Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme, interviews Ben Hammersley, explorer, technologist, war correspondent and, widely recognised as one of the world’s leading applied futurists.
Ben Hammersley
Ben Hammersley is above everything, an explorer. Someone who wants to know more, do more, see more!
He is also a war correspondent, creator of a startup, technologist, applied futurist, broadcaster, technology journalist, security and technology advisor to the UK government and The European Commission and author of 64 Things You Need to Know Now For Then (Hodder & Stroughton).
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Amongst the many things Ben Hammersley is undertaking in 2016 – a project to build a space ship, a Physics degree and a paramedic course.
Here, Ben Hammersley discusses the state of the advertising and media industries and how he thinks they will meet their demise as well as which jobs he believes won’t survive in an ever-nearing post-automation world.
He also offers his advice on what students and those in the early stages of their careers should consider when deciding what they want to do for the rest of their lives, taking into account where society is heading socially, culturally and technologically.
Additionally, Ben talks of futurism and his work as a futurist his exploration the next big trend.
Below, read the full interview transcript.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:00:00] So who are you?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:00:03] I’m Ben Hammersley. I do many things. I’m mostly a futurist, a journalist and a broadcaster.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:00:12] If you had to choose one label, what would it be? Maybe there’s a label that crosses all of those other labels?
A Three-Pronged Career
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:00:30] I mean, if you wanted to be particularly pretentious about it, ‘Explorer’ is a good one. I’m a fellow of The Royal Geographical Society and things like that.
[00:00:41] It’s very difficult. I have this problem when people ask me what my job title is. It really depends on the sort of work I’m doing. All of the different job titles are all tainted in their own particular way. So, a lot of the stuff I do is journalism, but if you say you’re a journalist that comes with certain amounts of baggage. A lot of the consulting work I do is futurism or scenario planning, which, again, comes with some baggage and weird implications. A broadcaster sounds a little bit like being an actor/singer/dancer/model. Technologist is pretty close I guess.
[00:01:19] The other thing is that I’m constantly reinventing and constantly iterating what I do. I’m in the middle of a process of doing that right now. I’m also a pilot and a flying trapeze artist and I’m about to start a course as a paramedic that I’ll study all of next year. I’m also currently studying for a maths and physics degree. Sometimes I get accused of being a polymath and that sounds terrible because that sounds like one of those 14-year-old boys who have breakdowns when they’re 22.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:01:57] Well, what do you spend most of your time doing at the moment? Let’s say in the last couple of months?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:02:02] So professionally, futurism. I’ve been working as a futurist which involves a huge amount of consulting and speaking around the world. Privately, I’ve been studying for my pilot’s licence qualification. Over the past couple of years, My time has been split between speaking and consultancy and broadcasting. I did a big TV series last year and a lot of radio stuff. So, it’s sort of a combination of the two.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:02:34] I’ve just been reading about a project that I believe you worked on with your wife called The Serendipity Engine. I’d love to know about that.
Data – How Knowing More Will Destroy Some Industries
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:02:48] So, The Serendipity Engine was totally a project of Aleks’ (Krotoski, Ben’s wife). It was sort of a physical exploration into the concept of serendipity. Specifically, it was around the ideas that Google and many other of the large search engines of the time were talking about. Which was that they wanted to manufacture serendipity. This came from a turn of the pendulum away from the personalised stuff. If you remember five or six years ago, there was a strong push in everything from search engines to marketing to journalism of this idea that given enough data about the individual, you would be able personalise your offering in a way that would be incredibly compelling. You had targeted marketing, targeted advertising, personalised news and personalised content. And, to some degree, personalised search results, for example, from Google.
[00:03:49] I think what was really understood by Google far more in advance than it being understood by the marketing industry was that this sort of targeting was basically impossible. The content becomes incredibly dull and not very compelling, so you have to add in serendipity, these sort of happy mistakes, you have to add in a certain level of random input to give the content that spice and interest.
[00:04:18] It’s very interesting to play with what you can use as different inputs into somebody’s personalised results. This is tied in with all sorts of interesting things such as the psychology of cold reading and the psychology of mentalism and all of those sort of fake physic methods. They can be used to take clues and small facts from people to create what would appear to be incredibly compelling and incredibly accurate selections of content. People would then think the machine was somehow insightful or intelligent in a way that it really wasn’t. So, the project was exploring lots of things.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:05:12] So could you argue that Twitter is doing that already?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:05:16] No, because you curate it yourself. Twitter sometimes tries to add in information to your feed. They’ve been experimenting with that. It’s interesting to see how useful that is for people and how annoying people find that. It’s one of the dilemmas that Twitter has in terms of what actually is it. Is Twitter a place you go to get interesting content? In which case adding things into your feed is a bonus and an acceptable thing, or is it a place where you go to communicate with your friends and acquaintances? Then it’s not acceptable. Twitter is used differently by people, But certainly, for the way that I use it, that sort of intervention by Twitter is deeply unhealthy.
[00:06:07] I think how acceptable it is depends on how you use Twitter. So it depends on how public or private a space you think Twitter is. For many people, Twitter meddling with the newsfeed is very bad.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:06:20] What do you see the applications of the research that you both did on The Serendipity Engine?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:06:27] It was just for fun.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:06:29] That’s a good enough reason.
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:06:31] It was entertaining and a bit of messing around.
[00:06:36] I started as a journalist. When I left school, I went to China for a couple of years and travelled around Asia. When I came back to London, I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) to study politics. Whilst I was there, I got an internship at Associated Press Television, which is a big TV news agency. At the end of that internship, I became a freelancer there and worked as a TV news producer. At the same time, I was writing for The Times newspaper. After about a year or so, I became the Internet reporter for The Times and wrote for the paper about the Internet. This was during the in ‘97/’98 dot-com bubble.
[00:07:22] I was reporting for The Times and then I started working on technical stuff at home and I ended up writing technical manuals and programmers, guides and so on. Then in the early 2000s, I left The Times and went to The Guardian. At The Guardian, I did a couple of things. I was working as a reporter and then I was also building things for them. So I did a lot of technology work. For example, I built their first blogs, their blogging platform and I built Commentisfree, which is their political site and I built what was the beginning of their multimedia journalism platform.
[00:08:03] I was able to use that as a reporter as it enabled me to report from a lot of war-zones. I went to Afghanistan. Previously, I’ve been to Iran and Burma. I’ve been to the Philippines and covered the civil war there for World Service. I went to Beirut and took photographs of Hezbollah. At that time I was living in Italy and running my own studio in Florence where I was making things for The Guardian and I was doing a lot of writing and writing books. So I had this weird, three-pronged career.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:08:43] How did you move into technology? Because you studied politics and then you found yourself writing about technology. How did you actually move into being able to do it?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:08:56] It wasn’t a matter of moving into it. It was always there, I’ve always had a huge amount of tech around me and I’ve been online since I was eleven or so during the pre-Internet days. Technology was always something I knew about.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:09:25] So did you teach yourself how to code?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:09:27] Yes, but I’ve been teaching myself how to code since the age of about eleven. I really sort of kicked it up a gear when I was about 22. During that time, the late 90s and early 2000s, the technical culture, the technical culture at the time was very much around teaching yourself to code and learning these things. A huge amount was yet to be developed, so with a little bit of application, you could learn to code and add to the state of the art. I ended up building things for the The Guardian. and I also wrote books. I wrote the first textbooks on a couple of technical standards called RSS, which have gone on to be very successful. One of the reasons for upping my coding game was because I realised at that time that if I was to be writing about technology for a national paper, I needed to be three or four levels above the level at which I was writing.
[00:10:41] I couldn’t just be a regular reporter reporting on tech as many of my other national newspaper colleagues were. They’d previously been general reporters or motoring correspondents or something like that and moved into technology when the advertising money appeared. I wanted to have a deep technical background in order to be able to not make stupid mistakes in my writing. So it was a combination of something I was already doing, something I wanted to be very, very good at and something I really enjoyed.
[00:11:19] Those three things came together and led to this parallel track of being a technologist as well as being a journalist. But it also meant that I could leverage that into enabling me to do the sort of journalism that I wanted to do. I had a deal with my boss at The Guardian, if I felt as if there was one particular system that I built which enabled us to upload the video and text and so on together online, which at the time was quite a big deal, then I was able to parlay that to go and do the sort of reporting I wanted to do in Afghanistan. Like I said, I had this triple track career where I was a regular reporter, a technologist and a war correspondent.
[00:12:06] Later on that led to lots of other parallels. Understanding, for example, how the different business models of the Internet work, like how innovation models work and disruption works, has many parallels with counterinsurgency, terrorism and foreign policy. So, a few years later, when I was consulting to Downing Street or when I was working for the European Commission or when I was giving talks on different technologies, there were many parallels between the way that, say, counterinsurgency works and the way that, say, technological disruption works.
[00:12:48] These things reinforce each other if you’re working within similar paradigms. So, talking about the digital revolution on the one hand and talking about Islamic fundamentalism on the other would seem to be completely different subjects. But in fact, they have an awful lot in common with each other and there’s an awful lot that both sides can learn from each other.
A Terrorist Threat Close to Home
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:13:10] You made some interesting predictions about where the next potential terrorist threat might come from. I thought it was an interesting thought that you felt that the next major threat will come from a socially disconnected 40-year-old.
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:13:34] Yes. Absolutely. I don’t think that’s a particularly radical thought. So, for example, I’m talking to you from Los Angeles. If you look at all of the mass shootings or acts of political terror that have occurred in the US over the past 10 years, since 9/11, the vast majority have been disaffected white men. I would say that the terrorist threat in the West is massively weighted towards the right wing, white supremacist, disaffected, working class white male. Not to sympathize with them in any way whatsoever, but as a group, specifically in North America, one can understand where it comes from. This is the same in the UK, you have a whole demographic of people who have grown up thinking that they are in charge, that they are special in some way and thinking that they are privileged and owed a living.
[00:14:54] For the past 20 or 30 years, globalisation, multiculturalism and feminism have taken away that illusion. So when you see disaffected white supremacists in some states in America or whether it’s UKIP voters in the UK, what you’re seeing is a result of progress. You’re seeing a multi-generational stroppiness from less educated white guys who think the world should be theirs and don’t like the fact that it isn’t. In the US, there’s also a culture of guns and violence and access to such things, making it much more likely that they’re going to pick up a gun and start shooting people than it would be in the UK, But in the UK, you still have the rise of the far right. When we’re talking about terrorism or political violence, if you look at any of the statistics, the vast majority of acts of terrorism are perpetrated by disaffected middle aged white men, without a shadow of a doubt.
[00:16:12] The reason that this isn’t a conversation that is held very much is because the reasons behind it are so complex and involve so much of a reassessment of so much of society that it’s easier for everybody concerned to just brush it off.
A New Wave of Violence in the Form of Cybercrime
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:16:32] What we’re talking about now is violent behaviour. One of the things that you’ve also written about is the overall decrease in violence across the world. You felt there was potentially a correlation between that and cybercrime. I’d be interested in hearing more about that.
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:16:50] That’s a different matter. In that, you’re talking about violent crime as opposed to acts of political violence. If you’re the Russian mafia, it’s much easier and much more lucrative to steal money digitally than it is to steal money physically by knocking off a post office . In terms of political violence, there’s a whole lot more of it. Because there’s a lot more disaffection and access to weapons. It’s almost an epidemic, a psychological epidemic.
[00:17:29] Here in the U.S, there’s been a mass shooting every day for nearly 400 days. Not to mention the burning of churches, vandalism at mosques and temples or the not shooting related violence and casual racism. But that’s a different matter.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:17:57] At the beginning of the conversation, you described yourself as an Applied Futurist. Clearly you work across many different areas in that respect. The project Onwards, Friend focuses on the motivations other than commercial of founders of start-ups. Could you tell me a little bit about Onwards, Friend?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:18:16] It’s the company that I do my consultancy through. The motivation for it is really just for my lifestyle. I want to have a particular type of price and I want to work in a particular way and I want to spend my time and energy in a particular way. That basically means that I have to do it myself and it’s very difficult indeed, but it would be impossible, I think, for me to have the lifestyle I have and do the sort of work that I want to do whilst working for someone else. Starting my own operation was just necessary because it enables all the things that I value the most.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:19:00] You’re working on a near space project I believe.
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:19:05] Yes, so this is the area that I am rapidly moving into. The industry that I’m most interested in at the moment and have been for a long time is the space industry. With my futurist hat on I can give you a lecture, but right now we’re seeing the beginnings of what I think is a 40 or 50 year explosion in our capabilities in space.
[00:19:38] There are lots of reasons behind that. There’s the technological advances that we get from lots of industries together with technological advances in launch technology. So you have companies like SpaceX and so on who are building much cheaper launch platforms, plus, there’s the general set of visions of what is possible and what we could be doing in space.
[00:20:04] Hear in Los Angeles where I live, there is a very large community of space commercial companies who are starting to develop all of these things. That’s what I’m doing as well. Like I said, because of everything that I want to achieve with my lifestyle, lots of projects that I’m doing are very small. For example, over the New Year break I’m launching an air spacecraft, which is a very high altitude balloon that will get right up into the edge of space and do some science and take lots of pictures. Then, with the success of that, hopefully I will move on to doing low-Earth orbit satellites, which will be genuinely in space. Then that leads onto various other projects over the next ten years.
[00:21:04] I spent the last decade talking about innovation and the future of media and working with all of those different things. To be honest with you, I sort of sat down. I think it was really with the birth of my daughter when I looked at marketing and start-ups and innovation and disruption and just thought, well, this is mostly bullshit. So, I decided to actually build things, because I think there’s a real danger, certainly for me that we can be talking about this stuff in a far too meta way, especially around innovation and digital disruption.
[00:21:41] I went through a period when I was advising various governments on innovation. Where, every other week, I’d be in a town or a city that was attempting to market itself as the Silicon Valley for ‘X’. It was this sort of cargo cult innovation, where they think if they put in a nice coffee shop with some beanbags, suddenly they’re innovative. It’s an interesting and entertaining way to spend a couple of years and it’s certainly lucrative, but it’s rubbish.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:22:18] A lot of the founders of start-ups are using a start-up to market really important things. For example, cancer diagnostics, a technology start-up is being created in order to market that. So, the world of start-ups is quite broad, isn’t it?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:22:40] Well, sure, but to be honest with you, for every oncology PhD who has to start a new company in order to get patients, there are 150 social media accounts. Especially if you’re in San Francisco. If you look at all of the really high profile websites, they’re all apps to replace the mothers of 22-year-olds. They’re all start-ups which are scratching the itch of that particular demographic of pretty well off graduates. They need their laundry done, they need food delivery and they need the hand-holding when they get to the post office. That sort of thing.
The Issues With Most Start-Ups
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:23:20] So you’re very cynical about that type of start-up.
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:23:22] I’m cynical about it for a couple reasons. Firstly, because although they’re perfectly entertaining businesses, I don’t think they are something that should be on the front cover of magazines, I’m much more interested in a cancer start-up or a space exploration start-up or something like that. Secondly, I think those sorts of businesses are a symptom of a massive venture capital bubble. We need to be very careful differentiating between the symptoms of a bubble and genuine, far reaching innovation that you get with a biotech start-up or a new innovation start-up. One of the things that frustrates me greatly about start-ups is that all of the statistics, all of the studies show that most successful entrepreneurs are people in their late 30s to mid 50s. They have been working within an industry for a while, have the contacts and have an understanding of a problem within that industry. They have insight into an innovation which makes that problem a bit better.
[00:24:30] So, they are surgeons who come up with a new technique or the car designers who come up with a revolutionary new idea to make cars a bit better. They are people who are working within an industry and have the context and understanding of this industry. Then they spin out of their current organisation and create a start-up in order to create the new thing and that’s what pushes those industries apart.
[00:24:58] Those start-ups are invariably very successful, the innovation mythos is the 22-year-old white man coming out of the desert with the answer to everybody’s prayers and those guys think that they are changing the universe, but actually, the vast majority of them are fodder for venture capital. They’re just coal put into the fern because nine hundred and ninety nine times out of a thousand, they are total nonsense. I’m much more interested in the 40-year-old surgeon or researcher or someone with a real basis for their idea.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:25:57] And changing the world for the better presumably.
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:25:59] Well, not even necessarily for better, but at least it’s a real thing rather than just a copycat service with no value in it. That sort of thing just bores me rigid, but genuine innovation is really brilliant.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:26:16] One last question, if this isn’t asking for free information. What are your predictions as far as where wider business markets are concerned for the future? I read an article that you wrote about people’s working space and how open plan doesn’t work. Do you have any predictions, for example, working hours and where people will work from in the future?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:26:40] Yes, sure. So I think there’s about to be something of a wreck, certainly in the UK. Many people have jobs which aren’t really jobs. Either because, what they do could be automated or what they do doesn’t add value. I think that the combination of automation that comes with artificial intelligence and ever increasingly connected devices, combined with the realisation amongst a lot of people that a lot of businesses like marketing firms are mostly rubbish will lead to a real catastrophic hollowing out of the middle class.
[00:27:22] You can see this coming down the line for various industries. For example, we are, without a shadow of a doubt, going to have stopped driving trucks on the roads very soon. When that happens, the clock is ticking for the trucking industry and supporting business. That’s quite a few million people in the US and hundreds of thousands of people in the UK. There’s all these knock on effects after that. So, there’s a whole class of people that when their jobs are automated away and that will happen very soon, they really have nothing left to do.
[00:27:57] So the challenge for anybody working today is to line themselves up for the next two decades with work that adds value and which only they as human beings can do. That’s the major challenge. I think there are far too many people doing work, which is really work.
What to Study for Future Job Security
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:28:15] If you had to suggest to students which areas to go into that you would see as being safer than the ones you mentioned. What would those areas be?
Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent [00:28:27] Well, it depends on their individual talent and whatever they’re able to do that can add value. In the UK, the biggest issues are going to be healthcare because we’re about to have a huge bubble of old people and healthcare can’t be carried out by robots. If you want to future proof yourself for the next 30 years, go into elderly care or something like that. Or I would have hard skills. So engineering, medicine, maths, physics and biology rather than marketing or those softer, more persuasive skills.
Are the Media and Advertising Industries Going to Crash?
[00:29:13] Unless you can actually genuinely demonstrate why you as an individual are adding value, I think you’re somewhat screwed in the medium term because all of the trends are heading towards either automation or analysis and the analysis will show that you’re not adding value. There’s a longer piece to discuss here, for example, the upcoming crash in the advertising market. To bring this conversation full circle, earlier we were talking about personalisation. This is an area that involves enormous amounts of statistics and data about the individual consumer and that’s a really interesting route for the advertising industry to go down. Once you go down that route, you realise after a while that most of the work that you do isn’t worth it. That’s difficult because, specifically in the media industry, there’s huge amounts of the media industry which only exist because the data isn’t very good.
[00:30:13] If you actually had genuine readership data about magazines or genuine viewership data about TV advertising then those industries would collapse because the way that the industries sell themselves to each other is based on a whole tissue of faulty data. Nobody wants to be the first person to point out that nobody looks at the ads in magazines because if you’re the first person to put it out, you’d bring the whole industry down. Any industry that looks as if it’s destructible, I would back away from it very quickly.
[00:30:57] So, as a final example, the geopolitical reaction to Syrian refugees in Europe is tragic from a humanitarian point of view in the short term, but it’s doubly tragic from a humanitarian point of view in the medium to long term, because all of the countries which are turning away refugees are precisely the countries that need new people to go and live there. The UK, for example, needs a lot more immigration. It just needs it. The studies will all show that immigration is a net economic good in the short term. So they don’t cost money, they actually make money. But also those people are going to be very necessary because we just don’t have enough people to pay the taxes to pay for healthcare for all of the middle aged people who are about to become old.
[00:31:51] That’s doubly true in Italy and Spain and some parts of France. So those countries which are turning away refugees are being idiots, because we want those people. They are highly motivated, highly skilled, highly educated and very thankful to be here. So they sound great. Let’s have more of them. In the short term, that’s, politically, pretty difficult. So the question about students at university now thinking about what to do with the rest of their lives is to think about it much more widely and not in the same context as advice they might get from their parents, which is inevitably about 20 or 30 years out of date. They need to be making models in their head about what the world will be like in 10 or 15 years time.
[00:32:45] In 10 or 15 years time, in the UK, there’s a huge demographic problem and there’s going to be increasing problems with the weather and things like that. So they can be solved together.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme [00:32:59] Ben Hammersley, Applied Futurist, Explorer and Correspondent, thank you so much for your time.
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