Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books About Technology 20240713

Host next on booktv, programs from the archives that focus on technology. You can watch them by visiting the website of booktv. Org my job is to model risk for a living. The same companies that control the lions share of patterns that have an extraordinary amount of money that are able to attract the best talent and fo food. It is something that is Companies Like salesforce that are not doing amazing things. In addition to the things i might mention, they are also building the frameworks and custom chips. If its the case of Artificial Intelligence although that is cool to optimize our lives using data as currency what does it mean when we relegate that to just a handful of companies and handful of people working at these companies. What are the implications of that look like . Three of them are in china and they are back. Anybody that watches china knows they are still under the thumb of beijing. The. Hes very smart and a very effective leader and a longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. You can go back through history and look at the Strategic Initiatives and fiveyear plans and see how a lot of them never really amounted to anything. But i think that things are different this time because we have a person in power and the Leadership Team around him that understand this technology so youve probably heard of the builtin road initiative. This seems like an Infrastructure Initiative building bridges and roads in exchange for deft diplomacy all around the world. It isnt just about building physical bridges. Theres a digital component house also 58 countries are part of the digital side of the bri. They are also getting the social credit score system there are parts you might be at an intersection and if you jaywalk, smart cameras placed around the intersection will recognize who you are. The systems are smart and can recognize you by gait and posture and how you are walking so if you cause an infection in your face gets put on a digital billboard at that intersection. That is transmitted to your employers and family members and if youve done it more than once he might be told to report to a local police precinct. Your total score is a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. There are opportunities to earn points if youve done something good somebody can report the word and you might get a few points up. This is a program that is intended to be national and you may be saying to yourself that china. I dont live there so this is very interesting but who cares. The system already has prevented 17. 5 million from buying airplane tickets. 5. 5 million last year couldnt buy a train ticket and 300,000 have done great jobs at work. Their scores were too low and as a result they were disqualified from ascending to management positions and these are not just ethnic minorities, this is a shot at huge social control and you may be saying to yourself you had me at talking microwave. I dont know why all of this necessarily matters to me and the reason that matters is bri so if it is the case china is allying itself with all these countries around the world. It helps keep the populace in control and china is already exporting this to various different places. Why this matters is why we are fixated on the wars and thinking about missiles in the sky what we have forgotten to look at is what happens if it reaches an economic war that blocks us out of places or forces us to come to terms we dont like or understand. It potentially reshapes any sort of new world order. A militaristic pacing threat china has become a formidable threat to all of us. In the United States there is an antagonistic relationship. Antagonistic more often than not between the valley and dc so what winds up happening the valley sort of does what it wants until somebody gets upset and 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 that they were broken up. You cant break up these companies. There are many reasons why some have to do with strategy and the nuts and bolts but this isnt like dell. Remember when the company got broken up, this isnt that. These companies have multiple positions and bigger intertwined and complicated. If the United States is going to continue to defend science and if it is going to the fund our Education System and technology, then who is going to go about the future of ai among other parts of science so you cant just break these apart. It doesnt work that way. This can put us up for inch by inch and little by little your daily permission being taken away somebody part of a small group and tribe and see if theyve got the vibe is probably even though weve never been in a car accident that seems insignificant but it is a compounding effect over time and we are part of the process that is unfolding in slow motion. Weve heard the analogy into the water slowly over time boiling and you dont realize it until it is dead. I dont want to beat the dead fraud in the pot. I realize that sounds like hyperbole but theres so many things happening that weve turned a blind eye to that at some point there is no way to turn this back. At the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President trump issued a executive order but then that executive order on the Artificial Intelligence is not self executing. We do not have budget and we do not have a singular department in charge or Institutional Knowledge is spread throughout our federal government. They are not in the right places and in the valley we have incredibly smart people who i do think want to do good by and for society but so are instead constantly dealing with market demand so let me be clear on this. I dont think the companies that are our part of the big blind i dont think that they are evil. I dont think they intend to do harm. Obviously worldly experience. Theyve been to my collaborator and i think it is a hard thing to do to run a company full of adults many of whom have debt or whatever and i have a lot of sympathy for someone that is growing up when they are a ceo. I feel that their behavior that i so institutionally as well as individually was more the result of a sort of structural position than the individual failure. The two offer a puzzle. Its more the incentives of the Business Models than the industry and many illustrate i feel like im Walking Around at these ratings with my own book they read my book and mentioned which i talk about how early members of my team are in the Conference Room at the manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know the these people who are smart and talented and interested in other things why should they work it does Analytics Company im here because i dont know my purpose and im trying to figure it out. It is just this idea that they should work here because it has economic value. Do you think that is how these Companies Work . This is the anecdote but im telling. Yes, i totally do. Maybe i should have a one line answer for everything. So, it was the first time that i heard of this. They had texted me to say this was like deja vu for me. They must have read it on the post. If you look theres this thing that happens where it has to do with the intellectual culture that i would call antiintellectual. It has to do with more people need business advice, theyve never ran a company before, they have accountability to their investors and responsibility to their employees so they read a post like here is how you can scale hiring and get good people for your team that will set the tone for the rest of the company into a Conference Room and pushed them to say we can pay you five to 8,000 per recruit. I think that the Company Cultures are shaped by that Business Models and those are shaped by the incentives so you have the prioritization of speed and scale of coupled with the sort of spirit of the industry they have conservation and research is iterative. I dont know what im talking about. Im so sorry. [laughter] its fair to say i guess im wondering if theres parts of the [inaudible] is now they think that they are doing good and unabashedly sort of a positive thing and even questioning that is kind of dangerous sometimes [inaudible] the heart of the book is ambivalence, so i think there was a lot that i appreciated was the intent. I dont know if i would go back and appreciate the same thing to be honest. I happen to be the right age and have the right yearning to be a sort of ideal employee in this certain way that win32. Select four years ago when it mattered. [laughter] but yes, having just moved here not knowing anyone, from a different city, i think what im admired and appreciated was the co moderate and commitment to the common project. I like the people had autonomy at least for a little while. I think it is also par that is e problem is people having autonomy who dont necessarily have the authority there seemed to be potential in that even if it just sort of replicates. There is one more thing that i did appreciate and enjoy it at the start of culture. I think that its very earnest. The deep painful earnestness i dont know if you can relate. [laughter] people in texas think that they are doing good for the world and i think that they believe and trust them when they say it. Its getting the recording. But i do wonder, you dont have to answer this question but ive heard people say that it couldnt exist if it didnt have this crazy culture. My question now because please should it exist and if you dont have that culture and it hasnt happened, thats fine. But one that is related to the incentives ar of the industy that could potentially be forgiving if you boiled down how this works you to the next level whether it is revenue or something and they get desperate and you have to start doing things you might not be [inaudible] i think also there is justification for the incumbents protected and those that are not necessarily fair and i am not saying that this is wrong. Guest delete the people were in the same position. Like depending on who the ceo is. You are watching th book tv n cspan2. You are probably familiar with a category of what people call online offline Platform Services using the same mechanism putting out a request for somebody to come pick up this food and deliver it to this address and the platform is participating in the exchange by recording when its picked up and delivered into executing a payment schedule giving an address. That portion of the work is automated but the delivery and the value of somebody being there to deliver the food is part of the equation we often are not considering. We are more aware because we can see those. If i said content moderation is a form of labor i dont think anybody would have known what i was talking about until cambridge and a ludicrous amount we know it is a job people do it absolutely is providing another service but these are people in the loop performing a very important service. We are focused on this world of startups. Anything that they would ever see as an end consumer and that is the work im going t i goingk about today. It is the world of editing and testing perhaps to some of you in the room. Many of these paths to drive Artificial Intelligence innovation and the arab Health Structure to clean data set. Importantly seeing the number of jobs that say it is quite hard. We are just going to keep a person in this moment of the Service Request that is perhaps text based you know that it is a mixture of script and a person assisting you. Thinking about that world of work when you have a person doing something on that spot that cannot be quite completed by automation as points of reference that come to mind coming and we covered this in the bucket as places to flood together this isnt new, theres continuity new and how we treat people that are there for what we imagine would just be a moment because automation will come around and be replaced. It might look like piecework identities of textile certainly there could be manufacturing knock out a shirbuck out of shid add the buttons, no for quite some time and without 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 in other cases the labor costs but also the reality of the paradox of automation would be too sophisticated for a textile machinery to be able to consume the automation if a person was kept around. We used the example of the women famous in the film Hidden Figures who could be brought in when the need for them and to demand for the services as computational experts eventually disappear, they could be let go. It wasnt less valuable. Seeing these women is valuable precisely because we had already moved forward the idea of what it was to value work. A often with particular embodiments of the profession that had very specific roles to play so anyone not playing those rules seem expendable. So, to continue this lineage1960s and the advancement of the services i would point you to the beautiful book on this economy quite thoroughly brokered on the devaluing of womens labor as a resource because they were mostly young women that were wee collegeeducated if theyve made great office girls and they were also expendable keeping that living by the time that we get to the 1980s and 2000 in the outsourcing and the shoring of the office work it becomes harder to make the case people are doing something that can so easily be replaced because it is also being done by the workers of the United States. It becomes much more obvious that this is a question of labor arbitrage and where you can find cheap labor that is just as educated as anyone in the location generating the request for work and i often lament perhaps to some of my colleagues dismay that those that involved microsoft never resolved the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is less necessary for the period of time that its project driven but it might be something where you need someone with a specific language expertise coding expertise that you know you are not going to need them for more than 12 months or 12 weeks were 12 days. What ways do we have to value of that worker and at the time we really di didnt have a category for that, so its important to note Silicon Valley and especially 2001 what happens if they have effectively. Com bubble burst and its at that moment we are going to leave questionable what to do with people with weak enough within the settlement was practices that treat Contract Labor and often dont leave them with the protection beyond the 12 month contract to be able to say im inflated these benefits come with my employment. Its certainly an argument in any trajectory is an argument that in this case they mostly assume the valuable work is the work that cant be automated without much projection about a fight one day become the target of automation. And then lastly to see the shift toward all the information economy for that Information Service work. Coding and other valuable skills that take a great amount of training but if you think about wide it took to code website and from what we talk about that is now completely done with software. At that time they paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. So keep that in mind as what can be automated and the complex communication. So what is it will be on the horizon with human touch going into a career . So that distributed wall of work is the thing to do as an anthropologist. We chose for businesses as case studies to identify groups of workers but also to show the inside of their black box how to organize the work and what does it look like. And then to stare at the world of the mechanism of the Artificial Intelligence. The best way to describe is how i came upon the idea how to write this book in the first place so in 2015 there were a number of terrorist attacks across france and in november the largest terrorist attack which killed over 130 people it was found out after the fact that a lot of these were carried out and organized on social media. Social Media Companies got involved working with defense agencies to try to figure out how to stop proliferation of terrorism on her platforms, keep them from organizing and attacks on the platforms that is a rough start in the beginning one of the people responsible for the attacks was captured six months later despite the fact he was actively posting on facebook for the entire time. Is a lot of cooperation between governments and Tech Companies than three years later facebook, google, youtube and amazon and others came together for a Global Internet forum how you fight terrorism specifically. What was organized by and for the Tech Industry so a lot of cooperation. So then we sought hurricanes Hurricane Maria hit puerto rico and wiped out there are power grid and cell phone coverage so who showed up . Tech company came forward to be billed the electric grid google showed up to provide internet and telecommunications coverage and at this time i thought what is going on with Tech Industry . That is making spreadsheets but outside of the core mission in areas that used to be the sole responsibility of government. The counterterrorism infrastructure building Citizen Services i thought there has to be a better way to talk about them than just tech they seem to have a role to play in geopolitics so the term nonstate actor evolved to bad guy so i started to study where the return happened those that think of Tech Companies as the bad guys. [laughter] i just did some research and as recently as 2010 the dictionary defines the nonstate actors as examples of un and natos even then they were not considered terrorist so somewhere around 2012 or 2013 there was a turn reference to al qaeda and then eventually basis. Nonstate actor was taken as a bad guy but they are not nationstates either. Maybe there needs to be another way to talk about them. And those that were outside of their Core Technology emissions like defense and diplomacy and infrastructure services. I wrote the article in 2015 to say that is a stretch and i put on the shelf for two years and after Hurricane Maria i said i felt there something to this thats when i put the article out there and wire publisher and it turned into the book. Whats the difference between the big Tech Companies who have philanthropic concerns like donating money or were volunteering were cisco or hube huber . Its a good question because in the book i dont put twitter in this category but i do plan to test lie which may seem surprising because im looking at how Tech Companies expand outside of Digital Services into the names that used to be the territory of government you dont see huber getting involved in counterterrorism at the moment microsoft is deeply involved in diplomacy you dont think of cisco as having a stake in the national treaty. This is the differentiation so what about other Big International Companies Like cocacola or mcdonalds that they dont open a counterterrorism department. Facebook has a larger Counter Terrorism department and the state department it doesnt seem that strange that they would. This is a reason space of the list that qualify google amazon facebook and microsoft and tesl tesla. One of the things i look at in the book is not just how Tech Companies expand into governmental domains but real life as physical infrastructure and services this is something tesla and many Sister Companies are doing more than anyone else with solar City Operations and partnerships to provide electricity now going to space with starling a lot of endeavors no longer looking at products and Services Like cars that are changing the way we think about Public Infrastructure so the Boring Company produces highspeed rail and chicago said thats the mechanism the line objects to. [laughter] one of the questions is now having private Sector Companies in charge of a Public Infrastructure what happens if they dont want to make it available for all . So i talk about teslas work in puerto rico when they really needed someone to step in and the government did not that they are not under any obligation to stay dont have that responsibility to provide equal and fair access to services. You say what do you say by that quick. Also what distinguishes these companies is that a number of people have a large enough contingent to make a difference that technology should be used for good so in the case of google they work with the department of defense on contract of how to apply ai to Recognition Technology this is a very small contract with a handful of people that when people found out inside google this is happening a number of people resigned in protest a companywide letter circulating google should not be in the defense business and they backed out so it is a significant portion of the drive of these organizations to build things and do good. Not totally unlike a government with its constituent counterparts. One of the interesting features of these particular companies is that of course they are interested in the bottom line and be successful businesses but you do hear about internal employee protest if they do something that doesnt align with these beliefs. And we dont have any role in citizens that makes a unique phenomenon. Host based on your experience and what you talk about in the book with the governments relationship. Start with this episode in the book invoked by the social Media Companies. And how that election and how it went. Up through 2018. And to reach out to Law Enforcement and try to work with them and they Government Entities have been slow to respond that the key Players Google and facebook and others from the department of Homeland Security offering information about their own strategy to deal with and the terrorist platforms and met with violence. Now and 2020 we see the shift from the Defense Sector reaching out aggressively to work with them the chief Security Officer facebook now stanford may be hardworking and strong to defend so that is why it is happening in the tech sector looking at these Tech Companies with their own defense mechanism not finding the support that they need. And that engagement it is an interesting parable about the risks of the government standoffish and as if dc and the federal government cant get its act together then the Tech Companies will do whatever they want to do. At the same time that presents a problem because we know dc and congress and the executive branch cannot keep up with attack and the lawmakers who make their careers in insurance or medicine that they Show Technology and i just remember during the hearings with zuckerberg asking if it was the same as twitter or how they made money. Its clear he has not been on the platform at all. They could hire better staffers but fundamentally do you have thoughts how the government can be smarter of those who oversee agencies physically knowing what to ask for. Thats a good question. We need to make sure we put people into congress who do understand this technology. As a power player. That is number one we are starting to see an influx and more Diverse People running for elected office. I have some hopes within a few years we will see the nature of the people representing us more globally. Also the people who are currently in office its not that Technology Companies are impacting our daily lives. We have the 2014 elections. And we have not seen any congressional actions. There is no real excuse other than appetite and lack of understanding. Even if Congress People themselves dont grasp the technology they have access to resources they could learn or inform themselves. Its hard to be passionate if you cannot grasp. They dont want them to decide. Talk about the work with netscape and counterterrorism. What do you think about that balance that exist here and abroad and if there is a certain balance in the First Amendment . And that could oppose regulations more easily. I was talking with someone from the French Embassy to say we dont have anything like First Amendment. I was looking at hand in a blissful way and that to find a middle ground. And that there is some sort of movement and that there is no mistaking other than what it is. And i think it is extremely egregious with this hateful content if they cannot regulate them in some way then for Tech Companies to be more aggressive and not taking them down. This is what you see with facebook and youtube and google with that content that is problematic. And information about the coronavirus. Labeling that as potentially suspect and one way to make sure they are stripping away completely. Do you have thoughts of that is working or can work . Is still early days. And that they took the heavy hand to identify the content. We can d rank that type of content. It comes up to the question and from the citizens perspective what is interesting to these algorithms that show and then to see the results. That people cannot necessarily see you. And its one of those things with the elements that make interaction online sound why it unusual. And to take for granted how much indication with that visual interaction want to make it clear of that title. And with that preferred way to acting with the internet. So i can ask you are there other specific places online that you consider yourself . Where are you working . I have never had a wedded profile especially that is sweet and unexpected. And also that are created of those facing homelessness. And is somewhat of a layer of anonymity so i dont myself there are a lot communities information wise and in the book i go through and you are choose to sedan you are welcome to. But that point credit which is a form that i cause myself pain and the fairmount if i am the asked whole. And the interacting form of the internet is through twitter one twitter if they post something ridiculous if i am the acyl post and then they respond. And that is usually quite bizarre. And he did in its own way that this is the underlying irony attached to it. And that you cannot be too sincere. So in the book i talk about that i was too much of a jerk for the social network. Look at all these nice people showing what they are eating for breakfast and why am i not a nice person . I have to make my weird jokes and i am overwhelmed with that edge and that it is an element of distancing yourself from the platform. I can be a way to distance yourself. And i will say as a not in but user and for those that are unfamiliar like open it and then we name it. Because the poor person decided they didnt want to facebook profiles and then facebook constructs a profile for them from all of the things they do even when they are not on facebook. And how has that changed . Is something that is possible on the internet designed to track activity and analytics those elements that are part of the function of the social network. Especially like facebook the profit is attached to having data on the users so that is another element because you cant leave without a trace and walk away. And with the surveillance cameras. [laughter] one part of the book i read was part of the book of tech feminism. And as someone that has identified with that label and then to appreciate the humility to say you will resist the urge to have a grand unified theory of the feminist commentators in new york. But just to note it seems overly kind to me. Looking at the. Of what you highlighted a real lack of attention to race and class analysis. Meeting over into the pipeline problem that we still see and the way in which there is a particular burden and with the commentators. And to be curious about the process and moment reflecting on how not to come off to be as nostalgic and more generally. That was an intense moment at that time i was based in new york. And then became unavoidable on platforms like twitter and facebook the professional feminist media at that time was not necessarily addressing the intersectional elements that went into harassment. And some of those resources to get feminism with a presentation of gender and quality. So that. Of time we can see coincided with activism with black lives matter. Having that comt in a platform that is designed for multiple communities did push forward some progressive ideas but i say that with a lot of hesitation because for the most part, i feel those platforms designed are dangerous and this is one of those tradeoffs that because you have a twitter account and have been to follow many types of people they probably followed a few from backgrounds very different from yours, so seeing this is, seeing their experience and argument as part of a conversation in the part of twitter adding a hash tag, one of the turning points for this activism is it is something i dont want to credit too much. I dont want to discount the role because twitter certainly did nothing fo for that to happ. Twitter the company did nothing for that activism. We have kids growing up where theres this Mobility Mobile devices, smartphones are internet enabled, i paths and laptops and all that stuff and kids are now being given these devices at infancy. In 1979 there was a band called the tubes but they were a band of San Francisco a lot of fun, but they had an album cover called Remote Control and it was kind of a wink and nod to think about the evil impact of television. People thought television was going to warped kids brains into things like that and they had a tv right in the kids face in a crib but im going to show you a little picture now. This is a real Product Available on amazon where the kid has an ipad right in their face from day one and theres others like this, potty chairs that have been ipad right there at the crib, so we are actually feeding Digital Technology to children before they acquire their language skills. Psychologists know theres something called brain plasticity that children their brains are malleable like plastic is the influenza symptoms they are exposed to shape their narrow pathways in the brain of children. What is the outcome that is going to happen when we have babies, like you said and things that are acquiring Digital Skills before acquiring language, what would be the outcome of that . We dont know yet, the vast stimulation of videos that we see on youtube, all of this happening most parents now also say they have the tv on at the same time and most report they have both going at the same time so there is always stimulation and noise or sound or visual coming in. What does that do to the thinking and pathways that are being shaped by all that input . We dont know yet and that is claimed to be determined on the horizon but that is where we are now in terms of Digital Technology and a steady diet of being fed to children. So, we could say that it is rewiring brains, that these children are going to think differently than you do and that is where we are at. Ive told you people are coming untethered. One of the reasons is because they have so many choices. Youve heard christopher say that ive worked as a researcher with the harmony and helped evolve some of their products and help people match better when i first started coming out with my dissertation. Whats happening now is it was a sort of web space matching service and now we have phones and apps. Tender and bumble and all this stuff they were just swiping. It becomes a game. But whats happened is its presenting this idea that you have an unlimited sea of choices in front of you in terms of romantic relationships, so what did you think that with this sea of choices that we would find just the right choice for you . But what happens come and we see this in consumer psychology there is a paradox of choice and the idea is its kind of funny but the more choices you have it makes it more difficult to choose. They did a study where have you ever been in a store or some markets where they are giving out samples of food or cheese or Something Like that, they have a table setup an set up and they g to give you something . They set it up with tables of jam and the first day there are 24 varieties and they said heres all of these different jams. Try anyone you want, and they gave then theyget a coupon to br that. The second day they came back and instead of 24 varieties they only gave six varieties, six choices and the same coupon to buy the jar of jam. Commonsensical you would think the more choices you will find just the right one, you like apricot or strawberry or whatever it is that you like you are going to find it there. But it turns out that that is not the case. When people were only a tenth as likely to buy any at all when they have more choices as opposed to when they had less. Now we have choice overload. The more choices we have it makes it harder to choose anything at all so people now are swiping and maybe they will find someone a little harder, a little richer, more in resting so they keep swiping that they dont end up choosing anyone at all. A new study came out just last week half of americans are not in a romantic relationship. 65 of High School Kids have never had a romantic relationship now. If you go back to world war ii a lot of people married her high school sweetheart. Now they dont have that so its really changing the dynamics of everything. Now one of the reasons i brought that up, another thing they are doing with all of this swiping is kind of easy come easy go. You can get a date so easily that people just disappear. Its called ghosting. They just take off and they dont ever contact the person again. Some of you might have done this at some time or another, but that is what they are doing and guess what, this same idea of the choice overload is happening in the workplace because theres this idea that you go on monster answers this plus zero Jobs Available tha but people now are boosting their employers thinking they can just get another one and another one. This idea of an endless sea of choices is maybe theres something incrementally better be at a job or a romantic relationship is changing the dynamic of commitment because of the endless sea of choices available. Whats happening also is that is changing the qualities of adulthood. There were sociologists have studied the markers of adulthood, the five markers and heres what they are, completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent with a fulltime job, getting married and having a child. If we go back to 1960, they age 30, 77 of women and 65 of men had achieved all five of those markers by early 30 but if you fastforward to now it is less than half. So in a sense, we are livin wea period of extended adolescence and thats part of the qualities of untethering from all of these traditional markers of adultho adulthood. Some people say maybe we should just unhook from these devices and things like that, but its becoming harder and harder because in one sense they are addictive which i didnt used to like that word but they are now once because mobile phones available to us they are raking in the qualities that are similar to a one armed bandit slot machine. Maybe un and maybe you dont. Then the lights are going off in the sirens because youve won. That is exactly how things work like facebook. You are scrolling just like those are going i arguing in frn the slot machine. Sometimes the content is interesting and sometimes it is kind of boring. Nevertheless it is like it keeps drawing you back in for more. For the same behavioral drivers that are the most predictive of people coming back for more are baked into the social media so it becomes harder and harder to put the phones down. Even an alert, a message. Have you ever seen one go off and for people check their phones around you, some people even feel the vibration or when its not even vibrating. I thought there was a message. They just want to keep checking some people are checking their phones thousands of times a day so the problem becomes this, im not trying to become on ash going back to the horse and buggy days. Im not saying that. What i am saying is the combination of our devices and or connectivity to that and im talking from these social structures has left particularly younger people on board. We see the highest rate of things like anxiety, depression that we have seen in 30 years. I work in the university so i might at thimright at the fron. I see it up close. I dont know if you realize this now but a quarter of students are on some kind of a psychotropic medication or a disorder. The key is coming untethered beans in some ways that we dont have this stabilizing social structure stabilizing peoples mental and physical health so we need to sort of reinvented and how can we do that . As we pull away from the social structures how can we create new structures to provide some stability for people . Because obviously we have a little bit of a problem on our hands. Im lucky i went through the computer revolution and when i was a kid, computers were big old things nobody could use and my mom didnt know the difference between software and hardware. I had to ask when that. Weve gone through a massive democratization of technology. Its the same today with ai and data into that new technology stack. Ai is done to us but we dont have control over it. Data is overwhelming and distance and access to get a Data Visualization but ive had the honor of interviewing hundreds of people as a Technology Analyst for a few years and asking them what are you frustrated about flex if technology could solve one problem for you, what would it be, and over and over again ive heard a similar answer and it looks sort of like this. This is why im pretty sure i know what im doing. Ive been building Machine Learning and applied systems a really long time, over 30 years so it was funded by the human genome project in graduate school of hundred Million Dollar budgets for the government. I felt thousands of Machine Learning models. My Machine Learning friends know what im talking about. I believe that this background has given me an insight that theres been something missing all of these years and what is missing is weve been coming up from the technology instead of putting humans at the center of the equation. I liked that he called it intelligence because if you sort of think of ai is putting humans at the center of the equation again. When i interviewed all these people i found the decision archetypes, what is a decision, its an action, a thought process that leads to an action and in a complex world moves through some stuff and i dont know buying that scarf or about half what it does to the world but its going to have an impact. Honestly i dont feel very motivated because i dont see the impact. Its not visceral. It doesnt grab me in a way that makes me think i really need to buy a hybrid car. I cant see it and the data stack today come with ai today and giving it to me. This is my dog. Im training him to be a service dog and ive had him to be much his whole life committees about 11 months old. I had this thing happen to me. I have a trainer teaching me how to train the service dog and she told me about abc, behavioral consequences and my head exploded. Thats what i heard from people ive been interviewing they talk about an antecedent is the context in the kitchen i see kiy said, the behavior my made out of sticks and the consequent come he gets a cookie. So this is a universal archetype it isnt just one way to think about how we might use ai and data and i will tell you a little bit about how that fits in in a moment. What i think and im pretty certain this is the way to think about it because it has the lowest friction to how humans think that the people live in complex environments. They dont have much brainpower for the optimization or inference, methodology or any of those fancy things. We have to meet them where they are at and the fact we have not has created a giant cultural barrier between people at the head of government, at the head of businesses and even the as they try to make decisions and try to use evidence and data to help make sure those decisions have a Ripple Effect that is good. Some farmers and working with have a proposal to decide which crops to plant. Down the road if they dont know if itll make them productive or whats going to happen because they have a few Migrant Workers and the situation has changed. Businesses might decide what product to launch or what price to pay and as they talk about that you will hear theres an antecedent which is a situation and a behavior we are going to launch the product at this price and down the road somewhere, for us what makes it special is we can think through one chains of consequences but that is limited so began but in a decision is n imaginative process as we think through the actions in some context that would lead to some result. If you remember nothing else, remember this template and whats clear about the intelligence which is what the book is about is because we start with humans you can take home and use immediately. How do we make decisions today . Especially in a complex world but in that evolution they dont really think the consequences of that decision very deeply. We are muc mature likely not to think through these nationally and instead to use social signaling. We look for someone that is successful in our society, dominant of procedures and simply copy the decisionmaking. It turns out thats very effective. Its been hugely successful and its what separates us from many other species we have great copiers. The society, they genetic evolution uses cultural revolution to come up with these behaviors. Its what they are programmed for, to work at some prestigious for dominant person and do what they do as opposed to thinking through the consequences come and its great for a few millennia. But the situation has changed. First of all if there is a bad actor here or here and they tell us how to do things they can subvert our behaviors. They can influence us to make decisions that benefit them, but not us if they are smart about the situation. Second, the context is rapidly changing. We need to be developing new ways of coping with this ocean that is fundamentally different because it keeps changing. And the old ways of thinking through problems that are societal at the ground level. These have complex system dynamics. We see the win gave you cope when winner take all. They get 90 of the benefit action at a distance is important anybody that worked with data we tend to focus on the things we can measure easily. We tend to overlook reputations come happiness, morale and ive never felt a decision model that didnt have at least one feedback loop that involved something intangible, a soft factor. We must Start Talking to the sociologists, cultural revolutionists and all of those other disciplines that understand those soft factors. The decision intelligence creates a roadmap for how to do that. Another thing i didnt say is its no longer like the past and so it is a problem when you have seen the past and the future and we dont realize the situation; this ones that used to be white or black. I believe that ai and decision Intelligence Council this problem. I grew up in a time of technology optimism. We were all sharing in the internet was meant to democratize ever going to collaborate. I think decision intelligence will help us go there. Weve created a number of data Machine Learning collaborations and theres one more that we need to start to make a big difference and that is d. I. How do we do this . We start with people. We dont say where is the data. We dont say we cant do this without data. Im sorry, dave is great but theres a huge amount of Human Knowledge that is in no date is set whatsoever. We are good at knowing how the actions lead to outcomes at your homework for tonight is to go home, ask a friend who didnt come to this talk of a think about a complethey thinkabout ai promise you they will talk about action and those actions lead to some effects and ultimately lead to some outcomes and they will talk about the context. What i do as is i sit down wita Diverse Group of experts older, john, gender, race, and i say what are the outcomes you are trying to achieve . There are so Many Companies that have these vastly big projects have never sat down and they stormed through the outcomes. I consult a fairly senior levels with Many Organizations and i say what are you trying to achieve, and most of the outcomes were different for each person. Let me tell you, you dont need technology to get better, you just need a brainstorming process where you think through what are the outcomes we are trying to achieve them is a tiger revenue, net revenue after two years, is it some kind of a military advantage, and military advantage that doesnt create a backlash that will hit ten years later in terms of the psychological reputation of the country. What are the outcomes we are trying to achieve . Make sure you ask that question. Second, brainstormed through the actions. Many do not take the time to have an open brainstorming session so they have bad ideas for the actions we could take te that might achieve those outcomes. Do that. Leave it to the side because when the blood on the creative e cited analytical side oside of r brain which i guess is over here, you dont have room for the creative side so separates the two. Spend time being creative and then spend time being analytic analytical. These triangles here are where ai fits in and most decision models i believe as we democratize this is the pattern. What they talk about the decision i am facing today. I saw greta on tv and she was so compelling. She said we have a Climate Crisis and the way we solve this is simple. Stop worrying about analysis at the very least pay for some trees. Theres organizations all over the world that will take money and buy trees and they will grow so there will be more biomass and there will sequester some carbon and most people do this perhaps on its own, she said it would make a big difference. I cant visualize how the money i might send leads to a chain of events to this outcome. If im going to use it to benefit me i want it to be an interactive, fun experience that this is what i think is the future. Its going to look like a video game and i hope that we can use some of this. We can walk through these spaces and they are experimenting with actions they might take and letting the computer help us understand the that lead to the consequences. We have members from across the world joining us for this conversation. I have been talking about it nonstop the last few days to the point of annoying. So to remind everybody the context of our conversation today we will be learning how to compete in a