PassW0rd – 8th April 2020 (Coronavirus Special)

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Speaker C: Hello, I’m Peter Warren, and I’m not in the studio at Resonance FM, and this is The Password Coronavirus Lockdown Edition, made as always remotely from Suffolk and Leipzig in Germany from interviews with people who are all over the world. We’re exploring how technology makes it possible for us to live in isolation for our own good and to save lives, and what that means for the future. Is coronavirus a curse that has locked us in our houses, or, as many we spoke to maintain, a much-needed disruption to a work-life pattern of behaviour that owed more to the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century. For them, the virtual office is the 21st century, and commuting is not only nonsensical, it was killing our world. Coronavirus has given us a taste of things to come and shown us that the networks we need are not road and rail networks, but the ones that link our computers. Real life, they say, is okay, but being virtual will augment it and it will be quite compelling. Here’s Martin Ware, former lead singer of ’80s band Heaven 17, now building 3D sound with his company Illustrious.

Speaker D: Let’s take an example of something like, I don’t know, you’re still in the middle of Trafalgar Square and you can hear pigeons on Nelson’s Column, you can hear maybe a helicopter flying overhead, you can hear all the traffic going around the outside, outside of it, you can hear various people at different distances walking towards you and away from you. You can hear the sound of the coffee machine in the coffee place. You can hear the buskers up on the top level. If you close your eyes in that situation, the way that we process sound is we can tell without being able to see what direction all these sounds are coming from and roughly how far away they are. We don’t think about this, it’s just something that our interior processing of auditory processing happens in our brains. This is what Ambisonics, the system that we use, replicates.

Speaker C: So is this an adjunct to then being in virtual reality? If I were in virtual reality, I’d have all of these speakers in my helmet perhaps?

Speaker D: Potentially. I mean, there aren’t many virtual reality rigs that can simulate this at the moment. We have worked with some of these. It’s the most realistic system of reproducing ultra-real sound. So this enabled— but the interesting thing is, as I mentioned, it existed since the ’70s really as a research tool and for acoustic design companies to kind of model how, say for instance, how auditoria would sound before they were actually built, things like that. That’s what the main use of it was. Ambisonics was. We wanted to make it and created an interface to allow musicians to use it as a creative tool. So in other words, for instance, we could take a sequenced synthesizer, for instance, like a kind of Georgia Murdaugh thing, we could fly it around the room in any way you wish, in a circle if you want on one plane, or we can have it moving around like it’s on a roller coaster, or anything, so it’s quite an amazing system. We can do up to 16 or more— well, actually probably more now if we rewrote the software because processing times are much better. We can do up to 16 simultaneous mono sound streams that move independently of each other in this virtual acoustic space. And the acoustic space is configurable to any shape or size.— that’s the other thing to realize. We often say to our clients, if you wanted to do the Grand Canyon, we could do that. I mean, we have done things like the full length of the Millennium Bridge, for instance, which is 300 meters long. We have actually done Trafalgar Square. We’ve done giant squares all over the world and parks, 3D DJed in various places around the world in the open air. Moving sounds around live, etc., etc. And our kind of bread-and-butter work is really museums and exhibition spaces largely, but we do our kind of, shall we say, flagship installations tend to be outdoors and huge.

Speaker C: So do you think that this is a technology that could be deployed in a domestic environment then? Do you think that that’s where it’s going? People are saying as a result of coronavirus that people will start being virtual and that they will increasingly demand a more realistic experience in that virtuality.

Speaker D: It’s completely designed for that. We acted as consultants for Dolby Atmos a couple of years ago when they were designing their Dolby Atmos system for cinemas, which is like their version of 3D. It’s not quite as good as ours, I have to say. And they admitted it, but they have been designing Dolby Atmos for the home using a similar kind of range of techniques. But we can proliferate the compositions we make for the open air, if you like, or for the real-world space. We can deliver it via headphones in a format called binaural, but it’s not as good. There are some caveats. Which I won’t go into now because it’s too technical, but it’s not as convincing as being in a real-life environment with an ambisonic rig. However, one of our ambitions always has been to create something ultimately that’s a bit like the Star Trek holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where you have a bit of downtime and you go into a virtual environment that sounds real, looks real, smells real. And to all intents and purposes is real. I’m personally not entirely convinced that the VR strapping device to your head thing is the way forward. I think it’s a little too prescriptive, and also from a philosophical point of view, I believe in the power of communal experience, and it’s very hard to have proper communal experience when you’re isolated from the outside world. Augmented reality enables you to do a little bit more of that, but it’s still— it’s like having something in between you and the apparent reality. So yeah, there are limitations to any way that you want to proliferate this stuff, which is why my favorite mode is— and I work with a lot of these people who create these things, by the way. I’ve worked in Second Life and you name it, we’ve done just about— we’ve worked with lots of different universities— Goldsmiths, Central Saint Martins, etc., etc.— working on various extremely forward-facing projects. And we are getting close to this kind of convergence of storytelling and technology to create something that feels like reality.

Speaker C: It’s not easy to replicate 3D sound without those ambisonic speakers. But one approximation is Microsoft’s app for visually impaired people, which lets them hear where things are so that they can orientate themselves in virtual soundscapes.

Speaker B: “Park, 295 feet.

Speaker C: Microsoft Building, 34, 295 feet.” And with sounds and pictures, there’s no limit to the new worlds you can create. David Wortley started out with video conferencing 20 years ago, and now he can also take you and your friend on virtual holidays.

Speaker E: The idea behind this is that you can invite your friends from anywhere in the world with their virtual reality headsets to come and join you in this same space, and there are many different things that you can do in this environment. You can watch a movie together, you can listen to music together, and then you can go to other parts of the apartment where you can go on a virtual tour. The one that I’ve seen, I think, is of Vienna. And then again, in a different part of that same room, there is a hot air balloon kind of souvenir. And if you effectively click on that, or you go to that, You can go on a hot air balloon ride either as an individual or you can go with your friend.

Speaker C: So how compelling are these experiences? Obviously you must have an awareness that you’re not there.

Speaker E: The compelling nature of it is really related to how relevant that environment is to you personally. So it’s a very personal thing. There are already some research projects going on at the moment which are looking at the use of VR to treat dementia patients. They have a virtual reality headset put on. They’ve tried forests, they’ve tried mountain scenes, they’ve tried seascapes, tried a number of different environments. And these environments definitely have an effect on the the mood and the physical and mental health of the patients. For example, on a video that I’ve seen, there’s a little old lady who’s suffering really from quite severe dementia. She sat in a chair with a couple of carers beside her, and they put on the virtual reality headset and they played to her a seaside scene with the sound of waves. And, you know, as she looked around, it’s an immersive environment, so she would see around the beach and things like that. And her mood and her reaction changed completely, and she started singing, ‘I do like to be beside the seaside.’ And this was a lady who had a history of not violent outbursts but really quite bad sessions of depression and sometimes antisocial behavior.

Speaker C: So this is a way of taking somebody to a place that ordinarily it would be very difficult to take them to?

Speaker E: Oh, absolutely. And I know from my experience of demonstrating some virtual reality to one of my partner’s relations— she’s over 90 years old— I put on a virtual reality headset and I played a 360-degree recording of a family christening which she’d not been able to go to. We put on this headset and she was looking around the church. The experience would be as if she was actually sat on one of the pews and she was watching the ceremony going on. And as she was watching, she said, oh, there’s so-and-so, he was just a little boy when I knew him last. And the tears started to well up in her eyes and she was just completely absorbed by it. So it’s, it’s able to take people not only across a distance, they can travel through space, but they can go back in time and see things, events that have already happened, that otherwise they would— if they might have watched a video, but it doesn’t have the same kind of emotional and immersive impact as, as virtual reality.

Speaker C: You see, VR isn’t only for young people playing computer games. It can have powerful positive effects on older people too. Even just seeing family members on a screen chatting and sharing everyday routines can be special at a time like this when the over-70s are forced to stay indoors and many people of all ages are isolated in hospital beds with no possibility of visitors. The thought that many thousands of people might die alone in this way drove Londoner Jackie Barrett to launch her campaign to find a technology-based solution. She calls it Tablets with Love, aiming to put a tablet in the hand of every isolated patient to connect them with their family and friends. But will they know how to work it?

Speaker F: So, well, what we’re hoping is that because obviously we’re targeting for them to go into hospitals, is that they won’t necessarily need to navigate the tablet themselves. There’s an army of NHS volunteers and family liaison people, and if these— basically, it will all be set up so that they actually don’t really need to do anything. There are all these apps that we can download that allow for free video calling, and then somebody on the ward will have that set up, and the patient just needs to hold the tablet, look at the screen, and see their loved ones’ faces. So, you know, hopefully that will help eliminate any confusion or for people that just don’t know how to use these, you know, this equipment.

Speaker C: Couldn’t they get the same effect from using a phone?

Speaker B: Why do you think it’s important to see the face?

Speaker F: Yes, well, there’s two points there. The first point is, first of all, the reason that we’re asking for tablets rather than smartphones is because tablets don’t need SIM cards. If we were to get an incredible donation of lots of smartphones, then it’s the other added layer of the who’s going to pay those bills and also maintaining the SIM card aspect. And then, yes, of course, just the normal telephones, of course, that’s a fantastic way for people to keep in touch. And it’s about being able to give people that additional feature of seeing who they’re talking to, because that just makes that experience so much more personal. Those smiles, those reassuring smiles, are worth a million dollars. It’s, it’s about enhancing connectivity, and we just feel so much closer if we can see a loved one as well as hear their voices. And especially now that isolation is really kicking in, the reality of not seeing a soul is going from days to weeks. And so of course speaking on the phone is, is still a great way to keep in touch, but you know, we have the tech, we have the capacity and the ability to make this an even better experience for, for those vulnerable, lonely, scared people.

Speaker B: It’s a great idea. What was it that made you personally take to it or think of this idea?

Speaker F: Oh, thank you. Well, yeah, there’s a kind of quite a few things inspired me. I mean, first of all, my, my mum sadly has got early onset Alzheimer’s and she’s in a care home. And I was really lucky to be able to spend the day with her before that home went into lockdown. And so, you know, it was that personal impact of the realisation of just not being able to see my mum. And then second of all, my dad lives by himself. And so Again, just before we went into lockdown, we managed to get my dad one of these home devices that you shout at. You know, there are lots of them out there and they now, you know, many of them have video screens on. And so I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing my dad for a while. And so we managed to just get him set up with one of these devices so that he can shout at that device and then it fires up in our home. And then we’re looking at each other on these screens. And so just that realisation of how that visual connection is so important, and for me, and just on, on that small level. And then, you know, and I, and then just reading about the real impact of what’s happening to these people in hospitals, and it’s awful to, to, to hear that people are literally dying by themselves. They’re dying alone. They don’t have any connection with anybody. You know, people, relatives are seeing, seeing them enter the hospital, and then, and then that’s it. And there isn’t any contact with any loved one or that, that human contact. And just the long-term effects that this is going to have, the, the grief process, it’s going to have a it’s going to make a real long-term mark on people. I’m just reading about the reality of this, and if we can help somehow, just marginally help with that grief, so that people feel that, well, at least I was there visually, and, you know, we could have some connection, it may, it may just help with dealing with the processing the grief.

Speaker C: Jackie Barrett from the Tablets of Love campaign, and she’s already won the backing of the VeryOnline store and tablet manufacturers Lenovo and is hoping for more donations to bring families together virtually when they’re in isolation wards, self-isolating, or quarantined. Of course, all those situations can also mean that some families are spending a lot more time together than usual. With schools and colleges closed and the grown-ups working in home offices— or trying to. Telecommuting, as it’s called, is about to morph into something quite different from sitting in a Zoom conference in your pyjamas. I’ve been talking about the technology of working life with Dr. Ramsay Farragher, founder and CEO of Focal Point and a fellow of Queen’s College Cambridge. He says in the very near future, it’s not just going to be in offices or factories.

Speaker B: One of the big drivers for autonomous vehicles is also still along those lines of maximizing how much people will work. So there’s a big economic driver for us getting into a world where you leave your front door and get in your autonomous car and start work, and you’re working all the way to work. And you’re working all the way home from work as well, be it on video calls like we’re having now or actually working. And you can basically do the maths on how much extra work will be eked out of the workforce into the economy if people working properly on their commute. And it’s a very large number in the many tens or hundreds of billions. I can’t remember which way around it is. But that has always been this economic driver for autonomous vehicles, not only the aspect of trying to save lives and reduce deaths, but to make us a much more efficient workforce as well. And so we will see that in this time of everyone working from home, that the commute time no longer exists. So we should, for some industries, see a greater productivity. It’ll be interesting to confirm the balance of how well people work when they’re in their working environment surrounded by other people working versus the challenges that people might have working from home for the first time and kind of concentrating on what they’re doing. Then on the technological side, there are great challenges in getting to that point where you can trust an autonomous vehicle to do all of the hard work for you while you’re paying attention to something else or potentially even being asleep. And so the technology we’re developing here is trying to solve one of the many pieces of the puzzle for autonomous vehicles. There are two major problems I see. There’s still the one around the positioning and navigation side and correctly moving through the environment safely. And separately, there’s the perception problem, the aspect of the autonomous vehicle understanding the environment it’s in. And there’s a huge difference between having an autonomous vehicle drive perfectly well around a racetrack brilliantly versus having it handle strange situations in a dense urban environment where humans are doing strange things. And now there’s a, there’s a digger in the middle of the road digging up the road and you have to go slightly on the pavement to squeeze past it, but you’re not allowed to. You’re not supposed to put your wheels on the pavement. And what does the autonomous vehicle do and all that sort of thing? So what we are solving at Focal Point Positioning is the problem of the GPS signals bouncing around inside an urban canyon. So there’s a critical piece of maths piece that goes on inside every GPS receiver that’s actually calculating where you are based on the signals coming from the satellites. And that piece of maths assumes the signals have traveled in a straight line. And so if they haven’t, the maths is wrong and the position fix is wrong. And that is a huge continuous problem all the time in between buildings in cities. The signals bounce and they don’t travel in a straight line.

Speaker C: So what is it about your chip that makes things so much better for people? Why are you an answer?

Speaker B: The simplest things it does is improve the accuracy and the reliability of the GPS positioning. So it’s less annoying for a human to see the problem you have at the moment with the blue dot being in the wrong place. That will no longer be a problem. And that’s also very important for autonomous platforms. They don’t like being lied to. It causes all sorts of problems. So a GPS receiver that’s much more honest and at times says, I don’t have a position fix for you because all of the signals I’ve picked up are reflected ones, none of them are coming straight from the satellite, and therefore you don’t have a confident GPS fix right now. For an autonomous platform, that’s a much better thing to pass on to the rest of the system than to lie to it about where it is and give it incorrect information.

Speaker C: Just to interrupt you there, when you’re saying lie to it, you don’t mean it is being lied to, you mean it’s getting inaccurate data.

Speaker B: So a GPS receiver tells you where it thinks you are and it gives you an estimate of how well it thinks you’re there. And my use of the word lie is referring to the scenario where your true location is well outside of that error. And it’s, you can certainly say that it’s merely inaccurate, but the point of giving an estimate of error is that that estimate of error is supposed to be telling you how inaccurate it is. And so it shouldn’t be wrong. It should be possible to say, I think you’re here, and I think you’re only here to 100 meters. And as long as you’re inside that 100-meter zone, then it was inaccurate but at least truthful. Whereas there are many times with the current maths that goes on inside a normal GPS receiver where it can say, I think you’re here, and I know that within 3 meters, and you’re actually 55 meters away. And for humans, that’s just annoying. It just means the little blue dot’s the wrong size on the map. But for For an autonomous platform, that might mean that it needs to go into an emergency shutdown mode because it’s suddenly in the middle of the river and it needs to go into its emergency mode because it’s fallen in the river according to GPS and so on. Or a whole host of other examples I could give you. But one of the simplest is how autonomous vehicles fuse data together and they try to combine measurements from different sensors into a single estimate of where or what they’re doing. And so if any of the sensors are giving you incorrect information, then the fused answer can be incorrect as well.

Speaker C: Dr. Ramsey Farragher, you’re listening to Password with me, Peter Warren, on Resonance FM, but actually isolated in my little cottage in Suffolk, keeping my social distance and mapping the limitations of virtual reality. After this on Resonance FM, you can hear A World in London with DJ Ritu. As Dr. Farragher points out, GPS tracking is not yet a perfect technology, and you don’t need to crash a lander on Mars to find that out. Anyone who’s travelled to a new place with a sat-nav can have a similar experience, though hopefully less devastating and expensive. So when the authorities in China, in Austria, and now here in the UK start talking about using mobile phone data to track the spread of coronavirus by logging people’s movements and contacts, that’s a cause for concern. First, because it’s not accurate enough, and more importantly, because it can breach our human rights.

Speaker G: As Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group explains: I’ll give you a couple of examples where this could go horrendously wrong, right? So there’s been a lot of talk about use of— so if you just take all of the mobile data and decide that because that has location data, we’ll now start mapping who’s at risk of coronavirus infection, well, you know, actually you’re going to end up with some problems there because firstly, you’re incentivizing people to simply not use their phones. If you do it by fiat, and there’ll be a certain number of people who do that. That’s a problem. Secondly, it’s just not accurate enough. So if you are just using mobile phone data, mobile mass data, and triangulation to work out where someone is, the accuracy is around 100 meters. So in something like in London, where infection rates are up to, you know, potentially to around 5% in some areas, possibly more, well, that’s going to tell literally everybody that they’re at risk pretty quickly. And if that’s the case, alerting everybody that they’re at risk when actually most of those people are not at risk, that, that’s a disaster. And that’s why you have to keep these questions of necessity and proportionality in mind. That is not necessary because it’s useless, and it’s not proportionate because it’s a total overreaction. So that’s why human rights don’t doesn’t go out of the window, why we have to think carefully through what we’re doing. The other point is, how do you maintain public trust when they do know that this data might get used and abused, it might affect their employment, they don’t know necessarily who’s going to end up with that data, they certainly don’t want their identity revealed if they happen to be somebody who’s accidentally spread the virus about, right? Now these are all real personal concerns. You have to get people to cooperate with the system one way or another. So you do that by maintaining public trust. That is partly about transparency, but it’s also about keeping a degree of anonymity or privacy where appropriate so people are not running personal risks. So I think it’s been really interesting seeing what both the UK and Europe have said about this. What they want is a— they want to use location data, but they recognize the problems with mobile data. They realize that the way they’re going to have to do this is by using Bluetooth connections, right? So Bluetooth broadcasts to people close by that you’re near. So the idea is that people would have to install an application that would connect to other people with the same application via Bluetooth, and it would supply that data back to a central database. And that central database would effectively know who you’d been in proximity with and for how long. Now that’s a much more effective way of understanding the potential for risk clinically, but it requires cooperation because to be effective that’s going to need something like three-quarters of the population to voluntarily install this application, and that again is going to require an enormous act of faith on the part of the population that this is worth doing and is not running them personal risk. So you have to maintain the privacy of those users at this point. And that’s exactly what the European and British projects intend to do. So, you know, I think let’s be sane about this is the simple proposition here. Yes, these things need doing, but you have to bring people with you.

Speaker C: Okay. It has been suggested that the issue with much of this is that you start to adopt these technologies or you use them under these circumstances, and they continue being used afterwards, and that this process doesn’t get reversed. I mean, you could arguably say, well, if it was a good thing, then it’s a good thing to keep on being able to analyze the data to get that value from it.

Speaker G: We have to learn from the past, right? And you don’t just grant people huge powers on the basis of emergencies or difficult problems. Thinking that that’s the solution. Because what happens is the means are the ends, and if you create a society without privacy and without trust of individuals, then you end up with a very paranoid sort of society to live in.

Speaker C: And if it’s not the powers that be who are snooping on our movements, there’s also the risk that our personal data could be stolen by cyber criminals.— a risk that’s heightened if we are working from home or on the go with a smartphone and potentially exposing business-critical data or clients’ credit card numbers because we only have a domestic level of protection. Given all these threats to privacy and security, can we really imagine that digitalisation, teleworking, and virtual workplaces will provide secure employment and help us to bounce back after the coronavirus crisis? If anyone knows the answer to that, it’s Professor Leslie Wilcox of the London School of Economics. His research spans the economy and includes all sectors of commerce and industry.

Speaker E: My point here is that those that have already moved to digital businesses and the high-tech companies, big pharma and healthcare products, which are going to inherit the future a little, These are going to be the successful businesses of the future. And as I said, I think that whatever sector we’re talking about, there are some financially resilient companies and some— and most that are not particularly financially resilient. And it’ll be a big sorting out. And if they’ve got technology helping them, then they become more resilient, I think, across sectors. Than other companies in the sectors. So even within sectors, the top dogs are going to be gaining enduring advantage from adopting technology successfully. I mean, our research shows— I’ve looked at hundreds of companies that have moved to digital, and basically what I see across sectors is that about 20% of the organizations that have moved successfully to digital digital are breaking away from other companies in terms of profitability and financial health. And the gulf that they are establishing in their sectors is likely to become irreversible. Some 25% are behind those organizations, are struggling to get there. But the 55% in those sectors are really struggling. And I don’t think the pandemic experience is going to help them much. There’s going to be a big sorting out of successful versus unsuccessful companies, with weak companies going to the wall, even if they’re supported by government for a while. I think in certain areas which are not going to inherit the future— at the moment, we see retail, aviation, and recreation being hammered. They might inherit a bit of the inherit the future. But the weak companies in those kinds of sectors that are not going to inherit the future are going to be seriously harmed, I think, over the next 2 to 3 years.

Speaker C: This is fascinating, isn’t it? Because in a sense, what you seem to be saying is that the 20th century, the working practices of the 20th century, the infrastructure of the 20th century, that’s now going to be under threat, not just because of the coronavirus, but because these patterns were already developing, they were already latent and underlying the economy, and now they’ll be accelerated.

Speaker E: Yes, I think that’s true. They will be accelerated. Yes, I, I’m not a person who believes that technology is the perfect answer to all our problems, by the way. I think with every technology you bring an inherent set of problems. So for example, when companies move to home working, they then inherit issues of security. How do they control the workforce? Issues of privacy, issues of how do they motivate the workforce? There’s a whole set of issues that come with the technologies that you can’t underestimate, I think.

Speaker C: Professor Leslie Wilcox, who’s got a new book just out called Becoming Strategic with Robot process automation. But are we ready for this new world of technology? Ready to embrace virtual reality and communicate in non-physical spaces for work, rest, and play? That’s a question for a philosopher. Reid Blackman’s the CEO of Virtue and the former professor of philosophy at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York State. Except he’s not in his office of course, because he’s working from home. But his research examines emotions and motivations, so he can postulate that humans could in fact live in a simulated world of virtual reality and experience everything that a real life has to offer in terms of sensations and achievements. For example, there could be a reality machine.

Speaker H: I mean, like, this is something that the philosopher Robert Nozick started to talk about, not with regards to offices in particular, but just life generally, called it the experience machine. You go into the experience machine, you can program it to give you a certain set of experiences. You could live your whole life in the experience machine. Is that the thing to do? Now, he thought the answer is of course no. And so something like hedonism is refuted. I think that was the, that was the point of his argument. And so you can think the same thing like this, that living that kind of life would be a shadow of, of real life. It wouldn’t what you do there in some sense wouldn’t count in the way that it would count in real life.

Speaker C: But then to go to Plato again, and then something I do know, Plato says that life is just a shadow of an ideal.

Speaker H: Yeah, we’d have to talk about what he means by that. And I don’t— without looking at the text and this, you know, the surrounding material, I can’t tell you exactly what he means by that. He certainly thinks that He seems to think that there’s a, you know, if you like, a realm of the forms. And there’s disagreement about whether he thinks that that’s literal or sort of metaphorical. But yeah, he thinks that there are sort of ideals of certain kinds of things, and whatever gets actually manifested is— it falls short of that, of those ideals. The issue is, I mean, if you, if you abstract from the office stuff and you just talk about life generally, the question that I like to ask is, if you had this machine that you can put someone in give them the experiences of making friends, talking to coworkers, achieving great things, winning the Nobel Prize, etc. You know, one question is whether you would go in. I actually think that question is not— I think there’s a better way of asking that question, and that’s as follows. Suppose that you have a new child, you have a newborn. I come knocking on your door. I’m a world-renowned scientist who has created this virtual reality, this alternate universe. And I say, hey, you’ve won. Would you like to put your child in the machine? Now, my guess— now you say, okay, you know, so to be clear, your child would get hooked up to the machine, would never be able to— sorry, hold on, a kid just rushed in here.

Speaker C: Hold on, sorry.

Speaker H: Sorry, let me just lock the door. Okay, you know, working from home is great. I love it.

Speaker C: It’s the best. I think, I think it’s wonderful that you managed to achieve that sound effect at exactly the same time as you were introducing that analogy.

Speaker H: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. That’s, that was us trying to drag her into the experience we machine and she doesn’t want to go. So, you know, your kid won’t ever literally meet someone. They will never win the— actually win the Nobel Prize. They won’t actually accomplish anything. They’ll actually feel like, in fact, be, you know, be on a bed sort of wasting away but hooked up to this machine. So having experiences as of winning the Nobel Prize, yada yada yada. Would you hook up your child to that machine? And the reason I like posing the question this way is that I think that people are much better about thinking about the welfare or the well-being of their children than they are about themselves. With us, we get to, you know, we’re sort of in some sense like short-sighted, and we just like, you know, we want a quick hit of pleasure. But for our children, we want them to really flourish in a way that we’re more focused on their flourishing more than our own flourishing. And so I think when you ask that question, most people would say, no, no, there’s no way I would hook up my kid to that. To that machine.

Speaker C: Would you? Maybe Reid Blackman wouldn’t want it for his children, and I don’t think I’d want it for mine either. But there are some young people who choose this virtual world. They live online, typically in their bedroom in the family home. In Japan, there are at least 1 million of these loners, known as hikikomori. It’s a recognized social problem there. And now in Europe, at least in Italy, the hikikomori lifestyle has enraptured around 100,000 people, mostly young men. Dr. Marco Crepaldi is the psychologist who discovered them. He says their lifestyle choice is a form of internet addiction and nothing like the feelings of most Italian people who are self-isolating from necessity.

Speaker I: I think it’s very different because hikikomori are isolated because they feel alone. So their isolation is a consequence of their social anxieties and their bad view of society. In this case about the virus, the isolation is forced. So it’s very different because we called in Italy hikikomori voluntary social isolation because they, yes, have a problem, but they feel that their isolation is voluntary. In this case, we are forced to be at home and maybe, yes, we could try some different sensation. We could, I don’t know, maybe feel some good sensation about to stay at home and don’t be in touch with other people. But I think if you don’t have social anxieties and a bad view of society, a bad interpretation of society, you can’t become hikikomori.

Speaker C: What was it that made you personally interested in studying this phenomenon?

Speaker I: Yeah, I discovered the phenomenon while I’m studying social psychology at Milan University, so I discovered it watching an anime, Japanese anime, so a cartoon where there is a person isolated. So I discovered the term hikikomori and I started to improve my knowledge about this problem and I started to do a lot of studies, to read a lot of studies, and I opened a website called ikikomoriitalia.it, and from this website a lot of people started to write to me and they asked me help or they asked me more information from all around the country. And from this website, from this blog, started a national association and a great online community with thousands of people interested in this issue from different points of views, like, I don’t know, teachers, parents, persons isolated, or a lot of, I don’t know, doctors. A lot of people are touched by this phenomenon because is a phenomenon that is very, very huge in the society. So you can find, you can find ikikomori at school or in your hospital. So I started to study this phenomenon, and now I go all around the country, all around the city to speak about this phenomenon, to do events. And a lot of people are trying to understand more about this phenomenon because It’s very huge, but a lot of people never have heard about this. So a lot of people don’t know how to approach when a child stay at home and they, he don’t want to go outside. So I’m trying to, to understand the phenomenon and I’m trying to make good information on the Indeed, you’ve written a book about it and you’ve made a number of films that we can watch on YouTube.

Speaker B: I know that in Japan there is a system now where you can, or parents or the families can, can rent a sister for a hikikomori person and ask the sister to be the one who makes the contact. What are the prospects for that sort of development in Italy?

Speaker I: Yes, we, we are trying to do the same, but not with girls, with not sisters, but with psychologists. So we use educator maybe a lot because we think that a professional approach could be better than volunteer approach. And yes, we are trying even this this road, this street, this way. But we think that work on parents could be very, very helpful because if you do a great work on the Ikikomori but you don’t do nothing on the family, maybe all your commitment could be without any results.

Speaker C: Perhaps one way to lure the hikikomori away from their solitary existence would be to invite them for a virtual night out. We’ve no doubt all been enjoying the many concerts and movies on offer to while away the hours between our home shifts in the lockdown. I’ve even been to the pub— not my local, but a version of the Zoom software called, rather tongue-in-cheek, the Koffing Pangolin. I just need to have my beer, Gavin. I’ll just polish my glasses, mate.

Speaker B: Oh, it’s toilets, Max. Kevin, your face looks like a beer. Yeah, I can’t— I don’t want to be a toilet again today, so I’m being funny instead. Laura, you look like a pirate with those teeth.

Speaker C: I love it. The coughing pangolin, a nod to the trade in the endangered species.— the suspected source of the disease due to their use in China as a delicacy. And here’s Mark Smith, creator and landlord of the pub, and the man credited with creating the first virtual reality conference in 1997 to solve environmental issues.

Speaker J: Well, a virtual pub is a recreation of the experience of an actual pub, but taking place entirely online. So what you can do with technology is you can take photos of actual pubs, and then you can overlay or underlay, if you like, those images behind the speaker. And then there are regulars that come to the pub who log in, if you like, or certainly walk through the door, as it were. And then there’s a landlord—that’s me—and there’s a doorman, the barman, and barwomen as well, of course. And we can engage in witty banter, and people can then take part in things like pub quizzes. We’ve done sports quizzes. We’re going to do an Easter egg hunt this Friday, where certain of our colleagues will be— regulars, I should say— will be placing mobile phones on their foreheads, and we will advise them to go left and right and up and down to find eggs in their gardens. So basically everything you can do in a pub but without being in a pub. There’s only one rule, though: every time the landlord takes a drink, everyone has to have a drink.

Speaker C: Sort of a tribute to Withnail and I. I see. So you bring your own booze and you just drink whenever anybody else does, and you do this using software, software system like Zoom. Yes, exactly that.

Speaker J: I mean, other software is available, but Zoom is a particular favourite. And not only can you bring your own booze, but you can bring your own fags, and you can drink drive if you wish, but only around your own lounge, of course. One would not want to break any rules. But basically, everything you want to do in a pub that you haven’t been able to do in recent times, you can now do in a virtual pub.

Speaker C: Exactly, so you’re in the virtual pub, you’re at home, so you leave the virtual pub and you’re back home.

Speaker J: Exactly that. It makes for very, very much cheaper taxi rides. That’s a virtual pub.

Speaker C: That’s how it works. But can this catch on? Mark Smith, CEO of the AI communications tool Contact Engine and the first person to create the virtual conferences that are now sweeping the world, thinks so.

Speaker J: I’m almost ashamed to say that my business is doing very well through this process because we’re involved in lots of communication challenges around the pandemic. But there’s a serious message in all this. My first degree was in biology and environmental science, actually. And for about the last 30 years, I’ve been an environmentalist. I mean, I’m largely off-grid where I live, electric cars and PV on the roof and all the rest of it. And we have in that 30 years made a bloody awful mess of the environment. And it always occurred to me that at some point technology will catch up and people will be comfortable to not move so much, not consume so much, grow locally, consume their power from the sky and the wind, and the world will be a nicer place. Now, what’s happened with COVID is absolutely remarkable. The canals of Venice are now clear. The NOx levels over China and Europe are at an all-time low. I mean, I can hear birdsong in the morning, not cars racing along. And oil prices has dropped to an all-time low. And that’s not a bad thing, right? If we burn everything, we destroy everything. And so actually, I really, really hope this changes the nonsense of people saying that working from home is some kind of Skype. It never has been for me. I’m twice as productive from here than I am from my office in London. So I really hope that what happens after this nightmare is over is people accept that home working is actually a decent, good, and productive thing to do. You’re close to your family, you’re closer to your friends. But you’ll need social interaction. Interaction. I believe people still need social interaction. I’m not so convinced, but others do. And so the occasional try— I only go to the Black Horse on Friday lunchtimes, right? I’ve outed myself. That’s 2 hours a week, right? If I can go to the Black Horse wherever I am in the country and then go to the actual Black Horse when it’s opened again, then that’s got to be good for everybody, I reckon. Good for the planet, good for you as an individual, good for the soul.

Speaker C: Just to follow on from what you’ve just said, Is what you’re saying that the silver lining in this very black cloud that is coronavirus could be that the working practices of the 21st century will be ushered in and that the behavior patterns of the 20th century will be put on the scrap heap of history?

Speaker J: God, I hope so. I mean, I, I ran an online conference in 1997, right? So how long is that? Only 4 years ago I started that. I’ve got— there’s a video of me on YouTube, my 30-year-old self, saying the future is online conferencing. You do not need to travel to Beijing or Alabama or Durban or Aberdeen. You can actually do this from home. What is a conference if it’s not a series of presentations, interactions, and exhibitions? And I created an online event called Environment 97 then. I am so disappointed that my voice wasn’t powerful enough to change the way people think. And the same thing applies with homeworking. People still have a sort of want to measure themselves by the size of their empire, by looking across rows of humans in front of desks in call centers or offices or wherever else. And it is so last millennium, it is so unnecessary, and it is so wasteful. Wasteful in time and resource and money and everything. I mean, I am no longer having to waste I used to spend 15 hours a day commuting into London. I live 45 miles away. It’s 1.5 hours each way, 3 hours a day wasted on a train. I don’t need to do that anymore. As it goes, those 15 hours my company gets back because I work anyway doing it from home. So I hope so. I don’t hope so. I think we have little choice, right? I think, you know, fundamentally, philosophically, if we carry on behaving like idiot children in a fragile museum, then we will destroy the very thing that we need to exist.

Speaker C: And Mark Smith, Martin Ware, and David Wortley aren’t the only ones who are ahead of the curve. The National Theatre has been working to put productions on the internet since 2009. Here’s David Sabel, the then head of digital and broadcast, talking about why the National Theatre decided to break down the walls and get out into the country.

Speaker A: My area is really about extending the life of the theatrical experience into places where either people can’t get to us because geographically they’re not in London or wherever we’re performing, or indeed, you know, sometimes enriching the experience beyond just the sort of what we call the rise and fall of the curtain. Of course, here at the National, we don’t really have curtains, but metaphorically it is about extending that theatrical experience and creating new experiences, new ways of storytelling. We have a whole strand of my department which looks after after sort of innovation and ways in which digital media and live performance are starting to fuse and intersect and meet in exciting ways. One of the biggest programs, of course, that I sort of started my journey here at the National on is National Theatre Live, where we broadcast productions from our stages to cinemas around the world. And this started 6 years ago in June of 2009, and we’ve since done about almost 50 productions, and it’s been a hugely exciting, rapidly growing and successful program which started very much as an experiment, started as something that we didn’t know really how audiences would receive it and even how we would feel about it and how the artists would get behind it. But we thought that it was an incredibly important opportunity to see whether we could increase access to the National Theatre’s work by allowing people They might be in Newcastle, they might be in New York, they might be in London and the show is simply sold out or they can’t otherwise get to the National Theatre, but this was another way in which they could experience the work that we put so much into on our stages.

Speaker C: But a lot of purists would say, hang on, it’s all about the greasepaint. It is actually all about being on that seat. It is all about getting that feel.

Speaker A: How do you square that? Yes, I think that’s right. I mean, I think we very confidently from the beginning said that NT Live is never going to be the same experience as being in the theatre. You can’t replace that. And of course, it’s one of the exciting things that you’ve seen as digital media has upended so many traditional business models. So you look at the music industry, and the fact is people still love going to festivals, they still love going to live gigs, because you can’t replace that smell of the grease paint, that being there with other people. The thing we love about the National Theatre Live model is that it is still a shared experience. So people really have a sense of event. They go to the cinema, they’ve bought a ticket, often in advance, often sometimes months in advance. These productions sell out even in the cinema. So there is a sense of booking. You bring a certain sort of theatergoing behavior to it. They get a program when they walk in, they often dress up, and we certainly hear from audiences that they even applaud in the cinema at the end of the screening, even though of course the actors can’t hear them, but they want their their appreciation to be in some way felt and certainly felt by those around them. And I think, you know, we certainly— the work that we’ve taken out on tour since we started NT Live has actually only increased. So we absolutely believe that you can’t ever replace the live experience, but you can offer people who might not otherwise get a chance to see it, either because they couldn’t afford to go, because they couldn’t get a ticket because it was sold out, or, you know, in most cases because they simply couldn’t get to London didn’t live in London or wherever we might be playing at that time. And this has allowed us to go into areas where we would never even be able to tour. So we play in cinemas from the Shetland Islands to, you know, to very sort of rural remote village halls and communities that simply don’t have access to live theater. So it’s been a huge increase, I think, in certainly across the United Kingdom, but actually in many countries around the world for people’s access to great British theater, both the work work of the National and also some of the partner theatre companies that we work with, such as the Donmar Warehouse or the Young Vic, and we film shows from the West End. So we’ve really tried to broaden the spectrum of what we’re offering and thereby grow a much bigger audience. And the feedback, of course, that we get from audiences is it’s not the same experience, but it’s still a great experience, and actually it sometimes brings other advantages. So you might get in the interval a look behind the scenes or an interview backstage or into the rehearsal room, which you obviously wouldn’t get necessarily sitting in the theater. You also get an intimacy with the performance. I mean, I think with some of the really, you know, incredible actors that we have here at the National Theatre and who we have the great fortune to have on our stages, whether that’s Helen Mirren or Benedict Cumberbatch, you know, to see the detail, the nuance of their performances in a way that you can because the camera affords that is often very exciting.

Speaker C: It’s an idea that’s got legs. Bertolt Brecht famously got the actors to come down off the stage and walk among the audience in the 1930s. Now they’ve gone virtual too. So I’ve also been to the virtual theatre in Hampstead, except I was at home in Suffolk and the people I sat next to were actually 1,000 miles away in Germany. It was a surprisingly appropriate play too, considering it was written 4 years ago, about the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who revealed that the American and British security services were snooping on the personal movements and conversations of millions of people. The play is called Wild by Mark Bartlett, and it centres on a debriefing in a virtual reality set that leaves the young hero totally disorientated. Literally not knowing which way is up. Snowden’s isolation is total. It reminds us that solitary confinement is a punishment, also used on the whistleblower’s champion Julian Assange. Confinement in itself is a punishment unless we choose it for ourselves like the hikikomori or the monks and nuns in closed holy orders. It’s odd though that the coronavirus is forcing us to think outside of our boxes. It can be a disturbing experience. I was once carrying out a phone interview in a quiet room at a conference centre when the room was dismantled and I found myself sitting in a chair on the empty floor of a building. If we do it right, we should be able to use technology to augment our lives. And improve them, not to isolate ourselves. Most of us are just not meant to be alone, and we are more together. No man is an island, entire of itself, Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less; as well as if a promontory were; as well as if a manor of thine own or of thine friend’s were. Each man’s death diminishes me; for I am involved in mankind, Therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. John Donne wrote those lines in 1624, just a few months before the bubonic plague killed more than 40,000 people, forcing Parliament and the court to move from London to Oxford, something he could not have foreseen. Nor could he possibly imagine that almost 400 years later, in a different kind of plague, the poets and artists and musicians would rush out into cyberspace to offer relief from isolation. I’m Peter Warren broadcasting from my bedroom. On my website, Future Intelligence, you’ll find links to the virtual reality and ambionics sound we heard about earlier, and Jackie Barrett’s on Twitter at #TabletsOfLove. I’ll be back next month with producers Blue Buffery and Jane Wyatt, here on Resonance FM.

Speaker B: Be well. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.