Joni, Tanya and the team at Samsung invited Matthew to give the keynote at a launch event at Samsung KX in London. Three years on from his last visit, he returned to the theme of Life: 2069, Samsung's centennial year and a hundred years on from the development of its first "televisor".
Filmed at Samsung KX and streamed to audiences across Europe and North America because of COVID restrictions, the session explored what Matthew regards as the foundational technologies of our time: artificial intelligence, communications, computing, electronics, energy and others. He then turned to the future of entertainment, well beyond AI creating synthetic content, and to the future of food and healthcare, including life at the age of 150.
"The future won't just be a more modern version of today's reality, it'll be sci-fi on steroids."Matthew Griffin, London, November 2021
His central point was that we already live in an age our ancestors would regard as science fiction, if they knew what science fiction was. As we move forward we will be in the same position, using technologies we once thought of as sci-fi, such as DNA based AIs and biological computers, which are already here.
He closed on the oddest thing about the keynote: nothing he talked about is science fiction, because all of it has already been built.
