How will the climate crisis, social equity and AI impact how we live, work and develop solutions?
Social scientist, technologist, evangelist, researcher, and futurist, Nigel Dalton, explores Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism (TESCREAL) and what it means for Proptech.
Nigel Dalton
What is on those chairs? Like, man, that was somebody sat on those and had a tough panel. There'll be one of those later on from someone, but anyway, thanks, Naomi. It's bloody hard to follow you. So I'm here because a lot of you have heard me speak about jungles and zoos and the period of time we're in and what you're building within and how important property tech is. So, like, Kylie and I were talking about, well, what's something a little bit different, we can talk about and really think about some of the bigger picture that you possibly do get to think about, but maybe you don't. And it's a little bit of a warning from that future, because I, as a social scientist, I'm super interested in what that future looks like. I'm nearly 60, got a good 20 summers to go, and in that time, the world is going to change dramatically.
Nigel Dalton
And for you, as people who are providing both part of the solution and part of the problem in that time, let's have a look. Now I'm old enough to have lived through when computers were science fiction and they came in the form of robots and movies and we're watches which look like that. That I finally did get one, but it doesn't have. A floppy disc on the side and I'm into Agile and one of my former colleagues, a nerd from the Rea group, is a conspirator and the wearing of headsets and the building of metaverses and 3d worlds around property. And I love artificial intelligence. In the world of data, the big picture here, which we'll just dwell on for a moment, is the mad and amazing change that's going to take place in Australia around you in the next 20 years. Four megatrends, which you just can't ignore.
Nigel Dalton
So everyone to offer the greatest force in financial services and compound interest. It aims, it's the aging of humans. We have lived with this belief that there is a population pyramid in all the countries around the world and I'm here to tell you, it's turning into a population mushroom. And that's a giant dilemma, because the products and services you're making today may not be relevant to half of Australia. Why would you go making proptech technology for less than half of Australia? Oh, we want to deal with the sexy millennials who are hot with the internet, do all the social that's the people we're after, they are going to be relatively irrelevant in ten years time. We're looking at countries like Japan, a third of the people over 60. China, it's one to one under 60 year old supporting one over 60 year old. And we are rapidly heading in that direction and there's brilliant things you can do about that.
Nigel Dalton
My prop tech, or fintech of the day, is a company called Careful, who figured out that there is a pattern that can be tracked in terms of fraud against old people and their financial transactions. They estimate $28 billion worth of fraud is perpetrated in fintech alone. And I'm assuming that involves property transactions as well. Every year, $28 billion. What fraction of that is purported against them by people they know, friends and family? There's a property opportunity. That's the world you're playing into. They're pretty smart. Stop building things for millennials. Okay? My famous favorite example is the Yombo supermarkets in Belgium who build Chat Lanes. Not GPT lanes. Chat lanes. You get people who actually want to go slow through that transaction away from the so called self service machines, which seem to require a 14 year old every two minutes to come over and service you.
Nigel Dalton
But that's okay. Climate and the risk around that, it's already been mentioned this morning it is going to change the game. Does your property portal have some kind of a field that talks about the residual climate risk in that area? Well, I'm living that dream. Going back New Zealand. I live in a space where bloody Queensland send a Cyclone Gabrielle in February that was supposed to go and we're in some other third world country and ended up in Hawkes Bay in New Zealand. So the simple thing of that $5,000 was last year's insurance premium on my house. This year, $20,000. And I have a bankrupt local government area. So that level of I want to know that data. There are houses for sale that have dropped by five X in my area because they can't get insurance. They can't get insurance, they can't get a mortgage, and they can't get a building permit to fix anything on them.
Nigel Dalton
Wild and crazy climate thing that happened to us. Social equities. The diminishing social equity in this country is the rich getting richer and the poor get the picture? Thank you. Midnight oil is the thing that will destroy this society. What are you doing in your business plan to address that? Whether it's homelessness with people like Orange Sky Laundry dealing with that, or whether it's just the environmental inequity. I mean, New Zealand has the shittiest houses in the world and the fastest growing rate of respiratory. So how do you reconcile that? And the war is on between rich and poor, the landlords and the people in there as to whether they should insulate them or not. Expect that to come to you. And of course, GPT. And that's what we're going to talk a lot more about because this is a prop tech conference, not a social equity conference.
Nigel Dalton
So let's talk about technologies that were revolized. And I'm old. Look at me in my baggy trousers there on the left hand side, outside Apple in the 80s, looking at where they made the Macintosh, because that's where I wanted to go on holiday. An amazing array of tech from the last 40 years or so. How much of that has actually changed the way we live and work? Not very much. Of it, maybe the smartphone that's kind of brought us into this world where it's a bit more technosocial than sociotechnical, where the technology is actually starting to constrain and box the way we behave. That's an interesting era to go into. But in terms of revolutionizing work, it's a bus, basically. We all love it so much and part of the dilemma is there is so much of it. We all got laptop computers, right, who did less work or who just took their work home.
Nigel Dalton:
In terms of productivity, this has delivered almost nothing for Australia because we work longer hours and we've got more people working those hours. Look at the OECD stats and this room. Don't be guilty of this, because I am. 20 years I've been hardcore in the digital industry, creating this archaeology of shit legacy systems for people, selling them far too much technology. So if you just think, oh, yeah, well, you've got 14 different things and you think, look, we'll unify them all in this one. No, now you've got 15 systems in your company. Typical player at the front edge of this industry, in real estate agencies, property management, those kind of things, probably has 20 pieces of software there that are critical to that thing, most of which they don't know about or how it works. We build our computer systems the way we build our cities over time, without a plan, on top of ruin.
Nigel Dalton:
And it's a massive dilemma and that's somebody else's problem. I'm building the brand new unified system for management of all systems. No, that's never going away. We need to get good at migration, we need to get good at Pruning of systems and that's where the investment is going to have to be in time, not on hiding another transaction based software as a service on the credit card of a junior employee, which I know is half of your strategy. So let's not do that. Red balloon. Funnily enough, I have a red balloon as well. But this is the surface area of your company's computing or your client's company's computing in a security sense that has become unfathomably complex for a small business person. Today, Naomi talked about getting the very first people. Just get them to buy a computer. Now, I'm imploring you, just get them to stop buying computers.
Nigel Dalton:
Because in a world where data and privacy and legislation and consequences are becoming serious, this is every single human today. And whether they're my 89 year old dad in an old people's home who's like at dire risk of having his financial the last of his wherewithal ripped off by someone because of his naivety, or whether it's a smart young person who's going to make a mistake with their data. We all have red balloons and this shiny object. We're just with a laser like CEOs all over, just going, I've got to have some of that juicy tea. You don't, which is going to insult at least half the people who paid to have a stance. I apologize in advance. Have a look through it, because there are some pathways, and this is the philosophical section of it, right? Three pathways could happen here based on all of that experience of what happened with everything from the earliest of Mac to all the different technologies, the fax machine, the cyclistyle machine, which only Peter Brewer knows what it even is in this room.
Nigel Dalton:
Let's have a look. Option one, do you know what this is? The AI future. And AI just becomes like a typewriter. The typewriters just automate a particular process. It made virtually no difference to the world. Option two is the model, not the kiwi middle. It is the middle. It's the model in the middle, which is terrible for a kiwi today. But this is where we don't know. This is where it's coming at us, at those waves so fast on the graph that Naomi has. And the third option, which we'll talk about, is the mad world of who's driving this and where's the money going and what is the agenda of the likes of Elon Musk. We talk about that for a bit and we're going to put that back in its box so you don't have to worry too much about it from there. So let's talk about the low impact scenario for AI, which you're all a bit disappointed by because you're going, oh, that's my offering.
Nigel Dalton:
I've bladed my thing over. Chat GPT OpenAI API. That's what I'm selling. I'm going to get amazing agencies to write property descriptions with Chat GPT. Okay, well, here we go. It's a whole new level of disruption. And here's the quote. Fascinating. There's a new writing technology drawing big clouds, used in eye popping demonstrations. While there's excitement in some quarters, there aren't many people actually using it. Instead, there is skepticism and even anger. Reading something written with it feels insulting. It's too impersonal, it lacks a human touch. It comes off like bland corporate marketing. Not only that, but using it is expensive and it feels like an invasion of privacy. That's chat GBT, isn't it? No, that's a typewriter. So that comes from the wonderful writing machine 1954, Bruce Blybin's book. And the public feel for what that was bringing was that it was insulting or an old fashioned officers in the early 19 hundreds.
Nigel Dalton:
It actually did have a bit of a revolution in the United States, because it didn't getting women into jobs because the YWCA decided they would go proactive programs of lifting their skills all times the average income of a woman in other work, manufacturing or office work for a typer. We call them typewriters. The job was typewriter until they called the machine typewriter. That's scenario one. Scenario two, the medium impact the model. Large language models everywhere. It's a nightmare, isn't it? And look at the rapid rise of these technologies in time. That's the phenomena. That's the thing naomi was pointing out was it's getting faster. What you need to appreciate is that what we're going through at the moment is a hype cycle one branch of an incredible tree that goes back decades. And in becoming obsessive about that one, you're forgetting the other good branches.
Nigel Dalton:
Right now, it's not for free either. OpenAI reporting what likely 1.3 billion this year. Microsoft have a budget on hate to be their sales manager of $10 billion. Revenue from Chat GBT generated OpenAI revenue this year. And you know how they're going to do it's? Quite simple. So what's going on? What we're going is chaos. Genuinely generating chaos. And thanks to this brilliant bloke, Steve Bannon, he explained how that's done because he advised a bloke called Trump on how to do it. Number one, create chaos. Because within opportunity lies within chaos lies opportunity for new young technology people making magic stuff. Step two, when people start to ask awkward questions about it, like the media, is this really adding value for small businesses in Australia? Flood the zone with shit so that they're so confused on a daily basis that nobody knows if technology is good and we trick them into buying more and then finding the truth amongst that is so hard.
Nigel Dalton:
Who knows? Like, I don't even know. I love this story. USAF drone kills operator in grim prediction a future where sentient robots take over. Do you see that story? Oh, we all panicked and went, oh, my God, it happened. Except it didn't. It just never happened. Somebody basically interviewed their typewriter after a talk where a military person said something completely different and the speed at which misinformation flows in our society is now phenomenal. That said, it's quite frightening because whether you mandated it or not, in your workplace, people are using this stuff. Whether they are software developers, marketers, content creators, designers. They're curious, so they're giving it a go. We had an event recently where had a speaker from America come in and had brand new books out and one of our staff decided the brilliant idea would need to get Chat GPT to get a summary of the book, rather than actually read Peter Wheels inch thick book on technology strategy, which I'm sure you've all read.
Nigel Dalton
And then he circulated around our team who as the briefing document for the event. I didn't have time to read it. I did the next day and went, did any of you have a conversation with our customers based on this briefing note? Because it is completely wrong. It never tattoo, panty, nothing. It had never read that book. The book's new, so our people looked as dumb as a bag of hammers, sitting at desks at lovely dinner tables, explaining the book with things that were not even in the book. You're like, here's four explosions that are going to happen. Chat GBT got none of them. That's your risk. Now, be super careful how to characterize your I love this. My favorite things as a social scientist. So here's a paper on a John Davis conceptual metaphors impact perceptions of human AI collaboration. And I look at how you're pitching your amazing automation through AI.
Nigel Dalton
Be super careful because in terms of human adaptation and adoption of those things, there's only really one recipe. Our resident PhD in artificial intelligence, dr. Sarah Bell. To be. She nailed it with Rita. Rita was a child. And it is you have to train Rita and Rita's a toddler and makes mistakes and Rita grows up. It's that if you come in with this AI is so smart, it's going to solve the problem. Nobody in your office is going to use it. So stop pitching anything you make that way and you can download that paper later. Now, when crime adopts a technology, you know something's going, oh, that's what I'm doing, I'm going the wrong way. Read the instructions. So, yes, when crime adopts technology, you know that's a problem. And crime adopting generative AI is one of the areas that's just going to be chaos going forward because you start to make quite credible players who are able to at scale attack your customers databases, ring them up with a very credible voice.
Nigel Dalton
I mean, there's tens of millions of dollars already being lost through the stupidest frauds in Australia and they could have your brand on them because someone's just going to hijack what you do and what you nigel here from Superproptech.com and we've just noticed that parcel hasn't been delivered and so we'd like your credit card number, please. An alarming number of Australians give their credit card numbers and gen AI is an incredible opportunity to expand that. Trust me, if humans made this thing, there is bias. And at some stage you will be accountable for this. As a leader in this industry, you need to stand up for the fact that we make machine learned AI based things from human work on sets of data that there is going to be bias within. So stop talking about any kind of magic, oh, no, we can take the bias out of hiring.
Nigel Dalton
We can take the bias out of this. No, you are just institutionalizing at scale the bias that went in the first place. If you train an AI and you live in a particular area and you don't like those kind of people, well, they are going to end up not renting through the magic tenant selection system you've created. And you've got to get comfortable with fact this thing might produce. Bullshit. This is a really interesting social science case study. You've probably heard about the lawyer who went to court in America with the Chat GPT generated case law, the precedent that meant their client should be able to sue the airline for losing their baggage. And the judge just went, I don't know, I'm not sure that's right, and went to look up the cases entirely made up. So eventually, about a month ago, they finally brought the judgment down on what should happen to that law firm.
Nigel Dalton
There was some extenuating circumstances. So the lawyer wasn't stupid, the lawyer wasn't naive. Do you know what had happened? Their boss was too cheap to allow them access to Lexusnexis. So there you go. The management consequences of the frameworks you set up for running an organization. They wouldn't buy West Law. They wouldn't buy Fast Law. Limited subscriptions. And so that hardworking. Desperately trying to solve the problem. Employee did their level best. But that's out there. And my favorite mythology around. Let's face we're human. The strongest thing we wish to enact on this world is revenge. So we all want revenge on Google. They've got too much money. They know all about me. Let's get rid of Google. Chat GPT is going to replace Google for search. We're so excited by that. No, it's not. It just doesn't work that fast. Okay. Indexing within the science of Google is a phenomenal scale thing.
Nigel Dalton
That's one of the edifices of human technology to be able to do that. And Chatt can at best sit on top of those search indexes, which are the old way of doing it. And all you're doing is having a conversational relationship with something that serves you five times as many display ads. There are no miracles here. Follow the money and regulation is inevitable. Australia a little bit behind the bull on this. Europe just forging ahead with all sorts of things that make business models illegal, make products and services illegal. Wow. And it is the Wild West right now, so you need to have some expertise and thought on that. And I suggest not consulting Chat TPT for your legal advice. And also know that it's not equal case. They are for billions of dollars against OpenAI from writers, journalists, newspapers. I forget which group wants 5 billion.
Nigel Dalton
And every time a story is quoted $180,000, an OpenAI actually is going, no, la la. I don't want to know about that stuff. Japan, no copyright law applies to any materials read in the training of an artificial intelligence. My wild prediction, OpenAI moves to Japan. So that wow. That's escaping the law. This is where things change quite quickly around you that's really material and significant. And finally, let's talk about the absolute nut far into this market. And I have fortunately brought along the equipment we need to have this discussion. Okay, I'll hand them out. There you go. Make yourself a hat to move along, all right? Because this is the territory we're entering now, the terrestrial world. And if you haven't heard of it, that's fine. This will be the last you need to know about it, but you need to know what's driving this industry and the madness of investment and data and where is the money going.
Nigel Dalton
I had to write down what test reality is. The words are so long, it's Transformationalism, extraponianism, singularism, cosmism, rationalism, effective. Forgot that one. And long termism effective. Altruism. What does all that mean? Well, it's science fiction, essentially. It's people imagine that this stuff could be real, these movie scenes of how we're going to live out our lives. Now, in all of these movie scenes, the thing to remember as a social scientist is that some people are doing better than others and the technology is being used to create the constraints. Very aware that I'm going to appear on social media and someone says with a piece of aluminium foil on my head, but that's okay. And here's the rabbit hole. I've summarized it for you, so don't have to. It's just a very weird coincidence that the same names that were behind every other bro tech patriarchal technology of the last 20 years turning up now, promoting Chad GPT and the hauling in of all of the data bitcoin blockchain, just the names, are exactly the same people.
Nigel Dalton
Sam, Bankman, Fried at the core of these mad philosophies and they're all basically looking towards this crazy scenario that without one of these you can upload your brain to a digital world that's serious. Like, just stop for a moment and realize that they are serious about that. So we've got Neuralink doing human trials now with Musk right at the top of our heat investor in OpenAI. We've then got Ray Kurtzweil, the man with the worst dress sense of any futurist in the world. And then the Tech bros, meta, Google, Microsoft, all of those people. Now, what they're relying on is that we will get to good enough GPT to be a really brilliant fake for it, and along that way, make a shit ton of money out of display advertising and a shit ton of money out of $30 a month subscriptions. Because you need to generate the illustrations in your next PowerPoint pack for an investor.
Nigel Dalton
So sure, I'll pay $30 a month for Microsoft Office with the AI bit in it, and it'll do Pivot tables where I never could, and it'll do spreadsheets better and it'll write paragraphs in my Word documents. It's an absolutely mad world now. Machines learn quicker than humans do. Humans take months, years and generations to learn. Machines can teach each other on math. Imagine how hard it is to get 150 people into this room, link 150 computers and duplicate your knowledge overnight. Change happens very quickly. And the long termists, they're possibly the worst of all of this. And they're going, you know what, it wouldn't matter if a billion people died today because in 100,000 year long term that's better for the planet. Just get the level. Pretty much every element of this comes back to you, Jim, but it's perfectly acceptable. So what we should do is hit the accelerator on every kind of artificial intelligence research, collect every piece of data we can on the planet and just go hard and if it harms people with less resources, with less access to power, then that's just the long term consequences.
Nigel Dalton
And people in 100,000 years will go, oh, well, the great plague, the great I O AI plague of the 2020. These people exist. They are funding a huge amount of the research agenda for AI. And just remember, you're sitting on top of them. Anyway. Life 3.0 great book. Maps technologies talks about it. These ones are special EAC, effective acceleration. So you kind of go down the rabbit hole a long way. These people are that's a great illustration of it. This is basically, you know what, just strap on the rocket to every form of unfair biased, uncaring, wrong artificial intelligence and just let go. And if there's harm created along the way in the long term, it doesn't really matter. I don't wish to live in that world, okay? But it's this world. It's Black Mirror, the San Junipero episode. Just Google that and watch that.
Nigel Dalton
That's what they're chasing. That's what Eurolink and all these things are about. And it is the bro town of the world of tech. And you know what? That social equity thing is going off inside me. Right? So what do we do? What's the sensible approach to this? Well, don't go and rebuild your prop techs that you come here to talk about those kind of things. That's the best meme I've seen about what it actually means in the moment out in society in Australia today, about generative AI. This is what everyone's doing. They are completely forgetting the underlying mechanics of this thing. And I work for a company who goes in with a generative AI proposition, and it's about two minutes before you go. So you don't have well ordered data, do you? You have five companies, you bought three rolled up CRMs, whole bunch in a spreadsheet that Gary runs and a 0% chance we can actually do anything about.
Nigel Dalton
What's your next best action or something that might be useful for tenants? Zero chance. So get plumbing data you got to be aware of. You call it the new oil. No, it's the new uranium. It's toxicity over a long time and you holding on to the wrong data and too much data. This is the war on at the moment. The amount of data collected in the process of a rental application is appalling and you've been caught up by the legislators and that's only going to get worse. And the way this goes is personal accountability and liability. Well, that's too tough. Nobody else is being treated as badly. Well, you're all working and supplying an industry who just loves data. And we get to the point where is the boundary? Where is your moral boundary? In line in the sand with technology. You need to talk about this with your partners and your customers because body cam technology, facial recognition, sentiment recognition, language recognition that the police have in mad police states like America with those things.
Nigel Dalton
It's an office work. Is that cool? Is that cool tech? How long before property managers all have a body cam and a recording of every call to figure out the level of hostility of that property owner? And you know what? We're going to report that off to some authority. I probably just started someone with a brilliant idea for a new startup because I don't know whether you noticed, but Officework Works have trialed these cameras and it's the best sell ever. Oh, it's for the safety of the employees and the other customers. We just need to track customer aggression towards each other and poorly performing managers who seem to use profanity during one ones. It's great. It's protecting the people, isn't it? I don't think it is necessarily, but it's a moral line in the sand. I don't want retail staff in Australia to be used by customers, but I'm not sure I want connected body cams connected to AI, because all we've done in proptech in the last 20 years is automate this.
Nigel Dalton
That's an advert from Adelaide from about 1999, I think. What happened to the poor illustrators who lost their jobs when we didn't color illustrate those anymore? And that's Hong Kong. This is a high tech level of portals in Hong Kong. It's called the lamppost. We knew how that world worked and all we did was we put bits and bytes and processes and connections together. And that's the prop tech industry of Australia. And I'd like you to stop doing that. I'd like you to start thinking about how do those human needs the jobs to be done that we talked about. It means I don't need to talk about them, but people don't get out of their office and figure out how the sausages are made. Because what you do, sarah and I talked about this. What is the first step to harnessing technology for your business is first, find the problem.
Nigel Dalton
There's nothing dismays me more than the obsession of my real estate network going, oh, my God, I can write property descriptions with Chat GBT now. It's just so amazing. And I walk them through and I say, okay, take me through how you got a customer and monetize them. Well, I started like, six months ago and I had this lunch and I sponsored the school thing. And then after that I did an email and then they got them on the database and then they were on another database and I rationalized database. Then I got someone to call out them and they were just a tenant and write you here. And then they decided to sell the house. So we did all the forms in the section 32. And that bit of paper there is the step where they were writing the property description. I don't know.
Nigel Dalton
We had a human come around to do ours. Took Sarah 40 minutes to write it, and I think she probably. Charged about $100. Is that the biggest problem in technology, in real estate in Australia today? Is Automating the typewriter the thing we want to solve? Or is Automating a little more of? Who got access to that database? Who was allowed to see that property? Who wasn't? Through the bias of property managers and people? These are the problems we want to solve. And these are the problems we want to solve. Stop making trivial parts of this industry automated. So that's it. Thank you.
