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The RFID story I think is interesting, because nobody understands it.
You understand it,
I do, but nobody else. Very few of your clients really get it.
Radio Frequency Identification Devices,
wireless barcode devices
with software, hardware, but they're basically entire PCs, the size of a grain
of sand as you know.
Software, hardware operating system: they don't need any power.
They will last a hundred years or more maybe two hundred years we don't know,
and Walmart alone needed 10 billion in the last 12 months.
That was just tagging the big crates coming in.
Metro in Germany is already tagging the individual cans of coke
and other products like that. And if
Walmart starts doing that, you'll be talking about trillions of these kinds of
devices entering the environment, every 12 months.
That means that I have an RFID scanner, I would expect to see
coming up here, maybe in this room right now,
I'd expect to see it maybe 1,000 (or) 1,500 6,000 (or)
1,200 (or) 1,400 devices all talking to me right now.
I know who they all are, unless you've encrypted them.
And I can see Sir, where you've bought your belt
and the prescription of your glasses and,
where your shoes were made. And that point, remember the future is not about
technology it's about
emotion. And you're starting to react
just like people started to react against Benetton. Benetton saw a
a massive boycott of all of its products because they started to label some
of their trousers with RFID technology in the United States.
The same thing happened to poor old Gillette. The reason why Gillette tagged its
razor blades is because *** razor blades are some of the priciest products
in the market. A box of them is worth more than 10-20 thousand dollars,
and did you know that 1 in 10 of all *** razor blades worldwide are stolen.
But yet, my customers, my clients, in the last 12 months
since introducing RFID have seen theft
fall by about 70 percent. It's a fantastic invention RFID,
it's the solution we've been waiting for, for years and years. Those of us who've
been fiddling around with SAP systems and goodness knows what else, to try and
track inventory
the problem was always getting the data into the system. Now we know.
It means that someone in China, who makes steel,
can actually watch tins of Coca-Cola
in a steel can go out of a Walmart store in Toronto,
and guess what the demand will be. They don't have to guess:
its all wired up and just happens. So it gives..
quite a big leap and doesn't stop there. This is brain tissue, human brain
tissue,
growing onto the surface of a chip.
And brain cells, your brain cells are programmed
to talk to chips. We don't need to teach them how to do it.
Here is a chip: you can see with those 6
round blocks sticking up. And those are to catch brain cells.
You fill glass of water with brain cells and put the chip in it,
and stir it up. Okay. You pull the chip out
and look at it under the microscope and you will find that
a few of the brain cells have got caught in these cavities.
And brain cells are very active and curious.
They don't like to be alone. They're community animals,
so the first thing they do is they put out a few branches or two, just to see what's
there.
And if they find a connection with another one,
they put out another thing, and another wire, and another wire
until you've got broadband. It's all about bandwidth. It's true.
That is how your brain works. The more activity there is in a particular
area,
the greater the bandwidth that gets built. And so you can see what's happening
with this great grid here and you can see that these brain cells are in a very
early stage
of generally starting to organise themselves. And you can see some bandwidth starting to
form there.
So there's obviously some active communication going on up there.
Fascinating. So we have the capacity already
to send a virtual Valentines Day card from you
to someone else the other side of the world using a combination of
RFID and SMS type technology. We're already doing it in mice and rats.
They already feeding each other, rewarding each other, and communicating
feelings
for each other virtually. And once again you're saying
'Oh my.' Because the future is about emotion it's not about technology.
We know we need a reality check, we say,
'Who's going to take this on?' A woman came up to me this morning. She said,
'I have to talk to you. I heard all about- my, my daughter was in the session
yesterday
at the SABC conference. She wants to know, your're a Futurist, have you got a bio-
digital brain?'
I said, 'Er, no.' She said, 'That's very disappointing.
I'm very disappointed I said, well my wife, who I've known as my best friend
since I was 16,
said, 'I fell in love with a biological man and said I want to carry on living with one
without the digital, thank you very much.' So,
emotion.