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Jonar Nader: Where is this thing called cyberspace?

Host: That is the real difficulty because if a transaction takes place on the internet where is this transaction taking place?

Jonar Nader: It is almost the same kind of question as when you close your eyes to dream, where is the dream taking place. Okay so it’s in your head, in your mind but where is it actually? Can you pinpoint it? If I pinch you it hurts but what is it that hurts? I know your arm might hurt,or your shoulder might hurt but what is it that’s doing the hurting?

Host: My brain hurts.

Jonar Nader: So what is it that’s hurting and the same question would be about Cyberspace. Where is cyberspace? It’s like when you write out a cheque to me and I go to the bank and I deposit it in Switzerland then Switzerland pays my phone bill, and the phone company uses an Australian satellite. At what point, and where is the money? That is the same as the question, ‘Where is cyberspace?’

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Host: Talking about storms in space and meteors, can they damage space stations and satellites?

Jonar Nader: You know the more satellites we have in space and the more space stations we put up (there is a new one going up called the international space station) we have so many storms in space that people do not even know how to measure it at the moment and they are not really all that predictable. You can predict the ones that are led by a great comet because you know there will be a great aftermath but sometimes they happen like thunderstorms happen as accurate as our weather forecasters are imagine they can’t even get that always right how are they going to know what’s going to happens near Mars but none the less, things do come our way. Something the size of a 10cm marble can travel at a distance of a maximum speed of 70km per second. Something so small can devastate a shuttle. In fact in 1993 the communication satellite called Olympus worth 800 million dollars was seriously damaged when one of those hit it. The worst recorded in 1966 there were 150 thousand small marbles lets say per hour, shooting around and coming near the earth. We have thousands of satellites in space at the moment and all you need is one or two to go down and you could virtually have a whole network down.

Host: We were talking about rogue commets a couple of weeks ago and the damage they could do to earth but what what is the worst that could happen?

Jonar Nader: Well if a very important satellite goes down then all of our mobile phones might be damaged for a little while, or the internet might go down, or the news reports might be cut so there are in fact very good and intelligent relays where if one goes down the other one can go up but I don’t think we have done enough drills on that to actually prove the point. We assume that it will happen but I think there will be lots of problems, so banks could go down very easily, things like that, and we are going to see a lot more of that happening. In fact, they are predicting one to happen next year.

Host: There really needs to be sophisticated telescopes to see all that stuff and be able to work out years in advance.

Jonar Nader: Yes, but at the moment they can only predict it by a year. That’s the accuracy rate, which is very poor. Even if a marble doesn’t hit a satellite and break it, the dust that is left over can settle on the solar dishes and therefore inhibit the light coming in to recharge the unit.

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Jonar Nader: The technology that went to Mars is so old that it no longer excites technologists, so what I am saying then is that many technologists can ask, why are we going to Mars? If what went to Mars is so old in technology then why are we investing all this money? Besides forget technology, socially what is the point of going to another planet? So we can put Uranium there, or so we can send the world’s over population there? I just need to digress a moment. What is this idea that the world is over populated, so we send people to Mars? How do we do that? We say if your name begins with A to F, line up here please we are going to send you to Mars so the world is less populated? What an absurd discussion! All we will do is go to Mars and populate it as well.

Back to the question of why we invest all this money in space exploration. The reason we can justify investing 150 million dollars in one particular launch alone, and billions of dollars over time,and in other associated technologies in other labs is that they allow accidents to happen. By that, I don’t mean the devastating kind, the shocking kind of accidents, but the accidents of invention. Sending people to Mars, the process in itself creates accidents for invention. The end result in one year’s time is useless; it’s nothing. The benefit is in what it does in 50 years time. This technology that we are using today in the form of mobile phones, or microwave ovens, or anything you do with cars, is 99% as a result of accidents. No-one meant to invent the light bulb, and no-one meant to invent the telephone. All these things and hundreds like them are accidents. That is what we want from Mars. You may say, well tell me what accidents are likely to come. Well minister if I could foresee the unforseen… we can’t! We just create the environment.

Host: But for instance just looking at the Mars probe itself as the little thing bounced along on its balloons and then one of the balloons did not deflate properly and it may well have stopped the little rover from getting out. They had to solve problems in order to make that happen.

Jonar Nader: Fine, and that is a wonderful challenge. It is like playing chess in such a remote control way. That was a lot of fun for the people doing it, and one minister or senator must have been tearing his hair out especially on the famous day of July the 4th. What a wonderful feat! I mean my airplane from Sydney to Melbourne can’t land me on time, how did they manage to land it on July the 4th for heavens sake? And they knew this years ago! I think they just must have circuited around Mars a few times saying quick quick, lets hope its july 4th so we can give our president something to cut a ribbon on.

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Host: Looking at the process of virtual reality, do we perhaps confuse the word ‘virtual’ with the word ‘remote’?

Jonar Nader: Yes, I think the word ‘remote’ is what many people mean when they speak of the ‘virtual’ corporation or ‘virtual’ teams. Sometimes they mean ‘not official’. For example, ‘virtual teams’ in an office are teams who do not normally work together but come together for a specific project. Remember the word ‘virtual’ means ‘almost but not quite’, so you can very well learn how to drive a car ‘almost but not quite’, until you actually get on the road-that’s assuming that you actually have to drive the car on the road. It will be ‘virtual’ until you hit the road. You can learn about much more dangerous things behind a ‘virtual’ car than you would if you were on the street in an actual car because on the street they are forever telling you not to go over 60 and you are forever bracing yourself etc. The best way to teach people something is to teach them its tolerances. Most people don’t know their car’s tolerances on a wet road or an oily road.

In the future when people will be able to vote through their computer or a local computer. That is a ‘real’ ballot box. It just so happens that it is a different way than we know now. It is in effect a ‘remote’ ballot box but it will only be considered remote until it becomes the norm. If everybody uses the computer ballot box at home for five years running, they will stop calling it the ‘remote’ ballot box or even the ‘virtual’ ballot box.

Then we have things like virtual bulletin boards, or virtual business park – a business park that has all sorts of business resources on the net where people can exchange information, buy goods on the net etc. Just like they have virtual shopping centres and virtual corporations (those that don’t have to have the building infrastructure in the middle of the city). Virtual coupons are the usual coupons you go to the supermarket with, except now they are just tokens made up of bits and bites and you can use them like virtual money. At what point will we stop using the word virtual? So your virtual office will be, ‘Honey I am going to the office’ which is probably upstairs or downstairs in the home, not necessarily elsewhere. But I think you are right, not always is ‘virtual’ the correct word to use.

Host: That assists me no end. I was speaking to someone in Melbourne the day they had the transport strike and rather than go to work and get stuck in the traffic he was able to work from home via his computer and modem and in that sense his home had become a virtual office but he was doing it via remote.

Jonar Nader: Yes, for example, you have things called the ‘virtual stockyard’. When the fish comes into a major fish market, the buyers these days sit on panels like a lecture theatrette with a keyboard on the panel, and they bid for the stock or the fish or whatever they are buying, via this pane. No longer do they shout at each other. Even at the Stock Exchange, very little shouting takes place, and they call that the ‘virtual stockyard’. Actually there is nothing virtual about it. It is ‘the’ stockyard and you do it there at the lecture theatre. What is happening now is a large percentage of stock is purchased over the phone as you can now buy at any major auction, so it is ‘remote’ but it is ‘actual’ not ‘virtual’. It is just one of those words that has to go through a cleansing process until people become comfortable with it, until it becomes invisible in the same way that we can speak over the telephone with a friend and you don’t necessarily emphasise that you spoke over the mobile you say I spoke over a phone, or I just spoke to my friend which is the more important thing to say. Just as you don’t say I watched a ‘colour’ television last night because ‘colour’ is no longer an important thing to emphasise.

Host: Although once upon a time in the mid 70’s when it landed it was, but as you say it eventually disappears in terms of the description.

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Host: We hear in recent times that the next step if you like in the use of computers will be where a computer can recognize your voice. Is that possible and in what way will it work do you think?

Jonar Nader: Yes it’s early days but the term around that, is ‘tele-savance’. The term ‘savance’ comes from the noun ‘savant’ which is a wise or learned person, or a person who has lots of knowledge about something. Here, we are communicating with let’s say somebody in London, and we are doing an operation in Sydney and the doctor in London needs to communicate to the other doctor. On their headset what they have is called AVATAR. An avatar is a representation of yourself. The reason that it is a representation of yourself, that is almost like a cartoon character that looks like you, not your actual self in video form is that the telecommunications lines can’t cope with video. Video needs about seven thousand times more bits to be transported through, so instead of clogging up the lines with video of each other let’s just form an avatar which is a look-alike of you. Ok so here is an avatar, but now I need to communicate with a doctor and say ‘no, no don’t cut that!’ Well to type that in takes too long and his hands are messy and dirty with blood, so what we need is ‘telesavance’ where he can blink or wink, or do the normal gestures that would go on, and which, generally, are not seen through a computer. So the study now is can we use telesavance, can we use facial expressions and voice expressions, and winks and nods and body language to communicate something to another person elsewhere? So you have verbal and gestural confirmations as we do when we are speaking, and nodding.

How will that continue and how that will go about is that you will need, either a camera on your face to study your facial movements, or you need pulsating type receivers on your body or on your movement, or you might configure your face with all sorts of plugs that can detect vibrations or movement. Some time back, several years ago, the large computer company Compaq put an ad in the paper on April Fool’s day for supposedly a new mouse, but it is operated through glasses. You put on these glasses on your head and if you look up twice it will open the window, if you wink 3 times it will close the window. That was an April Fool’s joke, and actually people rang in to say ‘where can I get one?’ Well they were not far off the mark anyway because the mouse is not really a very friendly thing to use these days, especially when the mouse is two dimensional, meaning you can move a page up or down and if you want to move sideways you have to unclick and move it and so on – it is too hard. What if we could have things connected like a laser beam in your eye, and you just move your eye about so your eye becomes the cursor, as a track ball would normally be the cursor. So here we have a new level of study, and that study is called ‘telesavance’.

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Host: One of the major hospitals in Australia is linking up specialist surgeons to take part in diagnosis and or operative procedures.

Jonar Nader: Yes there are two types of what’s happening there. In the area of neurosurgery you can have what is called ‘remotely assisted neurosurgery’ where it isn’t actually happening via remote control but it is assisted by remote control so that the surgeons from around the world can get the data, the heart and scan rates, and advise the surgeon on the spot, reason being, that neurosurgery comes into the area of nanosurgery and the margin for error is too minute to fiddle with.

There is actually surgery through telepresence, whether it be surgery on humans or on something like a bomb, or in open cut mines etc, where the remote surgery can take place. The idea is that if you can move a steering wheel and have the wheels of the car move, that is one on one, why can’t you do that through the satellites, so that you touch a steering wheel here and have something else move elsewhere, like you could in an F 111 or in an FA18? Why have a pilot in an airplane. If it goes down you could say is worth billions of dollars, and so is the pilot because it has cost you 10 years of training him or her.

Host: most of the activity in combat is done by pilots of the F111. The FA18 is in fact done by these remote controllers on the ground.

Jonar Nader: Yes, that is true but you still have to have a pilot in the airplane and you are right just like the formula one car racing, a lot of what happens (even though you still have a driver behind the wheel) is controlled via Japan or wherever the central headquarters might be.

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Host: The US government has signed up four American computer manufacturers to work together to develop a super computer capable of operating at 100 terraflop, now what is 100 terraflop?

Jonar Nader: 100 trillion operations per second. So imagine what a million is, what a billion is, what a trillion is. It is 100 trillion operations in any one second. That could be very useful for weather pattern reporting, cyclone movement tracking, but guess what the US government wants to use that for!

Host: War!

Jonar Nader: In fact it is interesting you mention that because wartime used to be what spurred invention. Luckily, because the war stage has been a little bit better in the last few years, there hasn’t been the necessity for invention so the government has put together a 50 million dollar program encouraging companies (in fact only 4 companies: Digital, IBM, Sun micro systems and Crey research) to put together the path forward for the world’s fastest super computer by the year 2004, hoping that they could then use it to test bombs, because they have a treaty on not testing nuclear bombs so they want to do it electronically.

Host: So virtual nuclear testing, it’s safer than the other isn’t it. This is one of the arguments I recall the French used for their latest round of tests in the Pacific. They said they needed the data from these actual tests to be able to set up a system of computer virtual testing.

Jonar Nader: Well you see computer testing has saved companies millions and millions of dollars but it is a question of psychology. Would you fly an airplane that has never actually taken off the ground but has been perfectly tested on computer? That is a tough question. Would you actually launch a bomb if it has not been tested properly? Computerisation and computer testing can help you refine things but at the end of the day unless things are really tested what happens? That is why nuclear technology is what I call the only technology that stands supreme as the one that cannot yet be improved upon as quickly as every other technology. Take the mobile phone, within years it is so small- the size of a matchbox. Well nuclear technology should have been that advanced but unfortunately, or fortunately, due to lack of testing it has actually stifled. So the government is saying let’s not let it stifle let’s continue, so let’s encourage organisations to assist us. However, that is not to say that these four companies are in the business of war merchants. These 4 companies have signed on the understanding and agreement that they will retain the intellectual property of their computers, and that they will be able to commercialise their computers for everyday uses.

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Host: A couple of words of the week to extend our knowledge, ‘Polymedia’.

Jonar Nader: Now ‘multimedia’ means multiple medium. That includes sound and graphics and animation and text and all those things. ‘Polymedia’ is something that will include smell, so not only will you be able to play the game that you are driving through a forest you will be able to smell the game that you are driving through the forest. There are already headsets being introduced in the US called the ‘experience system’. For a mere $12,000 you can have this system which enables you to have very high density, high graphics data glasses, a chair that will shake and vibrate and give you some G force, and as well as that, a few sniffs up the nose. The trouble is you have to wait for one smell to go before the other one pumps in.

Host: Smellavision

Jonar Nader: Hey good word.

Host: another quick one OTW another acronym.

Jonar Nader: Oh yes well if someone calls and you say Mr Jones is on the telephone, say OTW and it means ‘On The Web’, and instead of saying ‘would you like to hold? The question is ‘would you care to join him?’ Because you can join him on the web and have a session.

Host: The ever changing world. Jonar thanks for coming in, we look forward to talking to you from whatever country you’re in.

Jonar Nader: Maybe India

Host: Jonar Nader the president of the Australian Information Technology Society who next week could be anywhere in the world.

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Host: I heard discussions today about nanotechnology and so tell us, what is it?

Jonar Nader: Well let’s first think of the word ‘nano’. We know of the word million and the word billion they are on the big scale of the numbers a million is 10 to the power of 6, and a billion is 10 to the power of 9. Now go to the other end, the sub zero side, the microscopic side, a micro is 10 to power of minus 6 and a nano is 10 to the power of minus 9.

Host: So it is a billionth.

Jonar Nader: So what is nanotechnology? First if you look at all the marvels that we have had today, all the most brilliant things that we have been able to produce in this world, they have actually been produced with boxing gloves on and the light switched off. In a lot of the chemical world and physical world, it has always been hit and miss and it’s always been inventions by accident. You never quite see what you are doing at that microscopic level. Well what nanotechnology is trying to say is that we can take the boxing gloves off so we have a much finer precision to build things,and actually turn the lights on so we can actually see things being built atom by atom. There is what’s called the ‘wet world’ and the ‘dry world’. The wet world is anything that is living, like living molecules. The dry world are things like machines. If you actually look at the great advances in life in the last little while, the biggest boost to the human race has been coming from the dry world. The dry world has even helped the wet world. The things that we have been able to invent in hospitals have actually been able to help the wet world. Imagine if you were able to build things and change them around. Now if you were able to rearrange the atoms in sand and add a few trace elements and you end up with computer chips; if you rearrange the atoms in dirt and water and air, you end up with potatoes so…

Host: Do you?

Jonar Nader: Well you do don’t you, how do you get potatoes?

Host: The potato shelf!

Jonar Nader: Well you might, but we build them. So what on earth could we use nanotechnology for? Imagine if you could build machines the size of molecules that can actually repair cells and that you could perhaps even unify the great brains of physics and computation and chemistry and biology and end up in nanoscience so that you can custom design material from the ground up. If you think that the computer chip is marvellous, think that the computer chip is manufactured using what would in the microscopic equivalent be digging ditches. Computer chips are actually etched away. They use a lithographic process and pretty soon by about 20 years time we’re predicting that we’re going to hit the limits of it physically. We cannot keep digging ditches that fine. But instead of doing that, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could start building them from the ground up, even if not atom by atom, several atoms by several atoms. The promise of all that is to alleviate world hunger. How do you do that ? You can harness energy a lot better, harness electricity a lot better.

Host: Is this the next logical step in what has been to date the computer revolution?

Jonar Nader: It has to be the next step because if you look at the world’s population and the demands we are having on our world, we have to be able to say to a chemist, wouldn’t be fantastic if a chemist could write a script to the physicist and say build this for me. It is a lot of hit and miss. It takes about 14 years to build a substance that is actually useful. That is a lot of time, a lot of computation, a lot of investment, because some of it is so much guess work. But wouldn’t it be great if two brains could get together and say here build this for me and they could actually build it at the atomic level; and have little things like submarines that go into your blood and fix your blood. We are not just talking about dry technology here, we are also talking about wet technology. When we say nanomachines, they don’t have to be robotic type machines. They could very well be cells that work inside like enzymes work, like DNA works – all those things that work in the world as we know it.

Host: or as antibodies work or is that …

Jonar Nader: Yes, all these things that work at the sub-microscopic, we call it nanoscopic world. Everything in nature is made up of atoms put into a particular place. Humans are made up of atoms of a particular shape, well of course we are verging on a very big debate here, but wouldn’t be great if you could actually decide the shape you want from the ground up. What happens today if you want to build a radio? You actually get little components and transistors and this and that, and you engineer them together, but in the world of chemistry you don’t do that. Put them all in a bag and shake them up and hope that at the end of the day something comes out. Well what we are trying to do with nanotechnology is to put chemists and physicists at the same level as builders and masons who build things instead of shake things and hope to God something is going to come out at the other end.

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Host: technology experts suggest that TV might change dramatically from next year by adding a hard disk to it, for example, and some computer chips, television broadcasters will get closer, they say, to interactive television. What will it mean, and is it fact or fantasy?

Jonar Nader: The TV manufacturers used to be the big companies, and they still are, but they are a little bit disgruntled because the computer keeps beating them as the biggest seller each Christmas now. In the last 2 years computers have been selling more than TVs and they are thinking we are going to be left behind, especially now that the computer is being used as a web TV, where people can even watch things from their computer. The point is that these TV people are not going to take this lying down. They thought, why don’t we put a hard disk drive in a TV and keep the TV a TV, but as you are watching your favourite show, it actually records it onto a hard disc so that you can rewind, slow down, pause, take a photo etc. The chip can be used for you to give them feedback. You can turn a dial and say I think this commercial stinks, or yep this is very funny. They might even put a camera on the TV that doesn’t necessarily show things in focus but just general movement, like an infrared detector to see how many times you walk past the TV set etc. That way, the TV can become a little more interactive, say in the next 2 to 3 years. Beyond that, interactive TV means, I want to watch Lucille Ball in Japanese in this dialect now, and pause this photo for me, and so it becomes online in real time such that you can watch whatever you like. That will come when we have really super high bandwidths, and you will certainly need humongously big computers at the TV station end to cope with that kind of interactivity.