Visited bell labs. Named for alexander or graham bell, inventer of the telephone. The labs were created by at t. Theyre now owned by nokia, a Finnish Telecommunications company. We talked with bell labs president Marcus Weldon at the labs headquarters in new jersey. Host so, Marcus Weldon, where are we . Guest were at bell labs. The esteemed historical institution. But id like to say not just historical, in fact, very present and we like to think or very relevant to the future as well. Its an institution that has invented just about every technology, a system that led to lennox and thats what runs the internet. Your apple phone or your [inaudible] lasers that control the optics that do Long Distance communication, satellite communication, so we invented all of that and won a bunch of prizes for it. But we sort of consider ourselves the foundation of the internet. Host well, its 2017, who owns bell labs . Guest a Company Named nokia. That company you probably all remember from the 3310, remember the little nokia phone, did you ever have one of those . Yes . It was sort of a wedge. Very popular if you lived 20, 30 years ago. It got out of the handset business which it sold to microsoft and then microsoft shut down, but now its the network side of the equation. Theres the network and then theres the handset, and nokia owns the network part of it and sells radio and Optical Networks, the internet if you like, to all the major operators around the world. Still a little bit in the handset business but much more on the network side of things. An interesting company. Host so here its proprietary to nokia . Guest well, thats an interesting question because its inventing for the good of humankind. We think that sounds very noble and maybe unlikely in this day and age but, in fact, when it was set up as a research lab for at t, the monopoly as it was at the time, the rules for bell labs were because it was a monopolyowned innovation engine, it had to make available all the inventions we came up with for the public good. And so royaltyfree licenses to those technologies. And so everyone benefited, intel, Silicon Valley grew on the back of many of those innovations and all the webscale Companies Use them to create their Cloud Platforms and different applications and services. That was done for the public good. Obviously, that was 20, 30 years ago, but, in fact, the mentality remains invent the things that humans need. Some get licensed as patents to this [inaudible] but some are actually just done for the public good. We publish results still quite heavily, and we put them out there where we think the public can benefit from them. Its very much part of our attitude even though, yeah, theres a bit of a commercial outlet through nokia. Host now, back when bell labs was founded in the 1920s, Walter Gifford who was the president of at t at the time said that bell labs could carry on Scientific Research on a scale that is probably not equaled in the world. Is that still true today . I think it is. And thats maybe shocking to people, but bell labs at its peak was about 1300 scientists. It was a time where we changed what counted as being in bell labs to include all the development. At ts Massive Development teams were count as the lab, but the Research Part was only ever about and 00 scientist 1300 scientists. Today were about 1000. And in that 1300, there were a lot of technicians counted. Of course, back in the day you didnt tighten your own bolt or program your own system. You had a technician who assisted you. So i would say were about the same size as weve ever been, and i would argue, of course, that its a bit selfserving just as innovating. Which changes Public Perception more than anything. Host what do you mean . Guest well, i think weve lived through an era recently where everyone obsesses about their phone and maybe about the web services they consume like google, facebook, twitter, etc. , instagram. And they forget what connects those things. If you think about 30, 40 years ago, the only thing that was there was a black phone and another black phone at the other end. There was an awareness that telephony was big and important because you were sort of aware of the network. You knew you had a phone that plugged into the wall, there was a switchboard and it did all sorts 06 clever things sorts of clever things. In the smartphone or cloud era, people thought of the internet as just something that should be there but didnt really value how difficult it is to build that and have massively scalable mobile communications attached to any cloud anywhere, anytime. It seemed like all the value had become detached from the network, and yet its always really been the same. Theres a device, theres a network, theres an application. But somehow the momentum or the pr or the marketing was in your hand and was on the web. And its hard to know exactly how we lost the understanding that the network in between is a massively important thing, but it is, and its harder and harder to scale that and provide the data and the services you expect. But thats what we build, and that hasnt gone away. In fact, we innovate id like to give some numbers. Were Building Networks that have a million times more capacity when they started, and that start was only 30 years ago. A million times more internet capacity than when we started. Its an amazing thing if you think about it. We with talk about billions of search results and we talk about the billions of iphones, but were talking about a scale of we increased a million times up from where we started and not just, you know, added devices here and there. Weve done something remarkable, but people fail to sort of appreciate that now. I dont really know why, to be honest. Maybe were not living in a techie era like we used to be. Of. Host maybe we cant see it . Guest we cant see it. We could see the telephone wire, but i think we were in the era that it was so remarkable that that wire worked, that all the focus was its amazing this wire can transmit a voice. We cannot have an era where that wasnt possible, and now we take it for granted, and i think thats where we are. I think thats going to change, and we can talk about why that is. Frankly, the next generation, socalled industrial internet or the next industrial revolution, its called all those things, its a massive change to how we think about the network and how cloud and devices all come together in the network. Host so is, well, Marcus Weldon, is the cloud era a revolutionary era . Guest it is in a way, but if we look at it from an economic perspective, which bell labs [inaudible] understanding human need, you have to think about how could it change the fabric of economies and society, not just the personal sort of consumer level. So economically robert [inaudible] wrote this book called the rise and fall of american growth, and actually points out the more physical networks that were built, rail and road, gave rise to massive, increasing productivity and gdp. The internet age has resulted in a slowdown in productivity, and economists agonize over this. The general consensus is we moved information around, we offshored, we outsourced, but we didnt actually change anything for the good. And so cloud as being part of that, you would argue, perhaps hasnt yet changed anything for the good. At least not in economic terms. Maybe theres a sense that economists have called wellbeing. You feel a little bit better, but it hasnt manifestly improved your existence. You might be just a little more connected. For every feel, you feel overwhelmed by the deluge of information thats coming at you. Its a bit of a neutral reaction to whether weve changed the world in the internet age, but Going Forward we believe it does change as we actually automate things for you. The problem we have is weve presented you with a ton of data but not necessarily knowledge to think better. And so in the next era we will actually connect everything your environment, you, infrastructure, buildings, bridges, cities so we can actually see whats going on and then automate that. Think of your house will be, you know, the jetsons like automatically clean, your energy will be automatically managed for you, your car automatically driven or temperature you. All of that driven for you. All of that requires a massive effort. Finally, i think, cloud will come of age, the network will become valued again, and the devices will be everywhere on you, in you, your car, infrastructure. So its a big change coming. And i think thats when well see this increase in productivity. Host so when we talk about the internet anymore, were not just talking about the worldwide web, are we . Guest were not. Its a very good question. Worldwide web allowed machines to talk to each other, of course, and it was really how systems could interact in a very relatively simple way using Domain Name Service ises and urls and things like that. Now were talking about machines talking to machines and machines talking to software platforms, and thats a much larger thing because it doesnt all go through urls and and the worldwide web, its just an ip network now, and thats really the worldwide web is the web page part of the web, but the rest is ip networks that are just moving packets around in interesting ways and running maybe even a. I. Systems so theres no human involved, theres no web page involved. Its actually data systems that are moving, optimizing and understanding the information and then producing your outcome. So that may not involve of the www part at all, it may just be a machine signaling an a. I. System, understanding what the machine is saying and then a robot performing the outcome, and there was no www in that. Host so does that increase efficiency . This, again, is not something terribly sexy. Of we cant see it, we cant touch it, we cant put an app on it. Guest its a good question, isnt it . I think the way i like to think of it is if your life if i could pitch it to you the following way, that all the mundane tasks in your life would be taken care of for you. Youre already smiling. [laughter] it sounds fantastic. And as a result, youd have more time to spend on cognitive, valuecreating things, the ammunition youve always had to write the Great American novel, screenplay, poetry, whatever it is, make a movie. Those things youll have more time for, because im going to eliminate all the mundane tasks because machines will help you with those. Okay, that sounds good. And hopefully youll see the set of tasks that are done for you and the time you have to do more creative, humanistic things that make you feel more valuable. And that youll appreciate is because youre always connected over this infrastructure. So it will remain invisible to you because in some ways it is all wireless. Theres no wires youre dragging around with your roomba or your robotic system. But youll perceive it as having value because its changed your life. Humans are capable of understanding theres three ingredients in that, there is the robot, the america or the network and those three things have equal value. Host so among your thousand scientists here, do you have researchers, do you have engineers, do you have the technicians, the whole mix, or is it purely Scientific Research . Guest its a very good question. Thats one of the other misconceptions about bell labs, that we just do science for sciences sake. The reason people believe that is because weve won so many prizes. Weve won eight nobel prizes for work directly done here. If you count all the people who worked here on part of, for part of their career, weve probably won 30 or 40 sort of virtual nobel prizes because it was a massive throughput of very, very small people. But they were always focusing on solving a real problem. So to give you an example, one of the what you might consider more out there nobel prizes was for discover ising the socalled big bang radiation. You think, what on earth was bell labs doing looking for the origin of the universe . We werent. We were actually trying to do Radio Communications between new jersey and maine, the earliest Radio Communications, and there were no satellites at the time. All we had was a mylar balloon that was 10 meters in diameter, floated it up into the atmosphere, bounced radio waves off it between maine and new jersey. But you can imagine, that doesnt result in a strong signal. We hadnt even invented amplifiers at that point. So the noise that comes from the atmosphere mattered. So we started trying to investigation how could we get rid of that noise, and we found out we couldnt. We discovered that micro background radiation, all we were tryinged to do was bounce a signal off a balloon. Weve always been going after a specific problem, new silicone that was a transistor, new memory device led to the ccd camera which you have in your smartphone allows you to take pictures digitally, because it was a hard problem and because we went all in, we ended up winning a nobel prize. Weve never done pure Scientific Research. Its always what i would call Disruptive Research but directed towards a real problem in communications. And we go all in and tend to win prizes as a result. Yes, to answer your question, were still like that. We go after big human problems. We think ten years out. We try to find solutions that are ten times better than anything available today, and we focus our best and brightest on solving those problems as fast as possible, and it is physicists, mathematicians, engineers, chemical engineering, Electrical Engineering as well as the more artistically inclined person who provides design, physical design or even now artists to help us think about is there something we can do thats more than just communicating words, can we communicate sentiment. Its an interesting collective of unlike minds working collaboratively together to invent the future. Thats how it is. And i think thats how its always been. Host in my mind im seeing lab coats, laboratories, test tubes. Guest there are less test tubes now, but there are lab coats, there are big quantum computing labs which are full of liquid helium containers so we can do novel quantum computing type things. Yes, there are big laser structures and fiber, there are wireless antenna arrays. So, yes, you will find owl that. I all that. I think the lab coat wearing is no not what it should be, meaning i dont think were always protecting our clothes appropriately, and maybe goggle wearing isnt up to osha specs, but, yeah, you would find lab coats and goggles running around the place and big, massive labs full of very expensive looking equipment. Host so, dr. Weldon, what are some of the things that bell labs is focusing in on now and looking at ten years from now . Guest so i think the thing that fascinates us at the moment is the idea that were bringing all these machines online. Very popular phrase, the internet of things. It actually is a bit meaningless. Most people think it means your fitbit or smart want, but it means adding sensors to everything. You, yes. Biological senses that measure your physiology and let you know whether youre well at every moment of time. But the room will sense you and be able to pick up your movement and vitality, maybe even measure your heart rate. Equally, we will measure the infrastructure which means ill be able to see the position of every shipping object, every vehicle, every plane, every train. And the reason for that is to allow massive degree of automation. So we think of it as an industrial or technological revolution and there havent been many, technological revolution means you end vent a technology, you network it, and it changes a society and man kind. We think were about to enter that era, and the change is youll be able to remove mundane tasks, live a more complete life creating more things, because machines will take over the dull and the drab and the ordinary. To i think thats a very interesting reality. What we have to do to make that happen, we have to work on new cloud technologies, new computing technologies, new devices that sense you in deep physiological ways meaning your whole biochemistry is measured at all points in time. The environment has to be able to see you and sense you, maybe infrared, ultraviolet, acoustically, we have to build networks that make all that information flow from one place to the cloud and back. We have to build a. I. Systems that make sense of it all because if i send all that day to you, youre going to say i dont know what to do with that. That we consider our purview all the way from a sensor on you to a cloud system that runs an a. I. Agent that helps you perform and live your life more efficiently. So thats sort of a massive change. And, yes, therell be augmented reality, Virtual Reality will be part as well so youll be able to see things a bit like in a star trek way. I always use the example of the holodeck in star trek, walk into rooms and theyll become what you want them to be. Youll be sensed in every environment. That sensory input will be able to be transferred between people, so youll be able to understand how other people are feeling across the Digital Network. Your doctor will be able to understand your feeling, your work your employer will be able to understand whether youre in a risky position or perhaps even suffer ising on the job. So suffering on the job. So everything will be sort of understood and known not in a creepy big brother way but, rather, a con chex chullize contextualized, personalizedded way. Host lets go back to the creepy, big brother [laughter] a lot of that sounded like guest yeah, until i said its not creepy, big brother. Host yes. Guest i think thats the trick, the trick is so that the users in control of the information. You only advertise, you only make available lets take the example of we work on technologies that detect your biochemistry. You would only be willing to share that data with your doctor and maybe friends and family if theyre acting as your custodian or your caretaker. And thats where making that available is clearly the right thing to do because ill pose to you the way its done today. You go to a doctor once a year, maybe, if your spouse botherrings you to d