“Who was the monopoly giant yesterday, tomorrow may be nobody.” Interview with Evgeny Chereshnev from Biolink.Tech

    For almost two hours we talked with Evgeny Chereshnev about how you can and should be with Facebook and Google. He told what alternative software platform he was preparing and what kind of smart bracelet he was developing at his company Biolink.Tech. I found out how his third year lives with a chip in his hand and what digital DNA is. And finally, we talked about who would be better: a humanist or a techie.



    The interview was prepared for a long time, in several visits. Because his company has offices in Moscow, Europe and the USA, and he often travels around the world with lectures and speeches. The conversation even had to be divided into two parts, because it was time for the wife to take the SVO-LHR flight, and there was still a lot to discuss.

    - Hello! You and I tried to organize this interview for about a month. What projects require so much of your attention that you have become almost elusive?

    - Biolink.Tech - this is my main child. The vast majority of my time goes there. Unlike Mask, who is simultaneously the CEO of three businesses, I have a tough British contract, so I have no right to have any other companies in the field of AI and bigdata.

    But there are no restrictions on public speaking, research, hackathons, writing books. This is all I do quietly with those with whom I like it. There are good contacts with Russian guys - with the same ITMO and with Innopolis. There are international campuses and sites: British, Swiss, American. In general, there are many smart people in the world.



    I really like to find solutions to problems that no one has yet found, for which no one undertakes for various reasons. Somewhere - these are political risks, somewhere "in the bastard", somewhere resource-intensive. I agree with CheGuevara, who said that "If your path is free from obstacles, most likely it will lead the wrong way." My position is not to do what is simple, but what is important. These are different things. Che and I have a lot in common: we were born on the same day, I could also be a doctor, made my motor race around the world and eventually became a revolutionary. But that's another story.

    - Tell Habra what Biolink.Tech does?

    I thought and understood for a long time why the Internet works the way it works - with a thriving total tracking, the hegemony of the same Google and Facebook for contextual advertising - why all the money flows there. After all, there is nothing just like that, everything has a cause and everything is a consequence. It turned out that everything was simple: when the Internet only appeared as a substance, the first million of its inhabitants were military, students, scientists, hackers, in short, true noble dons. And when the first business rushed to the Internet with the traditional models of monetization - “pay for the product” - nothing happened. There are two reasons: firstly, the solvency of these groups was and remains weak (therefore no one was going to pay), and secondly, the average IQ of the population of the Network was too high at that time to live by the rules of the consumer society. They were interested in knowledge freedom of access to information and many more very correct ideas. The guys had the meaning of life, they changed the world with their own hands every day, with every line of code, not spammed with cats. Even when businesses started creating systems for protecting software [from copying] and distributing content, the residents of the Network laughed in response, hacked and avoided protection. Because they could and because they wanted - in their understanding, the traditional market economy should have remained in the past ...

    This is what I say. To the fact that this system of total and hidden tracking is, relatively speaking, the methodology on which contextual advertising works, it grows from there. When businesses realized that the usual models do not work, they invented freemium - when a conditionally free product or free trial is distributed, which are then converted into a paid subscription. Conversions at first were miserable - people often paid not because they had to, but because they decided to support the developer. Businesses decided this way: we will record statistics, look at when conversions are most successful and we will study the issue. Well, we have also studied the fact that now all the power of psychology has collapsed on contextual advertising, NLP, the date of Sains and AI - many ingenious experts are developing tools for breaking the resistance of the buyer. Not because they want, but because that they pay a lot for it. As a result, today multiple data points are collected about each of us and from users we are converted into consumers, because they follow the entire history of behavior. That is, tracking began as a good experiment, and as a result became the only driver of the web economy.


    I'm trying to create an alternative to this whole thing. See how the Internet will work if the data and solutions built on them are on the user's side. That's what I'm trying to do.

    - Are you flying from Sheremetyevo to Heathrow right now?

    - Yeah.

    - So the Biolink.Tech office is located in London?

    - We actually have three. In London, business development and strategic operations take place. Our development is mainly in Moscow, Kazan and Innopolis, although there is something in London. And there is a center in San Diego, in California - there we have an “iron” development and hardcodes like engineering and writing drivers for our own sensors. Plus, we still look at campuses in St. Petersburg and Europe — there are several interesting centers there. Brilliant people with an awl in the ass, able to work and not capable of giving in to what others consider impossible, we will always need.



    I do not believe that one country can or should manage everything related to big data. Therefore, it is necessary to look at international experience and immediately have people in different parts of the world. And so that they work, having a different mentality - it just helps a lot to avoid a lot of mistakes in terms of how you approach problem solving.

    - Do you think Biolink.Tech is a Russian company or an international one?

    - I consider it global. Sergey Brin does not make Google a Russian company, and Vitaly Buterin does not make Etherium only for those who write in Cyrillic, while Yandex is registered in Amsterdam, but no one perceives them as a Dutch company. The Internet does not work this way - it is global by design and all solutions must be built for the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Or do not even take it. Due to the fact that I am Russian, naturally, the company has at least Russian roots. But we work globally and want to communicate equally confidently with Aston Martin, or with some international bank, or Russian MVideo. I created a company that has no limits in the traditional sense. The Internet should be global and international, and the boundaries there should be exclusively between people who are able to create something beautiful and new and create it, and those who does nothing, but only spends another's time. We are often called upon to judge people according to where they were born or physically located, instead of evaluating each according to actions and thoughts, the level of consciousness. As Admiral Akbar used to say - “It's a trap !!!” - you shouldn't give in.

    I really do not care at what point of the planet we most of all give birth to ideas: it will be a Hindu, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian or Chinese. We have all kinds of people. Perhaps due to the fact that I used to work in a global corporation (Kaspersky Lab) - approx. Ed.) And spent most of my time in an airplane - I had to work a lot and tightly with local offices in Europe, the USA, Latin America, Asia In the Middle East, everywhere - I understand that people in their essence are not very different. All stereotypes are imposed on us by the media and are exclusively in our heads. If you read the book Sapiens of Noah Harari, there he explained everything nicely in terms of the fact that there is a tradition, a law, a currency ...

    - There is a lot of information on the Web about why you are doing all this in Biolink.Tech, but not enough answers to the question “how”. Here you have on the site on the first page of the site bracelet. Is it a symbol of what you do?



    - Not certainly in that way. One of the reasons why information about “how?” Is not enough - because we don’t want to reveal any things for the time being. I’m not saying that other companies may be able to steal it, but some solutions may push them to thoughts. And if a company with a large administrative and financial resource lights up with something similar, it will be an unfair struggle. And we want, of course, to win it.

    And yet, I will not lie, there are things that we understand conceptually, how to solve, but we realize that these decisions can be three, five, ten, fifteen. It seems to me that this should be a “effort community” - in the format in which Linux was created and continues to evolve. We need an army of talents to turn the world around, give a chance to make the Internet a new level, with a different value system and respect for each person. Fortunately, the time is right now.

    Can a bracelet be called a personification of an idea? Again - no. Let me start from afar and generally tell you why a bracelet. First, when we thought about the concept of owning personal data in general, assessed the potential, we did serious research, both marketing and technology. And they understood that, if done properly, then we should not limit ourselves to a software solution. On iOS / Android you don’t have access to the kernel, if you are an application, you work in a sandbox and you don’t have access to either the system’s memory or other applications, what nafig privacy? About Windows 10, I generally keep quiet: telemetry about everything that happens in the system, the hashes of each office document and much more - it all flows to the Microsoft server in a deep-flowing river.

    Suppose we would decide to do APP due to the fact that it is many times easier. But one day people will come and ask: what are you better than others? You, like, do not take away your data? And we will have to guarantee them, show for sure, absolutely that the data belongs only to them and we, as a company, do not store any hidden copies anywhere. We are obliged to verify our decision, that is, to be able to either open the code publicly, or show the experts - to do a so-called independent audit. It is best to publicly show the principle of work on some Blackhat with the hackathon for pinging on Defcon. I believe in the power of the expert community. Together we are stronger and more skillful than any organization in the world. In short, we must guarantee our values ​​and do exactly what we say and not a byte anymore. And with the usual application you can not do this, because the platform has you at all levels. The most important thing is that you sign an agreement that in fact you are subject to the legislation in which they [platform] define you.


    On such a form factor developers pip boy pushed from Fallout

    Here is another example: in the world, many are not fans of the fact that the IT industry is largely owned by the United States. Countries understand that everyone has a smartphone in their pockets, and there is no problem in making a passport, rights or insurance in the format of an iPhone application. But this is not done not because it is technically impossible, but because no country can afford to keep a passport or ID of its citizen (that is, an element of the strategic critical infrastructure) on a device that legally belongs to another country. This is a huge lag between technology and legislation. Many are waiting for alternatives. I hope that it will disappear one day, but not this year. And with this you need to do something. I think that an alternative to Google and Apple should exist. It should appear - just as there is Linux for the desktop.



    We need a platform that treats data in a different way that any state can use, knowing that it can check it at any time. And we decided to start by making our own product in the bracelet form factor. That is, our piece of iron, where we control every element of iron, every line of operating system code and, most importantly, the legal side of the issue, because we believe that in the long run it is more tenacious. With the development of thin clients, visualization tools, VR, AR, I think that ultimately we will leave the same “bricks” in our pockets, and we will still have a wearable computer. We make a piece of iron, not because we need a piece of hardware, but because without it we cannot show how everything should work correctly.

    - A sort of showcase turns out?

    - Yes, this is a showcase, proof of concept: look, guys, it works like this. Naturally, as soon as we make the iron and check how it works with our software, we will show it to everyone. The challenge is to let hardware manufacturers do the same, and maybe even better. We will give engineering documentation, tell you how we want it to work — the system architecture, the recommended components, and all of these things. And we leave software behind us. And the main value in machine learning algorithms, user scenarios.

    And iron is a difficult, but inevitable step. Of course, I ate over the last year and understood why investors are not investing in iron. Even in software development, you cannot predict deadlines and enforce them. And in iron it is multiplied by two, three, and sometimes by ten, because you have so many components. For example, now the bracelet uses more than 1200 parts. To develop them, to balance, to place in the body, to test ... It's just hell! Especially when contractors are not one, but five – six. If one of them is late, scored or sick - this is an ass.



    Bracelet - this is our ... intermediate stage. We want to make a quality, and then give it to iron producers. Anyone. Not in the Raspberry Pi format, of course, but any brand that wants to make a wrist computer, which will be called Biolink or otherwise, this new type of device is not a smartphone or a smart watch - it can do it.


    The first prototype of the device, printed on a 3D printer



    - That is licensing?

    - Yes, any company that wants to release on its own behalf or with us a wrist computer for payments, authorization, data storage and everything we have written, it will just be able to make its own body in its design. Or even use your own iron.

    But now I understand perfectly why, when Microsoft made Windows Phone, they “cast in cement” iron and screen resolution. Because it is much easier to maintain one specific iron set than any other at all. Therefore, we will limit the list of supported processors and some other components for other manufacturers.

    - Are you not afraid that while you will develop the first device, the iron will become obsolete?

    - We have two options now: Qualcomm and MTK. We took with a large margin - for 2-3 years. For example, we still do not fully understand what the load will be on cryptography. And we would not like to see what is happening now with smartphones, when they are changed once a year. The approach “now buy another such here” is not honest with respect to the user. I do not understand why do this. We often argue even with my own business development about what is right and what is wrong. We, people, will all die sooner or later, and we don’t take money to the grave, and therefore it’s already bad to deceive people. Sometimes you need to do not what is good from a business point of view and is guaranteed to bring real money, but what is called “right in a boy’s way”.

    In general, my "party policy" is as follows. We [humanity] launched a rocket on the freaking moon using a computer that was not much more powerful than a calculator. And I am sure that the power of modern smartphones is not used rationally.

    In Biolink.Tech, we built the process in such a way that all the value is in software updates. Roughly speaking, you bought a piece of metal - it can do A, B, C, D, E. And then you get not just a software update (although it is clear that there will be regular patches), but the update that the new functionality gives you F. We laid it into the iron immediately, just activate a little later - when we can and we understand what we have done qualitatively.

    - You said that you need an alternative to Google and Apple. I understand correctly that this alternative is Biolink.Tech?

    - Yes, it sounds ambitious. But we take a sober look at things. It is clear that this will take time, but I think it is absolutely real. Those who have been online for a long time, I think, remember both Netscape (the main browser), Altavista (the dominant search engine), etc. My position is that on the Internet there is always an alternative and a place for a new one. Always the one who yesterday was a monopoly giant and just owned a whole niche, tomorrow may be nobody. Just because he pissed off the moment or stopped understanding something.

    Remember Nokia. Great example. Who was Samsung then, who was Apple and who was Nokia? And this was relatively recent. And I absolutely believe that Facebook is not forever. Google is also not forever. But the Alphabet, he, perhaps, yes, more tenacious. That is why they did it, that they understand: it is necessary to diversify, to develop different directions. Not the fact that the search in the form in which it exists today will be the main business in 10 years.

    We need to find a way ... which is not just better, but another. More suitable for the mentality of people. This is one of the reasons why Facebook is there, but MySpace is no more. Technologically, in terms of content consumption, the difference is not as big as it seems. It’s not Facebook that came up with a social network! He is generally about something else.

    Many people think that our idea is impossible and idiotic. It is the right of every person to criticize everything that is outside the comfort zone. Let them say we respect that. But this does not mean that I agree with this or that you need to give up, because someone in the padla to help you or he does not believe in something.

    I am sure that there is an alternative to monopolies. Just do not need to compare apples with apples. You do not need to do another global search engine, which also invests in content and also sells contextual advertising - it most likely will not work. Their expertise is corny better, administrative resource, finances. What they do now, they do the best. But if you start making not an apple, but an orange, then you have a chance to win your audience. Google started doing searches differently than Altavista and Yahoo, so they occupied a niche. And Bing did not give anything new and came out with a copy of Google, so they lost. I'm about it.

    We are, in my opinion, the polarity of Google and Facebook, because we abandon their model of working with data, partners, and people. We turn it inside out and do the opposite.

    - But after all, to develop such an alternative "orange" you need a lot of resources? Are there investors who share your point of view?

    - First, you yourself need to fix in your head that you swung at it. Then there should appear moderately crazy investors. Not a problem - to find money. The problem is to find those who can and wants to help you change the world, and not just make a dough. And most of our investors are right here such the right people.

    And you also need to understand that revolution is not the way. It is necessary to do gradually and bend your line, what you consider necessary. No need to fight with anyone, this is the path of failure. You just have to build your own. I am not saying that we will immediately make an alternative. First, Biolink.Tech will make one small piece, then we will release a wearable computer, then we will increase, increase our capabilities. Biolink.Tech is not a company, it is an idea. And the idea can not be killed or crushed.

    I have a belief that you do not need to create everything yourself. No need to reinvent the wheel. We are essentially making a platform, and I believe that there are many similar developers in the world, authors of projects. There are plague alternative solutions: Revolut banking application, Lemonade online insurance, in the end there are Lyft, other mail and cloud documents. Encrypted messaging can be taken even tomorrow from Signal - the sources are. What we, by the way, did. In short, there are people who share your point of view. Why copy their businesses if you can invite them to your platform, which gives them guaranteed profit without the need for advertising? Biolink.Tech cannot and will not act alone, we have always tuned in to what we are doing the core. God willing, next year we will roll out the SDK - for those we trust, for a start. And we will be able to integrate their solutions to us together so that they work on our platform and receive their money, but at the same time privacy and possession of their data is fully ensured. I believe that together you can leave out of business at least Facebook, even Google.

    - What technologies do you use for development?

    - We have a hybrid stack. In terms of development, there are two main areas. The client part is done on the "pros". In the mobile platform part, we decided not to use Linux as a basis, so that for years we would not fix everything that Google had already fixed. Therefore, we took AOSP and cut out from there everything Google, including all tracking, identification and authorization by pin. It turned out that this is a hemorrhoid - replace the pin with multifactorial biometrics. We are now looking for those who know AOSP and understands the OS at a low level. And, of course, there are applications - this is Java. Anyone who is good, hardcore kodit under Android and will be able to understand how our storage and system policies work, easily port applications.



    Naturally, there is also data science - these people are worth their weight in gold. We have tasks at the junction of the gaming industry and data science. Biolink as a device (not the company) knows almost everything about the user. From this point of view, you have a lot of data points that you can somehow use. We turn these points into life experience. Roughly speaking, these are triggers that allow a person to change and optimize his life path. But not in an instructive format, like Apple Watch or Fitbit do - like “Go quickly, go make 10,000 steps!”.

    - But the edge is very thin. If there are no recommendations, then what?

    - The difference is who the customer is. You work with Google or FB. There, what you are recommended is determined by the one who sells. If you need to sell the car Kia and the book Dontsova, then that is what you will offer. On the “other” side, machine learning and psychology work awesomely - they profile the audience very well, they know the triggers. Someone needs to talk in the forehead, and someone needs to be prepared for a very long time, and in a month or two you will bring him to the climax with the right messages, and he will buy what you need to sell.

    - You mean that “they” are not looking for a conditional me among the whole mass of people, who likes Dontsov, but, as it were, pushes me to love her?

    - Not certainly in that way. I assert that they naturally look for those who love Dontsov. And the surname is chosen as an example. But here is an illustrative example: you, say, an advertiser, and you have a $ 100,000 investment in contextual advertising, having spent that you get $ 130k in sales. Profit! And you get excited - the next time you bring 200k and ask: what else can you do? With this approach, people who are not interested in Dontsova are bombarded by it, and advertising modules are constantly customized for different audiences. And sooner or later (of course, not all) buy it, of course. If you [as an advertiser] correctly profile and choose the right message, you can send anything to anyone. And when your demand is formed exactly the same way, when your volume of attendants dictates how much to sell, you squeeze all of this out. I myself did it somewhere sometime ... I look at it as an invaluable experience for myself. I read now that this is exactly how not to do for people. Luke Skywalker once also switched to the dark side of the force (in the canon!), For there was no other way to win, then he returned to the light with an even stronger Jedi. I look at my experience the same way.

    How are we different? If you know his data points about a person, you can recommend what he specifically needs right now, at least three feeds. The first is his personal data; we understand from them that this indicates such and such behavior. The second is the expert feed. For example, we looked at different sources and chose 1000 must read different books of all times and peoples - not only Russian and western, but generally international. So, if you correctly assess this feed in terms of weights: mark up the base, draw a map, then you get a very specific proposal, which is dictated by what the person is mentally and mentally prepared for, and not what you need to live through. At a certain moment [Biolink] can say: now you are ready for Dovlatov. And now to Henry Miller. And a person will get better from this, smarter, for he will receive which will fall well into its current state and level of perception. This is our task - to unlock the potential of man, to pull him out of the state of plankton.

    - It turns out the personal assistant.

    - In the “Golden Compass” there is a notion of daemon - it, by the way, originally appeared in the system architecture because Western programmers were in the “Golden Compass” school. This animal, which is associated with a person and acts only on his benefit, your absolutely trusted, never able to betray the avatar. Or in Terminator 2, Sarah Connor says: he would rather die than give the child a grudge.



    By and large, we want to do something like this: somewhere an assistant, somewhere an instructor, somewhere an ardent sergeant who will tell you even unpleasant things. Sometimes you need podzhopnik, sometimes you need to act gently, and sometimes you need to keep silent. We want this helper to do just that. He must give you what the education system and the environment do not give you. Now the environment is sharpened on consumption - when you consume, you're good. And we want the device to help people develop themselves.



    Probably, it is more correct to say that this will be a machine that will help you to squeeze the maximum of your potential out of yourself. But at the same time on your terms: if you want - set yourself minimal growth and don’t strain yourself.

    - And here we are getting to the thing that you have called "digital DNA", right?

    - In fact, yes. The complete set of data on the basis of which conclusions are made is digital DNA. Or rather, the conclusions and recommendations are an add-on digital DNA, a private AI. And properly labeled raw data is digital DNA.

    - And if you compare the biological DNA and digital. The first is still more or less a finite set of data. Will the cDNA change over time?

    - Even in biological DNA, it is already possible to copy some pieces, change something. Inheritance changes are not transmitted, but you can change a person. And in digital DNA there are different feeds. There are habits in a person's life that will never die. If there were no particular life shocks, we will always know that Petrovich is a cynic. And Petrov, for example, is a terrible introvert. And this in them will almost never die. And there are things that are dynamic. Until the age of 21, everything changes quickly, then more slowly, and then it does not change at all. Opinion changes, of course, over time: political convictions, behavior (to cultivate tomatoes at the dacha on weekends, instead of chopping in Overwatch, for example) and so on.

    We have now determined for ourselves with the experts that this is changing, but this is not. And then the system is already self-balancing. This is the beauty - everyone will see all this for himself. Huge potential for introspection, because you yourself see the results of your actions. And we will give a recommendation that you can change if you want it. Such a digital psychoanalyst is obtained, which is based on your digital DNA and makes its predictions.

    - Let's try even easier. There is a certain set of ones and zeros, according to which Vasya differs from Petit. What is all this wrapped up in you?

    - Yes, we can say that Petya is Petya. He has voice signatures, there is a unique delay between keystrokes. He has a certain heartbeat in the context of certain GPS coordinates. And I’m not even talking about 100% things like a digitized iris and fingerprints.

    If it is quite simple, imagine that you have an ID in one column, and somewhere in front of him there is a text, somewhere there are boolean options: you smoke - yes / no, straight - yes / no. And all with probabilities. Something similar to the scoring that banks do before issuing a loan, but much more difficult.

    - But the input data array, it turns out, is hefty?

    - Raw data is a huge array, yes. We considered that your personal data for life accumulates 41–43 terabytes. But again, this will change, because you will generate more: there will be VR and other new content. But digital DNA is not a data set, but a kind of hash. Now in the test version - it is about 65 megabytes of text data. Not so much.

    We are now struggling to ensure that for the signature you use not the entire data set, but only a part. That is, the entire base of conclusions about you is not always needed, we want to pull out some pieces of context from there and use them in specific scenarios. That, conditionally, they were measured already in kilobytes.

    “And do you have a patent for digital DNA?”

    - Yes, we are really waiting for him. Both on DNA, and on private artificial intelligence.

    - In which country is it better to apply?

    - We have filed in the States, but in principle we can very easily cascade these patents in Europe, Singapore, and Japan. In general, patent law is a madhouse. The patent is essentially tied to the territory. That is, if you invented something and patented it in Russia, you come to the United States, and they say: sorry, we have the same inventor here - a completely different person, and you owe money. They fall for the same in Russia. The question is in the volume of markets. Russian patents, even though we [the country] have ratified the agreement, are almost never accepted in the west properly. We decided that we were not ready to take risks and understand this. Lawyers advised us to patent in the United States or the UK. We did just that. In Russia, we will also patent it as soon as we close a round of investments.

    Then Zhenya flew to the London office, and again we phoned after just a day. During this time, there were more questions.

    - While you were flying, I had another question born. You talked about an alternative to the current state of affairs, when they give you something. But it will be later, and what now? Are you working on protection against all this targeting?

    - This is implemented in layers. 1st layer - VPN, at first you picked it up and only after that you let the person on the network. Without Internet traffic encryption there is no. The second one is standard ad-blockers, we all have it too, all the ads are cut out. There are also trackers and data brokers who are engaged in the resale of data, there are about 2,000 of them - we also block everyone we know and were able to identify. In short, the traditional network can provide protection from traditional tracking tools, advertising, bullshiting and everything.


    How the browser sees Chereshnev’s hour of life on the Internet

    Unfortunately, we cannot work with social engineering for the time being, but with time we will get closer to this. Suppose you are fifty and you never come across "Nigerian spam", you do not know what it is. And when you receive such a letter, we will immediately tell you: oh, oh, be careful.

    “But you still have Facebook that plays you.” You somehow perform some actions there, you can analyze them.

    - Yes, you can’t block it at all, otherwise your Facebook will stop working. But if we see social media buttons on the site, then a no-brainer is clear that this is not just a button, but a tracker - we can block it. But in general, if you take a social network like Facebook, then if a person comes to it, then he gets a service on their terms. With this, nothing can be done legally, not technically.

    But I told you last time: I think that Facebook is not forever. According to the law of GDPR, which entered into force in May of this year, companies must give a person's data on request. The problem of people is that nothing could be done with this data. To begin with, we at least give a person the opportunity to download and deliver this data to the download and update it to a stream and use it in your recommendations. If you want to leave for good, you will have your content: photos, videos, messages, your “dictionary”, a list of contacts. At a minimum, the dependency is eliminated.

    We believe that over time, someone will make a social network that will be built on other principles. I don’t know how it will be, I will soon be forty, and someone who will come up with a new approach is 18-year-old. Our task is to create a platform in which there is privacy and respect for human rights.

    - And somehow you can look at your digital DNA?

    - Yes, you can watch it right on our device or on Mac or Windu clients. Our app guarantees you private browsing - a VPN client is built in there. So you go to this client, to your profile and look at all the data that is about you. If you want, you can connect there the profile of Facebook or another social network. There will be statistics on the distribution of time, for example, per day, month, year. Let's say you spend six hours a day on Facebook. As to whether to define things like dependence or not, we still argue. But in any case, you can go and ask your surroundings: dudes, but six hours is a lot? “Facebook” I just give as an example. It could be Starcraft, Warcraft, anything. We will simply see the anomaly and not instructively tell the person: this is what you are. You can continue to live like this, nothing terrible, but if you spend two hours a day on this, such a profit is waiting for you. Like in a computer game.

    - It is also interesting to learn about another device that you recently discussed on your Facebook page - to disguise your face and offline protection against targeting. Is this a sight on a real device or is it just an abstraction?



    - At our place [Biolink.Tech] is constantly going on a healthy argument about how to develop an ecosystem. We have different options there: make your own locks or not? Do IoT make their own gadgets? Will we make smart glasses like Google Glass?

    And within the framework of this topic, we thought that no matter how you block trackers on the Internet, there are cameras offline that often work not only for the state - this is half the trouble - they started working for the commercial sector to profile a person by face and sell him what he will buy in the current state. At the same time, we are open to creative ideas. And our brilliant physicist says that it is quite realistic to make a device that would not allow the camera to shoot you normally. Now the sketch is, of course, superficial, and we understand that there is still to dig and dig. Conceptually, it can be a projection, a holography that hides part of the face. But there is a problem in the diet, because the projection will eat nemeryannom. You can simply make the module illumination, and then the camera will see a bright spot in the face and near.

    It is clear that if you wish, you can release a camera that works in a different spectrum and will bypass our protection. But we will answer. It is important to understand that the task of this idea is to make video surveillance is not impossible, but expensive. We will need 500-700 thousand dollars to bring the idea to a working prototype. And since we have money right now, I decided to go to the community and ask: is it really necessary or not? I was there in the comments, of course, pushed down - this is normal. It would be strange if everyone said: oh, great! In general, what I heard from the people - in principle, the device is interesting, necessary. Even if it will be a fan for six months, and then throw it into the closet.

    For me, the joy is that the people share my opinion that 1984 is our inevitable future, if we don’t do something with it now. Many would be ready to wear this in principle. By the end of August, when we finish the current stage, I would have put together a presentation and walked around our investors. And then we will decide whether to do it or not.

    - Forgive me for this, but I have to ask you a question that everyone asks you: are you a cyborg, yes?

    “Schwarzenegger is a cyborg, and I am so ...

    ” Three years have passed since you inserted the chip in your left hand. Is he still there? Is the flight normal?



    - Chip there. I'm not going to get it. Everything is OK. From the point of view of physical well-being, everything is awesome.



    - No, I mean, at first you had a goal with this chip to show that there is a digital footprint, it is unique, and you need to own it yourself. You achieved it. Told about it on TED. Now what?

    - One of the things that happens is that your mentality changes a little with it, you start to look at new things differently. And she constantly mutates. Naturally, when you only sewed it - it was somewhere at the junction of fear (what for did I do that ?!) and euphoria. Next were the first experiments, the path to TED. But I noticed that with him it is much easier to put yourself in the skin of a person with a chip more powerful than you have now. Without a chip, I tried many times, and this is generally heaven and earth. So you imagine something, but this is ... sci-fi. And here you really have it under your skin, you can touch it. Damn, it's hard to describe!

    I will have it next year, for sure. And all this time my perception continues to evolve. You know what you can compare with ... So you started reading Isaac Asimov. "I, the robot", the three laws of robotics (although four, in fact). I read one story, then another, and the third — he writes about various psychological and social aspects. And by the end of the book you have a completely different perception.

    I look at it as if I read "I, Robot." That is, from the digital footprint, I came to understand how the interface, for example, can be built. Or how will the backup be built? Should it start when I fall asleep? How should I work with this? A lot of thought was about charging. After some time, there will be either a charge or a battery that needs to be removed every few years. And you imagine: how is it? These questions - an infinite amount.

    How will the Internet of things management interface develop? In my opinion there is a huge potential and a lot of scenarios that you are in a traditional situation, when you are sitting in front of a laptop, you just can’t imagine in general. And when you always have something in your hand, it does not allow you to forget about it. Well, for example, Telegram was banned. What if end-to-end encryption were there? Do I, by law, have to get the chip out of myself? All these thoughts, they continue to appear, and therefore I do not get the chip.

    - Do you plan an upgrade?

    - I was thinking about it. And as soon as the normal decision will be, I will make sure. Just now the guys who offered it - the Scandinavians - they have it much more. They managed to negotiate with the bank, which, roughly speaking, at the plant is validated by ID, and in fact you can have a VISA or Mastercard in your hand. But in the hand it is impossible to place the antenna elegantly - it is still a decent size. Three centimeters. And I did not.

    - And how did you decide, by the way, the psychological question of introducing a chip into yourself?

    - It was dumb. Especially at the last moment. At the last moment I thought: it is good that I made some tequilas. And I noticed, by the way, that when it was the first thousand [who installed the chip], the youth said: YES, I WANT! And now I would say that the alignment is already 60/40. Now, many already say: why the hell do I need a government or Google under the skin? I hope not without my influence.

    Returning to the previous question, would you replace it or not? I look at it in such a way that human psychology pipets as predictable. Kaneman (author of Think slowly, decide quickly, ed.) Even writes about this: we are ready for everything if the benefit outweighs the costs. And now I look at the new chip, and its benefit - the ability to pay - for me it does not outweigh 3 cm under the skin. Anyway, it will be a one-time topic in a controlled environment. Because no one at the initial stage will give you uncontrollably to remove grandmas at any ATM and pay at normal terminals - there are risks.

    But let's fantasize. If I were offered to replace part of the arms, legs, brain - to be first. And it is not known whether there will be any profit from this or not. Will you then be considered a person? Here I do not know, to be honest. But there is a feeling that I would rather try. After all, someone should, and better if it is the one who fumbles than any fanatic.

    - I heard you write a book. How are things going, what progress bar?

    - There is news: good and bad. The good thing is that I wrote 350,000 characters. And the book is usually half a million. That is, in principle, I will finish soon. Further editing. The bad - I got into the general statistics of the authors, which lead to the timing of the publishers. Anyway, I'm already delaying her for two months. Any optimistic assessment with the book does not work.

    - What will the book be about?

    - It will be about that we are discussing the second day with you - about the data, the digital trace. But not through the prism of paranoia, in the book I try to tell in very detailed detail (which is usually not enough time in my life) to tell you: here are the prerequisites for us to have such and such. Tracking like this, then something.

    I explained the tracking technology using stickers on one speech. I say: take the yellow sticker, write what you know about the neighbor and stick it on your forehead. I know that his name is Vasya - write "Vasya". I know that he is 35 - write "35". All tried once, and then again. Once again. For the fifth time, everyone was already covered with stickers. And I say: now imagine that this is how the Internet works. If you are Google, then you look at a stranger and say: 35 years old, Vasya, straight, divorced, leads Mitsubishi, goes to the bathhouse, does not drink vodka, prefers brandy, served in the engineering troops ... In short, it turned out funny.

    Plus, I'm trying to explain what to do about it. How it is applied now, and on what grandmas do in the companies. And I'm trying to tell you how much profit this [data] can be for people. It turns out something between a story, educational program and Tarantino's pulp fiction.

    - A name already?

    “I don't know yet, really.” By the way, listen, if you have any ideas, let the guys write in the comments?

    - OK, I'll leave it in the interview. Will the book be digital?

    - And there will be digital too. But in general, while we want paper. And I sold the rights only to Russia, the CIS and Eastern Europe. Then we will translate, and in the West we will think how to do: there will most likely be both iBooks and Google from Amazon.

    - By the way, why are digital books so expensive?

    - If you recall my marketing past, then there is this answer: people pay not as much as it costs, but how much they are willing to pay. Digital distributors just figured out the best price. Moreover, big data helped them in this and machine learning helped them in this. That is why iTunes started with 99 cents, and now $ 1.29 - it turned out that people are willing to pay more. In short, this is disgusting, and this is what we are fighting against.

    - But you graduated from law school. Tell me, what was the path from the humanities to essentially a techie?

    - I was lucky that I had a computer early. My father worked at the Foreign Ministry in the Soviet era. I went on a business trip with him, and there were computers at the embassy school. It was 88, in my opinion, a year, I was 9 years old. And I demolished the tower: there was a ZX Spectrum cassette, there was a strange French Amstrad with non-standard diskettes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC). Basic was there. And at 9 years old, I started coding something. I, of course, half did not understand, but I was the pearl. Then there was another Amstrad, then the 286th ... Gradually, the geek culture absorbed in me, films, games, books.

    At school there comes a certain moment when you choose what to do. I chose the profession of lawyer, but then I graduated, worked for six months and realized that a lawyer is the most boring profession in the world.

    And since my father continued to be a diplomat, from the 1st to the 5th year I was alone in the apartment. Everyone who was a student, I think, understand what it means. And in the second year, when it was already impossible to drink, and you just get tired of the constant parties, you begin to understand: damn, you have to live! You start to follow the apartment, make payments, think about what to live. And I realized that scholarships are not enough. And computers are me twig. I wrote letters in several editions: I shave in the gland, I explain well, maybe I will write to you about something? Responded from the magazine "Hacker", which then only started. I wrote an article, they liked it, then the second, third, fourth. Then he wrote to others: he was in Upgrade, somewhere else. And when I was fired from my legal thing, they were already waiting for me with open arms. There was a period

    After some time you are pumping over, you understand that writing is no longer interesting and you are already the chief editor - the end of a career. I went to the publishers, then from the advertising manager quickly pumped into the head of the advertising service of a major publisher. But this, at a certain point, began to enrage. I read tons of literature on marketing, studied advanced practices, but in the end, nobody needed it, because the Russian advertising market then worked largely on kickbacks. I did not want to do this. I wanted to do something useful. And, as they say, be careful with your dreams. One day my friend and I drank hard and decided that we were engaged in unloved things and had to quit. And we really just beat, argued. He thought I was joking, but I woke up in the morning, came to the editorial office at 10, left the office at one o'clock, and at ten in the evening I was on a plane to Thailand. And I lived there for a year working remotely. There, I just realized that the IT topic is a diagnosis. But I worked before this in a marketing company, and I had invaluable experience: I understood hardware and software, and I knew how dandies are made, how context works, SEO (not dead yet).

    Honestly, we have a crap education system in this sense. I am opposed to being divided into the humanities and techies - this is idiocy. Of course, you need to develop what a person is best at, but balance is important! And we have smart engineers who can not sell anything, and sellers who do not understand how it works.

    Why is the [Silicon] Valley tearing everyone? And especially - graduates of Stanford and MIT. Because at MIT, as far as I know, if you study there fully, you cannot take certain courses without a marketing flow. You have to find common ground: you have to understand why and how he sells, and you explain to him how it works. And in the end, the two of you are defending. Therefore, they create agile, here and now, to sell something. They explain the value of the operational resource early, and we have a spherical horse in a vacuum. Brilliant and infinitely beautiful. Because for a long time was the state. order: dudes, grandmas do not count - we are flying into space! Dudes, grandmas don't count - we need a stable working connection that the nuclear explosion will survive. Such tasks. And they are focused on the applied reality - how to make money, to take another step forward.

    In our country, the people can solve any kind of problem, but it can last indefinitely and is completely uncontrollable in terms of resources, and from a business point of view it is sometimes not packed at all. Just because the techie can not explain what he did and why, and the marketer - on the contrary.

    I am glad that I have a joint. I think the education system, it should be about it. I do not say that the modern education system is a complete shit, no. But any employer will tell you that students who graduate are practically useless if they do not begin their internship at a 2-3 year course. That is why many companies are “fishing” at MSU, ITMO, Baumanka. They want to spend less money on training. Therefore, they sponsor pulpits, hakatons, so that the people at least roughly understand what awaits them when they come out. Those who do not have internships and do not study on their own can easily be identified at the first interview - they want horse salary and do not know how to do basic applied things.

    - Okay, let's imagine that our current education system does not change. Where would you advise young people to go to study? It will not work the way it did with economists in its time - a million economists appeared, and now there will be a million programmers?

    - And I completely agree with you. By and large, all the routine things on the frontend and some primitive things - on the backend, they will be automated. My prediction is 3-5 years and most of the procedures will be automated in programming. The base code will be able to create any jerk, or rather take one of the hundreds of thousands of ready-made and proven implementations of the same.

    People who understand what a system architecture is, those who know how to code on the pros, even at least know about what assembler is, how memory works and how a processor is made, they know mathematics, physics is good - they will continue to be in price .

    The answer to your question - where to go to study - yes, hell knows! For example, I realized that for the last five years Coursera gave me more knowledge ... well, maybe not more than all the higher education, but decently. There you choose a point course that you need here and now, quickly pass it and go to the next one.

    For example, for what I'm doing now, I lacked how the game is done. I took a course on game design, and it became clear to me about the way that weights are needed for each event. I understood how the quest system is done. Important information, but rather technical. Then I realized that I needed to understand how to package it, and went on a specialized marketing course. There they explained to me how gamification works, what a person reacts to. And again I thought: some glue is missing! I decided that I needed a game theory, even though I had done it once. But in high schools it is not taught. Or teach, but if only you are an economist, for example. Why did someone decide that a person of a technical profession should know one thing, and the other is not supposed to? And why the humanist should not know what combinatorics? Useful thing! Rule Direhle, that's all!

    - In general, you are now for self-education?

    - Rather, I for flexibility. Knowledge is now evolving faster than the education system. Once a year something changes a lot. And education as a system is updated every 10–15 years. Therefore, those who look at life really need to understand that there is available knowledge - we take a book and read! Otherwise you will not compete.

    - Finally, say something to our community.

    - Habr I love. The more feedback, constructive trolling and suggestions, the better. And I want to continue the audience not to listen to anyone, to think with my head and ask questions. Because outside of such specialized communities, this is just what is very lacking. Want to help and have a skill - come, we will be happy.

    Also popular now: