The Next Big Thing

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David talks to John Naughton about what’s coming next in the tech revolution and where it’s taking us. From quantum computing to cryptocurrency, from AI to the Internet of Things: what’s hype, what’s for real and how will it shape our politics. Plus we discuss what China understands about technology that the rest of the world might have missed.

Talking Points:

The metaverse is the next big thing in Silicon Valley. It feels like the logical conclusion of prevailing trends.

This is not actually a radical break.
The gaming industry is developing the metaverse. And big tech is investing heavily in gaming.
The metaverse bypasses many elements of the real world that people like Zuckerberg are keen on, such as government regulation.

What will be the next big technological shift? Are we in a kind of lull?

The internet of things has not gone away.
Blockchain, which enables crypto, is still a significant technology.
Proponents of Web3 want to disrupt centralized control of the Internet.

Does the Chinese system show us that there is another choice on technology?

The general view of autocracy is that it can’t be done. The problem is imperfect information.
Has technology made it possible to escape the autocrat’s trap?

Technology has undeniably changed our lives, but the liberatory promise does not seem to have been realized.

When will technology give us control over our own time?
The kind of capitalism that drives the tech industry is unstable unless it grows.
The relentlessness of consumer society is antithetical to a particular kind of creativity and a particular kind of politics.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name's David Runtzman and this is Talking Politics. Today, I'm talking with John Norton,
0:12.1	with whom we've discussed over the years many aspects of technology and politics, and we are going to
0:16.8	try and look in the round what's the next big thing.
0:27.8	Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books,
0:33.7	Europe's leading review of culture and ideas. And the LLB is returning to first principles with their latest exclusive offer for Talking Politics listeners get 12
0:39.1	issues of the magazine for just £12 and they'll also send you one of their surprisingly
0:44.9	famous tote bags acclaimed by the likes of New York Magazine and Vice.
0:51.3	Just use the URL my lrb.com.com.uk slash talking bag. That's mylrb.com.com.uk slash talking bag.
1:18.3	John is the, among many other things, technology correspondent for the Observer.
1:20.4	You can read his column there every week.
1:25.8	John, we've probably touched base on some of these questions more often than we care to remember over the last few years.
1:28.3	But we haven't talked about it on talking politics for a while.
1:35.3	And we're going to try and look as big as we can at how some of the different questions about technology and politics fit together.
1:39.6	So I'm going to start by asking about something I don't think we've ever discussed before, which is the metaverse.
1:42.9	You tend to hear about things long before the rest of us do. I can't remember when I first saw the phrase,
1:45.5	but probably, I'm guessing, six to eight months ago.
1:48.4	Can you remember where you were when you first heard someone or read someone say,
1:54.0	The Metaverse?
1:55.4	Well, I can't remember where I was, but I can't remember when.
1:58.5	In 1992.
2:00.0	That is further back than me.
2:01.5	When Neil Stevenson's novel, Snope Crash, was published, because the Metaverse plays a key
	...

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