|
Interviews A Meeting With Tomorrow's Man Professor Peter Cochrane, 55, joined BT as a lineman and maintenance technician in 1962. He retired last year after a career that put him at the centre of the company's drive to develop and adapt new technology as Head of Research and Chief Technologist with BT's world-famous Martlesham Laboratories. LEE WILSON went to meet him.and found himself gigabytes behind in the race to the future. Getting in touch with the man who predicted the development of an 'intelligent' pizza is simple once you understand he inhabits a world at least a decade in advance of the rest of us. I discovered it is no good writing him a letter, for instance. Paper is old technology. The only address you'll find on Professor Peter Cochrane's business card is for his e-mails. If by chance a rogue 'billet doux' manages to locate his residence in an affluent bit of Suffolk near Ipswich, he is likely to scribble a reproachful reply in the margin and send it straight back where it came from. It's the same with faxes. I still think there is something magical about receiving a document down a telephone line, fully-formed and ready to read. But Prof Cochrane junked his fax machine aeons ago. In his eyes it was a technology suitable only for a museum. He conducts virtually all his day to day business over the ether, through e-mails and the Internet. (You can check out his personal Internet site at: cochrane.org.uk). At home he can sit in his garden and correspond with his US office in California's silicon valley on his laptop computer via his mobile phone. His house is serviced by a 'local area network' - a sort of electronic force field - that allows him to plug into the rest of the wired-up world whether he's in his attic or his garden shed. All this relies on computing power more powerful than that used to send rockets to the moon. We eventually met in a London hotel lobby near the BBC's White City studios where Professor Cochrane has been giving an interview about the future of telecommunications. Since leaving BT he has become a media pundit, with regular appearances on television and articles in the national Press. Within minutes he was reeling off his vital statistics. A 180 gigabyte server. A 20 gigabyte hard-drive. Five hundred megabytes of RAM and a gigahertz of something else I didn't quite catch. To someone who still keeps a typewriter on top of the wardrobe (well, you never know, there might be a power failure) it was a dazzling display of techno-fluency. I was well out of my depth, not waving but drowning, when he threw me an unexpected lifeline. He admitted he had trouble programming his video recorder. I could hardly believe he had a technological blind spot, let alone one that we might share. But the Professor agreed that the process of setting videos is too complex. The controls are too fiddly; it all takes too long and too often it goes wrong. And suddenly I understood where the Professor's coming from. His interest in technology is in trying to make life simpler. He wants machines and systems to be user-friendly, not lost in a fog of gobbledegook. He wants a video recorder that is as easy to programme as ordering a meal off a restaurant menu. He wants us to be able to communicate with each other across the world as naturally as talking to neighbours over the garden fence - and he doesn't mean by expensive landline telephones. He foresees a time not too far in the future when people will be fitted with transponders under their skin carrying all their essential personal information, from health records to their bank balance. Artificial intelligence 'We already have cyborgs walking our streets. There are humans with artificial hearts and cochlea implants. People who resist the technology will simply become a sub-species,' he says. The driving force behind all this wizardry is speed and control. If you take the drudgery out of everyday actins you leave people more time to be creative. At least, that's what I think the Professor was saying. And in his eyes Britain is fast falling behind in the race. He reckons his own personal productivity has multiplied tenfold in the last decade because of increased computer power. He can now buy machines that can process information in nanoseconds. But if he wants to send it around the world he has to squeeze it all into a telephone system that runs like the Pony Express on three legs. 'I believe in a three-click, one-second world,' he tells me. 'If any computer function needs more than three clicks, or takes longer than one second, people get ratted off. The limit to creativity is the rate at which we can communicate. Waiting kill concentration.' Beyond the Star Trek imagery there's a worrying message in all this for the Professor's old company. He devoted most of his life to BT. He left because he felt stifled by 'corporate constraints'. He has described the multi-billion dollar auction of mobile phone licences last year, which helped tip BT into debt, as 'a study in madness'. More damaging in the long term in the company's failure to focus on the fundamental changes taking place in the industry, he says. 'In a few years time the Internet will eclipse the telephone network as a means of communication, yet BT has spent decades progressing from being a telephone company to being a telephone company,' says Cochrane. 'It's lost the plot'. His vision for the company is bleak. To survive at all he believes it will have to reduce staff by half and sell of 80% of its buildings. It will have to rationalise telephone billing - 'a flat fee would save millions' - replace copper cable with fibre optics - 'reliance on copper with its high maintenance costs will bring the company down' - and revolutionise its switch network. In the longer term he thinks BT should concentrate on being a network provider, a sort of Rail track for telephone companies but hopefully with a better public image. The big problem is that in a world in which information travels at the speed of light, 'long-term' is a shrinking concept. From his experience of 'corporate constraints' he thinks BT will need a decade to turn itself around. So, given the competition, how long does he think the company's actually got to change? 'Two to three year,' he says. |