The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Werner Vogels predicts the future (Interview)
04 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome everyone, I'm Jared and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week Adam and I interview the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. We pick their brains, we learn from their failures, we get inspired by their accomplishments, and we have a lot of fun along the way.
On this episode, Amazon CTO Warner Vogels stops by to help us explore his tech predictions for 2026 and beyond.
Chapter 2: What are Werner Vogels' predictions for technology in 2026?
Will companionship be redefined by consumer robots? Will Quantum Safe become the only safe worth talking about? Is this the dawn of the Renaissance developer? We're infinitely curious why Warner came to this particular set of conclusions, are you? But first, a big thank you to our partners at Fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship. We love Fly. You might too.
Learn all about it at Fly.io. Okay, Warner Vogels predicts the future on the changelog. Let's do it.
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Chapter 3: How will companionship be redefined by consumer robots?
Whenever we have a treat, we're here with the CTO of Amazon. My gosh, talking about predictions. Every year you have five. They mostly come somewhat true in a couple of years.
Chapter 4: What does 'quantum-safe' mean and why is it important?
So you're pretty accurate, Werner. Welcome to the show again. The last time you're here was for the No Sequel Smackdown back about 12 years ago, Jared?
Chapter 5: Is the era of the Renaissance developer upon us?
10 years ago, was it? Forever ago.
Episode 18.
Back when No Sequel was cool. Fresh and burgeoning. Now it's ubiquitous and everywhere. And I guess still cool. Coolish. Coolish.
Yeah. Engineering has come a long way since. I think the first NoSQL tools were really the first tools. Now, if you look at DynamoDB, if you look at Mongo, these are super robust, highly scalable tools where everybody can build a business on.
Come a long way. I think, you know, it was burgeoning was Dynamo DB was coming out then it was fresh and brand new. I guess the CTO, you probably architect a lot of that stuff, right? What, what do you do as part of your role?
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Chapter 6: Why is curiosity crucial for developers and technologists?
Like what is your role maybe then 15 years ago? And then how is it now?
So first of all, it's 21 years now, right? So that's a bit, and there is a predecessor to DynamoDB, that's Dynamo. And one of the things, when I joined Amazon, I joined as what was called a director of systems research. The idea was to bring, you know, let me go a little bit back. Think about 1994, when Jeff Bezos starts thinking about sort of the internet. And he starts a bookshop.
He doesn't really want to start a bookshop. He's just fascinated by the internet. What are the things that you can do online that you will never be able to do in real life? And he just picks a bookshop. A good bookshop has 40,000 titles in stock, yet there's millions of books out there. So he thinks you could do that online. But there is no book. There is no software that you can buy.
There is no book that says, and here is an e-commerce operation. The word e-commerce doesn't exist yet. So everything that the Amazon engineers had to do to build Amazon was to invent everything themselves. Because the kind of technology that they could buy couldn't operate at their scale. We've had a number of bloody noses because of that.
So when I joined Amazon, engineers at Amazon were brilliant at scaling. But from a, let's say, practical, lots of scars kind of approach.
Oh, yeah.
And Jeff hoped that by bringing a former academic in, you get some more robustness. You know, you get some more... better fundamental approach to scale and reliability and things like that. And we did lots of large projects around removing all single points of failures or how to best measure, how do you measure? What does it mean to measure? If 50% latency on your webpage, means nothing.
Yeah, well, it means that 50% of your customers are getting a worse experience. You need to know how much worse. Now, if I think about CTOs, there's sort of four or five different types, and there's no real well-described one. I think, first of all, there's the data center manager. He reports up to the CIO.
Then you have the CTO that is the second person in the startup, often the co-founder, the first coder. And then you have the big thinker, sort of the role that I got when I came into Amazon, sort of like look at the whole picture, what are the kind of things we need to do. But then when we started doing AWS, your world changes, right?
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Chapter 7: What role does education play in the future of technology?
And I think Scott Dietzen, who was at BA, I think it was at that time, he called it really an external technologist.
The ability to talk to your customers, look at that, how are they using my products, and what are the problems that I see with 10, 20, 100 of my customers that they may not see as a single problem themselves, but where you can find, if I can build a tool for that, I can really help my customers.
And so your role changes from being purely internal to being external and sort of bringing back things into. And then over time, I've become more and more interested in those organizations. both profit and non-profit, that try to solve hard problems. And with hard problems, I mean hard human problems. The United Nations expects that by 2050 we have 2 billion more people.
I mean, how are we going to feed them? How are we going to make sure they have an economic future? How are we going to make sure they have health care? Those kind of problems. are the ones that I'm mostly focused on today. On one hand, by the way that we build technology at Amazon, but also by looking for those often young businesses and how can we support them?
Take, for example, the Ocean Cleanup Project. It's a massive problem. The Grand Ocean Garbage Patch is full of fishnets and plastics. And there's about 30 rivers that sort of contribute mostly to that. So these guys have built plastic with GPS in them, threw them in the river and see them where they end up. Or they have these AI cameras on boats to sort of first, where do these boats go?
But secondly, also, what are the things that they're seeing? And so working with those kind of customers is extremely satisfying because we're solving actually real human problems. We're not building spam filters.
Well, 21 years is a long time. And there's that old quote, the best way to predict the future is to create it. You've spent 21 years with your teams creating, in many ways, the future that we're currently living in, but you're also out there predicting it. This is the fifth year, perhaps you're writing these predictions. You have five of them and they're fascinating. I agree with most of them.
The companionship one I'm skeptical of, but I'd love to hear your, your full case for us here. But why, why write these? Why predict the future in these ways and continue to do so?
There's a long history by large technology companies. And if you think about the IBMs and the Oracles and whatever, or McKinsey or whatever, the consulting companies, by kind of predicting the future. And always when I read them, I always felt that they were a bit self-serving. And the things that I saw in the real world were different.
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Chapter 8: How can AI impact our understanding of loneliness?
And if you think how they work, most of them are day laborers. That means that they go to the bank, they get $2, they buy something, they try to sell it, they bring the $2 back and hope to have 40 cents left to buy food. They probably have that. But then they don't have money left to cook it. Why? Because these big canisters, these butane canisters, cost $10. And they don't have $10.
And so there's a young company called Coco Networks that built a sort of ATM where you can go with a canister. You plop the canister in and you say, give me 15 cents of gas. And then you can take that home. You can cook your food. Yeah, now, this is not a world-shocking problem, but it is solving really hard problems that people have.
And those kind of companies are really the ones that, and those kind of problems are often kind of the things that I like to service through the predictions. This year, you know, I do think there are things every year. I mean, I could have done 10 predictions. You could have. But that doesn't work that fairly well.
Five is the magic number. Three is the magic number. Five is better.
Yeah, yeah. But, you know, was it two years ago? An example, a topic that has become more and more openly discussable is menopause for women. It's a major problem for them, you know. But even mothers don't talk to their daughters about it. However, that is slowly changing.
What kind of things do we see in the startup community that are trying to build, whether it's technology products or whether it is medicine or whatever, to solve those kind of problems? And so I also try to talk a little bit about things that people normally find a bit harder to talk about.
Well, let's talk about one companionship, loneliness, robots. I do not have any disagreement whatsoever with your casting of the problem, which is that loneliness is on the rise, especially amongst elderly. But even across all demographics, we see an increase in loneliness, which has all kinds of health and mental wellness problems, just overall bad, right?
But you seem optimistic because we have a new swath of robotic companions that are coming out.
It's one of these problems. Actually, I did this documentary series called Now Go Build, TV series. Probably two, three years ago, I was in Japan for that. Actually, and that's where I first really dove deep in this particular topic. So Japan really was a society where kids take care of the elderly. The grandparents live with the grandkids and the kids. And that was normal.
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