Rory Cellan-Jones: In the early stages, quite inexperienced and solo-bedroom developers, they were called, could make a big impact. And Edward Bentley, age 16 was one of them. He was this friend of my son’s, lived about a mile away. He developed this game, put it on the App Store. And one evening, the phone rang at the family home, and his father got a phone call from Apple on the West Coast saying, “Mr. Bentley, your app is being made App of the Week. And you’re going to need to open a bank account here for all the 1000s of dollars that you’re going to earn.” And he was mystified. Turned out his son had put his dad’s name against this because he was too young to be officially the owner of the app.

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society, and how society in turn is shaping the web.

You just heard from my guest today, Rory Cellan-Jones, talking about how the introduction of app stores to smart phones produced an enormous amount of creativity on the web and cemented the social smartphone era. Rory has been a reporter for the BBC for 40 years, covering Business and Technology stories for much of that time. At the beginning of 2007, he was appointed technology correspondent to expand BBC coverage of the impact of the internet on business and society. His first big story was the unveiling of the iPhone by Steve Jobs, something that we will be talking about today. He now covers technology for television, radio and the BBC website. And in 2014, he began presenting a new weekly program, Tech Tent, on the BBC World Service, a personal favorite of mine. He’s just published a new book, titled “Always On: Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone Era,” And he spoke about that book at the recent ACM web science conference. Welcome Rory. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Good to be here.

Noshir Contractor: I want to start again by thanking you for all the incredible coverage and storytelling and weaving that you have done over the years as a technology correspondent. And most recently, in the book that I have enjoyed reading, titled ‘Always On: hope and fear in the social smartphone era.” I want to start by trying to punctuate how you define the social smartphone era.

Rory Cellan-Jones: Well, my job as technology correspondent at the BBC started, as you say, in January 2007, and the first big story I covered was Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone in San Francisco, which was an extraordinary event in extraordinary performance by a brilliant, charismatic and very difficult man. 

I made a big bet, really on that event. I responded to complaints to the BBC, that we were plugging a product on our Nightly News program with my story, by saying, ‘Well, I think this could end up being a Henry Ford Model T Ford moment,’ which I thought at the time, maybe I went over the top there. But I think it’s proved to be correct. It was the moment that smartphones really became mainstream from then on. There had been smartphones, but they’d been clunky difficult devices. The iPhone transformed all that and brought mobile computing to the masses. But about the same time, all sorts of things were happening all together. If you think about those years. 2004, Facebook was created 2005, YouTube was created. 2006, Twitter came along, and then 2007, the iPhone. And what you had, quite quickly ,was not just these incredibly powerful devices in everybody’s pockets, but these extraordinarily powerful social networks. And my sort of thesis is those two combined to have an extraordinary impact on the way we lived.

Noshir Contractor: So back in 1991, Sir Tim Berners Lee had released into the wild, the World Wide Web. But as he said, coming up before 2007, we had the release of platforms like Facebook, and YouTube and Twitter. But the central piece, as I understand, is that all of this changed dramatically when all of these events, activities on the web now became possible in the mobile. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Let’s think of what Sir Tim said about the web when it came along. He talked about it as a ‘read, write, web.’ So I grew up in the age of television, the great mass medium that was this sort of big box in the corner of the room, which you did not interact with. The web was supposed to be an interactive medium that you know, we were all supposed to participate in it, build it, create it, so on. And that did happen a little bit at the beginning, but not a vast amount. Don’t forget that for millions, billions of people, there was no access to the web because they didn’t own a computer. It was a fixed line experience, It was an experience largely confined to the office in the home. So the arrival of smartphones, and the connectivity they provided, was a mass democratizing force along with those social networks, and we can discuss later the negatives as well as the positives. But What that unleashed was not just a democratization of the web, but a huge wave of creativity of content being created by these extraordinary devices. 

I started in television in 1981, a very long time ago, I could no more thought of creating my own television program all on my own, than I could have thought of landing on the moon. But these devices, enabled anyone to create quite sophisticated content, which we see done today on YouTube, and so on. There are lots of problems from that. But that did begin to really bring Tim Berner Lee’s original vision to life in a very full way.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you chronicle in the book is that at the time there was a battle between what you call the bell heads, and the net heads, the people who came from the phone systems and those who came from the computer systems. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Yeah. That culminated, obviously, in the arrival of the iPhone. Up until then, don’t forget the mobile phone industry had been around since the mid 80s. But it was telecoms people, it wasn’t so much software people. And from 2007 onwards, we know who the big victors in this battle were. They were Apple and Google. I mean, Google, obviously, in some ways, much more important, and the Android is on, you know, 80% of the world’s phones. So it was a triumph of software and apps over just the pure sort of telecoms engineering types.

Noshir Contractor: And alongside the fact that people are now using the mobile platform to engage with Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. One of the early applications also in the mobile space was mobile payments, which curiously got its innovation and start in Kenya.

Rory Cellan-Jones: I mean, the whole mobile payments world, what’s fascinating about it is very, it took off, yeah, really, through M-PASA, which allow people in Kenya to transfer money easily — and not between smartphones, between very basic phones, was far ahead of anything that happened, for instance, in the United States. And actually, the United States is even compared to Europe, is way behind has always been way behind in that area in the payments area. Checks, I gather is still quite big in the United States. Whereas, I’ve not written a check for years. So I think it’s all about need. There was a need in places like Kenya, which there wasn’t quite in the United States, you had, you know, obviously a reasonably sophisticated payment system in the United States. You didn’t have that in Kenya, but they managed to leapfrog to being ahead.

Noshir Contractor: Alongside mobile payments, another area that also became quote, unquote, a killer app on mobile platforms was gaming. You talk about a very simple app developed by a 16 year old Edward Bentley called the impossible game.

Rory Cellan-Jones: That’s a fun story. I mean, one of the things to remember is that although the iPhone was, of course, extraordinarily important when it came out in 2007, firstly it’s quite a primitive device. It only had 2G. And secondly, it only had the apps that Apple put on it. And actually the arrival of Apple’s App Store the following year, and then Google’s Play Store was what really cemented this revolution. 

Steve Jobs was the ultimate control freak, didn’t really like the idea of putting people putting any old software on his phone, but was persuaded eventually to open this app store. And that, you know, sparked this extraordinary wave of A. creativity and B. economic activity. And in the early stages, quite inexperienced, and solo bedroom developers, they were called, could make a big impact. And Edward Bentley, age 16 was one of them. He was this friend of my son’s, lived about a mile away. He developed this game, put it on the App Store. And one evening, the phone rang at the family home and his father got a phone call from Apple on the West Coast saying, Mr. Bentley, your app is being made App of the Week. And you’re going to need to open a bank account here for all the 1000s of dollars that you’re going to earn. And he was mystified. His son had put his dad’s name against this because he was too young to be officially the owner of the app. But of course, Mr. Bradley senior was very pleased with the money that rolled in.

Noshir Contractor: And I’m sure if it was Americans who were paying it, they were sending it by checks at that time. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Yes, yes. (Laughs).

Noshir Contractor: Of course, in a more serious note, you also talked about the sudden surge of messages that Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, began to get about a country that he hadn’t heard of called Moldova.

Rory Cellan-Jones: I talk in the book, obviously, about the positives and the negatives of social media. And we were incredibly optimistic, around 2011, 2012, about the impact social media was having. Biz Stone talked to me about that was the moment that really struck him, when he was suddenly being told that his company, Twitter, was helping to sort of foment a revolt in Moldova against the authorities. But more so the Arab Spring, I mean, don’t forget that Facebook was given a lot of credit. So that was the time that social media — and obviously only made possible by smartphones was an incredibly democratizing force. That’s what we felt. back then.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you also point out is that smartphone gave a big boom to AI, because it all of a sudden made a lot more data available that could be used by AI.

Rory Cellan-Jones: It was a sort of two way relationship. AI helped, you know, make a lot of the things you do on a smartphone much more sophisticated. But the big breakthroughs in the last decade in AI particularly is fed by vast amounts of data. And don’t forget, one of the huge changes the smartphone is broadened is in the way photography works, in the sheer volume of pictures we’re taking. And as computers were taught to, you know, recognize, for instance, the difference between a dog and a cat, was one of the great triumphs of AI over the last decade. the sheer volume of data from all these billions of smartphones. And these people taking pictures of everything they saw was one of the things that helped fuel that advance.

Noshir Contractor: And one of the things, though, that That has now fermented is a fear of what can happen with all of these data. You did an interview with Stephen Hawking, where he famously said that AI will make humans obsolete.

Rory Cellan-Jones: Yeah, this, this was an extraordinary interview. And this was quite early in the big conversations that we’ve had about AI, it was 2014. The way I did an interview with Stephen Hawking worked, is you had to send off the questions in advance. And he would then write the right replies, and then eventually you’d record it. And I sent off half a dozen questions about this, that and the other with a final question about ‘Oh, what do you think about AI?’ And that became his extraordinary answer, which basically said, If full ai ai was developed, it would be smarter than human beings and would therefore see no, real use for us, and we would become obsolete. And it was such a an extraordinary statement, that I got very excited. And then I realized that this wouldn’t be news until he actually said it. And he got ill for a while. And it was about another six weeks before we could actually record the interview, where he pressed a button on his computer and his answer came out and rocketed around the world and helped to spark the ongoing debate we’re having about the ethics of AI.

Noshir Contractor: And in this he was joined by other comments. Elon Musk talked about AI being the biggest existential threat. Dame Wendy Hall, who you and I know from the web science community, quoted as saying that AI might evolve faster than us and we might end up being slaves of the machine. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: On the other hand, that there was a certain amount of a backlash when the Stephen Hawking interview came out,  from people who were actual practitioners who thought he was probably worrying about the wrong thing. And I think as years have gone by, we’ve all begun to think maybe we shouldn’t be worried about the kind of Terminator style vision he was painting. There are far more imminent, and immediate concerns about AI — things like bias being built in.

And there was an interesting postscript to that interview. In the book, one of the great figures in AI certainly in this country is Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, which is now owned by Google. He told me that he’d gone and seen Stephen Hawking some months after my interview.. Hassabis felt that he put Hawking’s mind at rest to some degree by explaining how far away that kind of vision of artificial general intelligence.  

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that I want to turn to was your comment and your interview with Sir Tim Berners. Lee, who claimed, of course, in this very momentous Olympic moment in July of 2012, where he sent out that message, this is for everyone and caught a lot of journalists and the general public by surprise.

Rory Cellan-Jones: That was particularly the American, the NBC commentators, who said ‘Who is this guy? And someone said “Maybe you should google him.” And of course, the point is that Google would not really happen, but for Tim. 

I put that point as the high point of optimism about this area. I was actually there in the Olympic Stadium in London when that opening ceremony was happening, it was an amazing evening. And we did feel incredibly positive about all these developments about the web, about mobile economy activity, about social media. And I’ve interviewed Tim Berners Lee over the years, and in the last two or three years, his mood has darkened so much about what has been done with his creation. And he told me that what really woken him up was the Cambridge Analytica affair, and the way that he saw the web being used for malign uses of persecution of minorities, for manipulation of elections, and so on. And he said for years, he hadn’t worried when people said, there’s all sorts of bad things on the web. He said, I mixed with the people that I want to talk to on the web, they’re all really interesting. I just don’t interact with those people doing that bad stuff. And then he said, he came to realize those people doing the bad stuff on the web, as he put it, these people vote. In other words, they can determine the future of my country and other countries. And therefore, I need to worry if they are being manipulated in malign ways.

Noshir Contractor: Given that the smartphone has created such incredible opportunities for surveillance, we now have to think about ways in which we are being made aware and can have full control on who is surveilling us, and how we are being surveilled and you spoke with Jane Chapelle, co founder of digital shadows, a company that is trying to help us in this enterprise. And he is quoted saying something we’ve heard many times, if you’re not paying for something, you are the product. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Yeah, I took my phone to him just so that he could explain what was inside it and how it was tracking me. He took me through just how many different sensors there are in a modern smartphone, and how many radio different radio systems I think he counted about 5  providing this huge flow of data, this data flow, which we are providing, until recently, very unconsciously, to advertisers. And of course, it’s advertising money that fuels the modern web, and is the source of the huge power that companies like Facebook and Google have. That for instance, every time you sign up to an app, you are signing up very often to being tracked wherever you go on the web. That’s why that pair of shoes that you happen to look at yesterday, keeps falling around on the web. And we have begun to have the debate about whether we’re comfortable with that. And it’s a difficult debate because we get something from it. ie we get free services, Google, Facebook, and whatever are free to us. But in return, we we are consenting to being tracked. And of course the last few months, Apple has brought in this new system whereby you’re asked if you want to be tracked, and of course that that is changing the balance of power. On the internet, there’s a debate to be had about whether Apple’s motives are pure, as pure, as it says, because it’s not really in the advertising business. But in any case, we are beginning to have that debate, because the other thing that’s been very prominent, just in recent weeks, is the use of these devices for surveillance by governments and cyber criminals, we’ve seen that story with the Israeli company providing software, which can effectively turn your your phone on your iPhone on, turn the camera on, turn the microphone on and, and to spy on you, incredibly effectively. And that’s obviously a big challenge for the mobile phone industry and a big, big concern for all of us.

Noshir Contractor: That is indeed a very scary story. On the potentially positive aspects of monitoring, a lot of the ways in which the smartphone also has the ability to monitor us is in terms of health related issues. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Health tech has become a real interest for me. And it’s been a global interest, obviously, in the last year during the pandemic, what role could smartphones play. For instance, there have been a number of contact tracing apps developed. But for me, personally, the interest has been that I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a couple of years ago. And so I’ve taken an interest in what the technology can do to help me, and there’s quite a lot of work going on. It’s more in monitoring, rather than treating the condition at the moment, because the condition is quite difficult to monitor. If you’re a patient like me, you see your specialist once every four, six months, and they say how’s it gone? And you think, ‘kind of okay, too hard to tell, really.’ But I’ve been taking part in a trial, uses sensors. The hope is to develop a smartwatch, or more sophisticated version of the Apple Watch, perhaps, that would measure your symptoms on an ongoing basis. And for instance, would be able to tell whether an hour after you taking a pill, which I take, you know, four times a day your symptoms are approved or not. So there’s a lot of work going on in that area and health that generally is a huge, exciting and potentially life-changing area.

Noshir Contractor: And of course, talking about Parkinson’s disease and the fact that you’ve been so open about it, you narrate in the book the story about your conversation with then producer Priya Patel, who first sort of prompted you and into being able to put a tweet out about this to share this news with the world.

Rory Cellan-Jones: I was doing a live broadcast about 5g. one day on a breakfast television, I’d been diagnosed some time earlier — I was talking about it. And my hand was shaking quite violently. I didn’t realize at the time. But then this great producer said to me, have you ever thought about going public, because that was pretty obvious. And I said, “Yeah.” And I just sent out a tweet. And it showed the positive side of social media, because within milliseconds, it felt like I was getting huge amounts of response, and you know, very warm and helpful and positive responses. That was great. There was one person out of 1000s, who said, Oh, you’ve been standing too close to a 5g mask. That’s why you got Parkinson’s,’ but I was able to ignore that.

Noshir Contractor: Unfortunately, the world was not able to ignore that during the pandemic, where once again, the 5g virus theory was raised especially in the UK.

Rory Cellan-Jones: I’ve spent a lot of the last year covering that. And it’s ne of the things that makes me actually quite angry is how much nonsense there is talked generally about technology in that area. And ridiculous rumors about some connection with the virus. I mean, there’s a spectrum there are people who, you know, justifiably, I suppose, have concerns in general about the impact of mobile technology, and whether it’s causing them harm. I don’t believe it is causing them harm, but a lot of them genuinely do. But then there’s the spectrum, which goes way over into these wild conspiracy theories that say, it was only because 5g was switched on in Wu Han that the virus started or that it’s making people more vulnerable to the virus. And as a non-scientist, I’m very humble in front of science. So I trust the science. And I listened to the majority scientific opinion, just as I do on climate change. And the majority scientific opinion, says this technology is not harmful.

Noshir Contractor: On a potentially more hopeful note, you discuss what the pandemic would look like, instead of being COVID-19. It was COVID-05.

Rory Cellan-Jones: I think of how I’ve got through this pandemic, which has obviously been difficult, and many, many millions of others have got through it. And if this had happened in 2005, it would have been just about impossible for me to carry on working from home. I use smartphones and great fast connectivity, which I didn’t have in 2005. To do my work, it would have been very difficult to, to shop as effectively from home a lot. It’s not just that there’s better connectivity. It’s that the arrival of them, the mobile phone, kind of supercharged the online economy, made things like for instance, home delivery of food, made them more economic, gave them scale. So without those kinds of facilities, those sort of services that have come in the smartphone era, it would have been pretty challenging.

Noshir Contractor: There is a sweet irony though, that even though we talk about the pandemic as being in lockdown, we are still seeing the value of the mobile phone. Because even while we are locked down, a lot of the services that we rely on are indeed mobile services, or mobile-enabled services.

Rory Cellan-Jones: : That’s a very good point. Yeah, I mean, all of those delivery services, all of those careers, they’re all powered by apps. It’s the app economy that has really come to our age during the pandemic.

Noshir Contractor: Thank you, again, so much for taking us through the issues that I had with hopes and fears, has helped us navigate the web and leverage the web in ways that we could not have imagined, or the launch of the smartphone. I also want to thank you for all your incredible coverage of making all the technological progress accessible to people around the world. As I said, I’m personally a big fan of the show on the BBC World Service. And I certainly recommend your book to anyone who wants to get caught up quickly on the history, both in terms of hope and fears of the smartphone. Thank you again, for joining us today. 

Rory Cellan-Jones: Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.