Shebang: You are being modest again. As I say you are a legend, and you are saying it came from student service you performed? Not from hacking... O.K.

[PAUSE] [LAUGHTER]

Shebang: And the future?

Soggie: The internet will prevail even more than it does now. It will become really ubiquitous. To what extent will depend largely on what part of the world you are living in. But certainly in the industrialised world it will be all around you in your light switch and in your phones, all over your body, in your car, you name it. And all other means of telecommunication will become just a feature of the internet. Now you have the phone system and the internet, but eventually the phone system will become a part of the internet, you will be calling people over the internet. People might have cable TV subscriptions and maybe on those cable TV subscriptions you could obtain cable TV, but it will probably turn over the other way round, so that you will have an internet connection internet and maybe you will plug your TV into your internet connection. and you will receive your television programmes, and that will be a constant all over. Most likely.

Shebang: You’re so hot at this stuff, tell us about the rest of humanity and their stupidity regarding computers and the internet. It must drive you bonkers to see how useless most people are at it. Or are you patient with it? It MUST drive you mad

Soggie: It doesn’t drive me that mad

[LAUGHTER]

In most cases it’s really not the user who is to blame but the person who wrote the software or the organisation who put it out, because 90-95% of all software out there is total crap.

Shebang: Yes I know but most of the people you work with [here at Starlab and elsewhere] don’t read the manual, they don;’t do the hard work that you do. You pay your dues. There are a few people around who just can’t do that. Doesn’t it drive you crazy?

Soggie: It’s also not their job

[Shebang: LAUGHTER] You’re being very diplomatic - and NICE.

Soggie: I am nice. [LITTLE LAUGH] You can’t expect that they would be computer professionals otherwise they would be better off doing another job.

Shebang: Right. Would you like to have your own company? Anyone who didn’t want to keep you really would be mad.

Soggie: My original goal was not to have my own company before I was thirty, because I first needed to have some experience of the business. And you also need to build up some contacts, know how things are done in the real world and in the corporate world, and I felt that if you were to start a company without that experience one would probably make a lot of mistakes.

Shebang: Would you wear a suit?

Soggie: Depending on the occasion. I used to work as an internet consultant for a year and a half as an internet consultant, and I did of sales and resales work. Then I often wore a suit. It was more or less required

Shebang: So you do want to have your own company?

Soggie: It is an appealing thought, yes.

Shebang: What would be your ideal in computing?

Soggie: If it were to be able to upgrade itself automatically. Like a machine which would become twice as fast by itself every year or so. It should be able to follow the advances in computer production and computer design

Shebang: Do you have any interest in artificial intelligence, in consciousness, in the brain and brain building. Any of them of any interest to you?

Soggie: Yes. I have an interest in the progress in that. But Artificial Intelligence is still in its infancy. For some areas they have made some progress such as speech recognition and linguistics and so forth. But I am a believer in hard AI. I see no fundamental reason why a computer should not be intelligent or could not be intelligent. it all depends of course on the question of what is intelligent and every time someone comes up with a concrete definition of what intelligent is, then after a few years or decades someone builds a machine which is able to uphold that definition of intelligence and then they change the definition of intelligence.

Of course that’s the entire problem: Once you can exactly and correctly define something then you can do it on a computer. But intelligence is such a big notion that people haven’t yet seemed to have found a concrete and exact definition of intelligence such that if someone would build a computer with such a quality, it would satisfy people.

Shebang: Do you think computers are — in inverted commas going to ‘take over’

Soggie: I can’t see why they would bother.