Spencer Kelly tells me that he can’t stop talking, which is a handy skill to have for a television presenter. In fact, this trait is why he put aside the career path expected of a computer science graduate from Cambridge University and joined radio. He started off at a local station in the UK, as a traffic presenter and moved on to hosting the station’s breakfast show.
Kelly says the early 2000s were a good time for British radio, though the years since have seen the medium become formulaic. “It was innovative and people were constantly trying new things. As companies start to understand what works and what doesn’t, there is greater control over what music is played and what people say.”
In 2003, he joined the BBC as an iPresenter, part of a small team attempting to tell stories using new media. “We were trying to use live streaming to connect with the audience, and I had done some local TV, so I was comfortable in front of the camera, though still a bit green. The project was slightly early for its time because people didn’t have fast-enough broadband. Six months down the line, the project was parked.”
His short-lived career stint as iPresenter then led him to join BBC’s television programme Click , and he spent a couple of years learning to use the camera and edit video, eventually taking over as presenter of the programme when the previous host, Stephen Cole, left in 2005.
Starting on a technology show right before the mobile phone revolution is about as interesting as it gets, and Kelly says he saw it coming. “I remember doing a piece of the programme about how the tech was growing more powerful, they were packing the old phones with 12 buttons full of features because they didn’t know what to do, and what could be the next interface. One of the things I spoke about was on a company that made a dual-screen phone, one of which was touch-sensitive. Lo and behold, the next year comes the iPhone! So I was on to it.”
Kelly believes that the tech industry will always be subject to such bursts of innovation. “The mobile phone just opened the fence and all this stuff came pouring through. It was the same with broadband, which gave rise to YouTube and streaming. We will always have these step changes, then we plateau for a bit before the next thing comes along.”
Indian jugaad
Over the course of hosting the show, Kelly has interviewed Bill Gates, Julian Assange (“and Paul McCartney!” he adds, still a little in awe), besides seeing some fine innovation. One of the stories he tells took place on his first visit to India, in a village about four hours drive from Delhi. “I remember there was this LED signboard that was lashed to a tree. The children of this village would grow up, and leave for Delhi, where they would work and buy themselves phones. But no one in the village had a phone. So a company soldered a SIM card to this signboard, and put it up, so it could display messages and let the younger generation communicate with their families. I mean, that’s jugaad isn’t it? They hacked some stuff together to solve a problem.”
Problem-solving is at the root of a lot of the development happening in India. He believes that, as many of the issues India faces — erratic power connections, sanitation, education — are not as prevalent in the Western world, foreign companies have little incentive to address them. “What this does is create a unique environment where there is plenty of opportunity for the Indian tech scene to address its problems, and that is fuelling a lot of innovation.”
The robots are coming
While he agrees that the roles different countries play in taking tech forward are changing, that magic word —innovation — has remained a constant. “The manufacturing industry in China is beginning to slow down, because of the burgeoning middle class,” he says, pondering for a moment why the middle class seems to have monopoly over the word ‘burgeon’, “Now, young people are earning more and don’t want to work so hard for so little money. So we have companies like Huawei, which is now the third-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world.”
It was a similar situation in South Korea, now seen as a hub for high-quality hardware. Kelly finds the eagerness of Asian countries like South Korea and Japan to adopt technology in every sector, fascinating. “You know what the biggest problem in South Korea is? Jellyfish. They poison fish stock, clog power station inlet pipes and cause all kinds of trouble. So the South Korean government just commissioned a fleet of robots to hunt them. Because, why not?”
The problem with anyone who grew up watching sci-fi is the tendency to interpret robots as always being humanoid. “The ultimate robot I think we are going to see soon is the self driving car. I think robots are coming. They might not look like humans, but they are essentially machines that move about and do stuff. Artificial intelligence is the next big thing.” That is not to say humanoid robots are not a thing. Hear him describe the the rehearsal sessions of South Korea’s DRC-Hubo robot, which went on to win the DARPA Robotics challenge in 2015, and you’d be forgiven for hoarding supplies in your basement.
VR is good now
In March last year, Click broadcast an episode in 360-degree virtual reality (VR), and unlike their stab at live streaming over a decade ago, it went well. “I think VR’s time has come. It has been tried since the 80s, and it didn’t work and gave people motion sickness. But now, the technology has reached a point where it can match what you see to the movements of your head perfectly, and is capable enough to produce a long-form programme with. It won’t replace television, but it has its uses, though augmented reality (AR) has more applications,” he says, describing his walk along the simulated landscape of Mars using Microsoft’s HoloLens (which he describes better as a ‘computer in a hat’).
The future is never easy to predict (“We were among the first to discover Twitter in 2007, but we just listed it with a bunch of other start-ups that were in San Francisco at the time”) but Kelly is of the opinion that a lot of it will be driven by AI and robotics. “Right now, the problem is regulations; a lot of the tech is already there for self-driving cars, but if it crashes, who do you sue? The car maker? The manufacturer of the sensors? The programmer or the driver?”
He agrees that this tech might take a while to come to India, as the “ninja-like awareness” required for Indian roads may be too much for tech to handle in its current state. “But you have Uber, which if you think about it, is what would be born if the taxi service was invented today. Look at the railroad, which revolutionised everything, and has been around for centuries. I think we are due for a transport revolution in this generation.”
