
Speaker 1: much much bigger than that. Ours Technica reported in February
Speaker 1: seen that the then new wireless division in Google Fiber
Speaker 1: called web Pass, had put out a call for a
Speaker 1: new general manager to head up the division. Web Pass
Speaker 1: was a gigabit wireless company that Google acquired in October.
Speaker 1: By June, Google had expanded web Pass into its seventh
Speaker 1: market by opening up for business in Seattle, Washington. Google
Speaker 1: Fiber the wired version continued to operate in the cities
Speaker 1: where it had already been deployed, and in San Antonio.
Speaker 1: Google even dropped the price of its gigabit wired service
Speaker 1: to fifty dollars a month, which was down from seventy
Speaker 1: seventy dollars a month in all other markets. Now back
Speaker 1: to one of my predictions, I said that was going
Speaker 1: to be a make or break year for VR, and
Speaker 1: I said there'd probably be more VR experiences and amusement
Speaker 1: parks and arcade style businesses rather than at the home.
Speaker 1: For Right now, that seems to more or less be true,
Speaker 1: though it's not necessarily going to be the case moving forward.
Speaker 1: Hardware manufacturers are trying to bring costs down to make
Speaker 1: detect more attractive to a larger user base. HTC cut
Speaker 1: two dollars off it's VR kit, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot more developers creating virtual experiences for that hardware to leverage.
Speaker 1: This includes some big name ports over into the VR experience,
Speaker 1: such as Skyrim. Complicating my judgment of this prediction is
Speaker 1: that neither HTC nor Oculus release sales figures, so it's
Speaker 1: hard to judge how well they're doing. Though by August,
Speaker 1: most analysts felt that neither brand had sold as many
Speaker 1: as five hundred thousand units. Sony fared better in ten,
Speaker 1: claiming the companies sold nine hundred fifteen thousand units of
Speaker 1: the PlayStation VR, but that number hadn't increased by much
Speaker 1: over the following several months. According to tech Crunch, Sony's
Speaker 1: total units sold had topped at one million in June.
Speaker 1: So think of it this way. The hardware debuts in
Speaker 1: and sells nine fifteen thousand units, but then over the
Speaker 1: next half year fewer than a hundred thousand more units
Speaker 1: move off store shelves. That is not a good story. Gardner, however,
Speaker 1: estimates that VR has made it through the hype cycle
Speaker 1: for emerging technologies. Now, the hype cycle, it looks like
Speaker 1: a very sharp inverted the trench. Actually it's more of
Speaker 1: a hill, right. So if you start the very far
Speaker 1: left of a hype cycle chart, you have a technology
Speaker 1: that's just beginning to emerge. Then people get excited about it,
Speaker 1: and it starts to follow this very sharp curb until
Speaker 1: it gets to the peak of its hype cycle. Then
Speaker 1: starts to come down as people begin to get frustrated.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're waiting too long for the technology to get
Speaker 1: into their hands, or maybe the early builds of the
Speaker 1: technology don't measure up to what you imagined it would be,
Speaker 1: and so it sharply goes down the hype cycle until
Speaker 1: it hits a trough, uh the trough of disillusionment, and
Speaker 1: then slowly starts to climb out of that and becomes
Speaker 1: a more stable technology. Gardner says that VR has finally
Speaker 1: done that, it's made that turn. Not everyone agrees with this.
Speaker 1: Some people think so, but not everybody. So maybe VR
Speaker 1: has made it out of the woods and we'll just
Speaker 1: see it get adopted more gradually. It has become an
Speaker 1: integral component of many different high end and not so
Speaker 1: high end amusement park experiences. So I was kinder right
Speaker 1: about this one. The next prediction came to us courtesy
Speaker 1: of Mr Tom Merritt, the host of the daily tech
Speaker 1: news show, or co host, I should say he and
Speaker 1: Sarah Lane host that show. By the end of seen,
Speaker 1: he said, the combined number of subscribers to new over
Speaker 1: the Internet live television services will be the number three
Speaker 1: largest cable company, behind Comcast and Spectrum. In other words,
Speaker 1: it would be in front of cable Vision or what
Speaker 1: was then called cable Vision Now. Variety reported in September
Speaker 1: that twenty two point to million adults in the United
Speaker 1: States had cut the chord on traditional television service, which
Speaker 1: was an increase from twenty six and that the number
Speaker 1: of people who have never subscribed to a traditional television
Speaker 1: provider service rose to thirty four point four million people,
Speaker 1: which was an increase of five point eight percent from
Speaker 1: the previous year. But that's not quite the same thing
Speaker 1: as what Tom was saying. He was talking about internet
Speaker 1: live televisi services, something like YouTube TV or who lose
Speaker 1: live TV service well. According to Variety, again, virtual subscription
Speaker 1: TV services like those actually helped reverse, though only slightly,
Speaker 1: a decline in pay TV subscribers. So if you include
Speaker 1: the virtual subscription services, the number of people in the
Speaker 1: United States subscribing to pay TV actually grew by ninety
Speaker 1: thousand in the third quarter of seventeen. This was a
Speaker 1: number that had been in decline, but once you take
Speaker 1: in these alternative methods and you factor those in, the
Speaker 1: numbers change. Considering this was eventually going to be a
Speaker 1: pretty major decline, It's it's kind of interesting, but it
Speaker 1: does not mean people stopped cutting the cord, uh, but
Speaker 1: rather some people are shifting their traditional pay TV services around,
Speaker 1: so they'll go from cable or satellite for their television
Speaker 1: to these virtual services. According to the Nielsen Total Audience
Speaker 1: or for a Q two of which was the latest
Speaker 1: one I could get before this recording, nine million, three
Speaker 1: four thousand Americans get their television from broadcast and broadband access,
Speaker 1: meaning they're only using and antenna and or internet services
Speaker 1: to access traditional pay TV content. Cable Vision, which Tom
Speaker 1: said would be pushed to fourth place after Internet pay
Speaker 1: tv was acquired by Altice USA in seventeen and was
Speaker 1: rebranded as Optimum. Now the subscriber number for Optimum is
Speaker 1: two point four million. So even if we assume most
Speaker 1: of that approximately nine point four million broadcast and broadcamp
Speaker 1: Broadcom number from the Nielsen report, even if most of
Speaker 1: them do not use Internet for pay TV and they
Speaker 1: just get television over the air, there's still a really
Speaker 1: good chance that Tom was right on this one, that
Speaker 1: more than two point four million people are getting their
Speaker 1: television through the Internet, and thus pushing Optimum to the
Speaker 1: fourth place in cable. If you look at satellite providers,
Speaker 1: it's different. Satellite has larger numbers, but if you look
Speaker 1: at actual cable service, it would mean that Optimum is
Speaker 1: fourth place. I then had another prediction, which was that
Speaker 1: we'd see a big increase in Internet of things devices
Speaker 1: that work with personal assistants like Alexa or Google's Assistant
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing, and that we would see
Speaker 1: a lot of growth in that area, which is true.
Speaker 1: There have been tons of different products that have compatibility
Speaker 1: with those services built into them. Even so, I think
Speaker 1: this is just the beginning, and we'll see an explosion
Speaker 1: of this technology in ten But I suppose I should
Speaker 1: probably save that one for the actual Predictions episode. The
Speaker 1: next one came from Shannon Morse of Hack five Fame.
Speaker 1: I've had Shannon on the show a couple of times.
Speaker 1: She said that Marai, the big butt net that attacked
Speaker 1: Internet of Things devices, would create big changes from manufacturers
Speaker 1: and spur on new conversations about Internet of things security
Speaker 1: and lead us to ask tough questions as well as
Speaker 1: developed some new monitoring software that will look for potential
Speaker 1: vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Well, we did see
Speaker 1: a lot more talk about network security and Internet of
Speaker 1: things security and the wacom aray, but golly, we sure
Speaker 1: saw some high profile security breaches too. Now, to be fair,
Speaker 1: some of those happened a while back and we just
Speaker 1: weren't told about them until later. But while security remains
Speaker 1: an ongoing conversation, we still see reports of vulnerabilities either
Speaker 1: going unchecked or purposefully unreported. For example, and this isn't
Speaker 1: an Internet of things example. This is more of a
Speaker 1: computer based example. But the Wanna cry virus, which could
Speaker 1: have been way worse had it not been for one
Speaker 1: security researchers discovery of an Internet kill switch. It was
Speaker 1: based off a Windows vulnerability that was known by the
Speaker 1: n s A, but the n s A had allegedly
Speaker 1: decided against making Microsoft aware of the vulnerability in order
Speaker 1: for them to create their own agency specific exploit. A
Speaker 1: second virus targeting the exact same vulnerability, called Petya, caused problems,
Speaker 1: mostly in the Ukraine later in then there were the
Speaker 1: data breaches Equifax, which affected more than a hundred million people,
Speaker 1: and then there were the ones that hit uber. I
Speaker 1: don't think we'll ever go a year without some sort
Speaker 1: of data breach or system uh hijacking. Tech security is
Speaker 1: just it's tricky. You've got a lot of systems that
Speaker 1: change with various updates. Sometimes that creates unintentional consequences such
Speaker 1: as vulnerabilities, And you still have human beings in the picture,
Speaker 1: and and we are manipulatable goofuses at times. I think
Speaker 1: Shannon is right that we saw more conversations about security.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that they did much good. I don't
Speaker 1: know that the Internet of things devices of today, the
Speaker 1: general ones, are that much more secure than the ones
Speaker 1: we were talking about a year ago. But then again,
Speaker 1: there's no way to really know about all the attacks
Speaker 1: that didn't happen because people took the right action or
Speaker 1: companies put in the right systems. We don't know about
Speaker 1: the ones that failed because there's nothing newsworthy about that.
Speaker 1: We only know about the ones that succeeded. So maybe
Speaker 1: she is right, and it's quite possible she is, but
Speaker 1: it's hard to say back to some of my amazingly
Speaker 1: astute predictions, such as Moore's law would become less of
Speaker 1: a factor and now it would be more about optimization
Speaker 1: rather than pushing hardware capabilities. Well. Greg Garrick, who works
Speaker 1: for arm, a company that makes microprocessors, told the E
Speaker 1: n T back in May, I do think we are
Speaker 1: approaching the limits of conventional scaling with silicon. If you
Speaker 1: just did the math, you could convince yourself that cost
Speaker 1: per transistor scaling will soon stop, and you get pretty
Speaker 1: pessimistic about the industry's future. This actually helps illustrate that
Speaker 1: Moore's law is more about economics than anything else. You
Speaker 1: might be able to figure out a way to perpet
Speaker 1: wait Moore's law, but the cost of doing so would
Speaker 1: be so high that it would not be profitable. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't make any sense to do it from an economic standpoint.
Speaker 1: So it's not just the technological barriers but also the
Speaker 1: economic ones. Now, there are some other strategies we can employ,
Speaker 1: such as using three dimensional processors, which will stack elements
Speaker 1: on top of each other and allow for shorter transmission
Speaker 1: distances between memory and processor. That could speed things up
Speaker 1: even if we slow down on creating incredibly small components.
Speaker 1: According to Media Text chairman Psi mn Kai, we may
Speaker 1: have only two more generations of shrinking transistors before we
Speaker 1: hit a real wall via physics, and making smaller components
Speaker 1: is expensive, so there's the question on whether you can
Speaker 1: make a return on the investment to build transistors that
Speaker 1: are that small. We've seen a lot more movement in
Speaker 1: optimizing software so it runs more efficiently on the hardware
Speaker 1: we've created, but I think we're still holding onto this
Speaker 1: dream of Moore's law for a little while longer. I
Speaker 1: also said, and more companies will move services to the
Speaker 1: cloud rather than having everything on local devices, which was
Speaker 1: kind of a no brainer. According to all the articles
Speaker 1: I could find, that's the case, and it looks like
Speaker 1: it's still the beginning of a bigger trend to offload
Speaker 1: stuff like computing and data storage tasks to other platforms.
Speaker 1: According to Waterford Technologies of businesses are planning to increase
Speaker 1: their investment in cloud technologies, with a big and mid
Speaker 1: size companies planning to increase spend compared spending on that
Speaker 1: compared to only thirty of smaller firms. So still going strong.
Speaker 1: But this one was kind of a gimme. Alright, We're
Speaker 1: coming up to the last few predictions, but before I
Speaker 1: jump into those, let's take another quick break and thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. Our next prediction comes from Jason Howell, who
Speaker 1: is a host over at twit and Jason Howell says
Speaker 1: push back on social media and over sharing online would
Speaker 1: happen in and you'd start to see people back away
Speaker 1: from social networks in general. And keep in mind he
Speaker 1: made this prediction uh in the wake of the election,
Speaker 1: which had stirred up an awful lot of ugliness on
Speaker 1: all sides about fake news, about trolling, about abuse, and
Speaker 1: there were a lot of people who were kind of
Speaker 1: getting sick of social networks at the time. But it
Speaker 1: seems like this hasn't quite shaken out the way Jason
Speaker 1: originally imagined. According to a few reports over the summer,
Speaker 1: there was a slight dip in Facebook's active users during
Speaker 1: the summer months, but according to most analysts, that's pretty
Speaker 1: typical for that time of year. It just kind of happens.
Speaker 1: There were no indications of an actual decline and active
Speaker 1: users on a year over year basis. Twitter also saw
Speaker 1: a growth in teen, though not at the rates that
Speaker 1: they want. According to the Balance, Twitter added about nine
Speaker 1: million new users from twenty team to the second quarter
Speaker 1: of uh There have been a lot of criticisms directed
Speaker 1: at social media in general and Facebook and Twitter in particular,
Speaker 1: again in those areas of harassment and spreading false information,
Speaker 1: but it hasn't quite convinced people to abandon the format entirely.
Speaker 1: My next prediction was that Twitter would have a very
Speaker 1: roughen unless someone would acquire it. It could be in
Speaker 1: danger of going away, which is probably a little more
Speaker 1: doom and gloom than it merited, but I wanted to
Speaker 1: make a big prediction. There was this ongoing problem with
Speaker 1: harassment on Twitter, which is really only grown worse depending
Speaker 1: upon who you ask. Whom you ask, it's it's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty ugly. Twitter is still around, though it's not teetering yet,
Speaker 1: but there have been some developments that show cause for concern.
Speaker 1: Jessica Really, who had been with the company, for nine years,
Speaker 1: essentially the entire history of Twitter left the company in December.
Speaker 1: Seen Really was the head of corporate development over at
Speaker 1: Twitter and the lead in the company acquisition efforts that
Speaker 1: it had throughout the years, but Twitter didn't make a
Speaker 1: move to acquire any other companies in Seen at all.
Speaker 1: Business Insider reported that Twitter's ad business is quote demand
Speaker 1: constrained into quote, which is business speak for advertisers aren't
Speaker 1: gonna pay us more to do stuff. The Business Insider
Speaker 1: article identified two areas of opportunity for Twitter. One was
Speaker 1: to create a better return on investment measurement for businesses
Speaker 1: so that they can see how their marketing dollars are
Speaker 1: paying off when they use Twitter. The other was to
Speaker 1: create better technology for smaller advertisers that can't depend upon
Speaker 1: big departments that larger companies have. The article also stated
Speaker 1: that users are leaving Twitter, though that contradicts the other
Speaker 1: report I saw earlier. Then again, a net gain and
Speaker 1: Twitter users could just mean that more people around the
Speaker 1: world are getting access to the basic technology like smartphones
Speaker 1: that allow you to get access to Twitter. The Motley
Speaker 1: Fool has a cautiously optimistic outlook for Twitter, but acknowledges
Speaker 1: the company still has a tough road ahead. It remains unprofitable,
Speaker 1: and the growth in users has slowed significantly. I said
Speaker 1: also that there will be new attempts to curtail fake
Speaker 1: news online, and we've seen efforts from Google, Twitter, and
Speaker 1: Facebook to combat the fake news issue. These haven't been
Speaker 1: uniformly successful. In fact, in recent events, there have been
Speaker 1: reports of fake news articles giving misleading information on these
Speaker 1: platforms and even rising to prominence through their algorithms. This
Speaker 1: will likely be a continuing issue in ten but definitely
Speaker 1: true that major companies are working hard to push back
Speaker 1: against the flood of misinformation out there. Whether it will
Speaker 1: be enough remains to be seen. Also said that there
Speaker 1: will be more automation in and there would also, as
Speaker 1: a result, be more at the kits for a universal
Speaker 1: basic income concept because we would see automation take over
Speaker 1: some jobs that traditionally would be held by people. The
Speaker 1: story about automation and its effect on the job market
Speaker 1: continued throughout teen. Mckensey Global Institute issued a report that
Speaker 1: predicts that by automation could eliminate as many as seventy
Speaker 1: three million jobs in the United States alone, But the
Speaker 1: report also states that the economic growth that happens will
Speaker 1: create more than enough new jobs to accommodate existing workers
Speaker 1: as well as new ones, So the report did acknowledge
Speaker 1: that the nature of the work would change quite a bit.
Speaker 1: This poses an enormous challenge because how do you port
Speaker 1: somebody over from one job to another. It's not like
Speaker 1: the same basic skill set can be applied to any
Speaker 1: type of job. Forrester Research predicts that in two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: AI automation will eliminate nine of US jobs, these jobs
Speaker 1: largely being in the white collar sector. That's the sector
Speaker 1: that has relatively been safe from automation until fairly recently,
Speaker 1: and according to their research, Forrester says that the automation
Speaker 1: will only create two percent growth in jobs, so a
Speaker 1: nine percent loss and a two percent growth offset. As
Speaker 1: for universal basic income, the concept has received a ton
Speaker 1: of media attention in ten. The basic idea is that
Speaker 1: a government will provide a base amount of money to
Speaker 1: all of its citizens that are qualifying for such an program.
Speaker 1: Usually it's based on age and regardless of that citizens
Speaker 1: other sources of income. So let's just say for argument's
Speaker 1: sake that it's twenty tho dollars everyone would get the
Speaker 1: same basic twenty dollars. There are numerous examples of studies
Speaker 1: on this idea throughout the world, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of disagreement about whether or not it would work. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: more folks are eyeing the robots warily. This is another
Speaker 1: story I expect will continue to evolve inen with more
Speaker 1: people calling for a serious discussion about universal basic income.
Speaker 1: And then Shannon Morris also had another prediction, actually, and
Speaker 1: I talked with her. This was her technically her first prediction,
Speaker 1: but I played it second in the episode, and it
Speaker 1: was that net neutrality will have a big hit in
Speaker 1: seen like, it'll take a big step back and privacy
Speaker 1: protections will get stripped away to create a more surveillance state. Now,
Speaker 1: I also said that I thought net neutrality would suffer
Speaker 1: an enormous setback in as I mentioned earlier, I'm recording
Speaker 1: this episode on December. On December, the f c C
Speaker 1: met to vote on whether or not to overturn the
Speaker 1: regulations that had been passed two years previously that classified
Speaker 1: internet broadband as a public utility and gave the FCC
Speaker 1: the authority to regulate the industry. And just as I thought,
Speaker 1: just as everybody thought anyone could predict it. It was
Speaker 1: not a secret. The vote came down to party lines,
Speaker 1: three for overturning, two against. So those rules are being overturned. Uh, Again,
Speaker 1: not a surprise. This was pretty much guaranteed to happen
Speaker 1: from the very beginning of seventeen, which is why that
Speaker 1: prediction was so easy to make a year ago. It was.
Speaker 1: It would have been a shock for it to turn
Speaker 1: out any other way. There was a lot of drama
Speaker 1: to that story too. Throughout. Uh. There there's an ongoing
Speaker 1: investigation into false comments that were left in support of
Speaker 1: overturning the rules, millions of them that were falsely filed,
Speaker 1: attributing those comments to people, some of whom are dead
Speaker 1: and obviously could not have commented on the issue at all.
Speaker 1: So there's still that story that's ongoing. There's also going
Speaker 1: to be some lawsuits that will be filed in the
Speaker 1: wake of this decision, so it's not a done deal. However, Uh,
Speaker 1: you could easily argue that net neutrality did take a
Speaker 1: major setback in twenty seventeen, which is what Shannon and
Speaker 1: I were both saying, So we both get a big
Speaker 1: check mark next to that one. Although This was one
Speaker 1: of those cases where I think we both would have
Speaker 1: really liked to have been wrong. I also said that
Speaker 1: we're going to see some big movements in renewable energy
Speaker 1: with Google trying to go on renewable, and there was
Speaker 1: also the upcoming Testla Solar City merger, which was absolutely correct.
Speaker 1: Google did hit on renewable in December. According to Box,
Speaker 1: Google uses as much electricity as all of San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Google purchased three giga watts of renewable energy capacity in
Speaker 1: order to hit this earlier stated goal of being powered
Speaker 1: by renewable energy sources, although that's a little misleading. Google
Speaker 1: purchased renewable energy certificates, which are meant to guarantee a
Speaker 1: certain amount of renewable energy is allocated to something, but
Speaker 1: the actual electricity powering Google's operations may or may not
Speaker 1: come from renewable energy sources themselves. Google's purchasing certific it
Speaker 1: gets that represent renewable energy. That doesn't mean renewable energy
Speaker 1: is actually powering all of these Google centers. Google's paying
Speaker 1: a bill so that it might sell that renewable energy
Speaker 1: back to the market somewhere else. And this might sound
Speaker 1: a bit like a giant shell game to you, because
Speaker 1: I know it does to me. But Google is retired,
Speaker 1: retiring these certificates, so they can't just be bought and
Speaker 1: traded without anyone, you know, actually relying on the renewable
Speaker 1: energy it has to be used. Otherwise you would have
Speaker 1: these sheets of paper that would represent blocks of energy,
Speaker 1: but maybe no one's actually cashing it in, which seems
Speaker 1: really weird, like humans are bizarre. I don't get economics, guys,
Speaker 1: technology I barely have a grasp on. But I'll probably
Speaker 1: have to do a full episode on renewable energy certificates
Speaker 1: at some point and really explore how they work and
Speaker 1: whether it actually means companies are switching to environmentally friendly
Speaker 1: energy sources or whether it's just smoke and mirrors. By
Speaker 1: the way, smoke and mirrors are not environmentally friendly. Well
Speaker 1: that's it. Those are all the predictions I made for
Speaker 1: and I did all right, I think better than many
Speaker 1: other years. But I want to try for to make
Speaker 1: some more specific outlandish predictions, things that will be easy
Speaker 1: for me to say, yes it happened or no, that
Speaker 1: totally did not happen when it comes time for me
Speaker 1: to review all of my predictions and say whether I
Speaker 1: got it right or wrong. So in our next episode,
Speaker 1: I will lay out my predictions for and then after
Speaker 1: that I will go home for a long winter's nap. So, guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover
Speaker 1: in on tech stuff, whether it's a technology, I should
Speaker 1: talk about, a company, a personality. Maybe there's someone you
Speaker 1: want me to interview or have on as a guest host.
Speaker 1: You should get in touch with me and let me know.
Speaker 1: The email address for the show is tech Stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, or you can draw me
Speaker 1: a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both
Speaker 1: of those is text Stuff h s W. We have
Speaker 1: an Instagram account also tech Stuff hs W, if you
Speaker 1: want to follow along and watch all the pretty pictures
Speaker 1: come in with various hilarious commentary. We also stream live
Speaker 1: every single podcast recording at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: Just go there. You can find the schedule. I record
Speaker 1: on Wednesdays and Friday's uh so keep an eye out
Speaker 1: for that. You can join me there be in the
Speaker 1: chat room, be part of the HOI POLLOI as we
Speaker 1: all hash out what this technology stuff means you and
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