[0:06]I want you to be part of an exciting experiment with me today. In the next few minutes, I'm going to play two audio clips. And if you recognize any of those sounds, please raise your hand and say I. Now a fair bit of warning before we get started. Each of these sounds represents the pleasure of millions of people worldwide. And they also represent torture for many depending on where you come from. So, are we ready? Let's play clip number one.
[1:03]There we go. Who recognizes that sound? Please raise your hand and say I. Perfect. For those of you who don't know what that was, it wasn't Star Wars. It was the sound of a modem connecting to the internet in the early days when the internet really started. This was early '90s, late '80s, something around there. We used to have internet speeds of 56.6 kilobytes per second. That's roughly about 20,000 times slower than your average cell phone today. Really, those were the internet speeds, but for us, those of us who saw that era, it was a time for big change. And it was an exciting time because every time you connected to the internet, it was like you were getting into an unknown territory. You didn't know what to expect and so that thrill factor still lives with us. I'm going to play the second sound now and if you recognize it, please raise your hand and loudly say I. Let's play the second clip, please.
[2:20]Who recognizes that sound? Raise your hand and say I. All right, very few people here. That was the sound of an angry bird taking off, flying in the air, hitting these evil pigs that stole their eggs and crashing in there to reclaim those eggs. And it's from a popular game called Angry Birds that's been played by millions and millions of people worldwide. In fact, Angry Birds itself, uh, is played by over, if I remember right, 200 million plus people every month. They have a subscriber base of 200 million plus people every month. The game is played every day for 250 million minutes per day. That equals to about 16 years of playtime every single day. And it's just one game. There's hundreds and thousands of other games and apps that we all indulge in on an everyday basis. Since the beginning of time, since that modem time that I just showcased, to the Angry Birds time, the internet has had a growth of about 1,000%. So in the last 20 years, we've seen unprecedented change in the amount of people that use the internet and use it for business, for personal life and so on and so forth. The point I'm trying to make is that we all are part of this revolution. It doesn't matter if you're a Generation X, a Generation Y, a boomer, a zoomer, a millennial, or or any other classification of a generation. You are and we all are part of this revolution. So we just proved that everybody here is in the bucket together. Irrespective of your nationality, your creed, your religion, the internet and technology does not discriminate. So let's level the ground, first of all, we all are in it together. Now the internet and the revolution that it brings together opens up a many number of possibilities. One of the effects of technology is that it has made the world into a smaller place. We can communicate faster, we can travel virtually, we can travel faster. In fact, uh, back in the day, when you used to, uh, when they had horses and horse carriages, a long, long, long time ago before the railways, it used to take maybe about four months to go from New York to San Francisco on a horse. But now it's a matter of three hours. And by the way, did you know that a typical airline, a flight today, an airplane, generates about 500 gigabytes of data when it's flying? So the internet is everywhere. And I'll talk a little bit about the effects of the internet and where we're heading into. So going back to the fact that we all are part of this together. The world is also becoming a place where we all, uh, despite the fact that we're all, uh, you know, part of this huge change, we're also becoming very, uh, we're also shrinking into our own spaces because we're spending too much time on our cell phones. We don't communicate with people more, we don't go out and meet people anymore. So that's a challenge. On one hand, it's great, but on the other hand, it's a challenge. I want to talk to you a little bit about something that will probably affect you for the rest of your life. And it is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Uh, just a very quick lesson on industrial revolutions and this will not be long. Is that we've had three large industrial revolutions in the world. The First Industrial Revolution happened when the steam engine was invented. So that was a big thing. All of a sudden, manual processes were out of the way, the steam engine powered industry, automobiles, locomotives, and what had you at that time. And it was a huge step for humanity to be able to do things faster. The Second Industrial Revolution was when electricity was invented, and that really took things a little bit farther away, now technology of the times. Uh, suddenly you were able to power factories, uh, street lamps, and transport that electricity out way out using cables and so on. The Third Industrial Revolution happened around the 1940s, '50s, '60s, and this is when automation took over. Automation within factory floors, and now you were able to produce goods faster and faster and more rapidly, and then transport those goods to further out wherever you wanted to sell them. At this moment in time, we are at the cusp of what is called as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And what is different with this revolution is that it has started and kicked off right now, and because of technology, specifically internet-related technologies, it's going to it's going to propel us much more further than we would than we would anticipate. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the main key part about the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it is a time when men and machine come together. It is a time when, uh, Artificial Intelligence will work to create different outcomes as we have never seen before. And the industrial revolution, the fourth one, is going to go forward. No matter what you do, technology is going to be a huge part of our lives. So it's time that we start adopting ourselves more to technology and start learning how it can help us, how we can use it to create change in the world.
[8:08]Now, this is also the age of isolation, the age of uh, fading away uh attention spans. A few years ago, uh, Microsoft did a study along with Wired Magazine came out with this article, and they said that today attention spams are at the lowest. So they've been tanking, tanking, tanking, tanking and and going lower down. Uh, in the year 2000, they found out that, uh, an average human span, attention span is about is about nine seconds. The attention spam of a goldfish stands at eight seconds. So we were dangerously close to beating the goldfish at that uh, at that number. And then the inevitable happened, we actually beat the goldfish. So, our attention spams a few years after tanked, and they were at eight seconds or seven seconds, and we overtook the goldfish. And that's a challenge, because now experts predict that the generation that's coming after the millennials, the post-millennial generation will have an average attention spam of 2.3 seconds. And if you really think about it, uh, it it's it is a bit scary to think how will that next generation adopt to what is happening around them. How will they be able to create value? How will they be able to work, uh, the jobs that they work and create change in the world? So that is something to really think about. But fading attention spans is not not a big problem, because experts also suggest that if people with lower attention spams follow a process and they follow a method and they're organized, they are able to actually accomplish any task.
[10:29]So it has two different sides. I want to talk a little bit about the technology that's happening around us and responsibility. If you've seen any of the Spider-Man movies, I'm assuming we've all seen movies, anybody seen Spider-Man one? Quite a few people. All right. The most favorite part, my favorite part at least, in the entire movie that paves the way to the entire series, is when Uncle Ben pulls over the car and talks to Peter and says to him, with great power comes great responsibility. And that echoes through the entire movie. With technology, we have we have access to an enormous amount of computing power. For example, your cell phones today are more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer from the '80s and the '90s. And it's a fact. We carry technology in our pockets as if it didn't matter, but really the computing power, the access to information, is mind-boggling. You've got access to information, libraries, uh, videos, uh, research, everything is available at our fingertips. And this really puts a lot of responsibility on us, because with great power comes great responsibility. Imagine that all this information was available to humanity 100 years ago. We would have made a lot more progress and created more change. Let me give you an example. Some of the ways that technology and information is generally helping the world is by in is in different areas of uh of work. If you heard about uh healthcare and the strides that are being made in healthcare, recently a company a few years ago, they analyzed, they were able to analyze 50 million brain scans, and they were able to figure out how a certain disease was progressing. Now, had it not been for technology, analyzing these millions of scans would have taken tens and hundreds of years. Add to that the human error that we would have encountered. So definitely technology is adding a lot of value to many different industries and changing how we live our lives. If you've heard about smart cities or connected cars, that's the area of technology that'll change how we live. It'll change how our homes communicate with our watches, communicate with our with the roads. And it's not only because it'll make everything cooler, but it's also what are the outcomes in efficiency that technology can create to our cities and so on. And there's many other concepts such as a smart grid where electricity transfer can be made more efficient. So there's so much stuff out there that unless we don't learn about it, we are really at a loss and we're shutting ourselves from the entire world. So I really encourage all of us to go out and learn what technology is doing. How is it changing the industries that you work in? How is it changing retail? How is it changing experiences where we go and shop and how does that change the world? So we've got to be very inquisitive, uh, to in this in this era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Now because technology is putting a lot of emphasis and responsibility on us to to learn more, it's it's also very natural to think that we should be doing something about the the greater problems in the world. Uh, these problems are poverty, uh, deforestation, global climate change, pollution, uh, healthcare problems across the world. Now, there's millions of people, uh, actually more than a billion people in the world that do not have access to basic healthcare. This means they cannot just walk into a clinic, see a doctor and get medications and feel better. In many countries, women have to walk tens of miles every day to get a pail of water, because they don't have access to water. Now, we're very fortunate to be living in developed countries and living in, uh, infrastructure, in in places where infrastructure is really amazing. We've got running water, electricity, and we take, we sometimes take things for granted. But I think because technology is persuasive, it gets into every nook and corner of the world. Perhaps there is a way for us to add value through the information that we can collect, analyze, use and add our voice to. Every day after I finish work, and I'm sure all of you do this as well, the last thing I want to do is talk about work. I just want to switch on my television, spend time with my family, uh, relax, put my feet up, and and just watch some television.
[16:22]But I think if and I think about this every day, that unless I don't use the information that I'm privy to, there's no value that I have created in the world on that specific day. Now, talking about responsibility again, I think we need to embody this responsibility and take it on us at least on an everyday basis that if I, if I have, if I know something new, maybe I can spread that information to other people. Maybe if I've acquired some new knowledge, I want to find out how that is changing the life of the of other people or how it may help other people. So I think we need to build that into our everyday life, and everyday habits, because technology is part of our lives on an everyday basis. So we've got to be able to find and create that value every single day.
