On today’s show, we chat with Dr. Tom Coughlin, who is the Current President of IEEE-USA. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology. He has many publications and six patents to his credit. Tom is also the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which is now on its second edition with Springer. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis as well as Data Storage Technical and Business Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, the Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Report and other industry reports. Tom is also a regular contributor on digital storage for Forbes.com and other blogs.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- What is IEEE and what is its role in advancing technology in the US and the world?
- What are Digital Twins?
- Where are the boundaries between human and machine?
- Where do ethics play in the advancement of technology?
- What should we as a society be thinking about in terms of these?
We would like to give a special thanks to Zahava Stroud who made the introduction to Tomas. Zahava is the founder of Angel Launch and we would not have been able to conduct this amazing interview without her help.
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Disclaimer to the Transcripts:
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast.
Shawn Flynn 00:03
On today’s show, we chat with Dr. Tom Coughlin, who is the current president of IEEE-USA. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology. He has six patents to his name and he’s a regular publisher of Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, along with being a regular contributor on Digital Storage for forbes.com. Today we talk about what is IEEE and what role in advancement in technology in the US and the world does it have, what are digital twins, where are the boundaries between humans and machine, and where do ethics play in the advancement of technology, and what we as a society should be thinking about this and much more in today’s episode.
Intro 00:52
Welcome to the Silicon Valley Podcast with your host Shawn Flynn who interviews famous Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and Leaders in Tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 01:15
Tom, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley.
Thomas Coughlin 01:18
Thank you very much, Shawn. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Shawn Flynn 01:20
Now Tom, you are the current president of IEEE-USA. What is the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers? What does it do and what is the history of the organization?
Thomas Coughlin 01:33
IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, obviously it has to do with engineering but it’s more than that now. Actually, my background originally is in physics.
Shawn Flynn 01:42
Really?
Thomas Coughlin 01:43
Yeah. Yeah. And but it’s physicists, chemists, software people, people in all manner of different things. So it’s IEEE and of course the full name is the official name but IEEE is what everyone calls it and whatever you are, you can be that, you know, if you’re involved in technology.
Shawn Flynn 01:59
So anyone can be part of this organization?
Thomas Coughlin 02:02
Basically, yeah, I think there was a requirement. You had to have a degree. But I’ll bet if Thomas Edison came up and said, he was one of the founders, by the way, came up and said he wanted to be a member, they probably let him in.
Shawn Flynn 02:12
So other than Thomas Edison, are there any famous people are part of our have been part of IEEE?
Thomas Coughlin 02:18
Oh, a bunch of them. Alexander Graham Bell was another one of the founders, for example. There are people like Claude Shannon, who basically invented information theory. There’s some of the guys that created the transistor who are members of the IEEE. And the history of it is actually back in 1884. There was Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and a few folks founded the American Institute of Electrical Engineering. And they did standards, they put on some conferences, they had awards, they had publications that they did, and that was 1884. And then there’s another group. It was started after Marconi’s wireless demonstrations in the late 19th century. And it was called the Institute of Radio Engineers. And that was another group that was founded, they had also their own standards, conferences, focal section meetings, etc. They’ve actually got bigger than the AIEE. And in 1963, the two groups got together and joined to become the IEEE. So that’s the sort of the short history of that and there’s other things have happened. I have look for the date, but there’s a group that is called Computer Society that became part of the IEEE also and brought in a whole bunch of people in there. And so today, the IEEE is 430,000 plus members worldwide and it’s in a lot of countries. We do a lot of the world standards like the internet. Basically, the standards that run the internet are IEEE standard, all the wireless standards for instance, 802. whatever.
Shawn Flynn 03:45
So when you’re saying standards, do you mean you have kind of an influence on government policy or writing those policies or… could you talk about that?
Thomas Coughlin 03:54
So IEEE-USA in particular, dozens of government policies… Now the standards are often used, what standards used for generally is for people in an industry to have common equipment that will interface with each other so that they you know, you can buy different things and then work together. That’s a lot what a lot of standards are about. But also, IEEE, especially IEEE-USA, is involved in public policy. In particular for IEEE-USA, it’s public policy in the United States. That’s why it’s IEEE-USA. So we do white papers and publications on technological and related topics. We give them to Congress people, we actually have meetings with Congress people, we have a few lobbyists in Washington, DC. People are registered as lobbyists. And we also do amicus briefs for the courts. So there’s a number of ways in which if there’s technological issues, we will try to present both sides of a topic. Usually, it’s just to help clarify and understand the implications of technology and its use. But sometimes, we’ll take a strong position on something, particularly if you feel it is a value to our members.
Shawn Flynn 04:57
You mentioned a lot of white papers. Exactly how much writing or publications does IEEE do each year?
Thomas Coughlin 05:04
Well, IEEE as a whole has over 2300 conferences a year. They’ve got oodles of publications. They’ve got standards, they’ve got magazines, they have official transactions that they put out. IEEE-USA, for instance, has these committees on various topics that will create position papers, white papers on various things, for instance, that would go to Congress people or you know, if it’s something that’s going on the courts, it might be an amicus brief for the courts, that sort of thing.
Shawn Flynn 05:34
Is IEEE involved in any humanitarian activities?
Thomas Coughlin 05:39
Oh, yes. There in fact is a Humanitarian Activities Committee within the IEEE, which is an IEEE board committee, which has a pretty significant budget, encourages various sorts of activities, that go on. In fact there is one, was on National Geographic, there was this funded activity that was bringing solar power to a bunch of monks in the Himalayas. And they actually showed the monks hauling these solar panels, you know, up to their mountain lair, you know, their monastery. They had like electric lights, electricity for the first time. They’re really jazzed about it. And that was funded by the IEEE.
Shawn Flynn 06:16
Any other amazing stories you can talk about? So you got all these technologically-oriented people and they have a number of different interests. We have people in the industry, we have people in academia, we have people in management who are working in technological science. IEEE is kind of complicated. It’s got a lot of different pieces. There’s one that’s called technical activities. And in technical activities, there’s this future directions committee, and they explore new technological topics, things that are emerging and before it becomes mainstream, all things… Like right now, there’s one that’s called the Brain Initiative, which actually is nearing the end of its official life, which is exploring a direct connection of the brain to electronics and essentially being able to build better prosthetic devices that can sense what your nerves are telling, that would tell the muscles to do, when they don’t have the muscles anymore. But also it may eventually be used to, for new types of communication, for hands-free control of things, perhaps eventually, for people to talk to people directly through their brains, if you will. Are these research projects done by members outside of their normal nine to five, or are these members that are already doing this research that the companies are working for, and then just talking about it?
Thomas Coughlin 07:31
So there’s a mix of people who are interested in things and so they can get involved in something like that. And there also are people actually doing the actual research. And so that’s really exciting as you get these people that are working on these really incredibly interesting things. Other stuff like blockchain, there’s a group that’s called Symbiotic Autonomous Systems that recently joined up with the Artificial Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality group. So it’s now called Digital Reality. And there’s fascinating things there about where technology could take us in terms of autonomous systems, swarms of robots. And there’s something called Digital Twins, for example, where I can create something that is almost a perfect physical model of something else and then experiment with it, in order to make predictions about what happened to the real thing under these conditions. So take that to the extreme, somebody might be able to do that with ourselves. actually, have a digital twin. You know, a doctor performing an operation on the digital twin and try to predict what would happen to it. Or maybe it could even stand in for you at times when you’re busy.
Shawn Flynn 08:34
So let’s go into more detail of that and everything you mentioned later. But first, Tom, what’s your background in all this?
Thomas Coughlin 08:41
My background, initially, I have a bachelor’s degree in physics. And then I have a master’s in electrical engineering of minor material science and then later on, I got a PhD in electrical engineering. But my interest actually was in magnetic. There’s actually a part of the IEEE, it’s under the technical activities called the Magnetic Society. That was my original IEEE society, it was the Magnetic Society, in particular with regard to storing information using magnetism. So I was involved in magnetic recording and I worked on tapes and floppy disks and hard disk drives. That’s how I got into it. Since then, I’m still a storage and memory guy and I… Looking at semiconductor memory and things like that. Now, I’ve actually been on my own company for about the last 20 years. So I’m basically an entrepreneur in that sense. I’ve been consulting and sometimes bringing other people to help me on things, various types of projects, including due diligence for investors, you know, technical assistance with various things, but also write reports and publish them and make hopefully make money off them. I also put on events, you know, fueled a trade show technical event. There’s a conference I created called Storage Visions, which was just for the *CES show for many years. Another one that is called creative storage and focused on digital storage and media and entertainment. In fact, one of my reports that I’m actually working on right now, this year’s edition of the Media and Entertainment Storage report. But I also did a report recently with a colleague of mine that focused on emerging memories. And this summer, there’s Professor Sean Wang from Stanford, he and I are going to be doing, have organized a workshop on emerging memories in artificial intelligence. As it turns out, memories are an extremely important part of artificial intelligence, being able to store waiting values and that sort of thing, particularly for embedded products, using what they call the inference, where they’re taking an already built AI model, machine learning model or something like that. So we need memories to store this in. And there’s some fascinating technology behind doing that.
Shawn Flynn 10:42
What is emerging storage?
Thomas Coughlin 10:45
So a lot of the memories that we use, actually, if you go way, way back, some of the original memories were computer systems, were essentially non-volatile memories. When the power goes off, it’s still there. Those are called ferrite They were ferrite beads with wires wrapped around them. And they had these ferrite memories that actually would store information in these little beads. And that was the original core memory in a computer. And then they start developing semiconductor memories. The most popular semiconductor memories today are called DRAM, dynamic random-access memory. And SRAM, which is static random-access memory. But they both basically will lose the data if the power goes off. And so those are called volatile memories. But there’s non-volatile memories out there as well. So flash memory is an example that if you take the power away, the data still stays there. But there are emerging memories, non-volatile memories. Flash memory is slower than say DRAM or SRAM, doesn’t have the same kind of performance. But there are new memory technologies that have characteristics that are closer to those of these popular use dynamic random access memory or even SRAM that may eventually play a very important role and actually have an enormous impact. The design of systems in particular, a lot of, especially like battery-powered systems, with DRAM, you have to constantly refresh the data. And that means you’re using power. With a non-volatile memory, you don’t have to do the refresh. And therefore, they would use a lot less battery power and you could do whatever the device does, like an IoT device for a longer period of time with a non-volatile memory. So there’s new non-volatile memories out there. Magnetic random-access memory is one of them, getting into *magnetics image, which is in my background. And that’s becoming actually, all of the major foundries have said that they’re going to be making MRAM in embedded devices. Last year, they all basically said that and there are starting to be products that are showing up on the industry now. In addition to the magnetic random access, there’s also something called resistive random-access memory. And so that’s using other characteristics that change the resistance of a device that you store information on a higher low resistance state. And those are also possibilities that people are looking at for embedded in that type of devices. In addition, there’s about five or six other major technologies. Another one I should mention is the phase change memory. And actually, Intel and Micron developed something called 3D cross point a few years back. And Intel has been shipping what they call octane, which is their version of the 3D cross point, both NVME solid state drives. More recently, last year, they announced this year, they’re shipping essentially Dimm cards with octane memory on them, which basically you can use to augment your DRAM memory… a little bit slower, less cost, fairly high endurance, higher endurance than the nan flash. They’re essentially putting another layer in the memory hierarchy. But what’s happening is that we’re ending up with a diverse… in the storage, in memory, that there’s becoming more possibilities rather than less. It’s sort of a Cambrian explosion of storage and memory technologies right now, that are going to enable us to do enormous things to be able to understand the world around us, to be able to record what happens to people, to help to create some of these new technologies that we’re talking about. And ultimately, to be able to retain information and pass it on to future generations.
Shawn Flynn 14:14
You had mentioned an effect on IoT devices, IoT being Internet of Things. What will that effect be?
Thomas Coughlin 14:21
Well, a lot of Internet of Things devices are battery-powered devices or on the edge, right? So, especially on the battery-powered devices. So edge is actually kind of its broadening its meaning people will build this for it’s a cloud infrastructure, and there’ll be a big data center. And they will do things out of that. But especially like for content delivery networks, in addition to the master archive, master library, then they will have places where they’ll store content that is currently being used, say by end users, say your Netflix, and that’s closer to them. So the latency is less. The time it takes to get the data from when you ask it is less, but also so they can reduce the traffic on the central servers. They have these edge servers that are in more remote locations. Usually they’re in rented out space in a data center. That’s kind of a traditional edge. But with the advent of new wireless technologies like 5G, and even with Wi-Fi six, you know, another version of IEEE 802.
Shawn Flynn 15:21
What’s the Wi-Fi six?
Thomas Coughlin 15:23
Oh, that’s a next generation of the wireless networks. That’s for indoor and the 5g is for outside, right? That possibly there is that you will have actually the edge becoming even more spread out. And just in somebody’s rented space and data center, for instance, a cell tower with the 5g network could have a small data center. And I’ve actually seen people… have been showing, essentially served contained rack systems that you put in a small place like a cell tower and basically crunch data there. So you could more directly interact with people around you and also if you’re going to build things like smart cities and stuff like that, with smart stuff all over the place communicating, they got to communicate with something local. And if it’s real time, like trying to make decisions on traffic and that kind of thing, you want very fast processing, very low latency, that brings the edge even closer to the user. So the edge has become this kind of diverse hierarchy of connection points that eventually get down to the endpoint to the devices themselves, say an IoT device.
Shawn Flynn 16:28
How is 5g going to affect smart cities? And you’re going to have to tell us a little bit more about what you define as a smart city.
Thomas Coughlin 16:36
Smart City basically takes this technology which you often called IoT, Internet of Things. It builds sensors, it builds cameras, it builds various sorts of ways in which you can get information all over the city’s infrastructure. And then you have processing that happens at various edge points that may happen on the IoT devices, may happen away from the IoT device but it needs to be close enough that for whatever function it is serving, that the latency, that is the time for the activity to happen, happens fast enough that you can do what it is you need to do. If I’m working on communicating between traffic and this needs to be almost instantaneous. If it is, turning on lights, when someone’s in an area, pre-glide or something, then that could be something it does. So building up infrastructure that has this kind of intelligence in it, that’s basically what a smart city is. So it’s built on ideas around IoT, built around high-speed network connectivity, a lot of processing at various places in the edge of networks, and ultimately, with IoT devices. And ultimately, also be able to interact with the consumers, the endpoints, with the people that are actually in the city doing stuff and providing services for them, whether it be provide lighting. Help them so that they can avoid traffic accidents or helping people to find the best deal on something you know, all these things potentially could be functions that happen in the smart city. Hopefully it doesn’t look like some science fiction story is where you’ve got ads everywhere. But that’s another vision of what could be.
Shawn Flynn 18:08
Is a smart city needed then for autonomous cars?
Thomas Coughlin 18:13
I think a smart city is one of the key enablers for autonomous cars, particularly in an urban environment. If you’re traveling on a highway, you know, and it’s going between cities, because you have controlled access in and out of roads, doing something on a highway, I think it’d be a lot easier. But once you get into a city, there’s a lot more variables going on. There’s pedestrian traffic, there’s bicycles, there’s going to be skateboards, in addition to cars, buses, all these things. And so there needs to be a lot more coordination between devices if they’re going to interact in bad ways with each other. And that’s where I think the Smart City infrastructure has a key element doing it.
Shawn Flynn 18:52
When you say devices interact with each other, how does cyber security play a part in all this?
Thomas Coughlin 18:59
Very important question. If people are going to trust those networks, people are going to trust equipment around them. And security has to be very strong in these things. And I also think strong personal privacy that you have, you know, owning your own data, that I think is probably going to be a key part of that. Because if people don’t trust what the system is doing, then they won’t pay attention to it. So you have to build trust, if you want people to be able to rely on something. To work well within that system, it has to be a trustworthy system. So security, maybe using blockchain or other technologies to know the provenance of information, where it came from, is going to be a very important factor in terms of making IoT, I think, work the way it needs to work how the people are going to want it to work.
Shawn Flynn 19:44
What about ethics? How does ethics play a part in this, especially moving forward in the future with people’s own data and the engineers and developers making all this new technology?
Thomas Coughlin 19:54
I think ethics are extremely important and the people that invent in design, especially designed products based upon physical principles of how those systems are going to react in certain situations, there needs to be an ethics in the designers themselves. They need to have some ethical principles they are operating under. And they should bring that into their work. It is a position that IEEE has taken, you know, strong position on that. The other thing is that when you get into these systems that actually govern themselves in some regard, they’re going beyond our immediate supervision. And that means if we want them to behave the way that we think we should be behaving to each other, if we want our things to behave the way we think things should behave, then we’re going to have to build ethics into those machines and some kind of principles of operation. Now, I don’t know if it Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics maybe didn’t work out so well, but we have to think of something that will serve as guiding principles for systems that operate at least to some extent on autonomous space.
Shawn Flynn 21:01
Right now a lot of people are worried about AI and machines taking their job. Is AI kind of a marketing tool right now, is it overhyped? What’s your thoughts of it?
Thomas Coughlin 21:11
Well, AI itself covers a lot of ground. And to some extent, it is a marketing term. But underneath all that, there actually are algorithmic technologies that are being used to analyze data, and be able to look for patterns, for example, various ways in which you can understand and analyze those patterns in order to predict what’s going to happen and then make responses based upon that. And that stuff actually seems to work. So the thing people are really worried about is what’s called general AI, where I’ve got an AI that I can’t tell if it’s a human or not. I mean, it basically has consciousness and responds on its own. We don’t have that yet. We may not have that. Who knows how long it will be before we have something like that? Though it is possible, in the realm of possibility that we could make such things and hopefully we build them around our image, in the sense that I know we *fight a lot… but we avoid that, that they work with us and not against us, our paths are mutually beneficial by being together, that’s a symbiosis.
Shawn Flynn 22:11
So you said general AI, what other types of AI are there?
Thomas Coughlin 22:15
Oh, there’s all these specialized AI which is what we use right now. So the general-purpose AI would be able to react kind of like we do: learns relatively quickly on how to react to things, changes response, depending upon paying attention, a lot of really nuances of what’s going on around it. Our machines today don’t do that. We’ve got really good voice recognition and visual recognition now. But there’s a whole thing about the bias in AI depending upon how you train it. That’s been in the news recently. And then there’s also cases where if you throw something that it wasn’t trained on, it made a mistake, a muffin for a cat. If you’re online, you can find things like this, you know. So, we build this stuff. It works at some cases. But if you go beyond the boundaries of what it was designed for right now, it will fail. We’re still in that stage in a lot of these things, but they also can be very useful tools. Right now, I got a fairly recent car 2018, got a lot of whiz bang on it and sensors and cameras all over it, stuff. And it’s kind of cool to have. It will tell you if you’re getting out of your lane and that kind of thing.
Shawn Flynn 23:20
On the IEEE website, I actually saw an example of a robot picking raspberries. You, know something like that, that can easily replace a human’s job. And I’m guessing that type of laborer wouldn’t be that trainable for a new position. Is there concern there and kind of what is the future for robots in more these manual labor positions?
Thomas Coughlin 23:43
You know, robots have done the best in things that people really don’t like to do, but that’s one side of it. The other side of it is there are people whose livelihoods have depended upon doing those things. It’s not something that should be lightly dismissed, it needs to be looked at, but there also is yes, you can pick raspberries, it can do everything with the raspberries, with the a *third person also involved in picking the raspberries and making sure that the right ones… One of the things is going on in this factory 3.0 for instance, they’re building a lot of robots that are built to work with humans, rather than a caged off area, isolated, for safety reasons. So actually, building in the soft parts, they’re building in reaction speeds, they are more like human type speeds, and that kind of thing, you know. There is concern about, especially unskilled folks to be replaced. But on the other hand, there also is work to not exclude people from the process, for instance, in these factories, that sort of thing. Now, what do you do with an unskilled workforce? That’s an interesting question. I guess part of it is, and this kind of gets into some interesting stuff is that if we are learning creatures, by our natures, and if you can get people up to a certain level of learning, you know, to be able to read, to be able to see things for and have perceptions, that kind of thing, that we actually have tools that might increase our intelligence. In particular, what I’m thinking is these augmented reality devices, they actually are building glasses now for uses in factories or for fieldwork and things of that sort. Where I can have my hands free and I can be looking at a manual, or I could play a video while I’m working on something and tells me how to do the thing. Or I can call somebody for support in a remote place, I have a camera on my glasses, I can see what I’m seeing, tell me when I supposed to do in a sense, you know, it’s kind of like, this is not as immediate and not as in depth as the matrix where you plug in and download, you know, I want to be able to fly a helicopter, right? But it still gives you capabilities of learning quickly and becoming informed quickly on things I need to do real time. In fact, they found actually people that do this, their productivity increases. So again, this is an example of the symbiosis and people working with machines, in order to be able to do jobs better, in order to be able to get people who can get the information they need to do and what they want to do and have their hands free to actually work on stuff. I think we’re going to go beyond phones and things of that sort a lot more into wearable technologies, in terms of the next stage of our technology development. That could be glasses that have intelligence built into them, projectors for showing stuff on our glasses. They could be sensors in our clothes, watches people have those already, but where you don’t have to hold the technology for it to be useful to you.
Shawn Flynn 26:17
Tell me more about your vision for the future.
Thomas Coughlin 26:20
So part of how I got into technology is… I was a science fiction fan as a kid. And I loved especially the hard science fiction, you know, Heinlein, Asimov, Silverberg. All kinds of folks that wrote about the future. One of the big things that gave me an interest in technologies, wanting to make the stuff they talked about reality was kind of an inspiration for me. So my vision of the future is diverse, because I’ve read dystopian novels. I’ve read, great, wonderful, future novels, but I think mankind in our own stumbling way that I believe mankind will be better and part of that’s going to come from our use of technology. We’ve always been tool makers, these are our tools, our tools develop. And we’re now able to influence and affect each other in ways that we never had before, ways in which we can interact with each other, ways in which we can interact with the world around us in ways we haven’t before. And I would like to think that we would continue working in this light versus that we would push away from technology and go into a dark age essentially. And I think the opportunities for us are enormous, you know, we’re on the verge of moving out, away from our nest, Planet Earth, and people eventually living and working in and doing things in outer space. We’re finding new ways to understand nature, the gravity wave detection a couple years ago, the first detection of gravity waves. Now they’re going to be building gravity wave observatories. It’s pretty cool. The Event Horizon Imaging that was announced earlier this year, and now they’re going to be putting more radio telescopes in a higher resolution. Event Horizon Imaging is a really big engineering and scientific project. They want to record videos and not just fuzzy still images, but higher resolution for videos actually of event horizons. Particularly, almost every galaxy has a massive black hole in the center of it. And they want to be able to look at the black hole in the center of our galaxy, an image of it, and see it real time what it does. So all this is made possible by our technological tools, by engineering and processing, storage of information, by stuff. And it’s just fascinating to see this, and we live in interesting times. And we live in times of peril, we live in times of great promise. I would like to think that we would stumble towards the promise and away from the perils.
Shawn Flynn 28:47
With all this future advancement, I’m just thinking there could be so much waste with all these new products, new designs, new toys, more or less.
Thomas Coughlin 28:58
There could be. I actually know somebody, a guy down in San Luis Obispo, iFixit. He’s a big proponent of right to repair and building things that can be fixed. I’ve actually got some of his posters he’s got. I think it’s a fee. If he can’t fix something, you don’t own it. There’s something to be said about that. And actually, science fiction is one of the things. The other thing I think a lot of people get in technology is they like to take things apart and figure out how they work. And while it’s got a lot harder with integrated circuits and stuff like that, I think there’s still that desire to be able to fiddle with stuff and do things. And, you know, it’s in hobbyists. I think it’s in people who get involved in technology and are attracted to it. So the idea of being able to make things that we may be could extend the life of, I think is very important. In fact, I know some technology companies that are looking at building devices that are more modular in data centers, that for instance, they don’t have to take out the power supplies, just replace the CPUs. You can build it so I can replace an upgrade only when I need to upgrade. There are things like that I think we can do that are happening, that we could do a better job of. Personally, I’m hoping by the end of this year, I’ll have some photovoltaic in one of my places, not going off the grid, but at least you know, generating a lot of my own power. And a lot of this is driven by the economic cost of technologies going down so much. And ultimately, the cost of fossil fuel-based technologies goes up as it gets less available, takes more money to be able to exploit it. So I think we’re going to see a lot more into these renewable resources. We will do more, we will spend less energy doing it, ultimately.
Shawn Flynn 30:29
So you had said energy right there. What’s your opinion of smart grid technology?
Thomas Coughlin 30:34
Smart Grid, I think, is extremely important for both in terms of the efficient allocation of energy resources, and let, hopefully secure network that people can’t hack, although I know there’s been stories about people hacking into these networks, but ideally to be a secure network of electrical connectivity that can deal with multiple sources of energy. For instance, foldable tape, which doesn’t do much at night, right? So it can balance that, it can make it work, building energy infrastructure, that allows us to be able to create a more sustainable future. And also, to be able to feed into other activities that we do as well, you know, providing energy where it’s needed. And we’ll see where it all goes, you know, if you combine that with some of these other technologies, if you can anticipate more things, you know, you could do for instance, you know. One of the things that happens every once in a while is you get these solar flares that come off, and they will, they can cause about once the century, once or twice a century, these enormous verse, which essentially caused a lot of electromagnetic disturbance and damage of things, you know, but if we can build into these infrastructures, and combine that with our other analysis that we can make predictions and be able to build resilient, and in systems that won’t fail as easily that we can make more reliable power and they could lower costs ultimately too. Another thing going on there too, by the way, is recently I’ve seen upticks in the use not for power generation, but in devices for closer to room temperature superconductors, which if you can do that, it would have enormous implications in terms of energy. Superconductor doesn’t conduct electricity without heating up, it doesn’t waste the electricity basically, you know, turn into heat. And so we can, you know, potentially build very efficient things doing this. So, gradually it’s been creeping up on the temperature, you know, with material science of these superconductors. It’s been really interesting to see what happens with that. And another thing that impact our usage of power. Things as well, like I talked about before about the memory technologies. We replaced volatile with non-volatile memories, essentially turn something off, I turned it on, all the data is there, it doesn’t have to load the data into the memory. It just stayed there. There’s a lot of things that are coming together that are being driven by both the ability of human beings to think of interesting connections but also the desire to make money, to save money, and basically do good economics that are driving us to some very interesting capability, especially with regard to energy generation, consumption and management.
Shawn Flynn 33:13
You’d mentioned money there. With all this collaboration among inventors. should people be worried about IP protection?
Thomas Coughlin 33:22
Oh, yes. Yeah. That’s very topical, there’s a lot of discussion in that right now. And also, what is IP, you know, for that matter? And this kind of gets into this whole public policy questions as well. Should software be patented, for example? Or what should be patented? Should biological things be patented? What does that mean? I mean, there’s a technical background on these things, and they involve technology. But a lot of these decisions and with how we manage this is sort of our social decisions and what we decide as a people or as peoples, what’s right, what’s wrong and what someone can borrow from someone else and how they should be compensated for that. It’s a complex issue.
Shawn Flynn 34:01
What are some of the things that IEEE are currently working on?
Thomas Coughlin 34:06
So IEEE works on a ton of stuff. IEEE has an Educational Activities Board, which works on education products. It actually does the accreditation of colleges or engineering technical programs. There’s the Technical Activities. It has all these societies that are working on different technologies and that sort of thing. There’s a Member Geographic Activities, that supports regions, there’s 10 regions in the world. We’re not off the world yet. We don’t have region 11. The MGA basically supports regions and the sections that reports the regions. Actually, the sections oftentimes have chapters of these societies at the local level. And so, they’re kind of between the section in there for the NGA and the Technical Activities. There’s a Standards Group that does standards activities, and there’s IEEE-USA, which does career development and public policy sort of work. So there’s a lot of different things that IEEE does, a lot of elements and as much as we can. And I think it’s really an effort that a lot of people in the IEEE have leadership, and I think the membership really appreciates if we can work together on stuff. And try not to reinvent the wheel where you can combine activities and various parts, work more effectively and get stuff done.
Shawn Flynn 35:22
I just recalled right now, you’d mentioned digital twins, I have to ask more about that. I can almost imagine that it sounds like Shawn, a digital twin of yours is six foot two, 250 pounds of muscle. I think the algorithm needs to be tweaked a little bit.
Thomas Coughlin 35:27
That’s an interesting one. Right now digital twins, actually in design engineering is a concept where I can create a model of a thing, same thing I designed and like put it in realistic environments, and it actually will almost perfectly perform like the thing it has modeled, whatever these conditions that I’m doing it under. So let’s say it’s an aircraft, so I put under various wind, air pressure, all various conditions, it will respond the way the actual thing or really close to it, and therefore it gives me a good predictive capability. It also allows me to do an awful lot more simulations that I could ever do in real time to a physical object. I can do them faster; I can do a lot more than… The idea there is that then I can make a much better design because I’ve gone through a lot more possibilities with what can happen with that thing. So that’s what the idea of a digital twin now… Ultimately it could be used to model ourselves or make something else… kind of taking it a field, and makes something that acts like we do, put a stand in for us for, you know, for some purpose or other. It’s not exactly us, but you know, kind of acts like a, that could be a digital twin too potentially. Or maybe you want to augment it for special purposes.
Shawn Flynn 36:44
Yeah. So Tom, what else did we miss today that you think would really be great to cover?
Thomas Coughlin 36:52
The total amount of things that humans do is just increasing enormously. And the amount of data that we make is increasing arms. There is an IDC study actually, it was saying I think 2018 estimates something like *fiber, something like 31 zettabytes of data generated. What’s a zettabyte, a zettabyte is a lot of zeros, I think 10 to the 21, if I remember right, of bytes of information. And that by 2023, that was like what’s going to become 172 zettabytes, that’s the latest number. And so that’s enormous amount of data that’s being generated. Now most of that data’s purpose is transient. It’s like, I need to analyze this right now. That’s where you get into this whole latency thing where I need to do it at the endpoint, or at the edge. It works very close and I’ll get a response very, very quickly because I need to make an instant decision out of that. Of that amount of data, probably something like two or 3% of that data will end up being stored in somewhere or another and has a longer-term value. And therefore, that’s where you’re going to end to the long-term storage stuff, that’s still climbing a lot. The whole idea what we store stuff on or what we use for processing, what we use for long term retention, it’s gone from solid state storage, you know, people using flash memory now, hard disk drives is still very relevant. Magnetic tape is in there. And there’s even people talking about doing DNA to store information on. So, I’ve actually been talking to a few people, some startup companies and done some work with some of them on some of these technologies. Somebody’s been using some essentially semiconductor technologies for DNA, building DNA devices, which is really kind of interesting.
Shawn Flynn 38:26
You got to go into more detail on that one. DNA to store information.
Thomas Coughlin 38:32
Actually, DNA, under the right conditions can last a fairly long period of time. And people have actually been taking the identifying relationships of creatures with each other based upon their DNA, even things that are logged in, like Neanderthals, older people in Northern Europe have maybe up to 2% Neanderthal genes, and they get that from looking at DNA. What’s happening on the DNA side is if you look at it, it’s like a coming together of processing capability of Biochemical Engineering to create the ways in which you can get a whole human genome, I think the price is something like $1,000 now. Give it a few years’ time and maybe it’s something like $100. If you do that, that leads to things like very personalized medicine as a possibility, or even, perhaps even a better digital twin. But also, the possibility that I could, in part of the costs going down as it’s getting faster to do it, I could record digital information and read it back on DNA and people demonstrate this. Their rates are very good right now. But people have been doing demonstrations of some of these capabilities. And ultimately, it could be possible to store information on DNA, which may be very, very stable. One of the really interesting things about DNA is that if I make one, I can make a million copies of something. So if I want to have everyone have a copy of some information, if I store, if I could write a whole bunch of DNA strands with that same information on. I mean, not very quickly, but all at once. And as the speed goes up, the costs of doing the processing goes down. And so it may be, you know, within a decade or so, it might be possible to actually have devices that will store rights and read back information stored on DNA, which has an interesting implication to it.
Shawn Flynn 40:19
So if that were to happen, all the guys that used to use magnetics, would they still be around?
Thomas Coughlin 40:26
Yeah, because it’s probably still going to be fairly slow. So this is good for archival data, primarily, I think, but digital data today is what paper used to be… to whatever its capabilities are and its longevity is. It is the way in which we’re going to be passing down information to future generations, that we’re going to be telling them who we are, what we learned, and what people before us learned and that kind of thing. Right now, the ways in which we generate data leave a lot of vulnerabilities. And one of the big things is just the pace of technological change itself, the challenge to retention of information, that the technologies which we use to record this digital information go obsolete, or the interfaces to hook those machines up become obsolete. And so, recovering data on old technology is actually kind of difficult. And being able to actually recreate a piece of technology with some software that doesn’t exist anymore is difficult. So there’s new approaches people are making to try to create maybe packages that essentially could emulate software that was used originally to create something that will carry metadata as well as the data that help you to be able to process it and pull it out of whatever it’s in. Somehow that use something like this is a better way of passing down data to the future from the present. It’s imperfect now, but there’s interesting possibilities there. And it’s going to be extremely important for the survival of the technological culture that we’ve created, and for remembering who we are and where we came from. So that’s kind of an interesting angle on, that is that we are we are threatening our own data by our technological development. And in fact, what’s really fascinating to me about this whole field is that every few weeks, it seems like oftentimes somebody at a university comes up with some new idea for storing data because data is so important to us. And so there’s people that will store stuff in glass, people that store stuff in weird magnetic structures, and all kinds of stuff. And they think it’s going to be the cat’s pajamas, you know, they come out with it, it’s going to replace everything else. Usually they don’t. But still, it’s fascinating to see the development of these things and the cleverness. And it’s like a human drive, because of who we are, to create data, to create information, and to be able to access that information. And that’s what the memory and storage is about in the long run. That is, essentially our civilization consists of these things we passed down in, like I say, given stories in the past, like of Homer. It was paper, papyrus, old books, handwritten then published, and now it’s digital information. There are challenges to pass that on. But I think that ultimately, we can do that. In fact, maybe even some of these artificial intelligence tools can help us better to be able to know when we’re losing data. And when to save that data and how to save it and bring it back.
Shawn Flynn 43:11
I keep reading and listening to people give talks about how data is the new gold. It sounds like right now you’re talking about we’re advancing technology. And at the same time, we’re kind of losing this gold.
Thomas Coughlin 43:24
We could be. Yes, in fact, we’re losing it. But we also have people around that can-do clever things to try to get it back to some extent. The example I was thinking there is, so the Challenger explosion, you know, the space shuttle… It fell into the ocean, and there were some old magnetic tapes around this thing, and it plunged into the ocean and it was under there for a few weeks. They actually recovered these tapes. And there’s a guy from IBM down in Tucson who recently gave a talk, where he is talking about how the recovered data from these old tapes that were severely corroded, and it was fascinating. So there’s ways you might be able to get data back but data is the gold or even platinum. So a lot of information right now has immediate value. For instance, sentiment analysis where, you know, I’m trying to interpret some information I’ve got from social networks or something like that and make an immediate decision on that. Or I’m trying to make a prediction based on that. That’s has an immediate value. And that’s where a lot of this transactional, the gold stuff is. But keeping data *bytes, maybe the end results of that data for a longer time may have some longer-term value. It may tell what are the bigger trends, the longer-term trends that are happening? Data has value on many levels, it has value right now. It may have value in the future when I learned things that I didn’t know today, that then when I look back, I’d see they were starting to happen already. Or that I didn’t know how to look at it before. And now I do and now I could see something that now is apparent that wasn’t. Our understanding of things changes with what we understand, the way our brains are working and the ways in which we look at the world. For instance, Albert Einstein had a new way of looking at the world and that changed a lot of stuff. The way we understand physics is because of his thoughts about light and trying to travel faster than light, what that would mean. Likewise, there’s going to be probably new things in the future, new ways in which we can look at things that will change the way in which we will perceive what happened in the past. If we do not have that record of the past, first of all, we will not have as much inspiration to try to figure out the things that didn’t make sense in the past, what will make sense of them. But the other thing is, is to understand how ideas develop.
Shawn Flynn 45:30
The value of the data, can you just talk about… because it was very interesting how you were talking about how in the future, we might be able to discover more information from the data in the past?
Thomas Coughlin 45:41
Oh, yeah. In fact, that’s already happened with some astronomical stuff is that people have gone back and looked at back in the day they used glass plates that they exposed through old cameras. And people have actually gone back and looked at old, now oftentimes digitized images and they have been able to find stuff that they weren’t looking for before. And so therefore they didn’t find it. The perspective of what we learn, and what we know in the future can impact the value of data in the past. It particularly is true of natural phenomena, probably also true of human beings, on the natural history level, or the physical phenomena level. The way you look at the world can impact what you see and if you often see what it is you expect to see, that perception I think, can change over time with the change in our understanding of the way nature works. That the example for instance is going from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s relativity, when he was apparently a teenager, he was thinking about what would it mean to travel faster than the speed of light? And that led to what would you see? And how could you see anything if you’re traveling faster than the speed of light? These concepts lead to new ways in which, you know, we look at the world, and then even things you’ve seen before and the anomalies that showed up before. Sometimes with a new frame of reference, check this off the test, for a successful new frame of reference, new way of looking at the world is that it can explain things that were not explainable in the past. And for instance, Einstein’s relativity theory was able to do that, things that cannot be explained like the orbit of Mercury. In Newtonian physics, that general theory of relativity especially was able to explain, and there’s going to be new things in the future, because there’s more probably, much more than we don’t know that we do know. And it’s going to take us a while to figure these things out. And that’s part of the value of keeping data and information, is that it has future value, it has immediate value. That’s where a lot of people make the money. But it also has long term value in terms of it may change the way we look at the world or maybe part of changing the way in which we look at the world that we understand the nature of reality itself, the ways in which things work together.
Shawn Flynn 47:49
Do you think in the future that instead of public libraries, where you’re renting books, there might be public libraries with different data sets that people can just run algorithms on?
Thomas Coughlin 48:00
Yes, I do. In fact, IEEE has a thing called Data Port. And we’ve actually been collecting data sets and making them available for people to do work on it. So you can try to recreate the experiment that someone did with their data and see if it was right. Or maybe you could try to find something new. Artificial intelligence and other technology are feeding into this. But it comes down to is, there are so many papers, so many publications that are made each year, no one person can know all of them. And a lot of them are very, very, very minute piece of new information. In the future, what’s going to matter the most, and what’s going to have the most economic value is going to be knowledge, not just information. In other words, something that gives me the capability of knowing what’s important, what’s not important. And I think, increasingly, in order to do that, we’re going to need to have data sets that can be analyzed, big data problem, that that’s where a lot of the AI tools are going to fit into, it will allow us to understand bigger patterns and things beyond immediate research projects on very minute topics and look for larger trends, to look for information that wasn’t available when you looked at the small scale, but is apparent when you look at or at least you can start to see a tendency when you look at the large scale. I think increasingly, we’re going to have be, you mentioned just a library, but this is more than a library. This is the generation of knowledge. And in a sense, I think we’re going to be transforming from just an information age to an age of augmented knowledge that allows us to look at information, to draw new conclusions, to make new analyses with the help of our algorithms and combination of technology. It’s combination of our willingness and abilities to be able to explore these things. And I think it’s going to have enormous implications in terms of the value for the future. Like in IEEE, we do a lot of publications. But ultimately, I think we, for instance, as an organization need to be focusing more and more on the generation of knowledge, on collecting the data, and creating and making accessible the tools to be able to understand and draw things out of data, maybe even beyond what was originally talked about. So this may be papers, maybe the original data. It may be diverse stuff, from patents to other types of information. But be able to look at all the sources that are out there and maybe be able to draw some larger conclusions.
Shawn Flynn 50:18
If all this information is digital, it also becomes borderless. Is this a way that anyone in any country, in any economic situation might be able to rise up and play on an equal playing field to someone that was born in the US or Europe or a developed country?
Thomas Coughlin 50:36
What’s interesting, interesting thing and actually, to some extent, you say our technology has continuously done that. For instance, there are many parts of the world where they don’t have phone lines, physical wires, because they just went to use mostly cellular technology because the technology was there and it costs less, and allows you to sort of leapfrog where things are. So I think increasingly, our technology is allowing, if you will, sort of the globalization of the tools that allow the generation of wealth and allow the creation of new things. I think that there… no culture need be isolated from these capabilities from these tools. I think that no one people I think have, I think the thing that is important though is create society or societies that encouraged bringing together this information that encourage the and I sort of personally, you know, think it’s free market type environment, but also where there’s freedom of thought and freedom of movement, where people can go and explore that which excites them, in which they will be able to make the greatest contribution in that. And creating cultures that will encourage that I think is an important part of being able to, that universal information, bring people from diverse cultures together. So whether that’s in one country, it’s in multiple countries, those tools will give us capabilities, hopefully, of doing good things, but also doing bad things. That’s where the ethics comes in again, is doing the good things and focusing on the good aspects and the good results of that knowledge economy, and of being able to use those tools to rapidly bring people up from poverty into some degree of influence and have some dependability of basics of human life that I think everyone really would like to see.
Shawn Flynn 52:22
If you’re a student right now, what would your recommendation be for what that person should study?
Thomas Coughlin 52:29
Study that which excites you and interests you, makes you feel that you have a capability and insights. But a lot of it is, you know, sort of the Joseph Campbell thing you know, it’s follow your bliss, do the thing that excites you, that interests you, that makes you feel that you’ve done something worthwhile, wherever that is. And for some, that’s the technological side like I’ve done. And for other people and maybe other things as well. Technology is definitely cool. You know, you can do a lot of fun and do some exciting things. And really impact people through technology and by knowing technology,
Shawn Flynn 53:05
Tom, that’s been some great advice and I want to thank Zahava Stroud with Angel Launch who has connected us. Her information will be in the show notes. And Tom, if anyone wants to get ahold of you or learn more about IEEE, how would they go about doing that?
Thomas Coughlin 53:20
My personal website is tomcoughlin.com. And if you want to find out about the IEEE, just go to any search engine and type in IEEE. You’ll find out big organizations, a lot of different parts you can find out about that. Where I’m the president of right now is IEEE-USA. So type in IEEE-USA and you’ll find the IEEE.
Shawn Flynn 53:39
Great. We’ll have all that information in the show notes. And once again, thanks, everyone, for listening to this week’s episode of Silicon Valley. Thank you.
Outro 53:48
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
