Werner Vogels Predicts the Future  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Werner Vogels Predicts the Future - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2ac7ca9a-cb16-4bef-9788-ba65275a6cfb ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Tiny Fuel ATMs For Day Laborers** - Werner describes Cocoa Networks' pay‑as‑you‑go gas ATM that lets day laborers buy small fuel amounts. - He uses it to illustrate tech solving local economic problems in Kenya and similar regions. Transcript: Werner Vogels You drive 15 minutes and you see how the real Kenyans live. And if you think how they work, most of them are day laborers. That means that they go to the bank, they get $2, they buy something, they try to sell it, they bring the $2 back and hope to have 40 cents left to buy food. They probably have that. But then they don't have money left to cook it. Why? Because these big canisters, these butane canisters, cost $10. And they don't have $10. And so there's a young company called Cocoa Networks that build a sort of ATM where you can go with a canister. You plop the canister in and you say, give me 15 cents of gas. And then you can take that home. You can cook your food. Now, this is not a world-shocking problem, but it is solving really hard problems that people have. ([Time 0:12:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd7a9886-16e3-4993-9420-b469c69c89cf)) - **People Treat Robots Like Pets** - Werner Vogels recounts people treating robots and devices like pets, naming Roombas and preferring old units returned for repair. - He describes huggable robots easing children's hospital visits and improving patient communication with doctors. Transcript: Jerod Santo That are coming out. Werner Vogels More like it's one of these problems. Well, you see the problem. Actually, I did this documentary series called Now Go Build, TV series. Probably two, three years ago, I was in Japan for that. Actually, and that's where I first really dove deep in this particular topic. So Japan really was a society where kids take care of the elderly. The grandparents live with the grandkids and the kids. And that was normal. But the younger kids want to start making career. And there is a clear shift in Japanese society happening where the elderly are no longer taken care of by the younger people. And as such, you know, that's a shocker. Not for the young kids. It's a shocker for the old people. They're really on their own. And I think, and indeed, I think that there are a lot of technology solutions possible to help these people. One of the things, and loneliness is something we'll get to, but anything we can do as technologists to keep people longer out of hospitals or whatever, care homes or whatever, the better It is. And if that means that, you know, a company in Japan that I met called Z-Works, they try to do all these innovations around these elderly people to help them. Make in your mattress a little bit of a sensitivity pad. And maybe in the middle of the night, you go to the toilet, and you don't come back within 15 minutes. The alarm goes off. Yeah. And this doesn't seem like world-shocking kind of revolutions, but it does mean that people can stay independent longer. They can stay, yeah, and they don't feel that old. Let's put it like that. I think more and more people, I mean, becoming 100 years old is actually not that strange anymore, is it? Yeah, and getting to that particular age. Many of these people may have lost their partner if they had a partner. Yeah, or live far away from their, from other family. I mean, especially in the US, I mean, after high school, you probably move away from where you lived, where you grew up. You go to a college somewhere in upstate New York, you go to work in California, and people are not close anymore. That truly is a loneliness epidemic. So what can we do? And I think, and I love the work that is happening around sort of companion robots. Yeah. Sort of. Why? Because I've, I always thought that people would treat a robot like a piece of metal mechanics. You know? Right. Turns out, it's not at all the games. They treat them like pets. Really, Kate Darling, MIT, she's done all the research around here, is, I can tell you absolutely amazing stories about how people get attached to their devices. The story, I think, is also in the predictions. 80% of the people that have a Roomba, the cleaner in the house, have given it a name. And one of the stories that Roomba tells, well, one sent an old Roomba back because it needed to be repaired. And they look at it and they tell the customer, you know what, we'll just give you a new one. Jerod Santo And they say, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want mineral food back. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I want the old one because they're attached to it. Werner Vogels Or Kate tells this story where at some moment she divides it two groups of people and each get a dinosaur, a sort of baby dinosaur. And they really fall in love with it. They give it a name. They play with it. Blah, blah, blah. And then she gives them a hammer and she tells them, kill the dinosaur. Yeah? Nobody in the group will take the hammer and kill the dinosaur. They have no problem though, going to the other group and kill their dinosaur. You know? So now this is sort of, why do I tell these stories? That while these things are technology, we treat them as living beings. And especially I've always, of course, because before I was in computer science, I was in healthcare. You know, the application of these kind of tools, toys in hospitals are incredible. You know, if you're a young kid, a doctor is someone that is tall and, I don't know, dangerous or whatever you want to think. But for example, there's this, the huggable robot is a small green thing with a nice snout and talks to the kid and whatever. Kids with a huggable have no problem talking to a doctor. Yeah, because they have their mate with them. And so those kind of things, I think, are crucial for us as technologists to think about. We see a problem, not necessarily a problem that is going to make us a ton of money, but we see a problem that is really important for people's psyche, for people's feelings, for loneliness. Who wants to be lonely? Nobody. And if we can't do this through pure social interaction, what's the next best thing? We have, or we, Amazon has Astro, but there's more robots like Astro. And they'll just run, they'll go search for you through the house and ask you ([Time 0:15:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8ff38001-b911-4bb2-a79c-115805db6b94)) - **Dinosaur Study Shows Quick Bonding** - Kate Darling's dinosaur study showed people refuse to destroy a robot they bonded with, but will destroy others'. - This highlights how quickly humans form attachments to interactive devices. Transcript: Werner Vogels And they look at it and they tell the customer, you know what, we'll just give you a new one. Jerod Santo And they say, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want mineral food back. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I want the old one because they're attached to it. Werner Vogels Or Kate tells this story where at some moment she divides it two groups of people and each get a dinosaur, a sort of baby dinosaur. And they really fall in love with it. They give it a name. They play with it. Blah, blah, blah. And then she gives them a hammer and she tells them, kill the dinosaur. Yeah? ([Time 0:19:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33f285cd-65e5-41e6-ad10-503b5d6b2260)) - **Start Post‑Quantum Migration Today** - Start migrating to post-quantum cryptography and add gateways that protect old encrypted data now. - Treat data harvesting as ongoing: actors collect encrypted data today to decrypt later, so act early. Transcript: Jerod Santo Quantum. I'll say it three times. The headline for this particular prediction is quantum safe becomes the only safe. Now, we've covered quantum computing here in the past, and it's always been right around the corner. It seems like it's always around the corner, but your contention with some data to back it up is that that corner is getting closer and closer and it's maybe not five years away like it Always has been or 18 months away it's actually there's things happening and it's like we're getting there we're getting there can you tell us more well i i do think more the most important Werner Vogels Thing is that i don't necessarily want to put a timeline on it i'm thinking two years ago, three years ago, I think I said five to ten. I think five is now more realistic. But I've seen a number of problems arising that I think we need to be aware of and take action on before that. I mean, it's not about, I mean, we, we, we, we were in brackets, which is together with, um, you know, Caltech is an institute about, uh, quantum. And I see different institutions making massive progress in terms of error correction, networks, uh, things like that, that actually make me believe that it's no longer, how shall I say, a vision. It's an execution. Now it becomes an iterative process in improving the technology that we have created, step by step by step, until it becomes workable. Now, there is a ton of other problems to solve. How do you program these beasts? I mean, how do you do that? How do you do with something that is not necessarily 100% reliable? So how do you do that? So there's a ton of things that still has to be solved before we have production quantum machinery. But one of the things that these things, and they won't solve necessarily new problems, they'll solve existing problems much faster. There are things that will now take a thousand years and compute will then take a year or six months or two months. That's the premise of quantum. Well, the one thing that then we'll be able to do really, really, really, really fast decrypt and so anything that is uh has let's say is just elliptic or the usual rsa encrypted kind of Things that are perfectly fine now because it will take way too long to decrypt then will be decrypted with a snap of your fingers. So the reason for the prediction actually is to put in people's minds that we need to start taking action now if we want to be protected five years from now from, let's say, the ability To decrypt anything that we have now. Now, all the hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whatever, we all have been building post-quantum cryptography. We've been inserting that into our front ends, and we're doing all of that unfortunately we're not the only players in this world yeah there's there's lots of people with their own data Centers still with their colos with their whatever that are that will have a hard time protecting themselves that's one thing so really getting it into people's minds that they have To start taking action now if you want to be safe a number of years from now when these things become reality. Lean back right now because a lot of the breakings or data stealing or whatever you call it is basically data harvesting nobody's interested basically encrypted data is being retrieved And people don't try to decrypt it they'll wait till the machinery is there to be able to decrypt now well you your medical data now will be decryptable in a few years from now uh if and then So and with that i i don't necessarily script kiddies or whatever. It's really state actors. It might be commercial actors who are interested in that kind of data, even if it's five years old. I might have all the relevant data for them to take action on. Adam Stacoviak That's the scary part, really. The famous TV show you may have heard of this, Werner, is called Silicon Valley. And in season six, I'm going to spoil it for some folks, just a little tiny bit, let's just say. And you may know this because you may be a fan or maybe you're not because it's too close to home. Who knows? Is that the AI they build or accidentally build to some degree, they give it a task and it essentially goes out of their bounds that they plan for and breaks encryption. So this is predicted in a TV show that's now ended, but very much prophetic in a lot of its satire. And that's been my major concern with quantum is that in the future, we have a machine that is, as you said, it's non-deterministic or unpredictable in a lot of ways. It's also unpredictably predictable in the fact that it's unpredictable, but it has so much possibility that that's when encryption will essentially go away and the world we live In that is safe because of encryption is no longer safe. That's been my major thought around that really for quantum. Werner Vogels There's of course different types of encryption and you have letters-based encryption and you have that. So there are types of encryption that you will be safe from sort of these type of decryption. But you need to start installing that now. You know, LibSSS was 500,000, 600,000 lines of code or something ([Time 0:29:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/122f765f-2ce9-4b82-b467-9ac19e9ba5cb)) - **IoT Devices Are Quantum Weak Links** - Many home and IoT devices are unpatched and use outdated encryption, creating attack surfaces for future decryption. - A holistic inventory and update strategy is essential to quantum readiness. Transcript: Werner Vogels Probably every of your home devices hasn't been updated for a number of years. Yeah, they were Linux, whatever, version. No automatic updates or anything like that. Your automatic garage door might have a little bit of encryption in it between the key and you. Or think about hotel rooms. Your key is an encryption encoder. And so there are so many small parts. I mean, first of all, by coming back to these house devices, I recently looked at one of the house that we have, how many devices were on the network, and that was something like 56. There's your Sonos and there's your garage and there's your light opener and there's the thing that keeps track of this and all these kind of things. Are all these things up to date? Are all these things protected? Are all these things up to new standards? We have a number of years to get this done, but we do need to start now. ([Time 0:37:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6d775e7-2525-448b-89df-b6e360995460)) - **Automatic Reasoning Scales Trust** - Use automatic reasoning and spec‑driven approaches to prove system properties and reduce failures. - These methods scale from TLS choices to limiting AI hallucinations in spec‑driven IDEs. Transcript: Werner Vogels Really is the question in there. First of all, and there's a number of areas. I mean, there's just using newer encryption technologies, but you can imagine that, you know, something, some piece of data that you encrypted 15 years ago, you're not going to go through All of your data and re-encrypt it again. But, you know, are there gateway possibilities that protect you from that? Are there other ways? Let's use our inventive brains and find solutions to this. Because I believe we can, but only if we make it a focus. And the focus is not that quantum is five years away. The most important part there is that we need to keep ourselves and our businesses safe. And if that happened to be quantum, or if it happened to be an alien spaceship that lands from whoever and suddenly turns out to be able to encrypt all our data, decrypt all our data, that Doesn't really matter. We need to start protecting ourselves. Jerod Santo How sure can we be that quantum safe technologies as we define them today actually will be quantum safe? Werner Vogels Yeah, well. Jerod Santo Do we know? Werner Vogels Do the work. Jerod Santo Do the work. I was hoping you already did it, Werner. Werner Vogels Yeah, yeah. No, it's just do the work. No, no, no, that is it. The same goes for everything now. Let me take a whole different example. Okay. When at Amazon S3, we went from eventual consistency to strong consistency. Yeah. That was a major change that impacted every piece of technology. Now, how can you make that you touched every edge of this particular problem? Because it is either 100% or not. So automatic reasoning plays a role in that. Yeah, annotating annotations, TLA plus, other technologies that you have to prove to yourself that what you've built actually does exactly what you want it to do. So definitely, I think automatic reasoning is continue to play a more and more role in giving us a secure feeling that we are on the right path. ([Time 0:39:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba2e3347-346e-4155-afaf-c7f7ecdcc1d4)) - **Stay Curious And Keep Learning** - Keep learning and stay curious as tooling changes; adopt new languages and paradigms proactively. - Curiosity drives continuous education and prevents obsolescence as tools evolve. Transcript: Werner Vogels Why should we start to be scared suddenly? Why should we suddenly become, we just learn to use new tools? Yeah? Because remember, it's you that build, not the tools. It's also you that own it, not the tools. If the tools is built, something that and you're in a financial company that suddenly no longer makes you compliant, it's pretty hard to say to the regulator, oh, that was the AI. That was the tool. No, no, no, no, no. It's still your responsibility. And as such, I think that sort of we, no matter how good tools we build, we still need to educate ourselves. We need to continue to keep ourselves on a path of education, learning, continuing to learn. Looking at you too, you're not the youngest. So I'm pretty sure that before you wrote something in Python, you wrote something in C++ or in ABC. I wasn't learning Python or going to the next programming language, my favorite being Rust at the moment, but there will be something else after rust. Sure. We won't panic suddenly and thinking that the world will collapse and all our jobs are going to go away. No, no, we make sure that we educate ourselves. And crucial in all of that is curiosity. Yeah? If you just want to lean back, so if you just want to lean back and just, you know, write some code and things like that and don't want to learn the next language or whatever, then probably You've always been in trouble. That has nothing to do with AI. Yeah. You have to, because curiosity leads to learning. And these two things are, yeah, remain curious. What ([Time 0:44:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6528b3de-2bdd-4254-bbdb-466cf3a708da)) - **Renaissance Developers Will Dominate** - The 'Renaissance developer' combines deep specialism with broad systems thinking and communication skills. - T‑shaped developers who understand business tradeoffs will be more effective than narrow specialists. Transcript: Werner Vogels I think one of the talents, given that what we have we have the uh the renaissance developer as one of the one of the points in there in the renaissance the core of renaissance humanism Was that the belief humans are limitless in the capability of invention. As long as you keep their curiosity alive, the moment they're no longer curious, they'll lean back and it's over. And so I believe that that's really, we are limited in the capabilities of inventing, of do new things. If we're just being allowed to. Jerod Santo Yeah, I don't disagree. You hit on a couple of your points, the Renaissance developer and the personalized learning which i think is hugely uh opportunistic or a huge opportunity for so many because like you Said we but sometimes by necessity we push all of our children into a square hole you know regardless of their educational shape and they must come out conformed to whatever standard And i do think that technology is allowing us to break out of that conformity to a certain extent and provide personalized customized education you know leaning into what the kids interested Werner Vogels In and playing to their strengths Yeah, but also even also just learning maths. I remember I have two daughters. They're now in close to their 40s. Don't tell them that. They got to know that, right? One of the things, so I'm not American. I'm not US. I come from the Netherlands where high school has 10 different forms depending on sort of what you're, you go to a school to become a welder or you go to a school where you go to university And there's a whole range in between. And then I come to the rest and the kids have to go to high school and all kids have to go to the same high school. They have to take the same classes. They have to score good in the same classes. And when one of my daughters, in the first time that she got into math class, there were four guys in the back of the room that were four years older than that she was, still had failed maths Every time, but had to still sit in that class. Disruptive and, well, you know the stories. Yeah. And as such, I've always been a real fan of Ken Robinson, a professor from the UK that moved to Los Angeles at some moment. Really looked at that instead of that we let our kids bloom and and explore and become really what they can become we turn them into factory workers all doing the same thing that and um And that kills all the possibility in what these kids have in them. Jerod Santo What do you see coming out or happening in the education space right now that leads you towards this prediction? Because you're predicting infinite personalization and these things. Are there solutions out there today? Are there companies working on it? Werner Vogels Well, I think there's enough companies working on them. But what I see more and more is that these kids are doing it themselves. Yeah. Gen Alpha, the current kids that are in high school or going to high school, they really know how to use AI or AI assistance. And they know how to make a curriculum for themselves. And they know how to make something from which they can learn. That is really a tool for them to build something that they just want to do. It helps them build things without having to have to go through a complete textbook first. Now, I still believe that you need to be able to do maths before you should be allowed to use a calculator. That's like a reasonable kind of thing. But providing, if you're really interested in, let's say, how in the 1600s in Italy, from small states, this became one country, for some reason, I don't know. Kids have immense curiosity in anything. You can build yourself a curriculum that you become, not that you become an expert, but that you know everything about it. And this is something you have. Certainly you have control over that. ([Time 0:49:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/88de6160-5c3e-40a0-baf6-85d45abbd30c)) - **Gen Alpha Builds Their Own Curriculum** - Kids and Gen Alpha self‑curate personalized curricula using AI assistance and build real projects. - This trend accelerates infinite personalization in learning outside formal schooling. Transcript: Werner Vogels Well, I think there's enough companies working on them. But what I see more and more is that these kids are doing it themselves. Yeah. Gen Alpha, the current kids that are in high school or going to high school, they really know how to use AI or AI assistance. And they know how to make a curriculum for themselves. And they know how to make something from which they can learn. That is really a tool for them to build something that they just want to do. It helps them build things without having to have to go through a complete textbook first. Now, I still believe that you need to be able to do maths before you should be allowed to use a calculator. That's like a reasonable kind of thing. But providing, if you're really interested in, let's say, how in the 1600s in Italy, from small states, this became one country, for some reason, I don't know. Kids have immense curiosity in anything. You can build yourself a curriculum that you become, not that you become an expert, but that you know everything about it. ([Time 0:53:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1eca437-0d83-4c98-b023-4db6d5cd31d2)) - **Explain Tradeoffs To The Business** - Communicate technical tradeoffs to business stakeholders and quantify costs and risks. - Explain availability and resilience choices so business can make informed decisions. Transcript: Werner Vogels But without that kind of communication, you're not building the things that you want for your customers. So a very important part of the Renaissance developer is to be able to communicate in exactly the right way. Not only to the business, but also with your customers. What are you building? How does this interact with this? If I show you a picture of the thousands of microservices that builds out Amazon.com. If I do something here, what's happening there? Is there a relationship between the two? So system thinking becomes crucial as well, not just about your little piece that you're building but what impact does that have on other things yeah or you know i'm i'm happy going away My database is running my code is running everything's happening transactions are playing through And suddenly the number of transactions doubles. But there isn't a doubling of the number of the customer on the website. Who the hell is doing this to me? And as such, you know, being a specialist in one particular area and just staying there is safe, it's fine but you live in a bigger system you know if we think about and that really comes Out of 60s 70s Medellin Meadows began what's something called system thinking it is in nature you know, if you remove one piece out of that equation, of the complete nature equation, You know, you ruin the overall thing. At some moment, what was it? Yellowstone Park. There were too many wolves. They removed the wolves from the park. Oh, oh, they were killing all the elks. So they remove all the wolves. And then the number of elks grows like mad. Right, backfire. Yeah, which starts eating all sorts of parts of Yellowstone. And so not until they reintroduce the wolves, the balance gets back. Yeah. So on her thinking, on systems thinking, is something that we as the future, you know, Renaissance engineers need to be part of as well. We need to understand that the one thing that we're working on at this moment has impact on all the other pieces around it. We need to be able to communicate with the others. We need to be able to see how we are part of this bigger problem and you know what and it will be fun it will be fun i absolutely think and so one of the things i think that i i don't say hey um let's Say one of the most less interesting parts i always in the in the beginning as my life as developer thought were code reviews. Yeah? It's a bit like standing in front of the class. The whole class gets a chance to say like, you're an idiot. Right. No, but code reviews are fun. You know, sometimes you think there's, there's mistakes there. Or sometimes you go like, wow. That's an elegant solution. Ah, reset for it or not. And code reviews are super important for junior engineers. Because the senior engineers are in the room and discussing the code on the screen there. And you're learning on the spot from the senior engineer from all the years of experience where someone will say yeah i tried that when we were building product x y or z yeah and it really It didn't work then or the problem at that time was that. Now, whether the code on the screen is generated by you or by some AI agent, doesn't really matter. We still need to do code reviews. Yeah, because we have ownership and whether we used a tool to create the code that we're looking at or whether we actually wrote it ourselves, we're still responsible for it. We still own it. Yeah. And so those things don't go away. ([Time 1:10:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c50efcf-a8d7-4ba0-964e-5acc8643d345)) - **Own AI‑Generated Code** - Always own and review code, regardless of whether AI generated it; responsibility remains yours. - Conduct thorough code reviews and accept slower review cycles when output isn't human‑authored. Transcript: Werner Vogels Now, whether the code on the screen is generated by you or by some AI agent, doesn't really matter. We still need to do code reviews. Yeah, because we have ownership and whether we used a tool to create the code that we're looking at or whether we actually wrote it ourselves, we're still responsible for it. We still own it. Yeah. And so those things don't go away. And so, and as such, if your system has been created by one of the AI tools, and as I said earlier, you are responsible for it, especially if you're in life sciences, if you're in healthcare, If you're in financial services, in whatever. You cannot only rely on the fact that, oh, but AI built it. You are still responsible for what you deliver. And that means you need to be able to look at it. And a search generation of code may go faster. Reviews will probably go slower. Because this is not code that I've written. Now, if it's my code, I can go stand up in front of the class and say, oh, and this is why I did this, and this is why I did that. But if a complete unknown, unhuman entity created this code for you, it takes longer to get used to it. ([Time 1:15:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2004009-fd44-4ba5-9b77-f188d99a1e2a)) - **Pause Before Adopting AI Hype** - New generative tools were often dropped on users without education, causing misaligned architecture choices. - Pause to learn the tech and decide architecture with business needs, not media hype. Transcript: Werner Vogels I mean, I've written VB. I don't think there's anybody that writes Visual Basic anymore, is there? Adam Stacoviak Not on purpose. Yeah. Fix a bug, maybe, in legacy code, if it's still there. Yeah, something like that. Werner Vogels But it was fun when we were doing it. And I wasn't thinking about five databases replicated over different data centers throughout the world at that particular moment. I was trying to fix my Excel code. And so we've all grown as developers over the past 10, 15, 20 years with all sorts of new tools. We have a new tool. There is one, there is a particular point, a particular small problem I have with it, is that if you look at all the other tools that we've developed, we took some time to introduce them. Had learned people, we told people why we were building the tools, how we were building the tools, how they could best use them. Yeah, and the typical early adopters and you had to cross the chasm and then you had the early majority and things like that. And it would take time. But you would learn, you would teach your users why and how that tool was there. With some of the current, the new generative AI tools, they were just dumped in people's lap without telling them what it could do or what it couldn't do. Yeah. And, you know, there isn't almost a CIO that I meet today when I'm traveling that asks me, what should I be doing with AI? And I go like, well, my excuses, it's very inappropriate to answer a question with a question, but why are you asking me this? And I say, yeah, but those guys next door, you know, they will be ahead of us. And I say, are you really certain of that? Then maybe because you're a little bit older you know you start to drive down into what is actually the problem they're trying to solve yeah with this technology and is this the right Technology for for this you know every week we see five new models or 10 new models. Suddenly we went from regular LLMs to reasoning LLMs. I think as a business there is no shame in hitting the pause button for a moment and say why don't we get ourselves educated about all of this? 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