The future in 2026 – the perspective of a global player – Lightning talk 2016

9 June 2016 | 16:30-17:00
Programme overview 2016

Session Description

Demonstration of new innovative products, but also sharing views how Google thinks this innovation can happen and what it needs.

Format

A speech by Ross LaJeunesse, Global Head of International Relations, Google Inc.

Video record

See the video record in our youtube channel

Transcript

Provided by: Caption First, Inc., P.O. Box 3066, Monument, CO 80132, Phone: +001-719-481-9835, www.captionfirst.com

This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

>> MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: You’re a hard act to follow and we have an excellent panel. Before we kick off the panel we have the honor and pleasure of having Ross LeJeunesse here to share a few of how life could be in 2026. I think you’ll recognize a lot of the hints the Commissioner gave and some of it may stand still in 2026 and companies realize they need trust and that will be well expressed in your contribution I think. So floor is yours.

>> ROSS LaJEUNESSE: Thanks very much. I think to understand where the Internet of Things is going, it’s important to first understand where we are and how we got here. And I’d like to start with a short story. It was a Sunday two years ago and I was over at my sister’s house. She lives a couple miles away from me in Washington, D.C. We were spending the day together. We were watching television. There was a football game on TV. And my niece Eleanor who was 3 years old at the time, not a really big fan of football. So she walks up to the flat screen and she puts out her hand and she swipes the screen. To get the football match off the screen.

And she saw that screen and she assumed it was like any other Smartphone or tablet. She’s seen me on my mobile device. She’s seen her parents. I’m sure you have very similar stories for those of you who have kids at home so she assumed that it was just like any other screen and in a way she’s absolutely right. Now, compare that view of the world to my parents, Eleanor’s grandparents and ever retime I show them a new food delivery app or video chatting on my Smartphone they respond with this sense of wonder and amazement because it’s still so electrifying and new to them but for Eleanor and her generation, it’s really just the way things are and the way things will always be. For them, there won’t be a pre and a post internal age there will just be a connected world with connected devices and then they’ll be history. There won’t be new media and old media. There will just be what’s online and there will be history.

Traditional and modern workplaces will be a thing, a distinction without meaning. It’s going to be about connected workers.

But I don’t want to give you another statement or speech about why the Internet is revolutionary, because I know you get it. What I’d like to talk about instead is where that revolution is headed. I want to see if I can make this work. There we go. For the past 20 years, a focus of the Internet revolution has been these screens. The PC that in the ’80s and ’90s were largely used for word processing, number crunching, basic tools basic things in the office and at home, maybe a little bit of gaming, those screens suddenly became gateways to an entire world of information, and to an incredible number of people in that world.

Smartphones then put all that information and connections into the palm of our hands, and even smart TVs like the one that my niece swiped are giving you access to virtually unlimited entertainment, so the Internet is already everything and everywhere, and if that’s the case then it makes sense for it to be an ever increasing part of our lives, and part of the tools that we use on a daily basis.

Think about all those regular, everyday objects you have around the house that are already being made over for the Internet. There are thermostats, smoke detectors, baby monitors, there are even frying pans now, that are connected to the Internet. And we know already what happens when all these objects get connected to the net. You have lights that you can control from across the bedroom or from across the world.

I just used my Nest device to increase the temperature of my house in Washington, D.C., because my partner is now on a business trip and no one is home. Window shades that are timed to the sunrise and sunset. Cars that unlock automatically as you get closer and you can use your mobile device to find them in a parking garage which is a perennial problem I have.

All these devices are talking to each other in smart ways so that our lives can be made easier and better, and just like it’s hard to imagine our lives without Smartphones, I think in 10 years, we’re going to feel very much the same way about these smart devices. Now, they’re also going to be more secure and protect your privacy better than ever before, and here’s why:

When we think about the early days of the Internet, in the ’90s and the 2000s, it was all about creating content and websites, and that brought clicks and pageviews and that brought venture capital money about views and users. Everyone was moving at the speed of light to create platforms and sites that users went to and relied upon.

And then honestly, what happened is that too many of us were hacked. Too many of us had credit card numbers swiped, passwords were phished, and we’re victims of all sorts of malicious tools and environments that exposed our information to thieves. The race has been on for a while now to make the Internet as secure as it has been robust. Privacy and security as you’ve heard from many of the conversations we’ve had today have really risen to the top of the technology agenda.

Encryption is a hot topic of debate, and now as we shift to IoT, the privacy and security lessons that were hard learned in the early days of the Internet are giving us the right context and frame of mind as we move forward with these smart devices. Security and privacy aren’t an after thought with the Internet of Things. They’re the first thought of developers, of businesses, of Government, Civil Society, technologists.

When it comes to the Internet of Things, quite simply security and privacy are baked into the devices from blueprint to assembly line to the actual use by consumers. And the same goes for the technology that will connect these smart devices. Now, I know some of these devices may sound a little gratuitous or unneeded. You may have been in someone’s house where they Internet enabled everything: Devices all over, smart tooth brushes, smart egg containers. I’ll say this though that as these devices start to talk to each other and get smart, and then they get smarter, and they make our lives better and as the benefits outweigh the costs, Internet enabled devices will win.

If it’s the same price as a regular water filter, there will be many of us who will want to have a water filter that senses when the filter needs to be replaced, and then securely connects online to reorder automatically. Some of us will not want that world, but many of us will.

When technology is executed really with the best interests of the consumer in mind, it usually wins over legacy products.

There we go. So take the washing machine. In the future, it will activate washing at the most energy efficient time. It will learn the best cycle to wash, by sensing which clothes are in the drum. It will order detergent if you’re running out based on tracked usage. It will be connected online to do efficiency and safety checks. It will match your arrival times with those energy efficient times so that the clothes are ready when you arrive at home.

Now, this is great not only for users. That sounds like something I would really appreciate. But that’s also great for the environment. And all of this will be done securely with privacy as priority number one.

So I’m sure you’re wondering: That’s all great. I kind of knew that already. I suspected it was coming. What is Google doing with the Internet of Things? Now, our IoT focus really can be categorized into three pillars.

First, through partnerships we’re working to selectively develop devices and services that inspire and make the best use of the possibilities of IoT. Second, we’re working on systems and protocols that are open and interoperable and focusing on developers so that everything works together seamlessly.

And then finally, the third part, is we’re supporting research with partners.

Now, let me talk a little bit about partnerships. At last year’s IO, our product show case conference we announced a connected fabric project called project Jacquard. We will weave conductive yarn into everyday objects like clothes and furniture to transform into interactive devices and surfaces. I’ll show you a video and you can take a look.

>> What I find fascinating about textiles is the structure of textiles, it’s the same as the structure of touchscreens which we use in mobile devices and tablets. That means that if you replace some of the threads in textiles with conductive threads, you should be able to weave the textile which can recognize a variety of simple touch gestures just like any normal touch panel you have on a mobile phone.

So if you can hide or weave interactivity and input devices into the materials, that will be first step to making computers and computing invisibly integrated into objects and materials and clothing.

So this is exciting to me.

The challenge of creating jacquard yarn was to create yarn was conductive and scalable, which means it could be used on industrial weaving machines everywhere in the world.

>> For textile designers or fashion designers or furniture designers, it is interesting because it’s something you are very familiar with. It’s just textile. We made the yarn very thin and feel so natural so it looks like just normal yarn. The only thing is different is it’s conductive.

We work with textile designers from all over the world. It’s really interesting to see what kind of possibilities that we can have. Could be visible, very obvious like it’s here. It also can be totally invisible. So wire creating possibilities by combining different ways of weaving technique and that’s totally up to designers to choose and it’s up to their creativity.

>> We are trying to shrink down all the components down to the size of a button, and ultimately this will be something that’s so small we can embed into the manufacturing process.

So the users won’t even see it or feel it inside the garment.

>> The idea that Jacquard is an interface and it’s in with applications and devices and anything we do with our devices. It somehow gets the technology out of the way and making interactions more natural and more seamless.

>> In terms of what the technology can do, it’s really up to the user and to the designers and we expect users can reconfigure it as much as they want to. Software development and fashion design often don’t exist in the same place so we’re hoping to make it very simple for each of those parties to collaborate and we’re hoping to provide both software and hardware knowledge and components to make those collaborations very easy.

>> We like to think we have iconic products that haven’t changed much but the world is changing so I think Jacquard presents a great opportunity for brand, for design to open a door to the future.

>> In tailoring we use methods that have been used and not changed for 200 years so when something new comes along, it’s really exciting. What’s amazing about the projects is that I don’t have to have any knowledge about the electronics and how it works. So let’s see what we can create with it.

>> Jacquard is a blank canvas, designers and developers, we are just at the beginning and we’re really excited to see what people are going to do with it.

[Phone ringing]

>> ROSS LaJEUNESSE: So you’ll be able to get directions, make a phone call, play music by touching or gesturing pockets, or the fabric itself. Imagine riding your bike and touching your sleeve and asking for whatever song you feel like listening to at the moment to begin playing, and that happening within a matter of seconds.

And like you saw in the video, we’re working with partners around the world, a factory in Japan, a design studio also in Japan, our Google creative lab in London, Levi Strauss in San Francisco, tailors in Saville Row in London. Another really cool and interesting idea we’re working on is urban mobility. Over half the world’s population live in cities in urban areas and over the next 30 years 2 billion more people are expected to become city dwellers.

Civic leaders and urban planners are thinking carefully about the challenges associated with such incredible growth. Like avoiding all overstressed public transit, infrastructure, reducing traffic congestion, other issues that we already deal with on a daily basis.

And we’re interested in these questions, too. We’ve been helping people navigate urban areas and avoid traffic jams for many years already, and that’s why Google’s better mobility team is partnering with the EU and U.S. cities and experiments in each to figure out how location history might help cities find ways to reduce congestion, improve safety, and cut down on the money spent on infrastructure.

And we have some incredible partnerships to do that as well. In Stockholm we’re working with the Royal Institute of Technology to reduce the number of tunnel closures on the Södra Länken, the second longest tunnel motorway in Europe, to improve travel times. In the Netherlands we’re working with the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research to see whether it’s possible to reduce the reliance on expensive physical road sensors for information about traffic flows. We’re also working with major research institutions and transportation planning groups in Denmark and the United States.

We’re excited by the promise that these initial projects have shown in meeting the challenges of urban mobility, and we’re planning on taking these partnerships to new levels in the months and years ahead.

Now, on the importance of IoT being open and interoperable, we’re really interested in making the systems, the protocols, and the communications that are going to underpin an Internet of Things that is open, interoperable, safe, and reliable, and to make it easier for developers, any developer, to develop for the Internet of Things.

And here are two examples. First is called Eddystone. I’m sure you’re all familiar with beacons, they’re one way communications devices that are only useful when nearby devices receive their signals and turn them into some sort of useful context. A beacon can notify you of the arrival time of next bus while waiting at the bus stop. The possibility of beacons are huge.

Beacons can for example navigate vision impaired people to their destinations independently. Be used for things like automatic hotel check in, traffic estimation and on and on.

In order to make the most of these possibilities, we published Eddystone, which is the language that a beacon uses to broadcast its messages into the world and we’re making it available to anyone and everyone to use, so that they can improve it, first of all, and then use it in their designs and development.

And the format is also cross platform so developers can use it, Eddystone supporting beacons not just on Android but on iOS and any other platform that supports BLE, bluetooth low energy.

We’re also enabling developers and industries to develop connected products with Brillo and Weave. Brillo is a lighter version of Android where the ultimate goal is giving users an ecosystem of connected devices that’s open and full of choice, even in an ecosystem of devices that don’t have screens.

And Weave is a communications protocol that lets these devices talk to each other. It’s enabled by default on brillo, on the brillo operating system and works on both iOS and Android which again makes it easier for everyone to contribute devices and apps in a way that’s cohesive and interoperable. Again part of the story here is partnerships. We’re partnering with companies all around the world Intel and XP, Semiconductors, Marvel, Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm and we’re going to work with partners, additional partners, to explore ways to support connected devices broadly across the Internet of Things space.

And finally just a word on research. With academic partners at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and other universities, we’re seeking solutions and approaches to the biggest practical issues. This is where the concerns around privacy, security, ease of use, and development of open standards is going to occur.

Now, partnerships again are a key to this success. As I mentioned we’re partnering with industries, academics, developers all around the world and here in the EU to explore the possibility of IoT and we see already truly amazing products in the pipeline coming to life, with and without us. IBM and GE are working on sensors that they’ll put on jet engines, power generators, farm equipment, so that they can better control and monitor them. Nearly 50 companies, 50 companies, are working on fabrics like what we just saw, that can monitor people’s health, or even cool and heat them when necessary.

And that I really think will be the model we see over the next 10 years. Partnerships across many different sectors that will reinvent traditional industries and objects into next generation technologies. It’s not a race, but really a huge opportunity for everyone.

And imagine what the world might look like in 10 years. The way that the Internet revolutionized screens, well, it will do the same thing for almost every device in our lives, from the simple thermostat to the automobile.

Now, let me quickly just talk more about a couple key issues, very important principles, that we adhere to at Google. The first is that we need to develop a healthy ecosystem for IoT. We want to support the creation of an ecosystem that allows everybody, as I’ve said many times, to deploy, develop, share, and market products and devices.

It’s the same model that drove the Internet to success. It’s the same model that drove Android to success: Open.

Now, right now, the IoT landscape is confusing to navigate for developers and consumers alike. There’s several things we need to do to help a healthy ecosystem involve. The first as I said is to promote interoperability in a way that does not constrain innovation. Second we need to embrace panregional and global approaches to minimize nation specific constraints and regulations.

The third, we need to adopt a harms based common sense approach to regulation to enable innovation and evolution while providing appropriate protection for consumers. We must focus on preventing malicious and discriminatory uses of data that may be acquired from devices, rather than focus on criminalizing or punishing the data itself.

And the fourth, we think that Governments have an opportunity, in fact, a responsibility, to lead by example. As public infrastructure and Government services start to embrace IoT, policy makers should use this as an opportunity to model best practice behaviors, and ensure that legacy policies don’t stand in the way of IoT applications and development.

The second major issue is, of course, privacy and security. I know you’ve heard me say a little bit about this already, but they really must take center stage with IoT, and the way that we look at it, a couple, again, key principles which should be prioritized.

First, users should be given clear and easy data management and controls over digital identity, the data per sensor, per account, per product, and per home. Devices must ask users first before they start sharing any data with other devices.

And we must assign device ownership and access rights to these things, these devices, and the data they collect. The good news is, really, that we have been learning from the past. Many of the IoT’s primary challenges, privacy challenges, are extensions of those we already face on the Web, and on mobile today.

So conceptually, we’re not starting from scratch. But we need you, which is one of the reasons why I’m here. As much as IoT is exciting for consumers, for the environment, for the Public Safety and for all of us, and for ways honestly that we haven’t even thought of yet, it’s really everyone’s job to be advocates for the importance of security, to be advocates for the importance of privacy, and to be advocates at the same time for the robust ecosystem that will let IoT drive.

Now, there’s going to be a lot of wonder and amazement from consumers and the press, and that’s fantastic. But we also have to be mindful of the important underpinnings of these new platforms. We have to promote them and educate the public about them at the same time. And once we do, I know we really will have a very bright future with the Internet in our screens, our cars, our clothing, and really everywhere it can make our lives better.

Thanks very much.

[Applause]