Werner Vogels predicts the future (Interview)

38:42There's your Sonos, and there's your garage, and there's your light opener, and there's the thing that keeps track of this, and all these kind of things. Are all these things up to date? Are all these things protected? Are all these things up to new standards? We have a number of years to get this done, but we do need to start now. So the task today is what? What is the task we could do today as developers, as maybe potentially inventors? What should we do today to plan for quantum? That really is the question in there. First of all, and there's a number of areas. I mean, there's just using newer encryption technologies, but you can't imagine that, you know, something, some piece of data that you encrypted 15 years ago you're not going to go through all of your data and re-encrypt it again but you know are there gateway possibilities that protect you from that are there are there other problems other ways let's let's use our inventive brains and and find solutions to this because i believe we can but only if we make it a focus and the focus is not that quantum is five years away the most important part there is that we need to keep ourselves and our businesses safe and if that happened to be quantum or if it happened to be an alien spaceship that lands from whoever and suddenly turns out to be able to encrypt all our data decrypt all our data that doesn't really matter we need to start protecting ourselves how sure can we be that quantum safe technologies as we define them today actually will be quantum safe yeah well do we know do the work do the work i was hoping you already did it werner yeah yeah no it's just do the work you know then no no no that that is it the same goes for everything now.

41:00Let me take a whole different example. When at Amazon S3, we went from eventual consistency to strong consistency. That was a major change that impacted every piece of technology. How can you make sure that you touched every edge of this particular problem because it is either 100 % or not. So automatic reasoning plays a role in that. Annotating annotations, TLA +, other technologies that you have to prove to yourself that what you've built actually does exactly what you want it to do. so definitely I think automatic reasoning is continue to play a more role in giving us a secure feeling that we are on the right path the same is for example we recently launched Cairo that is the spec driven IDE for an AI system we use automatic reasoning there to limit the number of hallucinations that can happen.

42:31Yeah? Yeah. Not that automatic reasoning knows that terribly much more, but it knows A square plus B square C square is probably a triangle. And as such, it knows all the triangles in the world. if then this llm says this is a triangle i would make the reasoning you will say no that is not a triangle yeah and that is my that's just a simple example but we start building more and more technologies to prove to ourselves that we are doing the right thing well let me just take a quick moment to say we talked what wikipedia last week orner and i called it perhaps the eighth wonder of the world and if it is the eighth i would say amazon s3 is probably the ninth wonder of the world so just a quick moment of props to you and thank you for what is an amazing amazing piece of technology that's unlocked so much for so many businesses and people over the years s3 is is wild yeah yeah i am uh you know what my first programming languages were at school No.

43:43COBOL, 68 ,000 assembler, and Pascal. Okay. None of these programming languages, anybody writes anything anymore. Maybe I could make money as a COBOL programmer. I'm not too sure I'm doing well in 68 ,000 anymore, but things change over time. And we as humans adapt. But we're often ahead of the game. You know, we went from things like Pascal, which probably was sort of the first version of a little bit of structured programming, to C++ and Java and Python, and just the whole world. None of us panicked there. We just learned a new programming language. it's not like it's not like that we're suddenly frozen in our chair and now we have AI AI tools to help us building the systems that we do why should we start to be scared suddenly why should we suddenly become we just learn to use new tools because remember it's you that build not the tools it's also you that own it not the tools yeah if the tools is built something that and you're in a financial company that suddenly no longer makes you compliant it's pretty hard to say to the regulator oh that was the AI that was the tool yeah no no no no it's still your responsibility and as such i think that sort of we no matter how good tools we build we still need to educate ourselves we need to continue to keep ourselves on on a path of education learning continuing to learn and looking at you too you're not the youngest.

46:02So I'm pretty sure that before you wrote something in Python, you wrote something in C++ or in ABC. Yeah? I wasn't learning Python or going to the next programming language. My favorite being Rust at the moment. But there will be something else after Rust. Sure. We won't panic suddenly and thinking that the world will collapse and all our jobs are going to go away. No. No, we make sure that we educate ourselves. And crucial in all of that is curiosity. Yeah? If you just want to lean back, so if you just want to lean back and just, you know, write some code and things like that and don't want to learn the next language or whatever, then probably you've always been told.

47:00That has nothing to do with AI. You have to, because curiosity leads to learning. And these two things are, remain curious.

47:19What was it? Have you guys seen Ted Lasso? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The TV series. There is this brilliant darts scene where he froze 170. And he tells this story that... I saw this quote by Walt Whitman. It was painted on the wall there. It said, be curious, not judgmental. I like that. And he said, I suddenly realized that nobody had been curious in who I was. They were just bullying me just because they could. And curiosity is such an important part. Being curious about AI, being curious about quantum, be curious about how defense technology actually transforms into civil technology. If you're curious, you'll find out.

48:16and I think if you look at young kids they're all massively curious until we send them to school and then we make them conform to one standard they all need to become the same and regardless what their mentality is, regardless what their level of interest is I think everybody has the ability, how shall I say, to become special.

49:00I think one of the talents, and given that what we have, we have the Renaissance developer as one of the points in there, In the Renaissance, the core of Renaissance humanism was that the belief that humans are limitless in the capability of invention. As long as you keep their curiosity alive, the moment they're no longer curious, they'll lean back and it's over. and so I believe that that's really we are limited in the capabilities of inventing of do new things if we're just being allowed to I don't disagree you hit on a couple of your points the renaissance developer and the personalized learning which I think is hugely opportunistic or a huge opportunity for so many because, like you said, we sometimes by necessity, we push all of our children into a square hole, you know, regardless of their educational shape, and they must come out conformed to whatever standard.

50:21And I do think that technology is allowing us to break out of that conformity to a certain extent and provide personalized, customized education, you know, leaning into what the kid's interested in and playing to their strengths. Yeah, but also even also just learning maths. I remember I have two daughters. They're now in their close to their 40s. Don't tell them that. They got to know that, right? One of the things, so I'm not American. I'm not the U.S. I come from the Netherlands where high school has 10 different forms, depending on sort of what you're, you go to a school to become a welder, or you go to a school where you go to university, and there's a whole range in between.

51:19And then I come to the rest, and the kids have to go to high school, and all kids have to go to the same high school. They have to take the same classes. They have to score good in the same classes. And when one of my daughters, in the first time that she got into math class, there were four guys in the back of the room that were four years older than that she was, still had failed maths every time, but had to still sit in that class. Disruptive and, well, you know the stories. and as such I've always been a real fan of Ken Robinson professor from from the from the UK that moved to Los Angeles at some moment and I've been a real fan of him because he really looked at that instead of that we let our kids bloom and explore and become really what they can become, we turn them into factory workers, all doing the same thing.

52:37And that kills all the possibility in what these kids have in them. What do you see coming out or happening in the education space right now that leads you towards this prediction? Because you're predicting, you know, infinite personalization and these things. Are there solutions out there today? Are there companies working on it? Well, I think there's enough companies working on them. But what I see more and more is that these kids are doing it themselves. Yeah. Gen Alpha, the current kids that are in high school or going to high school, they really know how to use AI. or AI assistants. And they know how to make a curriculum for themselves.

53:28And they know how to make something from which they can learn. That is really a tool for them to build something that they just want to do. It helps them build things without having to have to go through a complete textbook first. Now, I still believe that you need to be able to do maths before you should be allowed to use a calculator. Yeah, that's like a reasonable kind of thing. But providing, if you're really interested in, let's say, how in the 1600s in Italy, from small states, this became one country. For some reason, I don't know. Kids have immense curiosity in anything. You can build yourself a curriculum that you become, not that you become an expert, but that you know everything about it.

54:32And this is something you have. Certainly you have control over that. Now, there's always two sides to this. The other side to this is that, and this is actually something from Ken Robinson again, And he says, there are no good schools. There are only good teachers. And he says, and what do most teachers spend their time on? Grading homework, doing administration, all these kind of things that actually have nothing to do with education. so yeah that that seems to me like a standard technology solution problem yeah and whether you solve that with ai or whether you solve that with some just some simple sequel fine yeah that doesn't really matter i believe that there should be a lot more support for teachers such that they can focus on things that is important.

55:38Well, individual interaction between a teacher and a student has so much more impact than the teacher just standing in front of the class. Yeah, by the way, Ted tells this wonderful story that he's a teacher and he tells his story that he's giving drawing lessons. and there's always this one girl in the back of the class that is never interested in anything but now they're drawing lessons and she's fanatic so she goes he goes to the back of the class and looks at what she's doing and he says what's she doing and she says i'm drawing god and he says but nobody knows how god looks like and she looks at him and she says but in a minute they will.

56:36That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, would we think, here's a blank paper, why don't you draw God? Yeah. Yeah? No. Yeah? But this is a kid. There are no boundaries to your curiosity and to what you can. all these things that these kids feel as constraints are put upon them yeah that's a double-edged sword with this curiosity point with with children i think especially with ai unfettered curiosity at a young age with such a powerful thing is not that smart but i've personally experienced my ability to be curious and to explore at my older age and i like to translate some of that to the younger generation because I agree.

57:27I think there's this idea of just in time learning when you learn about a new thing and there's curiosity there to accomplish a goal, but you can't really accomplish that goal until you've gone a little deeper here, here, and here for context. I think that's kind of the new term or the new word of maybe potentially 2025 is context. Sure, AI and maybe even agentic, but I think a subversion of that is context. Yeah. You know, this just-in-time learning is really, really fascinating. And you must have been to conference or whatever, to some tech conference at some moment where there is someone describes something about a new cache algorithm.

58:10Yeah. And they look at that and they think, that shouldn't work. Yeah. Or actually, Amazon, we have something called the Builder's Library that's available for everyone to look at. These are articles written by Amazon's most senior engineers. And there is this one article by Colin that I couldn't get my head around because I've grown up in a time that you minimize the number of bytes on the wire. One more byte means more time, more delay, whatever. That's no longer the case. You know, he describes this system in which if the receiver always has to do exactly the same number of things, because there are 10 things in this packet, but eight of them may be empty.

59:05But everything is just standardized. You don't need to think about it. And the resilience grows up. Yeah. and so it took me a long time to get my head around that but the first time I read the intro to the story it immediately picked my curiosity and it took me a long time to learn what he really tried to achieve there and so I think you know even no matter how old we are there are moments every time when you get sort of, oh, how would that be? I live here in a place where there are a lot of electric scooters. The ones that, what's it, Lime, that Uber bought and some others and whatever. And I've always seen them, but I always was interested in curious how would it be to wear one?

1:00:09Well, now it's just a click on your phone and you jump on it. Then you go to the supermarket to buy your groceries and then you come back. You know, and it's just fun. And so, but, you know, curiosity is really one of the most amazing things that is uplifting in our life. So there's only one of you and there's only so many hours in the day and really only so much focus to go around. So my question to you is, what if you had a teammate who could work just like you with all the context you have, but a little faster? That's what Notion's new AI agent feels like. Notion already brings all your notes, all your docs, all your projects into one single connected space that just works.

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1:03:31It makes me think about this next notion, which I'm not sure I agree with, but it's been potentially the phrase or at least the sentiment of the last year or so, mainly around fear, uncertainty and doubt, which is developers are dead. That we're a dying breed. AI is taking our jobs. It's going to replace us. And you seem to push back on that idea through being a Renaissance developer. I do think if your job was only being, and that sounds a bit negative, being a code monkey. Yeah. Just tap in. All you do is code. That's all you do. You don't think. You don't plan it. Yeah. If that would be. But I think most of us have had to think about some of the stuff that we built.

1:04:24You had to think about algorithms. You had to think about trade-offs. You had to think about sort of, you went over to your colleague on the other side and you said like, you know, this is what I need to solve here. But I think there's a cash over run if that happens and that will brown out. And do you think that too? Shall we set up a test environment and see whether that works or not? Or, you know, there are so many parts to developers, development that will require our brains. And that's why I picked the word Renaissance. It's because before the Renaissance, there were the Dark Ages. Thousand years, basically.

1:05:14The Black Death, the plague, all these kind of things. and everything was ordered by basically religious institutions. And that changed at some moment where people became interesting again in all the amazing things that had been done a thousand years before by the Arabs, by the Romans, by the Greek. And so where they suddenly completely started to change. and there is this word that is sort of associated with the renaissance that is polymouth and many people think that that's people that is someone who can do mathematics in many different forms no no no no poly means mouth and matininia means learning much to learn yeah and if you look at the people in those days, definitely they suddenly started to become interested in many more things than just only the one thing that they were specialized in.

1:06:26Da Vinci was not just a sculptor. I mean, he built airplanes while they didn't fly. But he did build them. And just trying. I mean, think about all the people in those days that suddenly allowed their curiosity to come out now and i think as um as developers there are a number of things that we will need to we encounter first of all i do think we've been learning for 50 years now or whatever how long we've been doing computer science probably 1960s so yeah 60 years yeah so So we've been learning programming languages for 60 years. We've been going from mainframes to minis to PCs to cloud to whatever.

1:07:26Everything required a new approach to building or enabled us to do new things. You know, before cloud, you may have only had one colo and never would be able to build a replicated database. But then cloud came and suddenly you could replicate your database. You need to learn that, how to do that. But still, it is. and definitely I believe that it's not just sufficient to and now I need to be careful because I don't want to give away too much of my keynote go ahead spill the beans I'm just kidding I believe to be successful not only in the future but also now is to not only have a deep specialism but start to become interested in the broadness as well.

1:08:32It's called a T developer. It is someone that is not just a database expert. Not just a database expert, but he knows about the other types of application. He knows about other programming languages. He may even be able to help his colleagues on the other side or at least can have a conversation about it. Understands the business principles. of the business that he's actually running to. Another area that I think the newer type of developers, the Renaissance developer, needs to be an excellent communicator. And with that, for example, I mean, if you look at the Amazon website, just imagine that for you.

1:09:21there are three there are some parts of the amazon website that always need to work because otherwise we can't sell anything browse search shopping cart uh checkout and reviews because if there are no reviews people don't buy things yeah five things that absolutely need to work and then we have all the other things that actually are really important as well then we have recommendations, personalization, whatever. And then there is stuff that is just nice to have. Now, take, for example, bestseller lists. Now, as a technologist, you need to be able to have a conversation with the business and say, how many nines do you want behind that?

1:10:13Or you want four nines behind your bestseller list? Well, that's going to cost you so much. And then it becomes a business decision how I am going to implement this. But I need to be able to explain to the business what the risks are, what the costs are, how resilient can I make this. But without that kind of communication, you're not building the things that you want for your customers. So a very important part of the Renaissance developer is to be able to communicate in exactly the right way. Not only to the business, but also with your customers. What are you building? How does this interact with this?

1:11:09Now, if I show you a picture of the thousands of microservices that builds out Amazon.com, if I do something here, what's happening there? Is there a relationship between the two? so system thinking becomes crucial as well not just about your little piece that you're building but what impact does that have on other things yeah or you know i'm i'm happy going away my database is running my code is running everything's happening transactions are playing through and suddenly the number of transactions doubles. But there isn't a doubling of the number of the customer on the website. Who the hell is doing this to me?

1:12:08And as such, you know, being a specialist in one particular area and just staying there is safe. Yeah, it's fine. But you live in a bigger system. You know, if we think about, and that really comes out of 60s, 70s, Medellin Meadows began what's something called system thinking. It is this, in nature, you know, if you remove one piece out of that equation, of the complete nature equation, you know, you ruin the overall thing. At some moment, how was it? Yellowstone Park. There were too many wolves. They removed the wolves from the park. Oh, they were killing all the elks. So they removed all the wolves.

1:13:07And then the number of elves grows like mad. Right, backfire. Which starts eating all sorts of parts of Yellowstone. And so not until we introduce the wolves, the balance gets back. So on her thinking, on systems thinking, is something that we as the future Renaissance engineers need to be part of as well. We need to understand that the one thing that we're working on at this moment has impact on all the other pieces around it. We need to be able to communicate with the others. We need to be able to see how we are part of this bigger problem. And you know what? And it will be fun. It will be fun.

1:14:01I absolutely think. And so one of the things I think that I, I won't say hate. let's say one of the most less interesting parts I always in the beginning as my life as developer thought were code reviews yeah it's a bit like standing in front of the class the whole class gets a chance to say like you're an idiot right but code reviews are fun sometimes you think There's mistakes there. Or sometimes you go like, wow. That's an elegant solution. I wish it for the water. And code reviews are super important for junior engineers. Because the senior engineers are in the room and discussing the code on the screen there.

1:14:55And you're learning on the spot from the senior engineer. From all their years of experience. where someone will say, yeah, I tried that when we were building product X, Y, or Z. Yeah. And it didn't work then. Or the problem at that time was that. Now, whether the code on the screen is generated by you or by some AI agent, doesn't really matter. We still need to do code reviews. Yeah. Because we have ownership. And whether we used a tool to create the code that we're looking at, or whether we actually wrote it ourselves, we're still responsible for it. We still own it. And so those things don't go away.

1:15:50And so, and as such, if your system has been created by one of the AI tools, and as I said earlier you are responsible for it especially if you're in life sciences if you're in healthcare if you're in financial services in whatever you cannot only rely on the fact that oh but AI built it you are still responsible for what you deliver and that means you need to be able to look at it and a search generation of code may go faster reviews will probably go slower because this is not code that i've written now if it's my code i can go stand up in front of the class and say oh and this is why i did this and this is why i did that but if a complete unknown unhuman entity created this code for you it takes longer to get used to it yeah and and so i mean and not that's not bad i mean none of this don't take this as that i'm sort of cracking on a ai as being no there's this parts that will never leave us we need to learn the next steps we need we continue to keep uh ownership of what we do We continue to need to learn the next language, the next tool, the next system that we built.

1:17:26And, you know, we need to know more than just that one piece. We need to be more than that. And my favorite, and he comes back in almost every presentation that I give, was Jim Gray. He won the Turing Award. This is the guy that actually built System R at IBM, the inventor of transactions. Jim was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. There's an article, if you want to look it up, it's called 20 Questions to Jim Gray. Jim said, give me 20 business questions or questions that you as a user of a database would want to answer the database, that have the database answer. I will build a database for you yeah and by the way one of the most interesting questions is he walks he walks into the room where the big machinery is and he hears the disks rattling and he looks sideways and he listens to disk he says your database layout is wrong yeah that was something he could hear yeah he was not just a database expert he had a lot of other skills in other areas and so he was what we would call a T developer an I developer is someone that knows only one thing a T developer has you know number of knowledges in other areas whether it's computer science, whether it's from the world or whatever.

1:19:12It's a broader person than just only the database developer. And I think in the future, this is something that we will continue to harness. You need to know more. You need to be able, because how can you communicate with your colleagues that build other parts of the system if you actually don't know anything about what and how they're doing it? This idea of code review, one thing you're making me think about is at least the sentiment it seems today is getting through code review. It seems like you're suggesting, even though it's painful, not so much pausing, but not getting through it just to deliver the code to production and correctness, but to understand why the code is what it is.

1:20:03And especially if it's AI generated and the human in the loop is less informed specifically about the code itself, that it's more of an artifact of a plan, not an artifact of actual implementation themselves. Yeah. And I'm getting old. I just had a great answer to what you wanted. And I completely lost it. I do think that we've changed over time as developers. I mean, I've written VB. I don't think there's anybody that writes Visual Basic anymore, is there? Not on purpose. Yeah. Fix a bug maybe in legacy code if it's still there. Yeah, something like that. But it was fun when we were doing it.

1:20:52And, you know, I wasn't thinking about five databases replicated over five different data centers throughout the world at that particular moment. I was trying to fix my Excel code. And so we've all grown as developers over the past 10, 15, 20 years with all sorts of new tools. We have a new tool. there is one there is a particular point that a particular small problem I have with it is that if you look at all the other tools that we've developed we took some time to introduce them we learned we had learned people we told people why we were building the tools how we were building the tools how they could best use them yeah the typical early adopters and you had to cross the chasm and then you had the early majority and things like that.

1:21:54And it would take time. But you would learn, you would teach your users why and how that tool was there. With some of the current, the new generative AI tools, they were just dumped in people's lap without telling them what it could do or what it couldn't do. yeah and you know there isn't almost a cio that i meet today when i'm traveling that asked me he says what should i be doing with ai and i go like well my excuses it's very inappropriate to answer a question with a question but why are you asking me this and just yeah but those guys next door you know they will be ahead of us or and i say are you really certain of that and then maybe because you're a little bit older you know you start to drive down into what is actually the problem they're trying to solve with this technology?

1:23:08And is this the right technology for this? Every week we see five new models or 10 new models. Suddenly we went from regular LLMs to reasoning LLMs. I think as a business, there is no shame in hitting the pause button for a moment and say, why don't we get ourselves educated about all of this? Yeah, and not just us as technologists, but also the business. Yeah, because at this moment, quite a few of our architectures are being determined by the media, not by us. Yeah, that shouldn't be the case. Yeah, we, together with our business, business should determine how our architectures should look like, not because the newest thing.

1:24:10And of course, and that's the task of the media. And the task of the media is also to write negative headlines. Even things are looking up. That company is massively behind that company. Yeah, you know what? AWS was never a consumer company. So we don't build consumer products. We build tools such that you can build your chatbots. Right. If Amazon, if AWS doesn't have a chatbot, means that we're out of business in AI, it just means it's not our business. And I think sort of that's really crucial in all of this, that we take time to learn the technologies, the capabilities of the technology, and where it can help us in our businesses.

1:25:03And, you know, if we also give it to a whole bunch of Gen Alpha kids that can go do wild with it and build their own educational curriculum with them, great, let them have it. Yeah? It's a bit like us 50 years ago with hammer and nails and building your own thing up in the tree, you know, and now kids do different things. But, you know, we need to give them the tools for it. And, but definitely in business, I think there is no shame in hitting the pause button and spend some time on education and making sure that you and your engineers are making the right decisions with the right tools. There is no hurry.

1:25:57There is no company will go out business in the company two months because they weren't using AI. Well, you heard it here first because very few people are saying that out loud. And while I agree with you and I think that it is a problem, I wonder if we have an appetite as an industry to address said problem. I think we're just barreling forward and we'll see what happens. But I also agree when you say give the kids the tools. Give the kids the tools. Oh, it's a big one. one of the other things I didn't make it this time into the predictions did I do it last year? one of the things that I think last year is one of the things I talked about one of the things that worries me is that parents driving in their car the kids are in the back seat they're getting when are you getting home and that was how we used to drive home now the kids get an ipad and become youtube experts and they're quiet in the back and the parents love it yeah but you set kids up from four or five years old to to get dopamine reactions they know how to manipulate youtube continuously and it's not only that they are said they're in this dopamine high, there's something else called dopamine too that actually removes your willpower in these kind of cases.

1:27:33Whenever you stand at the bus stop next time, look at how many people pull their cell phone out even if they know that the bus is three minutes away. Nobody wants to be bored anymore. Nobody wants to just stare out in the distance and use their brains. And we can't help ourselves because we've ruined ourselves. And if we do this with our young kids, we will have an epidemic on our hands 10, 15 years from now in terms of addiction. Invasive. Sorry, guys. I keep yapping. No, we appreciate it. We know you got to go. Didn't quite make it to your fifth, but great, great predictions. Thank you for sharing your extended thoughts on them and giving us some time today.

1:28:29Okay. Well, I really enjoyed it, guys. Come and watch my keynote, the last keynote at reInvent. I'm doing the C30 on Friday and Thursday. Nice. So after me, everybody can do whatever they want. You're the closer. You're the closer. I am the closer. Awesome, Werner. Well, you're welcome back anytime. Coming close. Yes. Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you, Werner.

1:28:59There you have it. Werner Vogel's predictions for 2026 and beyond. He had another one about defense technology that we didn't quite get to. Find the link to his article in the show notes. So do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What do you think will happen next? Let us know in the comments by joining our free community and chatting with us in Zulip. that link is also in your show notes thanks again to our partners at fly.io and to our beat freaking residents breakmaster cylinder who's hard at work remixing your state of the log voicemails we have a couple trickling in but we need more send us one why don't you at changelog.fm slash sotl that link is also you guessed it in your show notes all right that's it goodbye for now but we'll be back on Friday with Nick Neesey talking Anthropix, Acquisition of Bun, Sourcegraph and Amp splitting into Nick's latest Claude Code shenanigans, and what do we make of the new browser war?

1:29:56It's a good one. We'll talk to you then.

1:30:28Game on.