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• Bringing up baby - now with robots
• Innovative smart seats aim to improve feelings of safety in public spaces
• AI tools produce dazzling results - but do they really have ‘intelligence’?
• 'Living lab' at UNSW helps make our cities more climate-resilient
• Social robotics can help us move towards a more inclusive society

VoiceoverÌý 00:07

Welcome to UNSW's Engineering the Future podcast, a series where we'll speak to academics and industry leaders who are embracing cutting edge ideas and pushing the boundaries of what is truly possible. In this episode, we'll take a deep dive into exciting developments in smart technology and discuss what impacts we can expect on society over the next two decades. We'll hear from leading experts in the field, Dr Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson and Dr Erika Whillas, as they explain why well designed augmented reality smart glasses could change the way we live forever. They'll also analyse the potential problems of a more connected future world, such as a greater need for data privacy and the increased dangers of cybercrime. So join us as we discover how world changing action starts with fearless thinking in Engineering the Future of Smart Technology.

Neil MartinÌý 01:06

Hello and welcome to Engineering the Future of Smart Technology. My name is Neil Martin, and I'm a journalist and STEMM communicator working in the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW, joining me today to discuss what changes we can expect in the exciting world of smart technology over the next 30 years, is Dr Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson, a senior lecturer in epistemics at UNSW Sydney. Sebastian's research spans across many areas of human information processing, including dynamic theories of negative information, data sonification and the ethics of computer science. He is the co-author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on logic and information and semantic conceptions of information, and is the editor and contributing author of Future Shock: Current and Future Issues in Computer Science. Hi Sebastian.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 02:03

Hi Neil, how are you doing?

Neil MartinÌý 02:05

I'm great. Thank you. Also with us is Dr Erika Whillas, a senior experienced strategist focusing on human centered design for digital innovation in the public sector. Erika researches processes and technologies that increase community engagement in urban governance, with a goal to help cities adapt to climate change. She's also passionate about providing community oversight on the public rollout of artificial intelligence and helping to design smart cities that meet the needs of their residents. In addition, Erika has an adjunct lecturer role at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Welcome, Erika.

Erika WhillasÌý 02:44

Hi, thanks for having me.

Neil MartinÌý 02:45

It's a pleasure. I'm interested to start off hearing from you both how you actually define smart technology. And I ask that because it seems to me, as a casual non-expert, that everything nowadays is being labelled as smart tech, whether it's my car, my watch or even my fridge, and that's without the huge boom in public awareness of artificial intelligence in the last year or so, and many predictions of what horrors or delights might come from that. So before we get into the potential science fiction of a world 30 years from now, I'd love to know what the phrase smart technology means to you in 2024.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 03:25

Smart technology is just integrated technology, where that integration is predicated upon technology itself. So for example, it was only relatively recently that we moved over to an integrated tariff for public transport in Sydney. Prior to that, you needed, you know, a separate ticket for a ferry and a separate one for a train and a separate one for a bus and so on and so forth. Now, not only is the tariff integrated, but it's electronic. You don't need to buy, say, a new one every time, and your tariff card, as we have here, or your phone, if you've integrated it with your phone, keeps track of your balance and so on. For those who are familiar with the pre-integrated tariff, that was how we got around on public transport. Yeah, it's a lot smarter. Or E-tags are another example. These are very basic, low level instances of smart technology.

Neil MartinÌý 04:21

Do you think Erika that people are aware that all of this stuff is already as around us and is already having an influence on our lives?

Erika WhillasÌý 04:28

Yeah, well, I mean, some of it certainly back to Sebastian's point, like, where there are services that have been improved through the integration of technology and data and people meeting to provide, say, government services like transportation, just in terms of, perhaps how I might define smart. So, some of the key features of a smart city would be like a network of sensors, and that might be, say, temperature sensors, CCTV, GPS-aware devices, and all of these sensors create what we've probably heard of like as 'big data', and the sensors on these objects creates the Internet of Things or terms that may you may have come across just through your own research. And then two other key features of a smart city are digital communication networks, which allow for real time data streams and processing of all that big data. And then what has really seen smart tech explode, I guess in recent times are all of this, this access to cheap cloud storage, quite frankly, so things like, you know, Amazon s3 and that type of thing, where it's, we're in an age now where the amount of data or the storing of the data is no longer an issue. You need more, you just throw a bit more cash down, and it just accommodates you. And you don't actually have to have your own servers either. So between the cloud servers, the communication networks, and this network of sensors and things, that's kind of the primary architecture or infrastructure of a smart city.

Neil MartinÌý 05:57

Sebastian, do you think that the general public are aware of all of this smart tech going on in the background every time they walk down the road or jump in their car and drive to the shops?

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 06:07

A good piece of technology is one that you simply don't notice. It's when it's integrated so seamlessly. It's just another part of your your environment. If you need to sit there and read the operation manual, or if it literally holds you up, as opposed to enable something, then it's facilitating nothing and creating, instead a bit of a bottleneck. So I guess it can be noticed in a couple of ways. One, because it just doesn't work well enough, and it sends everybody up the wall, like, say, the the new traffic light system at the Rozelle end of the Anzac Bridge, which is only letting two cars through today.

Neil MartinÌý 06:42

Triggering a lot of our listeners there.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 06:44

ÌýI think everybody has noticed that, whereas people growing up with, say, just a digital ID and digital licenses and so on, well that's just what an ID and a license is, it's not something that's newly integrated or newly rolled out amongst their peers. It's just what it means to use identification in the public sphere.

Neil MartinÌý 06:44

And I guess, like you were, you've mentioned some of them, the benefits of all of these things are being felt already. Even if they don't know about it, they're getting the benefits. I guess, like you said, when it goes wrong is when they do notice and they feel like 'this isn't actually helping me'. So can you talk a bit more about the the actual benefits that people are getting that they might not be aware of?

Erika WhillasÌý 07:33

Back in the day, we would call that transparent technology, and I came up in the era of web design and development, so like, if you couldn't intuitively land on a website and know exactly where you are and where you need to go and how to get there, and you needed to say a manual, then you had failed as a designer. And then also the idea of that, the phrase a 'frictionless technology', which is when it drops and it's so seamless into your day to day life. But, yeah, I mean, I think what we're in an interesting time, just to sort of go to your point of like, what do we notice and what don't we notice, which I think, as sort of mindful modern citizens, that we'll need to consider and work out what we're comfortable with, as far as technology, what we notice and maybe what we consider private, not necessarily being private anymore, or maybe we're not aware that it's not private anymore, because there's an interesting dynamic now where public spaces, say, like the town square or the train network or that type of thing, when say smart technology and also monitoring, say technology gets put in place there, often municipalities don't have the money to do it alone, and there's public private partnerships. So in this interesting dynamic where in the public space, your data is now potentially being captured by private sensors and stored on private networks, but then also this other dynamic of like information that used to stay at home with you, like I don't know, your medical records, are now like in your back pocket on your phone, and also information that was probably once quite private, like your energy consumption in your kitchen and the devices that you use are now essentially through, say, smart metering, when that gets sort of more prevalent, that's data that's being captured and used by, say, the energy companies. I'm not saying any of that is inherently wrong, but you're not necessarily aware of where the lines between public and private are, and a lot of these things, you know, it's great, it's exciting and it's fun, but we will as a modern society, need to work out where we're comfortable, as far as that very, say, infamous dance between, say, privacy and security, which we've become a bit aware of with, say, you know, say, government access to things like our emails and that type of thing. But then there's privacy and innovation, what dance we are willing to play there, and then also privacy and revenue generation, because at the end of the day, with that public data, like, who owns it, you know, like, who gets to profit from it, if it's like me taking a train. So they're interesting questions, and like, say, none of them are inherently right or wrong, but they're definitely worth considering.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 09:53

Do you think our attitudes to some of our social conventions, like privacy, for example, will change as a function of the enablements of the technology itself.

Erika WhillasÌý 10:07

Well, we definitely love our convenience in the modern world, don't we? Our phones get everything brought to us, whether that's a taxi or a food delivery or understanding exactly what the weather is at any given moment. So I think for the majority of people, the convenience will be enough for the majority of people will be like, "I'm getting something for the data that I'm sharing. It seems so fine. Take it".

Neil MartinÌý 10:16

Is the genie not out of the bottle already. It seems to be very hard to suddenly put a stop to this in terms of, "no, actually, no, I'm suddenly worried about my data." Well, you've been giving up for the last 5-10, 15 years.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 10:43

People's behavior adapts to technology very, very quickly, and what very recently would have been absolutely unthinkable, then just becomes commonplace practice because it's so easy to do. My favorite example is tracking people against their will. Until very recently, the only people who are tracked against their will were criminals on day release or on parole, or some such with an ankle bracelet. And when I was a teenager, if my mother had said, you know now, "Sebastian, I insist that you carry around this electronic tracking device so that I can track your location in real time on my computer". I mean, if I'd gone to the police, she would have been arrested, and I would have been taken off into state care or something like this. But now I'm hard pressed to find a single friend of mine with teenage kids who will let them leave the home without tracking enabled on their smartphones.

Neil MartinÌý 11:33

And they don't find it unusual. They think that that's perfectly reasonable.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 11:37

Well, they're certainly keeping up a game face of finding it perfectly reasonable to their teenagers. We have fairly strong conversations about this sort of thing. At the moment, they're just hoping that they get away with it, and their teenagers don't call their bluff. But within a couple of years or so, it will be absolutely commonplace, just like taking photographs of, say, strangers in public, now that everyone has a camera on their phone to see people taking photos of other people all the time. But back when we only had analog film, if I had been on the street and somebody was standing there taking photographs of a lot of people, I would have been quite put out. It would have been behaviorally, quite an exception. I would have raised an eyebrow.

Neil MartinÌý 12:15

But there are, you know, lots of benefits to all of this. So that's where the balance is tricky. I guess.

Erika WhillasÌý 12:23

I think what's kind of sort of fun and exciting about this field, though, right, is that it develops at a breakneck speed, but it does develop. And so I think as we progress, we'll get to consider what we're comfortable with, but then as a new technology, or, you know, means of mining all that data comes out. So coming back to AI, we'll also get to have an opportunity, maybe as older types as a Gen X's, or zennials, as I like to call myself, cross between the two. We get that benefit of hindsight where we're like, we've seen what's rolled out, we've seen what's exciting. We've seen what we don't necessarily think is great, and so even things like wanting to have some sort of human oversight or explainability, or that type of stuff in, like, AI, it's like, you know, we're at the beginning. We have the opportunity to put those things in, and by design, have the opportunity to call for things like transparency and accountability.

Neil MartinÌý 13:17

Do you think this will all just accelerate because as the new younger generations are just used to this now, so there won't be as much pushback. Moving forward, they'll be just saying, "Well, yeah, this is how it works. You know, I get tracked. All my data gets collected. Yeah, I'm used to that."

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 13:35

Oh, of course. And young people will know how to navigate it seamlessly. Young people are very smart and very adaptable. It's usually older people like ourselves, or even older, who tend to have some troubles with things. I remember being a child and being astonished that my mother could not just simply work out how to use a cash machine with a pin number. But it's by looking at the thing. I mean, you only had a couple of options, and there were three of them, and it's told you what to do every step of the way. The young people do not need protecting. They will run circles around it, like young people have run circles around the world within which they find themselves. For many generations are past. It's the older generations who will need help adapting.

Neil MartinÌý 14:15

What are the kind of big things that you see in 20 or 30 years that maybe the older generation, and I might include myself in that as well, are going to maybe be struggling with and can't get our heads around while all the younger people are loving it.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 14:32

I think the one thing that we have a strong inductive basis for believing will be perpetuated via smart technology will be the creation of communities that grow up within certain technospheres, and they have their own tropes, their own frames of reference, their own sort of environments, of sort of semiotic exchange that are incomprehensible to those who have not sort of come of age within that particular space. This is less something that is imposed from above, so to speak, than it is new and terrifically exciting uses for the performance of identity to which technology can be put to people who are interested in so do it.

Neil MartinÌý 15:23

Can you see that as well, Erika, that these new development of smart tech can bring communities together and strengthen them?

Erika WhillasÌý 15:23

I would absolutely love to be behind that. I'm excited about the use of technology to promote and ease and streamline engagement of different types of people, including and very importantly, like the marginalized people who are living with a disability, people who have maybe come to our cities as refugees and maybe don't have English as a first language, or the elderly, or the people who basically don't necessarily get included at the decision table. I think increased representation or engagement with such different groups of people will make for better cities. Some of the positive stuff I see as well is, would probably for, say, the elders like ourselves, is that there'll probably be an eradication of interfaces like we know of them today, we'll probably be able to do a lot more talking to things. So like you might have to help you help your grandmother book an international flight right now and make sure that everything's kosher and she's not getting scammed. And the interfaces to navigate all that can be quite complicated. We'll probably just get to speak to it like we can speak to say chatGPT now and say, "Hey, tell me about this and break it down for me and do it exactly as I instruct you to." We'll increasingly no longer need to be like, "what's the drop down menu and where do I save this?" It's just like, we'll be able to we already have verbal based interfaces, which will reduce that learning curve, or also reduce the idea of elderly people being left behind from technology.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 16:58

It's so exciting, I think one thing I can't wait to see is not the outcome of the design of smart cities, technology and infrastructure, per se, but the way that people just hack it and repurpose it to do things that are absolutely fantastical that the designers and the funders and the backers and all the people sitting around the round table did not see coming for a million years, because it's always without exception, the weirdos and the outsiders who see the world from a completely different perspective to convention, who achieve the greatest breakthroughs and throw us forward further than any consultative committee could ever achieve.

Neil MartinÌý 17:46

Do you think we're going to get to the point where everybody's going to be wearing some kind of goggles or kind of glasses with augmented reality and having information fed into them? You know, via the internet, they'll be able to access all of this data that's being collected and all the information that's available. That seems to me very science fictiony, but I think they're getting, starting to come out in the in the community now. But do you think they'll really take off, and will that be what everybody is wearing?

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 18:19

Oh, absolutely. So I have some reliable goss from the inside here in the world of R&D, the race towards the trophy of wearable light, usable augmented reality smart glasses is furious. People are acquiring different companies, left, right and centre, as quickly as they can, because the first person to get there, the first person to make a pair of smart glasses that, firstly, don't make you look like an idiot. Secondly, are light. Thirdly, integrate with the environment seamlessly as we move around it, and also have the backing of various software developers, will absolutely change the world. Now, does this technology exist already? Yes, but it's horrible to use. The person who brings the iPhone version of augmented reality smart glasses to the market will change the world in which we live, and the race towards this, as I said before, is unbelievable, but it's all happening in the shadows. It's very quiet at the moment.

Neil MartinÌý 19:28

We're keen to know what the hot goss is in terms of, like, how far away this is. Do you think that it's 30 years in the future, or even closer than that?

Erika WhillasÌý 19:37

Definitely closer. Yeah. I know from a person who also worked in the industry that the race was also for untethered, untethered augmented reality glasses, meaning you can walk around without cables plugged into walls and that type of thing, so light, disconnected from any power source or, say, internet source, in terms of cabling, and then being able to, yeah, go out into the world. I think we're very, very close. Within the next five years, there'll be a, I mean, there'll be a rollout of of AR that I'm pretty, you know, relaxed and confident about, but what I'm as a person with the background and say as, yeah, design and user experience, for what I've known for people who have dabbled in this space, it does tend to be a lot of like hammers looking for nails. And I mean that a lot of this work might be being done, say, by engineering teams, who don't necessarily take things out of labs. It's like, because I don't think they're actually doing the engagement with end users, or at least enough of it to be like, what actual needs do people have that we could serve with this other than our fantasy of being the Terminator, you know, it's like, you know, what are these? What are these things that we could truly help? Like, again, coming back to like, how can we help elderly people with these augmented things? How could we help, you know, people who need to navigate a city, who find it out, like the blind, literally, perhaps, you know, like, how could we help? What are actual needs that we have, that these conserve, rather than what's this cool gizmo and how do we make it happen?

Neil MartinÌý 21:02

What would you hope then that that would bring?

Erika WhillasÌý 21:04

Really, you'd want to do co-design practices. You'd want to go and talk to different groups of people and actually find out. You'd want to do it, design it with them. So it's not like you have an answer right now, but it's just the notion that there are numerous needs in the world that could be supported by such technology, and whether we're actually engaging with the people to design those.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 21:23

But I think probably the most fun example is the ones we've seen already with Pokemon Go, this fantastic integrated augmented reality game where one would lift up one's smartphone to use the camera to see one's actual environment, and superimposed on that via the phone screen, was the gameplay infrastructure. Imagine having that as a head up display on your glasses, and let's not forget, it is gaming technology that pushed computer technology and hardware as far and as fast as it did, and it was computer games, literally computer games, that put computers in the home of nearly everybody who wanted a computer over the 80s and 90s who could afford it. And then the other technology was designed to integrate with the machines that were already in place.

Neil MartinÌý 22:19

So I might pick you up on that. And the the point about gaming driving that technology is really interesting. And I think sometimes people accuse gaming of having, you know, pushed everyone indoors, and now they're just sitting at their computer and they're not engaging. I wonder whether when, when you're talking about these people walking around with goggles on, and they're in their own worlds, and they're interacting with environments, you know, augmented reality. That sounds to me quite insular, and I wonder whether there is a danger that we're not creating communities. We're going the other way and making people very isolated?

Erika WhillasÌý 23:02

Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there's certainly risk of that. Say, when phones, or smartphones first came out, and people will say, doing video chats, or you'd see someone in the subway talking to themselves, like, is that person mad? Oh, no, they're talking to someone. I think with augmented reality, there'll be people sitting next to you, but they are not in your reality. They're in interacting with another reality, but maybe with another person. So it's not necessarily completely isolated, but I think there is the opportunity to, rather than, even say with gaming, to have you not remove yourself from your reality, but engage more with your surrounds. So imagine a game where you need to understand what the constellations are in the sky to be able to find the next clue, or whatever that is. And you'd sort of have to look up and be like, "Okay, where is the Scorpio constellation," or whatever it is, and have the, maybe the data lay up on top of that. Or, you know, it's you're in a scavenger hunt, and you're in a local park or botanical garden. It's like, okay, "go find the boab tree," or whatever it is, you know, and like, "what's a boab tree?" But, yeah, like anything, I think there will also potentially be a backlash, like, almost like the equivalent of, like, do I dare say the alternative culture of the 60s, or, like, you know, natural things and maybe free love, not that that's got to do with this, but maybe, like, a rejection of hypertech,

Neil MartinÌý 24:20

It would be cool just to, you know, be in a room with someone and, yeah, be looking at you like you're crazy because you interacted with someone in real life.

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 24:29

Will people start carrying around a Gregory's in the same people, the same way that people buy vinyl records now, you know, [yeah maybe]. For our younger listeners, a Gregory's was a very large, hard covered book that was a roadmap of Sydney or Melbourne or any large city in Australia, and everybody, until smartphones came along, simply owned one. Otherwise, how would you find your way around the city, especially if you were driving every glove box had a Gregory's in it, maybe reading a map will be like tuning a turntable, it would become this bespoke thing that only the very niche cool kids can do,

Erika WhillasÌý 25:06

Specialized knowledge, yeah, definitely.

Neil MartinÌý 25:08

ÌýI'm worried that looking at Google Maps on your phone is going to be the really tragic thing to do, because that's, you know, way in the past, and now you just get it on your goggles. Or, you know, are we talking way into the future, having a brain computer interface where you don't even need the goggle, it's just straight into your brain somehow.

Erika WhillasÌý 25:27

Yeah, like, nearly, like the neuralink research and that type of thing. Yeah. I mean, that's, I grew up again, you know, showing my age being loving sci fi, like Johnny Mnemonic. But that's just, he was just, like a, "he was an agent, and he had to take the data files and then leaking into his brain. But he needed that last job done," and then he was living in a future where, like, you know, there was, like, all sorts of things going on related to brain implants. And so I can understand why that, you know, science fiction, inspiring science, why it's, we're going there, because surely it was only a matter of time. But, yeah, I think it will arrive. And I think, but I think, but I think there's also really fantastic uses of that, though, too. And then the research in, say, biotechnology, like looking into like in helping blind people see. So we can literally do that. Now, a blind person can walk into a room and through electric signals send to the appropriate parts of the brain, see objects, like big objects in the room, which is now obviously a starting point, but that's amazing. A blind person can walk into a room and see objects. So I think that interface of technology in the brain can be, you know, really fantastic. But maybe coming back to some of those ideas too, about, say, privacy and innovation, like it's all well and good to know what, where I go shopping online, that augmented reality will be kind of wild too, because then maybe my behavior was like, not only what am I doing, but do you want to see what I'm seeing so that there's potentially, like, data breaches there.

Neil MartinÌý 26:48

Seb, would you be worried about information coming into people, whether they're using Google Goggles or whatever it might be called, or Neuralink, because somebody somewhere is feeding that information and where is that information coming from, and how are you choosing it? Would you be worried about that? It sounds, it seems to me, like we're already in a place where fake news on the Internet and people struggle to identify what's real, what's false, what's you know, somewhere in between, maybe those problems are only going to get worse.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 27:26

Oh, absolutely. Neil, it's a very astute observation, and we have enough trouble keeping relatively straightforward pieces of technology, say, one's computer, one's desk at work, secure and uncorrupted. The idea that anyone in the right mind at the moment, you know, just for reasons of beer and Skittles, as they say, would have one integrated with one's central nervous system is madness. We need to make all sorts of leaps and bounds when it comes to just security and assurance before anyone will consider doing anything like this, barring extraordinarily important reasons for research and development and health and so on and so forth. The great thing about smart technology is that it's integrated. It affords us a whole bunch of opportunities, because that integration allows us to do things at scale. But with that opportunity comes more than one risk.

Neil MartinÌý 28:19

Erika, do you have fears about cybersecurity? As Seb said, when all of these things are integrated, I'm thinking even on a bigger geopolitical level, a bad actor state getting into any kind of major system that might shut down an energy grid.

Erika WhillasÌý 28:40

I mean, I think that will certainly be something we need to prepare for, quite frankly. Like that I think will be what we start to see more and more of, even as countries want to casually flex, you know, and say, "Hey, you are pushing back on one of these major policies I'm talking about. Let's just take down all of the internet downtown for a few hours. Shall we see how your financial networks deal with that type of thing?" Yeah. But you know, even coming back before to those like crafty individuals who might, you know, learn what it is to live offline. I mean, I think it's going to be sort of, you almost want to be able to exist like without always having to be online because of those moments. Like, if I have to get from, you know, for example, I just went to Arizona, and my father, weirdly enough, had a map of Arizona. And he was like, "Do you want to take that with you?" Like, yes, I'm actually going off grid. This could be useful. Paper map is actually what I really need right now, which was novel in itself.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 29:39

Why does your father have a map of Arizona maps?

Erika WhillasÌý 29:42

He lived in the state. He went there. He was, he's a stargazer...

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 29:45

and he kept there, just in case he found himself off grid in Arizona. Yeah, "thank goodness I never threw out that map." Well, there you go.

Erika WhillasÌý 29:51

Yes, exactly. So yeah. So I just think that that will definitely be the case. We'll definitely need to be, ideally, an adaptable group.

Neil MartinÌý 29:59

On a different level to that, it could just be cyber hacking, people doing scams. It seems to me that that could only get worse.

Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 30:06

Of course, and so will our defences against it. But as a colleague and friend Richard Buckland is fond of saying, "a bad actor needs only to find one weakness in a system, and the good actors need to find all of them and make all of them stronger." But the great thing is that most of us are not bad actors. Most of us look out for each other. Most of us will tell a neighbor if something is going wrong and most people are trying to do the right thing, including most people in most state institutions in most countries in the world, as as well as a lot of private actors. I'm more than confident that if we do the right thing by the younger generations, and by this I mean we integrate sort of cyber safety awareness into the upbringing of children in the same way that in Australia we do with say poisonous animal safety awareness and water safety awareness, then it's just that sort of vigilance and the incorporation of this sort of thing into one's personhood. And people overseas don't really believe me when I say, "No, when you grow up in Australia, you practice bandaging up your friends legs in case they're bitten by a snake and all this sort of stuff." And they think we're having them on like, it's like drop bears. But no, really, we do this sort of thing.

Neil MartinÌý 31:31

And maybe something else that we need to educate people on. And you mentioned it before, Erika was this kind of idea of protecting our privacy, which seems to be eroding slowly over time, and will that ever change? Do you think, or is that just a slippery slope that we're already too far down?

Erika WhillasÌý 31:51

No, I think, even though it could probably be cumbersome till we work out good sort of interfaces for it, but the idea at the moment is that, you know, we've opted in by default and we have to opt out. I mean, I think as something as simple as that will need to change, like you shouldn't by default just get to collect information on me, but again, in a way that's useful for people to understand it, we're going to need to understand, yeah, digital literacy and critical thought will need to make a comeback as far as understanding what's being communicated to you and by whom, and whether it's trustworthy. Finland's actually done an amazing job of this. A few years ago, this was an article I was reading in The Guardian the Finnish were finding themselves essentially, maybe as the guinea pigs of certain Russian strategies of misinformation. And the Finns were like, well, we can't take on Russia. They're huge. They're powerful. They've got more resources to throw at this then we can. So what are we going to do? And they're like, All right, we're ramping up digital literacy and critique in our schools. And so they did, and they have an amazing education system over there anyway, but they essentially, how they tackled it is that we ramped up teaching our young people is like, "Okay, where is this article from? Is it a reputable source? Who is this journalist?" And so I think education will be supremely important for people to understand how to navigate the world and also how to navigate the information that comes to them.

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Neil MartinÌý 33:15

In terms of privacy and data Seb, on your side, do you think we'll get to a point where people might say, "Well, here's my personal information. You can buy it off me. If you give me enough money, then I'm happy to to give up some information." But at the moment, we seem to be giving out for pretty much nothing.

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 33:36

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been doing that ever since biographies existed, and that's precisely what influencers do on social media. They do give up a great deal of their privacy in the same way that celebrity culture has done in America for quite some time, and you just commodify your identity and as people lead lives that are more and more valuable informationally, we learn so many of our life skills through experience rather than instructions. If one's life experiences are the sort of experiences through which others could learn, then selling those experiences, especially perhaps a first person perspective from those experiences, being able to market segments of one's longitudinal behavioral trajectories might just be worth its weight in gold, not only for personal profit, but also just for education in general.

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Neil MartinÌý 33:37

And maybe we get to the point where we realize that pretty much everything is content creation. Every moment of your life is potentially a piece of content that is created. And I guess the new smart technology might also then give you a way to utilize that to control it a bit more. And sell it, I guess, if you wanted to.

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Erika WhillasÌý 35:02

Yes, certainly. I mean, I think we're already sort of seeing that again, coming back to things like people like their own self marketing mechanisms now, or content creators like, you know, we follow influencers, or YouTube channels and that type of thing. I think it was actually Coppola at the end of Filmmakers Heart of Darkness [sic], was sort of talking about how one day it would be amazing if every individual had a camera, and filmmakers could be everywhere. And I'm like, Oh, well, we got, well, amazing.

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 35:29

That's one word for it, yeah.

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Erika WhillasÌý 35:30

But I guess the idea of, like, content creation being subscribed to more different types of people, even coming back to augmented reality, imagine being able to, like, look out of the eyeballs of someone who's like, going down the size of an a Mount Everest equivalent, or that type of thing, selling your experience, I guess, or like, you know, your life being something that someone wants to sit in. I don't think we're terribly far off that as it is, so, let alone we have more tech where you can sort of feel literally in their skin. I think that will be quite appealing.

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Neil MartinÌý 35:57

You prompted my next question there, in terms of looking forward and then suddenly realizing that you've, you've, you've reached the future, so to speak. If I was to give you a time machine and jump forward to 2050, do you think all of these things that we've been talking about will be generally beneficial to society as a whole, or would you still be worried that there would be some kind of big problems that maybe we haven't dealt with?

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 36:24

I think we're pretty good at refining technology so that it is generally beneficial. We also have entire pockets of our history across various points in the globe where we've made terrible, tragic mistakes with technology and have damaged a great many things. Hopefully, this is where I'm more optimistic, is that we're self aware enough now as a species that I am cautiously confident if we really do put a bit of effort into listening to Greta Thunberg's point that the agents who deserve our moral attention and deserve to fall within our moral umbrella are not merely the people who exist now, but those who will exist in the near to medium term future as well.

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Neil MartinÌý 37:17

Erika, are you similarly confident?

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Erika WhillasÌý 37:20

Yeah, I think it will be important, like, how we engage, like today, with certain technologies to obviously with the ramifications of them. What we need to, sort of, in a way, is lean in rather than have a passive relationship with technology, because leaning in to, say, what, say the large language models like chatgpt, just for reference, can do. It's like they can augment you. It's like having your own dedicated, like research intern next to you. And it can make things faster, but it can make you more powerful in a way, in a good way, like it allows you to jump to the next logical thought. Because, like, "Okay, I want to know about this. Tell me, okay, now I'm going to start thinking about this. I need to know more about it. Tell me." It can empower you. So I think what will be really important is that we don't encourage a very passive relationship of just purely being entertained to death by technology and even say, AI tools. It's like, how do we inspire the young minds to go, "No, this is like a secret weapon for you. It's like having your own personal like amazing, dedicated research friend who can like any thoughts you have or any curiosities you have, can be like taken to the next level." So I think it will be that to inspire engagement and leaning in, into our intellectual faculties, rather than just going passive and just like eating up entertainment. So I think that will be something.

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 38:38

Well, I'm going to lean in if, if I may, the first thing we need to tell young people is that we're not asking them to say, write essays on subject x because the world needs another essay on subject x. We're not asking them to solve a logic proof or an equation because we need to know what the solution is to that logic proof or the equation. It's because we need the type of people whose personhoods and whose minds have been formed through those practices, and as the streams of information to which we're exposed continue to multiply exponentially, we need more people with greater faculties of critical discernment, and especially with the addition of generative AI, which allows for the generation of narratives. The ability to make a distinction between them and the ability to navigate the increasingly complicated InfoSphere is becoming more and more urgent.

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Neil MartinÌý 39:46

Seb, you mentioned there about young people. I wanted to finish off with this question to you both, if you were a 16 or 17 year old today, thinking of going into a career related to smart technology, what would you be most excited about?

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 39:58

Oh, wow. Creating something with my peers that only they and I understood. The same thing that's been getting teenagers up in the morning since time began, and that's creating their own worlds that then change the rest of the world in which we live.

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Neil MartinÌý 40:20

And Erika?

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Erika WhillasÌý 40:21

well, coming back a little bit to what I sort of mentioned earlier, is that I think the exciting aspect of the 21st century, especially if looking at a smart city context, and coming back to those very tricky challenges that we have to address as a species. And I think the interesting overlap will be not just the smart tech, but where the smart tech overlaps with just about anything you can be passionate about, whether that's environmental science or being an artist or, you know, working out how to, you know, help blind people see, or wanting to be an amazing urban planner, or wanting to, you know, be a scientist, or anything really. We need all the great ideas, and we need all the people to engage with smart cities in this context. And so I think it's exciting, because you won't just be in a silo. You'll get to use your amazing skill set of what gets you up in the morning with all these other great people. Because we want all of it, not at all.

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Neil MartinÌý 41:12

I think you just highlighted there that we've only really scratched the surface of what we could have spoken about. It's been a absolutely fascinating discussion. I think everyone listening will now feel smarter, as well as getting great insight into how smart tech could massively change all our lives in the future. Dr Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson, many thanks for making the time to join us.

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Sebastian Sequoiah-GraysonÌý 41:35

Thank you, Neil. It's been a blast.

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Neil MartinÌý 41:38

And thanks also to Dr Erika Whillas, it's been a pleasure to chat.

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Erika WhillasÌý 41:41

Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful.

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Neil MartinÌý 41:43

Unfortunately, that is all we've got time for. Thank you for listening, and I hope you'll join me again soon for the next episode in our Engineering the Future series.

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VoiceoverÌý 41:54

You've been listening to the UNSW Engineering the Future podcast, don't forget to subscribe to our series to stay updated on upcoming episodes. Check out our show notes for details on in person, events, panel discussions and more fascinating insights into the future of engineering.