Transcripts For CSPAN2 Noam Cohen The Know-It-Alls 20180222

We are going to get started here tonight. My name is seth mnookin im the director of the Communications Forum and a couple of quick announcements before we start. First Communications Forums are held three times a semester, six times a year. If you would like to be informed of future events theres a signup sheet over their. Put your name and email and we promise we will only send you information about our six events a year. We had judge john hodgman last semester. We have great stuff planned for next semester already. Also tonights form is being filmed by cspan so during the question part of the forum if you would go up to one of the microphones and hopefully state your name and your question. Another reason we ask you to state your name is we then go right up to the forums afterwards which you will be able to read a couple of days after the event on our web site and the last announcement is that this event tonight is cosponsored by radius which is another group here at m. I. T. I am thrilled to be able to introduce these three. It is a different breed than we initially thought would he here because jeff howe called me up at a little past five and said his daughter was and as the father of two young kids myself i said please stay home. Fortunately christina couch who writes about technology and is a brilliant journalist in her own right has agreed to fill in as the moderator. Let me introduce everyone. Noam cohen is the author of the new book the knowitalls and that is the tonight and i think moving forward. Noam and i worked together at decade and a half ago. I have known him ever since. He is a great guy and a brilliant journalist. He covered the influence of the internet on the larger culture for the news york times where he wrote the link by link beginning in 2007. His first book the knowitalls as a political powerhouse social wrecking ball. The history of Silicon Valley and critically examines how disruptive culture and ideology belittles ability empathy and even democracy. It was published in october of 2017 and it is available for purchase right here and in addition to supporting open discussion we also support both bookstores and authors. Please by all means buy the book book. Its a great look. Chris and i both read it and loved it. To noams left is sarah watson. Sarah is a Technology Critic who write a piece about the intersection of Technology Culture and society printer work has appeared in the atlantic wired the Washington Post slate and motherboard to choose the philly with the berkin Client Center for Internet Society and Harvard University and author of the town center for journalism on the current state of technology and then to noams right into my left is christina couch. Chris couch i had the absolute pleasure of working with for several years now. Shes the coordinator for the Communications Forum. The intersections of technology and psychology and her bylines appear in nova Net Technology review. The company coexist with wired magazine. We have for your convenience all of the twitter handles on the board noam cohen and couch cf. And without further ado i will turn it over to them. In addition to noams look we have book that jeff cowrote with the head of the m. I. T. Media lab called whiplash which is also a great book. Those books are available immediately afterwards and noam will be here to sign. Thank you. We are so excited about this panel. If i feel like it addresses a lot of really important issues. I would encourage you to buy the book. Its a great book. First of all i want to start off this panel by talking about the central argument of the book and correct me if im wrong here, is really the disruption and individualism to Silicon Valley has in a lot of ways eroded humanity. Is that fair to say . I was thinking about the question the premise of this gettogether and the glib answer is they havent. The deeper question is every person has humanity so whether we are talking about this happening i approach some of this from the computer aspect Computer Science aspect. Its one of the crucial mistakes or paths that we are on that is scary so i think that is denying the humanity of people when you think of them so individualistic way. Its a wellknown and it does about googles design director who created the design for gmail. Instead of using the color they tested 40 different shades of blue. The one that people use the most would be the one they would choose. Whats it like an oxymoron to have a human vision for what they were doing and they dont apologize for that. They say that shape who we picked as the most popular one and worth 200 million in additional revenue so its that rate down. Ive seen people at data points and i think they are not apologetic about it, at least the bad outcomes. Can you speak a little bit to what those outcomes are . For people that are not familiar with the intricacies of Silicon Valley can you tell me about how does that play out . They are taking the french ideology and make it seem very normal and mainstream. Resisting regulation and the idea that we should regulate taxis or hotels and he think of all the Different Companies that we should regulate what children see on video and regulate should they live in america and should they declare what they are doing. Thats one part of the ideology. Distrust of government which i think is really on that side. I think the extreme idea of free speech is another one. To me i wrote a piece in the new yorker. Com about an issue at stanford and whether back in the 80s whether there should be any limits on free speech. There was a group that told very racist and sexist jokes. There were such a severe pushback from the Computer Science department that it was reversed. To me having limits on free speech is a community that is cohesive. Thats another dangerous aspect of the libertarian ideology. I think some of it is done in good faith but i think its having horrible consequences. I wrote this book for the 2000 election. I was certainly thinking about it but what happened in the election bears obvious points. The fact is Companies Like Google Facebook and twitter are so blase about the idea that a foreign country could influence our election and whether these powerful tools should be used by anybody to stir up anger and resentment shows a disconnect. They are not custodians of this power they have and utopian visions like Mark Zuckerbergs dream of connecting the world. I would add one thing. In talking about the book what prompted me to do it because clearly it wasnt the 2016 election. You can look at me as a hypocrite and the issue of gmail. Remember thinking having a computer read your email in order to place ads. My mom how i never mentioned the word cancer and email. I didnt want hey at the thought of radiation treatment . It would still feel like they had a right to commercialize it in dowsett crystallizing moment for me too. A lot of people work with not just the criticism itself but the cultures rounding it. From your perspective do you believe or how do you feel about the premise of the culture of the Technology World having an impact on humanity and empathy and civility . I absolutely agree with noam noams overall premise and a lot of people have started to unpack the way that technology is built and also the assumptions and ideology that are acted out and obviously looking at the individuals who are leading these companies in coming up with these designs and looking at their assumptions and ideologies really do matter. The biggest thing for me is i like to think about this in terms of occupation. Most Silicon Valley leaders and companies are designed around question is of optimization whether its the design itself, whether its giving you the information as fast as they can or connecting people as efficiently as possible or connecting you to all of the worlds material goods. Those are efficiencies and optimizing forprofit. Those are taken for granted in the terms of optimization. I think trying to unpack what those assumptions are ken really be a productive point to say well what if spending more time on a spoke wasnt in the optimization model . What if it was a quality experience on facebook . What would that look like . How would that change the design of platform but also what would that change about what facebook in our lives is. I thought the crux for a lot of the questions i would ask about to algae, i think the trick is using the terminology of the industry optimization and away they are thinking about problems and problem solving. Its actually a productive way of sharing language and trying to get at, we havent necessarily agree to the terms of optimization but they are coming from it with a market perspective and is a natural way for things to evolve. But we as a society can turn to the question whether those are the terms we agree to or not. One of the things i thought was really well done and the look is how many of the issues that we associate with Silicon Valley now and the Technology World issues of privacy issues of commercialization issues of users being assessed in ways that others dont agree to but some of the companies that are major giants currently google being one that sticks out of my mind, really started with an ethos that was entirely against all of those things. How did we get there . I think all of that was spot on. She kind of classified critics and i think what she is talking about are practical ways of trying to get to a better place than this book i was looking at the history and also trying to ask Bigger Picture questions. I was almost going to make it the beginning of the book. In the bible theres this instruction. You should give but one pass and harvesting and you shouldnt go back a second time and officially get every little fruiting colonel you missed. People are traveling or poor people who live off of the. Here again i have a farm and i need all of the content out of it. You are part of the society and the efficient thing is to let leave some scraps there for other people. You think about the picture there. An editor sent me a tweet where it was pointed out the Mark Zuckerberg said he cared so much about election meddling that he was cool the company was going to spend all this money to hire people and thats why he mentioned it in an investment call. Of course the natural comment is you are basically saying you make up for the current bad situation. I was trying to look back and i didnt know these answers learning about how did we get here . That was the question now is trying to ask ray it accounts for some of these extreme ideological ideas about free speech and will i credit stanford for a lot of the prophecy. For me the google case was very enlightening. It was really an incredible invention like the Google Search engine. Everyone agrees that they were standing on the shoulders of others but they really have this chaotic thing called the early web. They made it incoherent. The reason why it became so popular but they explained why it needed to be advertising free and in the actual academic world world. There shouldnt be these lacked boxes and of course we have come to accept the idea that the bookal algorithm is a secret thing and no one should know what they were doing. They were arguing thats bad for science and buried bad for test. The way i see the story going is basically they are serious academics and their parents were academics. They offered this incredible idea that they had an there was so much bandwidth at sanford they were told we have to start figuring out how to pay for this. Couldnt sanford had said this is great. Its very important for our society and science to do this but instead they were told you had better figure out a way to do this and they were immediately connected to the stanford network. Some of them werent incorporated so as the story and openness look about how a person who is when the stanford graduate will send a check to google incorporated. There is no google incorporated. A month later there was a google incorporated. The rest is history. I feel like maybe its a little corny but its a corruption narrative for them and for facebook is well worth a had ideals of being and not the computer. In the book there other characters who are bankers. That is what they were really trying to do. I feel we were led astray a bit. Thats my view. Zmax sarah you have talked about how coverage of the Technology Roles have changed. Can you explain how has the media involved as the tech world has evolved . The Research Report i did at columbia i think one of the things i was trying to look at was coverage from that early on most breathless excitement about Silicon Valley moments in the dot. Com boom and all the energy that went into covering before the amazon error and later in the google and facebook and others era. Thats during from a business oriented coverage model or from it text logger model. That coverage moving into something a little bit more as the technology starts to intersect with a lot of things like politics and people in society shifting the narrative about what matters about technology and why its changing and affecting our lives. That shift happened at a couple of different points. In 2007 or so all of a sudden things have dramatically changed our daytoday relationship with a computer in her pocket basically. Yes that was in that excitement phase and we have 2013 moment which was the snowdon mode and and snowdon moment. Everybody comes to terms with the fact that technology has good and bad uses. That is a larger moment where everyone specifically journalists and publications are willing to a knowledge that we need to think about this and so on. I wanted to touch on this a little bit. Right now at this very moment your book came out and franklins book came out a World Without and which is more about companies controlling her access to knowledge and information. Theres also the four by Scott Galloway which is more about the monopolistic approach is to company so a little bit more on the market side of things but you also have tam wu writing about merchants talking about companies monopoly over information. I think its an interesting moment right now and part does all of these books were being written before the crisis hit. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Publishers seem to have acknowledged this to think that there was a market for this book book. I like to think of this in terms of a meta, wheres the audienc . I wrote a piece earlier than that about this german politician a young guy who petitioned data. It was you kind of point out in the paper you wrote the breakthrough is hard. Isnt that where they are keeping all but data about you. I think that probably was big. We are talking earlier about the public access. I would be curious to hear your take on this. For journalist to have access to these companies they have to stay on the good side to a degree and that is especially true if you are a Business Tech journalist covering a story. As more journalists from different walks of life are also coming to terms with technology technologys impact on society the narrative starts to change. What you are pointing out is leaving that gadget phase. There was a sense in 2007 getting the first gadget is important but now we are beyond the gadget phase now. The ramifications become as important. I knew it wasnt the issue they were talking about. Theres an incredible sight called zuckerberg files were a professor at the university of wisconsin milwaukee saying it was a privacy issue. Everything about Mark Zuckerberg that was ever said. Usually its videotaped streaming. I read i think almost all of it. Until the deleted all of his tweets he tweeted 100,000 times. One book talks more about it than the other one but there was a look reeling about his worldview. They all have a lot of applications. When i did try interviews it was very stenographic and not that revealing. There is an appreciation for the critical journalism. It has to be supported by a the institutions publications willing to stick their neck out and put that forward. I think specifically of the amazon Workplace Environment example. Their reactions for that piece was like, what are you talking about . The news york times ran a pretty large piece on the inner workings of amazon employees and are really spanned from very low level all the way up to high levels but not all the way to the top. They really detailed the Network Conditions and it ended up getting lots and lots of attention. I felt the response wasnt really a classic libertarian response. The owner of the Washington Post they think he embodies a lot of what i say in the book. His response was very clear. He said you cant be sure because these are people and go to another company. If they were being treated right they would work here. They are being treated right. There cant be discrimination because the company would take all the great women programmers and therefore the market would correct for it. Its bad and that is another theme of the book this detachment from reality. Theres something very productive about the internet erases all the past. Its a new world. This company get up are really proud of this carpet they had. They were like we are so proud and the women were saying this is really offensive. Whats offensive . By having that saying what we have now is fair and if you arent representative here its because you didnt cut it. Eventually it took the carpet away but such a reader to infer him because we believe the world has been remade. None of the legacy problems that are obviously current. I wanted to draw on that because its so clearly articulates this complete disregard for the physical world. They are in seattle. For them to get another Silicon Valley job they would have to uproot their families so its not as what they are making it out to be. The question is whether its on purpose or not. Does he really not understand it packs that was one might always got hung up on. When we talk about things Like Technology in the Culture Technology and under representation of a number roots of people as well as exhibited at the products themselves whether that Computer Vision systems that have a harder time detecting. There was an article recently about women having getting prosthetics that fit. They are largely designed by men men. You have the dominant group in power. Silicon valley is so very much dominated by white men. First of all from your perspective do you see these types of issues changing . Changing over time are right now . We are talking about it. There is a lot more Media Coverage on these types of things. Is that landscape beginning to shift or do you see it as we have a really long way to go . I would say it would require change. It would require the book is fundamentally saying that these companies are a democracy. How do the correct in a society for wheelchair access. Ideally in a democracy everyone gets to express their opinion and thats how you represent people. I talk about Amy Klobuchar and hearing that the senate had about general counsel for Google Facebook and twitter there. She was explaining to them very patiently we live in a Representative Democracy so its very important that we control our elections. You understand that. Thats how we do it. That is like a message they dont have. People here like if there would have been at japanese representative. You need to have some political way of correcting things. They are selfregulated and the love the government paid im optimistic that there could be a waive in the election that would present a new path. The idea of selfregulation wont work. Selfregulation is 60 of the people and people who are talking about this is another problem with selfregulation and they Technology World. The numbers are just astronomical. Its hard for anyone to regulate themselves. If i were given free will i mean i do fundamentally believe in democracy and i think its a little scary. One point of this book is if you are feeling like an outlier he is described as a fringe character but he is really expressing the thoughts. Democracy, when democracy happens you have smart people running the world and thats not good. There was a person who was the cofounder of paypal. He was saying he believes in regulation. They think its not efficient. I do think its down to democracy and its really important and thats why you wrote the book. Sarah you have written about how specifically within Technology Criticism that world is often in certain ways reflective of technology and the female voices and minority writers have been overlooked in a systemic way. Can you talk a little bit about, do you see that changing at all . I absolutely do which is part of why we are looking at the larger ecosystem of people. I think certainly in the last couple of years that has drastically changed which is all for the better. I think that puts pressure on Silicon Valley to change so at the very least speaking up now verses in the future, we have seen the oh yes we will work on diversity for hiring. We will work on thinking more about users needs. Whether or not that is effective is another question. On the writing side of it i was interested in looking not just at people who were covering technology but the rest of the people in the larger discourse about the role is technology and society. Some of that has to do with looking at the whole range of writers not just technologies but the people who think of themselves as critics, people who are just writing in oped because it is t a response to the Current Issue on russia for example. In trying to articulate this larger to people who are contributing and a lot of that has to do with women writing about terrible things happening at their workplace or a technology that doesnt include fitness tracking comment feed iphone not having a track her. Those kinds of pieces are coming from a lot of different disciplinary backgrounds and existing and a lot of them. Obviously that is not in a lot of publications but what is restricting is a majority of the traditional waive in places that you look for Technology Coverage coverage, we are dominated by your standard sorry. The list of things you are mentioning, this is why i stumbled on it. No matter how enlightened you are you are going to be able to do that. If you look at the example of the coverage of the press and the media and weathered journalists are writing about that. Imagine if there was a similar kind of push going on with the way Silicon Valley works written by women journalists. Certainly in this current in the last two months i am hopeful. I think when you look back at what ellen powell went through. Ellen powell, i guess she was in a company and had a Sexual Harassment issue and that kind of got shoved under the rug basically. But that again was years ago at this point. Theres a book out on follow through on what to do about this systemic sexism and not having an ability have support and have people take her seriously and take her claims seriously. I cant remember the guys name but the google engineer. They fired this guy. They fired the libertarian guy for his insidious ideas and i wonder how do you see that . In some ways it was like that pr pr. For those who dont know the author of the google memo. It included a pretty large critique of googles internal cluster and included some information stating that women might be naturally inclined by logically less inclined fork coding then men. He ended up getting fired and went on a fairly large push after that saying it was his autism spectrum that led him to believe this. Ive never seen someone on twitter saying Charles Garwood cant work at google. The problem is google is company that is doing programming. Yes you have free speech but we can also fire you. That doesnt preclude you from you dont fit in our culture anymore. What i think is fascinating this week reached the point thats not what their culture is. Still indicative of this transaction will be addressing backing of an idea. There is a very valid argument that increases as we become reliant on automation algorithms. You might once be able to love someone responsible for hiring only men or whoever picked an algorithm doing it and now what you talk about the role that transparency might play with some of these issues . Wwe will let we wont let the system do the work. Then this goes back to my main question. If you are building this algorithm then you are already making a lot of assumptions about the background and history and all these things that continue injustices. Theres a lot of people talking about this. They are outsourcing the decisionmaking process lookingf looking into what the terms are really does matter and that is still a hard conversation. I went back and looked at one of the chapters about a guy named John Mccarthy who moved to stanford and came up with an early Computer Science pioneer. So thinking that it is an entity that can exist outside the body really is an audience revealing the request these pioneers had. The key scene in the book is between John Mccarthy and the professor over whether the computer could be a judge. Mccarthy was like of course as long as it is programmed correctly. So that is where it was an obscene idea. She interviewed minority students in the early 80s and they were very encouraging of the idea. The judges are harsh and it was when the computers could be a separate entities and then you cut to ten years later and basically its being this garbage information whats it going to learn and how will it be any different. So a long way of saying they are good or bad but they are not going to be any better than our society. Its a product of the portal and i think that the quote that was a carryover in the book is a lot of the problems they think they are so great at math but they should solve justice or write a poem, that is hard. So thinking you were good at programming math in the society we know how hard it is to fix the society is a fundamental problem i would say. Does technology have any role to play in terms of correcting these issues . There was a famous court case in the 80s but showed systemic bias. The clerk said you have to prove that there is racism in each case, you cant have the argument of criminal Justice System is unfair so we should fix it. On the other hand i do think data could enlighten us about how unjust the society is. This leads to a bigger question. You do an amazing job of articulating the history of where these concepts are coming from and that they have their mentality butting up against the entrepreneurial model thats what i was left wanting more of us like o. Want and also what more can we do. I kind of always go back to the planes of what we do to change things. One of those things is okay, we can decide the technology is alternating for or what terms you are designing the algorithms for or what direction we are leaving for and that goes back to the question of is it optimization to words efficiency or justice. There are still other parts we can start to unpack what if thee libertarian approach is a problem where this has led to huge monopoly systems, we can start to talk about the market code oh that could change society or where things are going. Im hesitant to say they seem to be a real possibility. Weve ended up in a monopoly situation that basically means the market is working this kind of impossible. Like do we have an alternative to facebook, kind of yes but not at the scale which is why we get back to this problem. Im scared because that isnt going to be functional for the next four years that we gave to at least where we are sending all of the limitations. Antitrust isn isnt set up to discuss the way and it doesnt apply to Free Services either. These kind of dont work and so i think we have to think about other ways to hold the Companies Accountable for the past two evils and is not based on our old leverages. We are seeing what happened with those kind of norms kicking in any way and i guess im leery of code being used because its like a wellintentioned male programmer but it wont be a viable solution and i think characters in the paper talk about how thats not my department as they say. The power narrative is to embrace the argument because i do believe in people getting the most of their lives. People should have a right to their data but something has gone off the rails and its not done in a very transparent way and is fundamentally wrong. Imagine if you walk into a store and people point out you see the see a penny take a penny. Maybe its possible to have better rules. I feel like if google and facebook. It sent us on a wrong path and we have to get back to that pa path. They are telling us everything you bought anyouve got and wha. We need to try to get back our control in society. I still wonder how does that actualize. Its one thing to say i need access to my data or ownership of my experience to address my interests and my needs to determine the way my newsfeed is filtered. I was struck watching this hearing to comment about the Senate Judiciary hearing the sharpest question of the republican of louisiana who asked the best mos this most pod questions about whats going on. I dont think it should transcend like greed versus not greed. Theres this belief in a political system that i do think something could change and things are galvanizing. Even in that case. There is a possible way that it could be used and by the way we dont believe that is an appropriate use. It has taken a long time to get enough examples and how advertisers are using them for example for the threshold of what is appropriate or not. It was impressive, so maybe that is the burden and i need to be more concrete and galvanizing enough way. I kind of team at thi came at ut of optimism. It is an obsession of mine i wrote many articles and saw this incredible some of these little parts become this incredible thing. We are going to have to open up for questions in just a minute and then if anybody in the audience would like to ask questions, please go to one of these microphones we would love to hear from you. I am obligated to ask what role does the university have for students who are here designing things and making known startu startups. There are guards then trying to create either think there would be a thrill to create a small project that can have better values. Seeing that come to fruition even new companies are looking to be acquired so i say try to nurture something that is smaller there is a yearning for it. Its clear that that is accurate here in strikes me as very strange. What should be thinking of when they are on that path . What kind of questions do you think they should be asking when they are building their groundbreaking technologies . The hardest question to answer is how to recognize that it can be used and its hard to answer until someone discovered another way to use it or monetize it. Learning how to see your own effort and run it by so many different people, that is what is missing from what happens in the Silicon Valley where a user gets to tell them how they feel they do so much testing but does that ever tell you what my attention was as a user, my experience, emotions and all the things . There are so many assumptions in the way most of these technologies are operating by desigdesign that datadriven aph is that we can look at what the behavioral data is and determine what is going to get you to spend more time or spend more money. And if that doesnt get into anything about what my actual intentions were. So actually talk to people. Forging real connections would be a way of interrogating the idea. Even mark zetterber. Can i add one more thing. So much of what we are talking about is the leadership role like the men who are in charge and have these ideologies, but that filters into the culture of companies and its actually imperative to think about the more context of the way played out. Having some control over the questions seems to be another way that we could cut into the overall culture we are going to open this up to audience questions now if you would like to ask please be kind and we are going to switch from one to another. People start with this one here and the next one coming over to you. Im here from the chapel at harvard so thank you so much for bringing this topic up to the open. I believe the use of the emotion is a proxy for looking into the dopamine circuits and creating an addictive experience which is very unethical and i wonder what your feelings would be about how to bring this to awareness. As of the engineerthe result ofd designers who are recognizing that again going back to the optimization question. Whenever these engineerone of ta former designer at google working on the question of time well spent. She used to be at mit but now she has a book called addiction by design. She is clearly articulating the systems are designed to keep you in flow and that is an interesting look at specifically the use of addiction. Theres a lot of complexity and good things and bad. One thing that struck me as the inefficiency if you have some Large Corporation optimizing to take over some market or product whatever it is and squeezing out the small people that live on the qualms. Qualms. Ic alsiac also on the flipside n argue when you pay a medical bill when you actually the focus of waste in the industry. If you have a tech company it goes through and tries to redo health care and make it an efficient system. You cant really paint it in black or white either way. It is a much more important goal than either one of those things. Theres a reason they are successful and popular. It just needs to have a higher goal. It could maximize the profits but not be good for society. They are very popular and i think if we need to have the enthusiasm why havent they disrupted the Healthcare Industry yet and i think it comes down to the need for a regulated ecosystem that is so far down the road. They want to start getting into the code. The reason is theyve gotten so far back with approval in things like that. I was trying to think of the Artificial Intelligence so that is how i viewed it in that kind of context is the ideology that led to Computer Science. You have those but think about your place in the world and whether or not is that is a sacred thing or not i am a grad student in mechanical graduate student in Mechanical Engineering. I grew up in india and one thing that struck me once i moved here was to free speech and protection of First Amendment. I was taken aback when you mentioned free speech and i wonder whai wonderwhat you meanf free speech across th of coursee internet is not the best place for cordial discussions the company maintain the spirit of the First Amendment going ahead . There is a rape restrictio rd that is their Corporation People are people as well and so i mean, that either could be a very enlightening scenic it was revealing because it is that free speech and if you really believe it is an absolute they are putting words and pictures together. Its just words and pictures. That could be the limit on free speech. There are real costs and places are allowing incredible anger directed at certain groups. If its the right thing to do and not. In the twitter context theyve done so much to protect free speech that it has hampered them from addressing things and behaviors like harassment and how to have checks on things. Theyve done a whole lot and try to do a whole lot but there are a lot of people who are underwhelmed by Health Advocates manifested in the code. If you are living in a normal Society Picking on someone in a harsh way, we should say dont do that. We would say dont do that. And when you abstract it to this label it becomes dangerous im a humanities graduate student and a moderator piggybacking off that question mentioned the companies believe all the regulatory behaviors should be offered controlled or administered but they still rely on the moderation so what do you see as the current place within these online social spaces . I think that they do some automated policing. There is a description about the scalability moving people out. Theyve managed to go quite big but its people that are motivated to do the right thing to. It gets bacdo. It gets back to the question who is determining how to the norms are expressed for the automated platforms that is a pretty good question into the filter throu through. I kind of stand on the side of maybe we are going to be working alongside of our technologies and its not just going to be either or, its going to be both. I look at both the political scientist and european. In a way i cant help but want to ask where do you see the political system because when we take an individualistic approach that is valid and interesting this is about how much influence we want to give to the government and thats why we have the german court case said if you could elaborate a. It is hard to know what you describe is that individuality. It would be like how dare the government protect vis me so ths the kind of catch22. We have these rules to protect individuals, get the government off my back. People dont really appreciate what is being done. They have this rule that basically says youve served your time you deserve it cannot be talked about but i remember discussing this with the executive director and they dont like that. Itits perfect or part of your t should be in there for that is another reasonable regulation recognizing how it is different than a newspaper or court record when there were no limits and things were published. That is a different definition of free speech. Part of what you are getting at is the legitimacy of the companies and individuals. As institutions, we have kind of popped iopted into living in thd and those are very different from the Traditional National view of the world and its interesting when we talk about understanding that he spelled the Largest Community so i feel like that political term is operative to say did we sign up for this and are these the ibs bbv fan and if not, what do we do about it. The general Data Protection regulation which is coming out or applies in may of 2,018th of. Its the place a blanket of any company they are talking about if they operate and serve a. Its a kind of least common denominator situation where in the same way the cars are manufactured to meet the highest standards, in california i think we will see that level of regulation. Obviously it is a little easier to change so that is a tricky loophole element. This is my life and all of the articles you brought up and people that you named are used to work in the area focusing on the social responsibilities of my field which is tech and engineering and how to get people to understand technology and be a technologist, even a sliver of interest that may be folks can respect. I wrote down notes because i knew i would start babbling and lose my thoughts. They dont get the same coverage as ma maybe the people in the media, but erica baker and office because all the people that spoke out against the brave women i dont know how to amplify them even more and get the same kind of coverage that you see. A lot of the stories are about women journalists. Besides not only the Market Driven that youve got to connect all these people. Maybe they will care about their users but on the ground a sense of your here to change the world. Its t two things that matter. They even put their ads and marketing people open to different campuses and engineers to go do whatever they want and so its actually only driven by money then maybe we can help you figure out what to do there but to believe what they are doing is so good and that we are going to make up for a safer place because this is where the Real Security happened to teach someone how to farm so they can pull themselves out and fast for me is a harder thing to put your finger on. You can say theres something wrong about the meaning its marketing and advertising people. They are part of the company so really you are saying they are not as smart as you are and that is another superb if it is i want to think of this i was struck with the argument you are in control and its clean and makes sense in your mind and maybe hes doing world conquest now. Thats fine but is that crossing off the reality and were you drawn to the programming because of that to create a world there are groups that think of it that way. The whole world connects with each other. This goes back to what sarah was saying. Its your algorithms. They dont touch on ethics were users. That is what drew me in for the companies that geared towards developing a certain way even if we have certain interests in life. I dont know how to fix that, its what i think about all the time and is it a question of actual impact and then how do you know that you are doing it . I dont think most companies have a way to volunteer on that once you finish one product or feature or whatever, youre on to the next. How do you get to understand how its impacting you and use it. Its the arrogance of thinking im going to program and analyze how my work will affect the city. Mostly men but who people look to and pave the way so they are some of the original writers of the main algorithm and then they say stuff people really listen. Things they say arent usually around six but its more algorithms and things like that so perhaps there are ways to influence the leaders that many people listen to. They passed over for tenure and went to dartmouth and was brought back as a professor. No one is secure some may be an idol is the way that it would change. I am a graduate student and have a quick question around what you mentioned. I think a lot of these issues because of Business Models and when people hear the talk about the innovation hell do we think of monetizing the value of healthy create and value what we create. Do you think it is going to become decentralized or are we going to go back to the tribes that are interconnected. It was interesting just last week there was a debate around the scale of this and people were revolting around that. Everyone was like do we really need to scale is that the model of success, so i am curious what. I think in your account its purely about we dont know what the opposite Business Model is. So yes i think it is hard for people to imagine others aside from maybe mastodon or whats the other one is and is there a possible way to disrupt facebo facebook. It was distributed in the infrastructure cannot have a centralized control some were former facebook guys and then mastodon similarly. It is very libertarian. It would probably make more sense to say that in the university of the the other thing about the Business Models not to fall back on the regulation but you were supposed to make a penalty for things that are harmful to the searchers were at the cost to extract the most value. I would also add even if it is hard to imagine a World Without facebook, google and apple wants what it looks like e it they started demanding differenstarted demanding diffee different ways of interacting with them and its hard for people to get their head around but probably the only way that they are going to change. If you think about the power and the lobby that doesnt mean its wrong. It certainly led to some good things but anyone watching, it is an ominous thing that is kind of undeniable i come from the ie sociological perspective of having delivered mail for 30 years right smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. So you have seen the technology. I have seen the houses go up hundreds of thousands and come into these neighborhoods, divider houses and then people get pushed out of the houses and they are the people that are now for contract workers tthe contrp support facebook and google but these are the people that work in the cafeteria and the dry cleaning cars to work 15 to 20 hours a day. They have to spend more time on the internet getting drawn into seeking you pick up another. So the fact that there is a disconnect between the foundations right now i read an article about how they are trying to work on this problem. Its somebody that lost the benefits from a job and only has parttime so the only value the core center they are. They could at least take care of their own. The most common argument they make is the core business. They are only going to do the core business. My niece worked for a startup company. This was before they have a pr department. A lot of them are very and dont understand how it is to value everyone around. Antifeminist by definition basically it is fiction that you can be a google employee that the food shows up magically. The communities that raised you, i would at least agree the ideology and hard work is what you should be warned, that would make sense that its kind of predicated on women and the role of emily and women and getting us here to adulthood. Just my conversation she was worried about losing her child and defense so that is a good thing. There were not things set in place a. December 23 they all went on strike. I am an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering and as someone interested in the user centered design and getting into that as a change for different users. I noticed a lot of conversations tend to be by design firms and thats where a lot of conversations exist. Even in my capstone class you shift between the jobs people end up picking and a framework its kind of very stark and i wonder as somebody going into engineering that want to be a professional in this how do we see that shift in thinking . I think the best way to get inmates tin is to make that a bs case. Its going to lead to better experiences enduser value. I think the question is how to speak their language and a numbeput anumber on it or integt into the way they want to value the process and development. It is a tough question. Those that are thinking like that and have an importance in the ways are just working outside of it. They use google to advocate on a largescale project designers to be asking these questions and their institutions from the bottom up. I think that is arguably the most effective way to have the ethics from the bottomup. Thank you for bringing these important issues to light. I am a resident fellow at Harvard Community school, so a shout out. Theres not a lot of us that come into this. I worked on a policy so i am kind of aware. Select question is through theyve through that. Did a lot of work to bring them to the government in part because its like if you want things to change, then come and join us, so i am thinking of how do we interrogate our own products and if it is even realistic to talk about having the teams within the leadership of the Companies Whose job it is precisely to think about the effect on humanity and what is the justice there is an element its like a boiling water problem you just forget how to look at those things were you taught yourself its easy to believe the narrative of we are here and changing the world in those ways but even if the product is working on connecting people to education you wouldnt otherwise have it its up to work on a macro level at how the Overall Company is influencing the direction of things. At least from an oversight perspective for a bunch of regions reasons but not to the level of having a Human Experience officer or some version of that. Yeah i mean i think this is why its really important to not only look at the individuals in charge and the zuckerbergs but also look at the systemic support system around them. Like what is the institutional work chart for facebook. That matters. And how does that change over time . That also really matters coming to scale as they get bigger and start touching more things. I think aside from trolling linked in how do we as the public get to look into that . May be a shareholder has a little bit of insight into that but probably not much. The book you know didnt dwell on this but in nature action is lack of a labor movement. There need to be these checks. Theres a long list of why labor unions are inefficient but when you see the whole of society you can see them being inefficient and they serve as a vital role to check these companies. Its not going to be selfregulation. Only in reaction to the valid concern about the election. Lack of diversity could lead to change if there were actual labor unions that would be able to strike and affect the balance of power. Its not beyond the roma possibility that would happen but you expect a chart to reflect that. It wont happen voluntarily. The message in the book is they are doing the best job because of their experience and they will say look how successful they are. That is how i know im doing a great job. Go back to the example of the google designer. I have a vision for google. My vision and how it should look great im a designer, i studied it. People like what we do and its like they are not speaking the same language. It doesnt compute i would say. It strikes me we are at a moment where they can no longer say we are plat warm and we dont need people whose job it is to point out these things. That may be naive. I would just add any product goes through the lawyers have too do the check the box. The lawyers are the last step and engineer see this. We build all this stuff and we cant do it because its not integrated into the process. Imagine that not the lawyers integrated into the process. Its a huge case for but a huge case for the humanist to find jobs in these companies. The last question. Youve been waiting so patiently. Thank you. Hi i name is heather and im a lawyer but not one of the lawyers you were talking about. And the thing that has struck me as what we study in law school is largely how the rules got there and why we have them and the internet seems to be a giant erasure of history and why we do things. I know lots of engineers and the general mindset of engineers as we can figure out anything so that means expertise is not valued because we can always learn it. We have all this information out here but they have forgotten the part about Bad Information is not helpful. And so when you have a plat warm that has no way for you to tell what is good information and what is Bad Information, you make bad decisions. In my corporations class the first thing we study is taxicabs taxicabs. Not actually the uber issue really but more what they used to do to avoid liability was one car, one corp. 10 cents in the bank. So thats why we have the rule of piercing the corporate veil. If you dont capitalize your corporations and guess what . You dont get the benefit. And we are losing all of this. We have all of these people who are so much smarter than everybody else that they decided they dont need it. They are also really young and they havent lived in a havent seen the Different Reasons for why we do things in a particular way. Yes we should reexamine them periodically but we should recognize that there is a reason reason. There are is probably some reason. Have some respect for history and context. We came out of the conservative perspective and you can see why fundamentally what we are talking about is pretty conservative values and libertarians are talking about are highly radical. Things like the Russian Revolution and lack of respect for institutions and for history and mysterious things have happened. The stakes are very high and its easy to get confused by what is being pushed forward but its really a very dangerous ideology and that is what i was trying to say in the book. I would just add to address the kind of allergy to regulation thats a perfect example. Theres a reason the tax is regulated or they have rules around them. This is the kind of the uber model. Well we are just going to make it more efficient like thats all we are trying to do. So regulations for taxis and local jurisdictions dont matter matter. That was quite literally the first that came out of traviss mouth but we all know where he ended up. All of that is to say its worth the balloting that technology has politics and the libertarian stances such that this is efficient, this is Market Driven driven. There is no politics involved and i think what is really pushing it is yes there are policies involved, to call that out and call a spade a spade. If you choose not to decide you still made a choice and actually it was pascal who said that. But thats the myth that they believe in making huge decisions. Additionally the way you ask a question has an answer embedded in it. Thats what you learn in legal writing. Thank you all so much for coming out. A big round of applause for our speakers. The knowitalls is not recommended highly enough so i would encourage you please give them all a round of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] company. Is an hour and 40 minutes. Thank you guys all so much for coming. Thank you for coming to the wilson center. And on star wars day. Really appreciate it. I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming you to Woodrow Wilson center and the launch the book designing reality. Am