Transcript: A - Z of Tech Episode 25: W for Web3
Louise Taggart:
Hello and welcome once again to the A to Z of Tech Podcast. As always, I'm your host Louise, and today we're going to be looking at the topic of ‘W’ for web 3.0. I'm delighted to say that I'm joined in the studio by two guests, who may be familiar to some of you if you have been listening to our back catalogue. Our first guest is Maria Axente. She actually joined us what seems like a lifetime ago on the “E” for Ethics Podcast and is PwC’s Responsible AI and AI for Good lead. We're also joined by Haydn Jones. He, if you recall, was on our ‘O’ for Open Data episode and is a senior blockchain market specialist also here at PwC. Thank you both so much for joining me in the studio. Now when it comes to Web3, I don't even know what the correct terminology is, let alone what the definition for this is. To my mind, Web3 seems to mean different things to different people. It seems to be about a decentralisation of the internet, maybe a more federated ownership and giving people wider access, but I would really love to hear both of your thoughts on what it actually means to you. Maria, if I might ask you first.
Maria Axente:
Thank you very much Louise. It's a pleasure to be here. It's interesting you mentioned that Web3 has different definitions and different people will see it differently. We had the same problem with AI, and we still have it, so much so that the European Commission who's tasked now with drafting the first step for AI law, has a mammoth challenge in defining what artificial intelligence is. If we learn anything from the world of AI, it's starting with a little bit more of a narrow definition of the term, being able to understand what are the technologies that converge into web 3, what’s the evolution, how did we get here and what are the major changes that we expect. With such a major change I think what you said about the tension between centralised web - that is the web 2.0 - and decentralised, which supposed to be the web 3, it's the fundamental trade that will challenge us to rethink how we approach exchanging information, accessing data, accessing products and services and the whole world of digital.
Louise:
Haydn, would you agree with that?
Haydn Jones:
Yeah, absolutely. I think not wanting to trivialise it, but the simplistic way to look at it is to think about, we started with ‘G’ we have 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. Essentially, it's a catch all term that's designed to bring everything together in place of some upgrade in relation to the web. What is really interesting is and again, as Maria said, if we unpack it, there's a lot of stuff in there and you got to start from the premise of what's wrong with the web, because the web is actually pretty cool, but the challenge is that it just moves data, it just moves information. We've got this wonderful technology called blockchain, which allows us to combine ledger and payment and store value and conditionality, which, if you plug those things together you can end up with a transmissible store value. The challenge with the web at the moment is that it only references existing payments infrastructure, existing banking infrastructure, existing contracts infrastructure, so with something like a blockchain embedded within this next iteration of the web, you can actually have a transmissible store value within the web. It is not referencing any real world infrastructure such as banks payment infrastructure. We will step through the discussion, you can then see how we can then layer on other types of technology that can then sit on top of that, and then you change that experiments.
Louise:
If we break this down a little bit, then you've both already referenced some types of technologies and technology names actually, many of which we have already covered in previous episodes, I'm glad to say. So what is it? What is the technology at the minute, which is making this transition to web 3 actually possible - Hayden from your perspective?
Haydn:
If we go back to 2008, and I'd say that's a tipping point in terms of the maturity of basically cloud, networking, processing, compute storage, and then social media infrastructure on top of that. The reason why that for me is a critical inflection point, is because that's when I go back to the alphabet. I'm going to use the ‘B’ word, Bitcoin. But Bitcoin emerged 2007 and 2008, as did the Fintechs. Because, we actually had this new wave of innovation that was possible, because we got to a point that it was possible for six people in a room in Shoreditch to set up a small bank or a Fintech, a peer-to-peer lending organisation. All that technology is highly mature. We've now got these new technologies that have come through, specifically blockchain, that has been around for about 12 years, but actually when you unpack Blockchain you can do lots of things with it. We've got blockchain. We've got AI, all of the maturing that's happened there. We've got virtual reality. We've got augmented reality. All of those additional technologies derived back from 2008. They've now matured, and people are now seeing how we can actually start to plug all of those things together, and then they look at the challenges that we've got with the web as it stands at the moment. Actually, we can do something really innovative in terms of the way all that fits together.
Louise:
Haydn, you mentioned AI though, at that point I will obviously turn to Maria, but from your perspective, does it feel like we are at a bit of a tipping point when it comes to all of these technologies converging and being at a certain level of maturity, where we are able to start this transition to web 3?
Maria:
We definitely are at a convergence point and if we are to look at the AI predictions for 2022, which we released in December last year, one of the predictions was this convergence of technologies in web 3 and the metaverse. We will have to discuss the distinction between metaverse and web 3 - and how important it is for us to understand those technological components in isolation. The opportunities and challenges but also when you aggregate them, when you bring them together, what does it mean? How will we address the challenges that they have generated independently into a medium where they are all intertwined and connected? What we have seen with the adoption of AI is a general increase in adoption. Our clients expect to move more into cloud in the next five years, we'll definitely see an exponential adoption of AI and with that, multiple applications that were not possible before and more likely that will influence how AI will empower the next generation of web. How much of the possibilities that we've seen for human intervention to be replaced by machines and create intelligent blockchains, intelligent protocols for web 3; but also, being able to create a web where exchanging the data and information will be much more adapted to the way we as humans exchange information - to the extent that computers will become much more intelligent and will understand semantics; will understand meaning and as a result, the interaction will be much more attuned to what we need. That is going to be fantastic, I'm looking forward to that; but on the other side, we're not going to delve into the challenges, but the challenges we have seen with AI and we haven't seen yet them emerge in full scale, will have to address them before we actually accelerate too fast in the direction of creating a brand new world or accelerating a brand new world, we will not have control over.
Louise:
Before we open up that can of worms and some of the challenges that maybe this brings about. Haydn, if I might ask you, in terms of what does this mean, what is possible, what kind of conversations are you having with clients around how they're maybe going to be leveraging this type of technology?
Haydn:
To date, it's been very much and I use the ‘M’ word again. It's been very much metaverse oriented. We saw some NFT metaverse opportunities last year, but I would say we've seen probably 10 times as many in the first three months of this year 2022. The companies and individual projects, they see the opportunity to put the brand in the metaverse. It's probably more about experiential brand positioning, and then when you work back from that, then you actually realise that what you need is web 3 to support what you're trying to do, because it creates this huge amount of complexity - when the tax footprints of selling an NFT within a metaverse is very non-trivial. We're seeing probably more from the metaverse NFT space, but then very quickly, you realise to enable all of that, a new type of web that sits underneath it.
Louise:
Haydn there did also allude to some of the challenges we might see, taxation, regulation and Maria, I know this is something like the ethical issues around AI or in particular something you have been focusing on for several years. How are you seeing those types of issues now being reflected in some of these wider conversations around web 3?
Maria:
That's a very good question. I don't think we are there yet to understand how to think about the moral implications of this convergence, these platforms. We haven't yet got to the terms with the complexity of the ethics of artificial intelligence. We are now starting to discuss the ethics of the metaverse. But much more from the perspective of the immersive experience that we are creating where humans will be put on the same virtual stage with virtual agents and the lines in between what's real and what's generated by a machine, it's going to be very hard to comprehend or very hard to spot. How do we deal with that? We're not ready to go into that domain yet, but we've learned quite a lot. Fundamentally that the conversation should start from acknowledging this transition from a centralised internet, which we have at the moment as dominated by big platform and big technology providers into a more decentralised and how that transition will impact business models, individuals, regulation, because the current regulation we have, is very much geared towards centralised entity.
So, going decentralised, what will that mean for the regulators to be able to police disinformation, misinformation coming from billions of users, the information itself being decentralised. All these are very big questions that remain to be addressed, but if we are pacing ourselves and allow at least to have AI regulation maturing and allowing us to address some of the evils that this technology can deliver, we will be in a better place. We're not there yet, but with the wave of new AI regulation that's coming from the European Commission and from various other governments around the world, we'll see in the next two, three years on one hand the desire to adopt AI, on other hand with quite strong guardrails in place. Out of this mix, we'll see where do we go next and how fast do we go in adopting new technology in a way that is safer. But I will conclude by saying that one of the biggest outcomes out of our external engagement around the risks and opportunities around AI, it's an increasing awareness of the potential of technology to harm people. We've seen a lot of content, we've seen the streaming platforms producing audience wide productions to educate the public, and with that we'll see a different pace towards adoption, because the public will say, ‘hey, stop, I know this is going to harm me. I'm not going to go in that direction.
Louise:
It sounds as though there are some challenges in this implementation or this transition to the new world of web 3. If I might be devil's advocate for a moment, what is it then we're trying to solve with web 3, what are the challenges that we have with the current version of web 2.0? Haydn, if I might ask you that question.
Haydn:
Make our lives simpler, make our businesses simpler to operate, cheaper to operate, which is good because if you spend less money on things like cost of payments, costs for contracts, we can reinvest that money into things like health care nurses - simplify the way we live - where we operate businesses and people and the way to think about that. At the moment, we live in this wonderful world, but all of us carry it around. It's obviously not physical, but the way you think about it is physically. It's like a big filing cabinet of digital bits and bobs. The banks, your mortgages, your pensions, your ID, your certificates, childcare stuff, healthcare stuff, all of the people you connected to, all the social media stuff that you've got, all of your jobs stuff blah, blah, blah, and it's this big filing cabinet have lots of digital stuff, none of which speaks to each other. As wonderful as we think our lives are, our lives are incredibly complicated. I was doing something this morning, for the umpteenth time I'm telling somebody what my date of birth is and have to prove what my date of birth is. How many times have I done that in my life? It's a repeatable piece of information that I can prove, yes this is me, and that's when I was born. If nobody's ever done this, I'd strongly recommend it. Take some time off over the summer, go stay in a top class hotel, don't worry about five, go for a seven star hotel. Because it's great, because you walk in and they know who you are, and they know what you want. You can go to your room and your room is all set up. They know what you like to eat. They call you by your first name. They welcome you back. Your whole experience is seamless. It's simple, and it allows you to just engage with life. When you go on holiday, you do that and it's great.
Technology should be like that. Technology should be like turning up into a high class hotel, that simple, easy, they know who you are. I don't have to get my passport out. I’ll just turn up, that's what web 3 should be about. I can just turn up and it knows who I am and that's not because it knows who I am. It’s good that there's an identity credential in there that allows you to access a range of credentials associated with me. It makes my journey through life, whether it be digital or physical, but it makes my journey through life easy, because if I want to buy something online, I've got to faff around with this and faff around with that, and then it takes three days before it hits my bank account and then it gets sent to me and it's the wrong colour and I've got to faff around with it and blah, blah, blah, that's just a drag, because I like to spend my time doing wonderful things like fishing and playing music, but digital should be simple and easy, seamless and enjoyable.
Louise:
I have to say I thought your recommendation now is going to be to give your filing cabinet a spring clean, but I have to say...
Haydn:
Absolutely not, no its not junking it, get rid of it. This is about taking it and reengineering the way that whole filing cabinet operates.
Louise:
We all have to move into seven star hotels, which sounds good to me. So, in the short term for our listeners what will we notice? We're not necessarily all going to get seven star treatment overnight when web 3 becomes a thing, but what might we see in the short term do you think. Maria from your perspective.
Maria:
I will have to go back to the world of AI and what we will experience is unnoticeable changes of optimisation of increased access or easy access to services and the products we buy.
How many of us have observed, or noticed, how much the world of digital has changed: the fact that our film preferences are tailored to what we have watched or the products we buy on ecommerce - very much tailored to what we have browsed or we have already purchased. This uber-personalisation has been building for a while and that will become even more, I would say, fine-tuned in the future generation of the web. Building on what Haydn said is about this ease to access, paying your council tax or any other dreaded task we're performing is going to become much more easier, and that's might not necessarily say that web 3.0, but it's a step in that direction.
Louise:
Haydn from your perspective, maybe slightly longer term, what are some of the implications or some of the outcomes do you think of web 3?
Haydn:
I go back to where I said - simplification. What does that mean in practice? Well I see it as a world whereby we don’t have a phone, but actually I go into the internet, currently I’ve got to faff around with passwords and all this stuff. But I do not see why I can't just open my laptop or open a mobile device or whatever and it uses facial recognition, voice recognition to ascertain my identity, and I then navigate to web 3 enabled businesses, web 3 enabled websites, and it's got a little kite mark on the side and it says web 3 enabled and then that means that I don't have to - that if I want to buy or if I want to sell or if I want to interact, there's already this handshake between me, my identity credentials, all of my digitised filing cabinet of digital stuff, but it's all interconnected. I can go to a university website or I can go to a job website, and it knows who I am. It knows what my qualifications are and it's all pre-identified, and it's all working in the background.
It's technologies like blockchain, because we can use blockchain for store of value, but we can use it for authentication, identity certificates, but it’s the AI and things like robotic processed information that all will be the mechanics to make all of that work, so that I can just, as I said, I glide through my digital life seamlessly, we need guardrails and AI that will provide it, we will need regulatory guardrails, will need legal guardrails and all of that can be created, but I see absolutely no reason why our lives, our digital lives, can't be much simpler. That cuts all the way across the entire spectrum of all of the wonderful demographic types that we have within our population.
Louise:
I started out this episode by asking for a definition of web 3 and I think maybe the answer is that isn't really an easy definition. Actually, it does encompass a huge number of different things, but I think my main takeaways have been that actually web 3 means that, for users, there will be more of a streamlined approach to data, to accessing digital services. But Maria, as you've in particular made clear, we need to do that in a way that is regulated and that is safe and which protects the user at the same time.
Unfortunately, we're probably reached the end of today's discussion. Time to wrap up, but I wanted to say a huge thank you to both of you for joining me again on an episode of the A-Z of Tech Podcast, it is much appreciated.
Listeners, as always, thank you too for joining us. The end of the alphabet is now hoving into view, but you can join us for our next episode, which will be ‘X’ for XR when we're going to be exploring augmented reality and virtual reality.
