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What is the next area you think is ripe for tech disruption?

One of the things I would say about answering that question is often people look at the technology. And it generally is much better to turn it around and look at the people, because it is what people do or want to do or their fundamental needs that drive the technology, not the other way around. So, if you understand that for most of our civilised history people have grown up in a village and they all know each other, they have a common currency and understanding of the world. And then you see a world where people relocate for jobs around here to another city. That's going to get you to why you need a Facebook or a new social media.

Similarly, if you think about the Roman legal system on which our legal system is based, everyone turns up to court and produces the evidence, and then a judge opines on how the law works. But now you suddenly realise that your company has 10 terabytes, then you realise that well you can't throw the legal system out. So, there's going to be an incredible technology situation that led to the whole sort of E-discovery and changes in the legal system. The point I'm making is it’s about what people are doing, and you can look at all sorts of interesting things - people want to be able to solve things they can't work out. Quantum computer, you could do that, perhaps. You've got these ideas of: does currency work? People are thinking about Bitcoin.

The more interesting thing, I think, is when you come back to, what do people do each day? For the number of people that take the contract and read it and edit it and negotiate it. That's not really a great value add and that should be automated now that we have AI that can do that.

And then I've got some other more specific ones, you know, young people these days have earphones in their ears all the time, they're too loud. They're going to have hearing loss. That's an incredibly difficult thing as you get older. Technology should be able to deal with that we should be able to get back to a pretty perfect hearing, even if he's had hearing loss by using some of the new methods, so that's another interesting area. And then because of all the things I've done, and building billion dollar companies, I’ve got to the point where I want to do things that are a little bit more ambitious now. I just love the idea of non-existent worlds at the moment. If you've ever used AR, where we could suddenly have a goldfish walk across this table, but at the moment that would require us to have strange glasses on. Well let's get rid of them, let’s make it like the Star Trek holodeck. Massive technical problems in doing that, but that would be amazing. Imagine that we could just make anything in this room appear to be in here that isn't in here. It would be like Harry Potter you'd be completely free of the laws of physics. So, I think that's a very exciting one.

I think the ability of us to communicate is so limited by language - now I realise at that point every English teacher is going to have a fit - but the reality of how we see our world is incredibly subtle complex interrelations of ideas. But when we talk, we have to use words and words mean that we generally take what can be 100 things that have gone into an intuition and we try and reduce it to four or five ideas that we can explain in a sentence using a linguistic construct. What if we could communicate with our machines directly, without having to go through language? So that they actually get to be working with us at the level that we actually work, which is much more intuitive level. 

I should just explain that, when you ask someone why they made a decision, we’ve all been trained in the Western world, to give a reason why we made a decision. But there are many experiments you can do with quite simple things like how fast you drive a car round a curve that shows the explanation we give bears no relation to what we actually did. We thought about it a different way and then we were constrained by language to explain. Well, imagine if you could take that out. The machine could be getting everything that you understand about what's going on when you communicate with it, it would be a very different world, we could do much cleverer things. So, I think these ideas of mind machine interfaces are really interesting. Again, massive technical problems, but a very exciting new area to be thinking about. Technology is moving at an amazing rate.

And then this whole area in biology around not so much genetics but related to genetics. So, you know the reason why when Darktrace did this idea we came up with immune system was I've had a very strange education because of the Cambridge tripod system. I had to study advanced physics and I did biochemistry as well. Not many people did that mix. So, when we came to Darktrace, I was thinking about how we explain this - well it's like an immune system so that was fine. But coming back to the idea of genetics is not think about epigenetics. So, epigenetics is not what's in the DNA in terms of your what you inherited, it's how the DNA is modified in your life. So, for example, if your grandmother lived for a famine, your DNA is the same, but the controlling mechanism which is called epigenetics around that is changed by her experience. And that's fascinating. And then you've also got this whole idea of what are called non-coding parts of genetic information, so people thought that genetic information was about fusing proteins, but it turns out there's whole bits that do other things. So, there is a whole world opening up there of things that you know weren't even conceived of 20 years ago.