Internet DNA Podcast

Why can't computers tell good jokes? Do you know what the first wearable tech was? Not some cheating cowboys in a casino but a watch, you did know that one. Well how about virus zapping jumpers, flirting robots, bras that know when you are running., lobsters that don't age, octopus who live forever. and technology that becomes biology, join us... but don't forget to wear the right pants.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

 

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of internet DNA with me Abi,  and me Dan, this week, we're going to discuss smart clothing, wearable tech. No, it's not wearable tech wearable tech is your Fitbit or your Google glasses, Google glass. Google glasses this is clothes, it could be called  e-textiles or it could be called the IOT of clothes. That's catchy. Isn't it.

 Are we talking about dresses that change colors according to your mood? And that nonsense?

 That's what the sci-fi books talk about, but no, we're talking about textiles that now either have. Sensors like haptic clothing or they have what's called conductive yarn, which means that they take the electricity from the static that you generate.

Anyways, you walk around with synthetic polyester type clothing, and it uses that for the energy. And then it sends information, tiny little bits of information using what Internet Of things use the very low bandwidth. It then sends information back to your phone. So the information it might send back to your phone is your heart rate, how much you're sweating and muscles stretch your temperature, anything about your body.

 So effectively wearable track, whether it's a piece of textile, a piece of rubber, a watch, it's the same kind of thing.

People have designed all manner of bits of textile to do different things. I was looking at something today about micro-generation, which are small things that they place in the fabric that when they slide across each other, when you move your arm, your knee and all your joints generate the electricity to power, all these different bits of wearable tech, whether it be textile or non.

You

 can have skin patches, you can have implants.

 Exactly. So you can have a lot, especially with COVID where we're all going to live in these little weird bubbles. It doesn't feel too far away where we're walking around in bio-haz suits basically does it anymore.

 Right? Well, the reason I wanted to talk about a smart clothing was that I saw a company in Japan Piezoelectric , what their clothing does.

So using the static that you produce their clothing, zaps viruses and bacteria. I don't know how is that, that it's got stuck within the clothing itself. So that's pretty amazing. So that's really good for COVID. I would go and buy a virus, zapping fabric, but they're not allowed to test it on Covid-19 coz they're not allowed access.`

It's very regulated. Who's allowed to test what, and who's allowed access to sort of bits of the virus, and they're not allowed to test their clothes, which I think is ridiculous. The amount of money being spent, you might as well test a jumper that might save you.

 Yeah, but if you've already got COVID is then useless.

 It's not going to heal  you.

 No it's only going to kill it on the outside, so it doesn't get to you.

 So it might be really good in a face mask because it's stopping the virus, getting to you because it's zapping it in the fabric. Yeah. And apparently as a human it's. Okay. Cause you can't feel the zapping.

 No. Cause it's micro, micro Watts. I mean, we let's start with the initial wearable tech or do you think that might have been,

 I know what this was, there were these two guys and they had a bit of wearable tech on their belt in the 1960s. And they went to a casino and this little bit of wearable tech could tell them where the roulette ball's going to land and so that they could cheat.

 But before that we had watches, which were a bit of wearable tech.

Yours was much more exciting, but not the first. Well, I think one of the biggest problem with all our devices at the moment is clearly batteries and charging and all of that. Really boring stuff. And so what's interesting about wearable tech is how you connect the generation with the function. So you're very movement is driving the electricity to do it's zapping the bugs and it's, it's reporting your heart rate and your temperature.

I mean, it's slightly worrying in many ways, but one of the things I thought was really interesting was I thing called cute circuit. It was a dress. In fact a t-shirt as well. It used your body signals like temperature, heart rate to change the color and the resonance of the fabric.

 That's terrible. So if you saw someone and you're like, Oh, they're rather nice. The whole world would know,

 I don't know. Maybe you can play with the parameters. So all it's doing is it's changing color. It's not like the culture book where the robot goes red. When it's angry, maybe it would go a light cyan when it was angry. Cause it's changed what the interaction of the colors are.  It doesn't have to be that obvious.

 I was reading today as well, and I can't believe this. According to Google analysts by 2020, which I sort of feel we're nearly the whole way through robots are going to be as good as humans at flirting and Jokes now I haven't really heard many robots flirting or telling jokes, but I'm thinking that's because they're still not very good, but maybe they're just going to wear the cute dress and then there'll be absolutely fine.

 Well, I think this is like when people said, Oh, robots won't ever be able to beat chess people. I think you'll find that once they've learned. Cause the thing about AI and all of that kind of machine learning is they just learn and learn and learn and learn and learn until they are that good.

 Alexa  does tell jokes. Kind of, yeah. And she does give compliments.

 Yes, she does. But she demonstrates the real problem with it, which is really funny stuff is actually quite shocking and slightly off the wall and computers to understand what shocking is and how to make that. Funny rather than just unpleasant or rude, but it's quite a task to do.

Did you know that Intel created a sports bra that responded to the colours sorry, to changes of the body. So it firms up and loosens off depending on the kind of shock.

 So you don't have to put on a sports bra, you can just start running and it goes, Oh, change quick firm up. That's quite good

 Yes you think about ok that kind of thing is actually quite interesting.

As you know, I watch a lot of MotoGP and they have in their race suits airbags, because obviously you can't have it on the bike because when you fall off a bike, you generally not connected to it anymore. And they have quite an interesting amount of tech in them to work out when to set there's no point it going off when you hit the ground, that's too late to work out the changes in your G-velocity in order to say, right. It actually needs to deploy before this guy hits the ground. So there are lots of things

 There is that fine line between no, they're just getting their knees very close to the ground and, Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Quick. airbags.

 Exactly. Which is  are they changing direction or have they been flicked off their bike and are now traveling through the air at a vast amount of speed, things like that. So with VPDs as well, which are a kind of compression foam that harden when they hit the ground, which can be augmented by electricity so that you could wear very thin body armour, rather than these massive stabbed vests that police wear makes them look really frightening. They could wear really thin ones that know how to harden against different types of threats.

 I'd quite like clothing that became waterproof the moment it thought it was going to rain.

 Yes and that was another brilliant thing. It's Iris van Herpen. She used a kind of material that was breathable until it touched water. At which point it became. Impermeable.

 Waterproof. That's very clever isn't it.

 In hot countries, you're constantly in this horrible place where it's hot and humid, but when it rains, it really rains and you want to wear something light and linen. But  actually when it's raining, you want something much more like a rain jacket.

You can see how the mix of technology to having the power to generate it so that it's not having to constantly be in charge because there's no point being in a rain shower and finding you haven't got any battery left. So you are going to get wet anyway. And then this way of making fabrics change their form makes it quite interesting. Going forward, even from a fashion point of view, fashion really has got kind of boring

 Fashion are using AI to help predict the fashion and be absolute immediate, but what I was reading this, it says, you know, fashions change on a daily basis and I'm thinking, well, it's not really a fashion. Is it? Then it's more of a fad for a day.

 Also, the thing about fashion is that as it accelerates, it's like music it ends up being no fashion in the sixties, everyone wore miniskirts and that was the fashion. And then we got into the nineties and they were like different tribes, but they had their fashion.

 Yeah. So the use of AI to speed up the ability to change the fashion. I don't necessarily think such a great thing, but the use of AI to be able to change the form of the material. Is amazing and Sci-fi books for decades they've been talking about. Yeah. The changing color and slightly sparkling outfits.

 Iridescence And also the fact that fashion becomes a little bit more interesting because it's not, Oh, it's a centimetre longer and the colors are slightly rounded and it's like, really, you know, haven't we done all the lengths and all the sizes and all the shapes already, at least once.

Whereas now it becomes much more functional design. How do you integrate into clothing? All the little bits of gich that we walk around with keys, payments, mobile phones. If you think about everything that you put in your pocket, or every time you go driving the car, all of those things could actually just be built into what you wear, your phone, your keys, to everything, your payments, anything that you use could just be integrated.

 Yeah but what if you go oh no I've put on the wrong pants and now I can't get back into my house. Oh, not that you'd have their own pants on out and now I can't get into my car or now I can't.

 What do you mean the wrong pants? What are you talking about.

 If I wear, if my pants tell everyone,

 You pants don't tell anybody your body tells them. When you put on any pair of pants, it goes, Ooh. You are Abi Fawcus effectively.

It doesn't go all your Abi Fawcus. It goes, this is your unique signature

 Ah, so it's not that the pants are holding the information. It's that they've got the conductivity to be able to pick up on my sweat and heat and whatever DNA

 exactly. Rather than having 50 pairs of specially designed pants, that are only for you, which would be a crazy way of doing it. And you would actually say, right, anyone can wear these pants and it picks up, let's say your DNA

 I hope not, I don't want anyone wearing my pants either

 but maybe they're self-cleaning pants. Yeah.

 That was the other thing that I wanted to talk about that would be really good. Self-cleaning and self mending.

 Yes. Oh, well, there we go. And actually there are fabrics that are self mending. Now they're sort of slightly organic. Yeah, not available to you and me, but in laboratories they've been designing fabrics that rebuild themselves, using a kind of an idea like DNA.

It's a very simplified version, but it knows how to rebuild itself. So it knows that I should be a string and I should keep growing on being a string until I meet another bit of string that looks exactly like me, for example, so that it can repair and it can sew just like your human body does

 Which needs to repair more as well as we get older.

 But the human body has a problem where we have Telomeres, which shorten every time your cell divides that ends up killing you because that's why you get old. It's a defence against cancer, which is as why we get older. We are more susceptible to cancers, I think. And it may not be correct. I think octopus or maybe squid, it's one of them sort of gelatinous sea creatures, or maybe lobsters.

They don't get older because they don't have this shortening Telomere in their cells. And I think plants don't have it either.

I think it's octopus octopus very, very clever. And apparently there is an octopus that has eternal life. Did I talk to you about this starts off as a sort of weird sea cucumber Caterpillar thing then goes into an octopus and then goes back to the sea cucumber Caterpillar thing and then goes back to, so actually, if we want eternal life, we need to look at the cells of these octopi.

Yeah they are octopi much like hippopotami.

 I was going to talk about something really interesting. And then you went off onto death now? what was it, squids eyes?  No it was on the self mending clothing. Right?

 Go ahead.

 No, I forgot what it was.

 Oh, so the idea of it is when you tear it, it produces much like blood or actually much more like a plant or sap.

And that sap is then recombines itself back into the original fabric. That it was much like when you cut yourself and you, you have a scar.

 I remember what I was going to talk about. So we'll move on to what I want to say now. I mean, I know that a lot of people, especially like my husband will go, well, I don't want clothes measuring my bodily functions.

I don't care. I'm fine. And if I know about these things, then I'll be constantly terrified that I'm going to die, which is what we were talking about. But in certain cases like hospitals or. Care homes or things. The fact that the sheets can absolutely monitor everything is amazing. And also in sports or formula one or anything, the fact that the team can know absolutely how the sports person is doing is also amazing.

And the rest of us, it's a bit like those who have Fitbits and those don't we choose, but I agree with you. What, I find interesting and exciting. It's the slightly more tech items, like my keys in my pants that we'll start to use.

 Also to counter that argument about, I don't want to know then fine, don't look at it, but actually having all that information about everybody and then seeing how those people.

End up getting ill, dying, all the different things that they might happen to them or not. They don't get you because you can then start putting all of that data into machines. That can go well, wait a minute. If I start seeing this kind of behaviour, even in an eight year old, I could see that that person at 40 is going to have problems with their eyes.

And I also know that by doing the following things, we can mitigate that problem. So if you imagine the amazing thing about everybody wearing wearable tech is that you get to pull out really amazing data sets from medical uses. Now, obviously you're going to get the same Facebook, Google, Apple going on, where they're using that information for less than helpful reasons, but not helpful to you.

 So what we're saying is, is helping people to live healthier, longer lives. So it should be getting to the point at the end that we're inserting, uh, octopus cells into them. And then they can live forever talking about inserting cells, actually once wearable tech or smart clothes or e-textiles are the norm, I think we will be more open to putting things inside ourselves as well until we're starting to use our DNA for storage. So people like me, who've got my notes. I can put that straight into my DNA and it's stored there forever. So we've started off with an enormous computer in a different room. And then we've got to a computer, a bit closer, and then we've got to have a phone that's always in our pockets and then we get too clothes.

And then I think finally, because that's where I really think it's easiest. Anyway, it will be inside us. And it will be on such a nano level that it won't be like putting a chip inside like you put in a dog. It would just be like our own cells.

 Yes. And we've become the, A-humans of the future

 Better than being a B-human or

 Or an R-human as they were called, which were the, remainders the ones that didn't tech up.

 And in what book is that?

 It's the one with the meld plague. Isn't it?

 Is it the one with the the rust belt? Alison Reynolds

 Revelation space. Exactly. It was a long time ago, but that R-human, A-human really was a thought that made me really think about, wow. That really does start to divide people from people who are massively augmented and then people who are not.

But effectively, when you look at your children, they have no, or very little problem with technology. So you think their children probably have very little problem with that for us, or I don't want bits of computer stuck inside me. 

 Oh I do, I need more memory

 of course, but I think our grandchild by the time they're our age, they will be jacked in, in a almost matrix sort of way there. Distinction between reality and virtual reality or some form of electronic fantasy is going to be much more blurred than ours and wearable tech will take them down that path. Once you're wearing pants that open your door, it's not a huge step to bits of stuff inside you. Why would you bother putting on one or just have it as a part of you?

And as you say, then it will become even more and more a part of our biology rather than a separate piece of technology.

 All right. Well, thank you for listening and we will speak to you again soon. Goodbye from me

 and it's goodbye from me.

 

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.