Will.i.am on the Internet of things
Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is happy to admit he’s a tech geek. The musician, producer, philanthropist now has the title Director of Creative Innovation at the chipmaker Intel.
This week, we are talking to notable folks in the tech world about what could be the next digital frontier — not the Internet of webpages, but the Internet of things, of interconnected objects. We caught up with Will.i.am at the recent MacWorld/iWorld conference in San Francisco to get a sense of his creative process and ask him if there’s any truth to reports of him moving out of music to learn coding — writing software with computer languages.
On his future career path:
“I’m not going to quit music, I’m going to continue to make music. But I want to code because I would like to contribute to how music is experienced, and the way to do that is through coding.”
On the Internet of things:
“Everywhere that we go in the world, the things that we come across aren’t intelligent. Like this wall that I’m looking at, it’s just separating the room from the other side. In actuality, that wall should be intelligent. Nobody thinks of it like that. That’s why when you go into a house, you need to put a TV on it, instead of the wall being the display system. I think what’s going to come is the Internet of things…The next ten years is nuts. That’s why I want to code.”
To hear Will.i.am share his thoughts on how technology will influence music and other everyday experiences, click on the audio player above. And listen to our previous interview with Will.i.am where he discusses his work to bring better science and technology education to U.S. schools.
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