Amount of money that are able to attract the best challenge because of the best food, the have the relationships of the universities, it does not mean that there arent other Companies Like salesforce or ingber are doing amazing things, its through these Nine Companies that Everything Else flows, the entire a. I. Ecosystem in some way or another touches these nine. In addition to the things that i mentioned, they are building the framework and the custom silicone chips, they have the code basis, all roads lead to these Nine Companies and the challenge that i have, if it is the case Artificial Intelligence is not just being built to create a better microwave although that is cool, instead to optimize our lives using data as currency, what does it mean when we relegate that to a handful of companies and a handful of people looking at these companies who probably dont look like us and have the same worldviews as us, what are the longerterm downstream implications of that look like . Three of those companies are in china, there out of fat, ali baba, their publicly traded companies but i lived in china and lived in japan, and anybody who watches china knows that publicly traded companies are still under the sum of beijing, there is no escape, you can be an incredibly if youre an incredibly successful ceo is because youre in lock step in some ways with the chinese government, that matters because we have a brilliant person at the home. , prejesus interne xi jinping. Live a culture of longterm planning, you can go out throughout history and their fiveyear plan and see how a lot of them never amounted to anything but i think things are different this time, they are different because we have a person in power and the Leadership Team around him who really understand technology. So you probably heard of the bells and road initiative, this seems like an infrastructure initiative, your building bridges and roads in exchange for debt diplomacy, all around the world, around the silk road route into deep latin america and africa. But what most people dont realize is that this is not about building physical bridges and physical roads, you think digital component as well, 58 countries are part of the digital side of the bri, theyre getting 5g, chinese 5g, theyre getting Small Cell Technology and theyre getting something called chinas social credit score system. Theres parts in southern china, right now where you might be at intersection and if you j walkway to the legal there, smart cameras placed around the intersection will recognize who you are, you can have your face covered or you could be obscured but these symptoms are very, very smart and they can recognize you by gait, by posture, by how you are walking, if you caused an infraction, your face gets thrown up on a digital billboard at the intersection, along with your name and where you work, the information is transmitted to your employers, and to your family members, if youve done it more than once, you might be told to report to a local police precinct, and you are demoted, your total score is a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. There opportunities to earn points if you done something good, somebody can report work and then you might get a few points out, and this is a program intended to be national the house not rolled out nationally and you may be saying, thats china, i dont live there, this is very interesting but who cares. Let me tell you why this matters to you. First of all, the system already has prevented 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets, more than 17 Million People last year could not fly, five and a half Million People could not buy a train ticket and 300,000 people who did really great jobs at work, their scores were too low and they were as a result disqualified from sending to management positions. These are not ethnic minority for being discriminated against, this is a shot at huge social control. Again you may say to yourself, listen you had me at talking microwaves, i dont know why all this necessarily matters to me and the reason that it matters is the bri. If its a case that china is aligning itself with all of the countries around the world, many of which are economically vulnerable or their phone number for any other number of reasons because of Climate Change or because of political unrest in their inching toward authoritarian leaders in the social Credit Scores is a good option helps keep the populace in control in china is already exporting this to various different places and why this matters is while were fixated on wars and building big ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky, we have forgotten to look at what happens if china wages an economic war which effectively blocks out of pieces or forces us to come to terms that we dont like or understand. This prevents us from doing business in from traveling, and potentially recent shapes the world in a new world order where china is not just a pacing threat, militaristic economic pacing threat but china becomes a formidable global threat to all of us, that is china. In the United States, there is an antagonistic relationship, theres a transactional relationship on good days but it antagonist relationship were often than not between the rally in d. C. So what winds up happening, there is a lack of understanding, there are not enough relationships, the valley does what it wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologize and then they do the same thing again over and over and over again. Until one day when you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding more from that their broken out, you cannot break up these companies. There are many reasons why some of them have to do a strategy, some have to do with the nuts and bolt of technology, this is not like bell, remember when the bell company got broken up into baby bells, this is not that, this is not telephone. These companies have multiple divisions in intertwined and very complicated and if the United States is going to continue to defund science and if its going to continue to defund our Education System and technology, then who is going to build out the future of a. I. Among other among Everything Else, you can just pick it apart, it does not work that way, in the process of arguing back and forth, in the process these process are competing against each other rather than collaborating, this sets up for inch by inch, little by little, your daily permissions being taken away, i no longer have the ability to back my car into my garage with the radio on full volume, thats because somebody who is part of a small group and a small a. I. Tribe decided that they would optimize my best healthiest life and that i was probably unsafe, like youre probably unsafe although weve never been in a car accident, i no longer have control over the volume in my car, that seems insignificant but theres a compounding effect over time and we are all part of the process that is unfoldin folding and sl, he heard the analogy of the frog in the pop and the water slowly over time boiling and you dont realize until the frog is dead, i dont want to be the dead fr frog. I realize that sounds like hyperbole but theres so many things that are happening that we turned a blind eye to that at some point there is no way to turn this back, there is a singular switch for a. I. And a Single Person that is in charge and at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue, President Trump issued and signed an executive order but the executive order on Artificial Intelligence is not self executing, we do not have budget or singular department in charge, we do not have Institutional Knowledge spread throughout our federal government, we love smart people but theyre not the right places and in the valley, we have incredibly smart people who i do think want to do good by and for society and who are constantly dealing with market demands. Let me be clear on this, i dont think that the big Nine Companies and certainly not the g mafia which is our part of the big nine, i do not think they are evil. I dont think the intent to do harm, i think weve gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken. We broken up our archives about technology, next, reporter anna wiener recalls her experiences working for tech startups. The ceo of the company is a Second Company work for in San Francisco was 24 when i joined the company, i was 25. Obviously we experienced and he had been through why, nader, i think its an incredibly hard thing to do to run a company full of adults, many with dependence or debt or whatever, i do not and the one in that position and so your select for that if youre lucky, but i have a lot of sympathy for someone growing up at the same time their learning how to be a ceo. I think the reason i dont Name Companies and the executives, theres few of them but one that i feel the behavior that i sell institutionally as well as individually was a result of a structural position than any individual failure, i realize thats exculpatory narrative or exculpatory framework. [inaudible] its not to be cory or to offer a puzzle for people to solve [inaudible] more than i wanted to gesture toward what i think is a common leadership style and has more to do with the incentives of the Business Model than the industry and let me illustrate this, i told this antidote at another reading. I feel like im walking onto the readings with my own book like an American Girl doll like here i am, with my book. [laughter] anyways, i think it was in newarks committee came up to me after reading and they read my book and they mention the scene in which i talk about how early members of my team got into a Conference Room in my manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know, write their names down and we all did this exercise and look at your list, went out they were care. I was like why would they were care, this is something this is a useful thing an interesting thing to do, why would my friend who is in graduate school and make their way to tech, you name them, why would these people who are smart and talented and interested, why should they work at the analytics company, im here because i dont know what my purposes and im trying to figure that out and have health insurance. Its the idea that the five people that you know should work here because it has economic value, anyway,. Is it required yes, i totally do, im sorry. I apologize. Maybe i thought we should have a one line answer. So she came up to me after this event and i was like the same thing happened to my company, actually it was the first time i heard this, another woman that works at a startup interprets as a text to me too say, this was like deja vu for me, i cannot believe this happened, they mustve read on the blog post because i too was pulled into a room to write down the names of the five smartest people that i know at a totally different company, unrelated, ceos are probably not friends. I feel like theres a thing that happens with culture if there is an intellectual culture that has a fashion for itself which i recall interim flexural but theres more about that in the book that has to do more with people giving business advice, theyve never run a company before, the tone of money and accountability to their investors and attentive responsibly to their employees, their train to figure out how to read and they read a blog post and they read heres how you can scale hiring and get people good for your company and corral your employees into a Conference Room and then push them to recruit them as they will pay you 5 8000 per recruit. I tried so hard to recruit people who were not the smartest people that i know. [laughter] anyway, i think that the industry has values, you can speak to this as well, you maybe have seen this in your excellent book of investigation of uber. [laughter] its called super punk by mike eisen, is available at the bookstore. Hell be signing after words. I think the Company Cultures are saved by the Business Model and the business incentives and those are shaped by the incentives of Venture Capital so you have prioritization of speed and scale an acceleration in whatever, coupled with libertarian spirit of the industry that has been incubating if you will for 25 years 40 years i dont know. Or 2020, longer, 50 years, and you kind of get this ultra product that doesnt value expertise, and over consideration and research has this iterative complex, i dont know what im talking about, im so sorry. Im just going for it. I dont remember actually. On cspan. All right there is a lot of securing in the book, im wondering if theres parts of you experiencing some of these things that you take with you that you actually appreciated. Journalists are typically handed a lot of textbooks who think again tech is doing good for the world and sort of a positive thing and even questioning that is a dangerous sometimes, i am wondering if there are parts that you took away from your time . And if you say no its fine. There is. This is the heart of the book is ambivalence. I think there was a lot that i appreciated about working in tech, i dont know my 30s if i would appreciate the same things to be totally honest, i have to be the right age and have the right your means to be an ideal employee in a certain way, in my 20s, and 32. [laughter] , when it mattered. But yeah, in my 20s having moved here not knowing anyone from a different city, trying to find meaning, being told heres your meeting, run with it, i think i admired and appreciated was a moderate in the commitment to a common project, collective project if you will, i like that people had a tenor seemed to have for a little while, i think that is part of the problem, people having autonomy he dont necessarily have the authority to have the autonomy or shouldnt necessarily but there seems to be so much potential even though the people with the most autonomy replicate power structures that exist externally for years but obviously that was exciting to me. There is one more thing that i actually did enjoy and appreciate about starter culture, i think its very earnest that someone who is going between detached mockery in deep painful earnestness, i dont know if you can relate, anyway. They might be wrong but i generally believe people think theyre doing good for the world, i believe that they believe it and they trust him when they say it, i think what is missing i think the problems are systemic i dont think the rooted individual although id be curious what you make of that giving your reporting on uber. I do wonder, i dont even actually know if your legally can answer this question, you can move to the next one if you want to, do you feel like someone, i heard people say uber could not exist if it did not have the crazy culture, my question is should it exist and obviously that culture shouldnt exist and if you dont have that culture, maybe that is fine. [laughter] do you see a structural explanation for his behavior, one that is related to incentives of a Business Model or the industry that could potentially be forgiving of someone like that. I think youre getting at the exact thing, if you boil them how this works, youre getting invested in your company and whether its users or revenue or something, for most companies, we can get kinda desperate and we have to do things that might not be legal and to see how a lot of this works, i also think there is justification, the people who are in their own space come the income net, protected in ways that are not necessarily fair and can believe, im not saying this is wrong, we sense for doing a lot of the stuff and just to go on my back argument, i do think people are in the same structural position when theyre done a ass holes. You have to be a jerk, depending on who the ceos. Youre watching the tv on cspan2 with Author Programs on technology from archive, in september of 2019 microsoft Senior Researcher mary gray reported on the workforce that drives Large Technology like amazon, google and uber. Youre probably familiar with the categories that were caught online and offline Platform Services anything from uber, lift, doordash, the using the same mechanism in the interface putting out a request for somebody to come pick up the food, deliver it to this address and the platform is participating in that exchange by recording if its picked up and delivered executing a payment, scheduling giving an address, that portion of the work is automated, the delivery, the value of somebody doing their to deliver the food, thats the part of the equation we often are considering more were not aware of it if i would say it was a form of the libretto think anybody would know what i was talking about. Now you will know that content moderation is a job that people do and its absolutely providing another service for training Artificial Intelligence and more importantly as an executable loop for performing every important service. We are focused on the vast World Business startup, often businesstobusiness services that are below the surface, anything you will ever see as an in consumer. And thats what were going to talk about today, its the world of editing, its a world of visibility testing, which might be familiar for some of you in the room, many of the different tasks drive Artificial Intelligence innovation, its what help structure a clean dataset and i love being mit because most of you in the room know what im saying when i say that. But importantly increasingly seen the number of jobs, its actually quite hard to mail the a. I. Thing, were just when to keep a person into the moment of Service Request that is textbased, anytime you have gone on to a website and have a little help pop up, you know its a mixture of script and a person who is assisting you. In thinking about that world of work where you have a person who is doing something on the spot that cannot be quite completed by automation and the point of reference that comes to mind and we cover this in the book, places to thread together, this is not new, theres continuity and how we treated people who were there and it would just be a moment because automation will come out and come around and they will be placed in that might look like piecework within the days of textiles certainly we cannot manufacturing knockout the shirt but couldnt force the button in the bow, no, quite some time, that was a matter of decades and thats the important thing to take away, automation made it possible for piecework to go away and textiles in some cases and other cases, the labor cost but also the reality of the paradox of automation of what we call the bow being too sophisticated for textile machinery to consume your automation met a person was kept around, it is also in the world of federal Contract Labor, we use the example of the woman who made famous, who could at the time be brought into serve those computers which we again mit no that was a reference to the people not the machines and just as quickly when the need for them, the demand flowed their services of computational experts, eventually disappeared, they can be let go and there was a security in the employment, it was not less valuable and we didnt have a way of looking at employment and seen these women is valuable per se so because we had already forward an idea of what it was to value work, it was fulltime employment it was professions and often it was bodies embodied in this profession, white men of privilege who had very specific roles to play, anyone not playing those roles seemed expendable, to continue this lineage by the 1960s and the advancement of Temp Services that quite literally, i would point you to aaron hattons beautiful book and quite literally brokered on the value or devalue of womens labor, i believe first because was mostly young women who is collegeeducated, they made great office girls, they were also expendable keeping the thread moving by the time we get to the 1980s and 2000 and that outsourcing and off shoring of knowledge work of Office Service work becomes much harder to make the case that people are doing something that can so easily be replaced precisely because theyre doing work thats being done by work in the United States, becomes much more obvious that this is a question of labor arbitrage, its where you can find cheap labor that is just as educated of anyone in the location that is generating the request for work, and for some of my colleagues this may, the settlement of the case against microsoft that involve microsoft meant that we never resolve the question of what you do in the case of employment that is necessary for a period of time, its project driven, it might be something that you need of a specific kind of expertise, language expertise, coding expertise, we know you will not need them for more than 12 months or 12 weeks or 12 days, but what do we have to value that worker. And at the time we really did have a category four that, its important to note the post 2000 Silicon Valley in 2001 what happened, we had of effectively. Com bubble burst that is at that moment that we resolved settled without caselaw that were going to leave questionable what to do with people who are necessarily but not necessary as a number going to hold them for career but we came up with the settlement with the practices that treat Contract Labor to vendor Management Systems that often dont leave them with the protection beyond the 12 month contract. To be able to say unemployed and the benefits come with my employment, if you think about this history that weve drawn and is certainly an argument in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of laws around labor protection that mostly assume the valuable work is the work that can be automated without much projection of what might one day be a targeted automation, policies built for Assembly Lines and professions that were imagined to be beyond the touch of automation, and then the lives of tent staffing just driven much of our Economic Activity globally in the growth of the Service Industry and the staffing industry that serves peoples request for need more than a serves the need to build something. Lastly to see the shift towards information economy that involves a lot of people doing Information Service work. It involves people doing coding and other valuable skills to take a great amount of training, if you think about what it took to code up a website in the 2000 and the html, how many people in the room know what im talking about that is done with software, at the time we paid quite a bit of money and we pay quite a bit of money to build peoples websites, what was my first work of a 1099. Keep that in mind when you think about what can be automated, what is in the work of the auditor and the Creative Work in the complex communication that is beyond automation, that is an open question, what is it that will be constantly on the horizon, it requires human touch or some amount time but we can see growing until a career. Let me give you how we study this, studying and distributed world of work is not the most obviously thing to do, to figure out were cut it again, we chose for businesses as case studies and also these companies to show us the inside of their box, how do we organize this work, what does the workflow look like, and the four Companies Standing for the world of the mechanism that can build out Artificial Intelligence but also keep you in the loop. At a look at the programs about technology continues, deputy chief Technology Officer for new york city, she spoke at cramer books in washington, d. C. About the power dynamic between Big Tech Companies and governments around the world. I think the best way to describe is to talk about how i came upon the idea to write this book in the first place. Back in 2015 there were a number of terrorist attacks across france and in november of 2015 there was the largest terrorist attack which killed over 130 people and it was found after the fact that a lot of these attacks were organized on social media. So social Media Companies got involved in working with defense agencies to try to figure out how do we stop the pool information of terrorism on our platforms, how do we keep them from organizing, tax like this on a platform and it was a rough start in the beginning it was captured six month later and that hes been actively posting on facebook for the entire time. There was not a lot of corporations between governments and Tech Companies at the time years later facebook, google, youtube, amazon and a few others came together for a Global Internet forum to talk about how to eat fight terrorism exclusively. , this is organized by the Tech Industry and for the Tech Industry and a lot of cooperation with government and lets skip a few more months, we saw series of pure hurricanes in the u. S. , hit puerto rico and wiped out their power grid, wiped out cell phone coverage and if you do not show up, who showed up, tesla came forward to rebuild their electric grid, google showed up which provides internet and telecommunication coverage what is going on with Tech Industry, theyre not just making calendars in the getting in areas that are outside of the correlation and the full responsibility of government. There has to be a better way to talk about them them a role to play in politics. The term was nonstate actor which had already evolved to be a bad guy, i started studying with the stern happen. Some with think as Mark Zuckerberg is a terrorist. There are some people to think of Tech Companies as a bad guy. I just did some research as recently as 2010, the dictionary social science define actors with the un and nato, even then they were not considered terrorists. It was sometime around 2012 2013 that you started seeing the term to alqaeda and eventually with isis, nonstate actor was taken with back ice but clearly these Tech Companies were not nationstates either. So i thought maybe there needs to be another way to talk about them. I introduced the concept, internet companies, internetbased companies who are working outside of their Core Technology mission in areas that used to be the domain of nationstates like defense, diplomacy, infrastructure and citizen services. I wrote the article in 2015, people who read it said i think this is a little bit of a stretch and they put on the shelf for two years, and after hurricane rhea i thought i felt like there was something to this and thats when i put the article author, the wire published it and it turned into this book. Whats the difference between other Big Tech Companies you might have concerns like donating tensor money or volunteer aid, whatever cisco or uber or any of those but also major. Its a really good question, in the book i dont put twitter in this category, and you put tesla in this category which you might think is surprising in some ways, the reason, im looking at how Tech Companies are expanding outside the Digital Services and into the domains that used to be the territory of government. You dont see over getting involved in counterterrorism yet or at the moment. Microsoft is very deeply involved in diplomacy, you dont think of cisco as having a real stake in national treaties. This is a differentiation between these two and all these people asked me, what about other Big International companies, you have cocacola the operates globally and mcdonalds, but neither one of them or opening a Counterterrorism Department, facebook has a larger Counterterrorism Department in the state department and it does not seem that strange that they would. I think this is one of the reasons that i thought its worth paying attention to. The list of companies that qualify and youre following along is google, amazon, facebook, apple, and microsoft and you anticipated my question tesla, why tesla. One of the things that we look at the book, not just how Tech Companies are expanding into governmental domain the how the expanding into what i call in real life, physical infrastructure and services. This is something that tesla and elon musk and his many Sister Companies of tesla is really doing in some ways more than anyone else which is a solar city operation, pursuing to provide electricity, hes now moving to space with startling, theres a lot of endeavors were there no longer looking at the products and Services Like cars, that are really changing the way that we think about public infrastructure, for instance with the boring company, theyre producing highspeed rail in chicago. Thats a brandnew mechanism that elon objects to. If we have a private Sector Company who are in charge of a public infrastructure, what happens and they decide i talk about teslas work and when they didnt need someone to step in and the federal government did not and theyre not under obligation to state and they dont want to responsibly the government has two provide equally and fairly access to services. What do they want, you write that they have the lease. One thing that distinguishes the companies is that a number of people that work there, large enough contingent to make a difference jose are driven in some ways by the belief that technology should be used for good, we see this with the case of google, they worked with the department of defense on a very small contract called project navin looking how to apply a. I. To the recognition technology, this is a very small contract that was a handful of people out of googles empire working on it but when people found out inside google this was happening, there was another murder of people that resigned in protest there was a companywide letter circulating saying we do not believe that google should be in the defense business and google backed out, they like with the contract that was expiring. Its a significant portion of the driving people that work in organizations that want to see tech being used to build things, to do good. The belief is not totally unlike a government is constituted on the constituent parts. This is something that i think is one of the interesting features of these particular companies of course theyre interested in their bottom line and making sure that they can be successful businesses but you do hear about internal employee protest when the company they dont think it aligns with these beliefs or their core beliefs that tech should be used for good and i think its one of the challenges with the dynamic that we may see them from the sidelines and say google go ahead protest, anything you dont think is right that we dont actually have a role at citizens to directly influence our process, i think it makes this a unique phenomenon. Will come back to that in a minute, based on your experience and a lot of what you talk about in the book, i want to ask you about the governments relationship, let me ask you if you can start recounting the episode in the book that i have not read about before meaning in the social Media Companies and Tech Companies with the Justice Department ftc about interference before the 2018 election and how that went. There has been the Tech Industry up to about 2018 and a reference to the book to reach out Law Enforcement to reach out to federal agencies and how to part with them and work with them and to figure out how do we meet the challenges that we all face together and the Government Entities have been slow to respond, there was a meeting that was held in which the key player of google, facebook and others have invited members from the department of Homeland Security and offered a lot of information about their own strategies to deal with, the emerging Misinformation Campaign and in response they met with violence, the next time they convened they didnt invite anyone from government to the table. I think in 2020 receiving the shift a little bit especially from the Defense Sector starting to reach out aggressively to get them to work with them but i think for the key Security Officer facebook was at stanford but it really well, he said a local Police Department may be really hardworking and strong but we would not ask a local Police Department to defend against an invading army but that is what is happening in the tech sector, were looking at the Tech Companies to stand up for their own counterterrorism and own Defense Mechanisms and not getting the support that they need. The disengagement after the episode and before the cycle is an interesting part in the book about the wrist of government standoffish in us in d. C. And the federal government cannot get his act together to participate than the Tech Companies are going to do whatever they want to do which is a valuable point at the same time presents a problem because we know that d. C. And Congress Even more than the executive branch does not and cannot keep up with tech and we have all of these lawmakers who made their careers and insurance or medicine and law but they show 0 grassroot technology, i remember during Zach Zuckerberg when he asked if space book was the same thing as twitter and lauren asked how facebook made money, it was clear he had not been on the popper model. And we can tell these people to be better and hire better staffers or whatever but fundamentally a wondering how the government can be smarter with the people in charge of overseeing agencies. Its a good question and i think theres a couple different ways we need to think about it, we need to make sure were putting people in congress who do understand the importance of engaging with technology, not just as locale but a power player in geopolitically, thats number one, were starting to see an influx of younger and more Diverse People running for elected office, i have some hope that within a few years will see the nature of people who are representing us start to have the interest more globally. But i also think the people who are currently in office, its not a surprise that Technology Companies are impacting our daily lives, this is not new in 2020, we have a 2014 election in the Information Campaign from foreign actors, that was a few years ago and weve not seen any congressional action and theres no excuse for other than a lack of appetite, i dont think a lack of understanding, even the congresspeople themselves dont grasp all the details of technology, they have access to resources that they can learn or help inform themselves better about what to do. Its hard to be passionate if you cant grasp, apparently he does not want. The campaign. Talk about the work of these states who are staffing up and counterterrorism and antibigotrys and prejudiced groups, and wondering what do you think of that and balance that exists between the work of those Tech Companies that they could do here and abroad and there is a certain balance of the plainfield of the First Amendment presents from strictures compared to the eu which impose regulations and other things more easily. When you talk about that. I was talking to someone with the French Embassy earlier and they have robust hate speech laws in france and saying we dont have anything like First Amendment and this was the way and i was looking at him with this wisp away and thinking when it be great if we were able to find double ground and i think there needs to be some sort of movement from people who are at the extreme end of these things, there is no mistaking for anything the water it is. There is a crowded theater, i think extremely it extremist examples of hateful content, we cant regulate them in some way, we can put pressure on a Tech Companies to be more aggressive about labeling them if not taking them down, something that we seen a little bit with facebook and youtube and google is labeling the content that is problematic, facebook recently has been doing this with information about the coronavirus that seems problematic, labeling as potentially suspect and this is one way to get up and making sure consumers are more informed with what 13 without stripping it away from the internet completely. Do you have any thoughts about whether that is working, can work . I think its early days and will need to study the impact, i think its a start, its better than nothing, i remember a few years ago asking eric who is the ceo of google at the time what the thought was at google about search, whether or not this should be something that took a heavier hand in identifying the problematic content, he said we dont censor anything, but we can be ranked, and that kind of content so it does not, first, were putting on the skills of little bit behind scenes and this comes up to the question of the fact that we dont necessarily have visibility into these actions so i think one of the things that makes these companies interesting from her citizens perspective is this, and it shows the ranking or not, we just see the result and hope that theyre doing a good job. A reminder, all the programs youre seeing right now are available to watch in their entirety at booktv. Org, just like the authors name or the book title in the search box at the top of the page. Next inner Author Program on technology, Joanne Mcneil speaking a harbor bookstore in cambridge massachusetts, she argued the internet news has shifted from being individualistic, spontaneous and voluntary to be in data and advertising driven. A part of your wildflower, people can see it in the corner and you can easily be the creep that people cannot necessarily see you watching them and i think its one of those things that has to do with the elements that make interaction aligned and unusual from physical world interaction and sometimes because we take for granted how much our communication in our daily lives, that core difference of physical and Digital World interaction i wanted to make clear in that title. Thank you, you see looking at your preferred way of interacting with internet and said she wrote a book about it, is there a specific place online that you choose, that you consider yourself primarily a lurker, where are you lurking these days. I would say ive never had a reddit profile but ive spent a lot of time on their and especially in the corner that is actually very sweet and unexpected and there are some that are very toxic and have many problems but there are also some that are created that people facing homelessness and its all about exchanging resources in their somewhat a layer and its a place worth a lot about screenings as opposed to, i dont participate myself there are a lot of communities that i find useful information useful ways and in the book i go back to the chat rooms and before i would leave the post, i would spend possibly months making sure that i would be welcome there. I am noting that the title is lurking and we have folks lurking at the edge of the room if you want to sit down you you campaign we will make it participate in this way. I think the point about reddit is interesting because one of the weird things of reddit, i will admit im a reddit lurker, i read a fair amount of legal advice as a lawyer which is probably a form im causing myself pain as viewing other people, i read a fair amount in which i think is funny because it is actually gone a lot of people way of interacting this form of the internet through twitter and that is reddit and someone will will post a very ridiculous amide the post and lots of people respond on twitter, totally departed from the actual contents in which the initial post was made. That is a classic example of how a conversation that is still usually quite bizarre and heated in its own way on reddit but if you take it to another platform like twitter where there is already an underlying ironing attached to it in something you always have to be above the content and i think thats what makes twitter distinctive, you cannot really be too sincere about things and what is incredibly funny about that and twitter and i was too much of a jerk for a social network, i remember looking on all the nice people sharing with her eating for breakfast and why am i not a nice person who can freely share these peaceful moments in my life, why do i have to make my weird jokes and now days i feel like im overwhelmed with the edge to the content and everything its a must in element of distancing yourself from the platform, if you can laugh at everything, youre not so entwined, you have some layer of personal distance. What youre doing there. I think in some ways lurking can be a way to distance herself because youre like im not invested as the people choosing. I will say someone who is much of a lurker online, it is not a lack its not a lack of investment, im not less invested than the people in some cases i feel like im more invested than the people to post, i still get that sense of distance. So you frame the book both in terms of working but in the idea of becoming a user and one thing you talk about fairmount in the book is facebook which i thought was particularly interesting because of features like the offline profile were basically for those who are unfamiliar, facebook and online profiles have the ultimate meaning because what offline profile is a perperson who decided they did not want a facebook profile and then facebook constructs the profile for them in all of the things that they do even though theyre not on facebook. More generally how do you think about tracking on the web and how has that changed the experience of being online generally or lurking more specifically. Thats another element of the title, it is not something that is possible on the internet which is designed to track activity and analytics and those elements that are part of the function of the social network, especially Something Like facebook where its profit is attached to having data on its users and so thats another element of having advantage, you can leave without a trace, you can walk away from things and perhaps if we dont have cameras in the future. This interview sort of leaving without a trace. Sorted to switch topics a little bit, one part of the book i read with a lot of interest is your section which is part of a broader chapter which is entitled and as someone who at times identified with the label and actively new the people you described, i was really appreciating the humility in which you approached it and specifically you say you say that youre gonna resist the urge, grand unified theory about women in the Tech Community and feminist commentators in new york to address concerns. And im not going to ask you to leave the grand narrative, you have waited but did note that this seems a little bit overly kind to me, i look at the period of tech feminist organizing that you highlighted in a real lack of attention to raise a class analysis that ended up leading over into what i would call the white women focus problem diversity box that we still see with grace. And the way in which there is a particular very version that you mightve seen in new york professional feminist commentators that your contracting but at the same time, it is a version of white feminism. Certainly there were bright spots and they think there is a lot to be said and positive about that. But id be curious about your process and thinking about that chapter is a real moment where i think youre reflecting on how not to come off as nostalgic in a way that is historical about the positive parts of the internet and were generally how your views on the tech feminist like your own reflection on the tech feminist stop. Absolutely, that was an intense moment in an eyeopening one whereas at that time i was based in new york and i remember as elements of harassment became unavoidable on platforms like twitter and facebook, i found the professional feminist media at that time was not necessarily addressing some of the intersexual elements that went into this harassment. Some of the resources that i found that were pertinent were things like d feminism that had the resources that just seems so much beyond, this thing of course immediate presentation of gender, inequality, that period of time we can see coincided with activism two. Certainly black lives matter. Or accepted much more broadly. I am always hesitant to name certain factors why that might be but i do think as manic as a major platforms are and problematic with twitter but to have that nature with trending topics somebody can create a to use personal experiences of oppression and having a Community Element in a platform designed for multiple communities. But i say that with a lot of hesitation because those platforms designed for everyone is dangerous. Its a tradeoff you have a twitter account you follow a few people from backgrounds very different than yours. So to see those experience and arguments as part of the conversation or the part of that are having a to be one of the turning points for the activism it is something i dont want to discount it but credit it too much i want to just credit its role that certainly twitter did nothing for that to happen as a company now we have kids growing up mobile devices, internetenabled, ipads now they are given these devices at infancy. In 1979 there was a punk band out of San Francisco they had an album cover called Remote Control it was a wink and a nod to think of those evil impacts of television and they had a tv right at the kids face. Now 2018 this is a Product Available on amazon with a kid has an ipad right at their face. They have their ipad. We are feeding Digital Technologies before they acquire those language skills. Neuroscientist know theres something called brain plasticity they are malleable like plastic into shape the brain of children what is the outcome and what will happen if we have babies or infants acquiring Digital Skills before language . What is the outcome . We dont know yet but those videos on youtube and stimulation now parents say they have the tv on at the same time. There is always stimulation theres always noise and sound and what does that do to attention and thinking with those neural pathways . We dont know wet on yet. But thats where we are i at with Digital Technologies and the steady diet of that being fed to children. We could say this is rewiring brains they will think differently than you do and that is where were at. I told you people are coming untethered because they have so many choices you heard christopher say i worked as a researcher with eharmony to develop some of their products and to match People Better when i came at my dissertation. But now eharmony was webbased matching service now we have apps like tinder or a bumble people just swipe and it becomes a game but its presented to young people the idea of the unlimited sea of choices in front of you with romantic relationships so what you think this unlimited sea of choices you find just the right one . But what happens and we see this with consumer psychology there is a paradox with the idea the more choices you have the more difficult it is to choose. They did a study where have you ever been in a store where they give out samples of food or cheese . They set that up with samples of gm they had 24 varieties and they said heres all the jam. Try it and then they gave a coupon to buy a jar after that. The second day they came back and instead of 24 varieties they only gave six and the same coupon. Common sense you would think the more choices you would find just the right one whether its apricot or strawberry. But it turns out thats not the case they were only one tenth is likely to buy any at all with more choices as opposed to less. We are in a situation with a paradox of choices called choice overload it makes it harder for us to choose anything at all now people are swiping maybe they will find someone a little hotter, richer, more interesting, someone i fight with they keep swiping but they dont choose anyone at all a new study came out last week half of americans are not in a romantic relationship and 65 percent of kids have not had a romantic relationship a lot of people marry their High School Sweethearts now they dont have that. It is changing the dynamics of everything. Another thing they are doing is easy come easy go for dates then you can just disappear. Its called ghosting then you never contact the person again and then guess what the same idea of the swiping and the choice overload and ghosting is now happening in the workplace because there is an idea you go on monster or this endless plethora of Jobs Available now people ghost employers thinking they can just get another and another. The endless sea of choices is changing peoples willingness to commit because maybe there is something incrementally better out there whether a job or a romantic relationship that changes the dynamics of commitment because of the endless sea of choices available and whats happening is changing what adulthood means sociologist study the markers of adulthood completing school, leaving home becoming financially independent with a fulltime job to marry and have a child. If we go back to 19 sixties 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had achieved all five of those markers by early thirties. The fastforward it is less than half of one third of the men. We have extended adolescence and as part of an tethering from the traditional markers of adulthood. Some people say maybe we should unhook from the devices. But its becoming harder and harder because in one sense they are addictive i didnt used to like that word but now they bake in the qualities that are similar to the slot machine we talk about gambling addiction if youve ever played a slot machine you pull the arm maybe win maybe you dont ill try again. Then all the coins fall for the lights in the sirens because you when thats exactly how instagram works in facebook you scroll just like a scroll in front of you. Sometimes the content is interesting, sometimes its boring but nevertheless it draws you back in for more. The same behavioral drivers that are the most predictive to come back for more are baked into social media its harder to put the phones down have you ever seen people checking their phones even they feel the vibration or oh i thought it was a message they just want to check and check some people check thousands of times per day so the problem is im not trying to be honest going back to horse and buggy days but the combination of devices and conductivity and unhooking from the destabilizing social structures have left younger people on board we see the highest rates of anxiety, depression that we have seen in 30 years i work at University Im at the front lines you may not realize this but in college one quarter of students are on medication for a disorder be coming untethered means on board to have this stabilizing structure to stabilize their mental and physical health we need to reinvent that how do you do that pulling away from those social structures how do we create new structures to provide stability . Because obviously we have a problem on our hands. Im lucky i went to the computer revolution those were big old things nobody could use and there is no difference between software and hardware. I had to explain that to my mother but going through democratization of Computer Technology with ai and data and the new technology stack. Ai is done to us but we dont have control over it. But i have had the honor to interview thousands of people and ask them if technology could solve one problem what would it be . Over and over a similar answer, it looks like this. I have been building Machine Learning applied systems a long time. Over 30 years i was hired by the human genome project in graduate school i built budgets for the government and thousands of Machine Learning models who would have known . So many years later my machine to know what i was talking about but this background has given me insight that is key something has been missing all these years but we have been coming up from the technology instead of putting humans at the center and those that work closely with doug im honored i like that she calls the intelligence because instead of ai it is i a putting is at the center of the incubation one equation. So when interview them i found what is a decision . It is a thought process leading to an action in a complex world i dont know buying that car will do to the world it will have some impact but honestly i dont feel very motivated because thats not visceral or present for me doesnt grab my brain in a way that makes me think i have to buy that hybrid car. I cant see it in that stack today was not given to me. This is my dog. He intended to be a service dog ive had him his whole life. Hes 11 months old i have a trainer was teaching me to train the service dog and taught me abc behavior consequence my head exploded thats what i heard from the executives they always talk about the antecedent and then the behavior my dog sits and the consequences he gets a cookie this is universal archetype not just one way to think about how we could use ai or data i will tell you how that fits in a moment im pretty certain this is the way to think this is the lowest way to how humans think naturally. People live in complex environments they dont have much brainpower to learn that methodology and then the fact to create a giant cultural barrier between the heads of governments and businesses they try to make decisions to make sure those decisions have a Ripple Effect that is good some farmers im working with a have to decide what consequence down the road they dont know if that makes them productive what happens if they had fewer Migrant Workers . The situation has changed they dont know what price to pay as they acquire a company then we hear the antecedent which is a situation and get the product at this price but for us we cant think through long chains of consequences and we need computer help so a decision is the imaginative process in our heads as we think through the actions in some context for a result. If you remember nothing else remember the template which is clear about intelligence because we start with humans i can teach you. Thats my comment. How do we make decisions today . Im sorry to say especially in a complex world its not from Human Evolution we dont really think through the consequences of our decisions very deeply. We are much more likely not to and instead use social signaling someone that looks successful in society whose dominant or prestigious and then copy the decision they are making it turns out that is very effective and has been hugely successful for the human race and me as a species and cultural evolution theory says we develop behaviors and patterns that any individual cannot understand but use cultural revolution to come up with these behaviors we are programmed to look at a prestigious person and do what they do instead of thinking through the consequences. That was great for a few millennia but the situation has changed. First of all if there is a bad actor and they tell us what to do they can subvert our behavior influence us to make decisions that benefit them and not us if they are smart about the situation. The context is changing we should develop new ways to develop this ocean thats fundamentally different because it keeps changing and the old ways at that societal and crowd level are no longer working in the feedback effect with winner take all patterns were large are just get 90 percent and then massive inequality. What we have talked about anybody that has worked with the data focus on things you can measure easily like money, price we tend to overlook reputation, happiness or morale. Of never built a decision model that doesnt have at least one feedback or a soft factor you have to talk to this sociologist and cultural rut evolutionist to understand the soft factors that creates a roadmap for how to do that. The past in the future and it doesnt warrant the situation. I believe that ai decision intelligence can solve the problem. We all will democratize reality and i dont think we realize because visual intelligence we have created and then the nonlinear impact. And then we start to talk about it practically. We dont say where is the data. We dont say we cant do this. But thats a huge amount of Human Knowledge with no data set whatsoever we are good at knowing how actions lead to outcomes and how to have a complex decision in the intermediate effect. And those outcomes and the context so with this Diverse Group of experts and i say what are the outcomes you are trying to achieve . And those that have never sat down. And they dont see the outcomes. So what are you trying to achieve . Is different for each person. You just need to have a brainstorming process with the outcomes we are trying to achieve. And with that advantage that doesnt create a backlash in terms of the psychological reputation what are the outcomes we are trying to achieve . Asked that question. Second and then to heaven open brainstorming session to achieve those outcomes to go to the creative side of your brain or the medical side so separate those two and spent some time to be creative and then being analytical the triangles here of ai and most decision models as a democratized ai this is how we will do it. So talk about a decision in facing today. I saw greta on tv and she was so compelling and said we have a climate crisis. This is how we do this stop worrying about the analysis there are organizations all over the world those trees will grow with biomass and sequester carbon so i havent sent money to a Tree Organization yet and then to achieve an outcome so if im going to use ai and then to experience the future if i do some of this then we can walk through the spaces and what we do in these spaces and experimenting with actions and that the computer help us understand what the consequences