Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of The Future In Five Questions. I recently sat down with Matt Carter, a longtime tech and telecom executive who is now CEO of emergency communications company Intrado. Carter is at the center of debates in the U.S. around upgrading the 911 system — a key piece of national infrastructure that lawmakers are debating how to bring into a higher-tech era. Today, Carter discusses those possible changes alongside the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence and the promise of converging satellite and telecom companies. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity. What's one underrated big idea? The advancement of next-gen 911. That technology promises to be transformative, helping us to connect better with first responders, analytics, helping us to be smarter about the information that we're garnering from distress situations. It's one that I believe is transformative in actually raising the bar of providing 911 services in a much more advanced, responsive, responsible way. What's a technology you think is overhyped? AI and machine learning certainly have great promise and potential. But it's really all about use cases — practical application, the things that need to continue to be worked on in terms of their data models for better accuracy, and making sure that they're not biased in any sort of way. They've been overhyped as sort of this nirvana, this sort of savior for any and all things. We've got to take a step back and just say, yes, technology has great potential, but we also need to be thoughtful around the practical use of it and ensure that we're being responsible in terms of how we choose in ways that don't corrupt our thinking. We have to put some guardrails around it just to make sure it doesn't run amok. There's always a new shiny object out there. What book most shaped your conception of the future? It's an old book — the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. He wrote the book before he died when he had cancer. He needed to leave his family some kind of money after he died. And at the encouragement of Mark Twain, he wrote his autobiography. It feels so relevant to today. Grant was a guy who was very decisive, very strategic in his governance and leadership — he was a great strategic thinker. He was a failed businessman and had the wherewithal to bounce back, become a great military hero and then president of the United States. Grant was a guy who was adaptable. He first used telegraphs during the Civil War, which helped with better communications and to deploy military tactics in a much more thoughtful way. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn't? Investing in the technological infrastructure of 911 services. There’s IP pairing, and next-gen 911 and making these things more interoperable, more seamless. It creates better response times, better analytics, helping to make things more efficient and effective. Government can be powerful in helping to drive some of the investment, helping to upgrade the infrastructure around this. It needs funding. What surprised you most this year? The convergence of satellite and telecom, and how fast that's moving. I grew up in a telecom industry, and you have your telecom companies, your AT&Ts and Sprints of the world, and your satellite companies. Now what's happening is the convergence of these two, as really an extension of each other's networks, to create much more broad availability. I wouldn't be surprised if a telecom company or a satellite company bought each other. I think the future telecom company is going to be some combination of those two. There are other practical applications — it can help maybe with rural coverage.
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