José Elías is one of the VIPs at the XX GeneXus Meeting. From his blog at eliax.com he informs and invites millions of people to reflect on technology-related topics, offering them a space that started out as a hobby, intended to explain where the world is heading to with regards to science and technology.
His talk on “Technological Singularity* and its future impact on business” had a large audience on Tuesday afternoon, the second day of the Meeting.
This interview at Montevideo Comm is about his blog, his professional profile, the future of social networking and Uruguay’s technological development.
In your profile at eliax.com you say you “predict the future” and counsel companies from that point of view, helping them understand where we’re heading to in the field of technology. How did you become this kind of professional?
I’d say it all started when I was a child. I lived in the Dominican Republic and then in the US until 2001. I was the kind of kid who went to the barber shop on the corner to read the paper every day — which my friends never did. I loved to learn about the latest developments. Then, I started writing stories about what I thought would happen in the future, which I gave my friends to read.
Many things happened then — I ended up studying in the US at Boston University, where I met some teachers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University who found me a job counseling companies.
They found me on the Internet; I spent my time talking and answering questions, before the Web. At the time, my friends and relatives would ask me “Hey, what’s this? Can you explain it to me?” and I’d explain. Then, with the advent of the e-mail, I started to be bombarded with questions and it got to a point where the number of questions was so large I couldn't answer back. That’s when I decided to write a book, only for my friends and family, entitled “Máquinas en el paraíso,” to answer all the questions I was constantly asked about technology, science and so on. My friends and family liked it a lot and passed it over to more and more people, and that increased the work I had rather than reduce it because I was contacted by an increasing number of people.
That’s when I decided to create my blog, which was initially aimed at informing my friends and family.
You originally wrote with a limited number of readers in mind but your contents were read by millions. How do you explain that?
I believe everybody — regardless of their profession or their academic background — is curious about these topics. We naturally try to understand things; that's why the motto of the blog is "For curious minds." What sometimes happens at colleges or universities is that these things are not explained to people, you’re simply trained for a specific technical task and that's it. So I think people found in my blog a place where they could relate to each other and understand things.
What’s your specific academic training?
I’m what in the US is called a “computer engineer,” which means you’re both a systems engineer and a hardware designer — you could say a “computer architect.” That’s what I studied, but then I specialized in Internet-distributed systems; that's what I love.
The topic that brings you to the GeneXus Meeting is “Technological Singularity and its future impact on business.” An imminent change is implied when speaking of technological singularity, at least when thinking of significant evolutions. How do you explain this concept when you need to counsel a company?
The idea is to start thinking exponentially rather than in a linear way. What does this mean? Until a few decades ago companies — and the Japanese were stereotypically leaders in this view — said, “Let’s plan the next 10 years for our company and in 30 years we’ll do this and that.” This cannot be done today, because the world changes so rapidly that it is impossible to know what will happen in 10 years' time. What we do know is that there will be many changes, so the aim is to help companies understand this and see today’s trends in top-notch labs, in software research, in order to have an idea of where we’re heading to and, above all, understand that changes will not happen in 50 years but soon, or rather, now.
Regarding Web 2.0, do you think it came about as a result of this search, this frantic technological advance?
People want to participate. You’ve probably read the newspaper many times and thought "Oh, I want to comment on this." But you felt powerless because you couldn’t publish on the paper itself or didn't feel like picking up the phone and making a call because you doubted anyone would even answer. Web 2.0 has allowed contents to be generated by readers themselves and has enabled them to interact with those who generate the contents — this is a direct result of our curiosity and our impulse to interact.
And is this changing people’s minds? Because when you talk about singularity, technological advance seems to imply a change in the way we see the world...
Yes, it’s a social change. I think what’s happening now is that the famous “melting pot” we used to talk about long ago is finally taking place. And I believe this will have significant consequences, not only in the technological field but also in the social arena and the way we see the world.
For example, I’ve published articles about atrocities committed in some countries with regards to human rights, and we wouldn't normally have access to this information but now, with Facebook or Twitter, you may have a friend who lives in such and such place where something happened and you learn about it. And since you have a personal link to that person, you feel these problems closer to you than you would if you heard the news on the radio, “100 people killed in Africa.” If a friend tells you about it, it’s different.
I have this theory that regardless of what agencies like the UN or governments may do — and I don’t think the UN actually does much and governments do even less — to try and bring the world together, society will become integrated by itself, even if it’s not done methodically but rather chaotically. And the moment will come when all this feeling of change will translate into a change at the government and political level.
Regarding Web 2.0 platforms, do you think Twitter is today's interaction platform?
Twitter and Facebook
And can you tell how far social networking will get?
I think everything will eventually be in real time and there will be an integration of our senses with other people’s senses. That is, if I'm feeling something and I’m at a café, the other person will immediately know what’s going on and I won't even need to post it on Twitter or Facebook — it’ll happen by simply being there. Everything will be automatic.
At the philosophical level, have you wondered why this exponential technological advance is taking place?
I don’t know if this is a philosophical point of view, but it's a result of the natural evolution of the universe itself. What happens then? If we think about the primary aspects of the universe itself, this is evolution. And I’m not thinking of the biological aspects of it; I’m thinking of a generalized evolution. And evolution in itself implies trying out many different things where those that survive will advance further. This concept of things changing and improving naturally implies that since things will be better, they will be more efficient. So from a philosophical standpoint, what’s happening now is intrinsic to the concept of evolution — things are improved over time and, due to this improvement, times are shorter.
From your participation in this GeneXus Meeting, how do you see technological advance in our country?
I’ve always thought that Uruguay, and also Argentina and Chile, can surprise us with their technological level. GeneXus is an example of this; it’s a platform that can compete with the best offerings in the US, such as Google and Facebook, but in a different arena — the business field. And this is something many Latin Americans need to value, because there’s a stereotype that the best in the world is in the US or Europe and they forget we have valuable people.
Have you heard about the impact of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay? It’s the Uruguayan implementation of the One Laptop per Child program.
Have you done that already? That’s great! I’ve always said if I were a president one day my number one priority would be education. Because when you educate, you value people and they can better understand social problems. It’s the basis; every technological advance in any nation needs to be based on education.
(*)
“Technological Singularity refers to an event in time where an ‘intelligence explosion’ will take place as a result of Artificial Intelligences (AI), which will be able to create other more advanced AIs at an exponential rate, and these will create more advanced ones and so on in an explosion that will enable anybody at that time to have the intellectual and technological power of today’s whole humanity combined." (eliax.com)