Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books About Technology 20240713

Companies, the same companies that control the lions share of patterns, that have an extra amount of my comp that are able to attract the best talent because that the best food, you know, that have the relationships with universities and it doesnt mean there are not other Companies Like salesforce or nvidia uber that are not doing Amazing Things but its through these nine compass Everything Else flows. The entire ai ecosystem in some way or another patches of these nine. In addition to all of the things i just mentioned they also building the frameworks and the custom silicone chips and they have the code bases. All roads lead to these nine companies, and the challenge that i have is that if its the case that Artificial Intelligence is not just been built to create a better microwave, although thats cool, but instead to optimize our lives come 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 who probably dont look like us and dont have the same worldviews as us. What are the longerterm downstream implications of that look like . Three of those companies are in china. They are they are publicly traded companies but i lived in china. I also lived in japan and anybody who watches china knows that obloquy traded companies are still under the thumb of beijing. There is no escape if you could be an incredibly if youre an incredibly successful ceo it is because you are in lockstep in some ways with the chinese government. That matters because china currently has a brilliant person at the helm. President xi jinping is very, very smart. Hes a a very effectively and a very good longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. You could go back threat is you look at a lot of the big Strategic Initiatives and the fiveyear plans and feel a lot of them really never amount to anything. I think things are different this time and their different because we have a person in power and a Leadership Team around him who really understands technology. Youve probably heard of the belt and road initiative. Okay, so this seems like an infrastructure initiative. Your building bridges and roads in exchange for debt diplomacy all around the world all along the old silk road route as well as deep into latin america and africa. But what most people dont realize is that this isnt just about billing physical bridges and physical roads. Percentage component as well. 58 countries are part of the digital side of the bri. Getting ig. Chinese i keep it there getting Small Technology and also getting something called chinas social credit score system . So the parts in Southern China right now where you might be at an intersection and if you jaywalk which is illegal there, smart cameras placed around intersection will recognize who you are if you can have your face covered or you could be obscured but the systems are very, very smart and they can recognize you by kate, my posture, eye how you are walking. If you have caused an infraction, your face gets thrown up on a digital billboard at that intersection along with your name and where you work, and that information is transmitted to your employers and to your family members. If you have done it more than once you might be told to report to a local police precinct. You are demoted so your total score as a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. There are opportunities to earn points if you done something good come somebody can report meritorious work and did you might get a few points up. This is a program that is intended to be national but hasnt yet ruled out nationally and you may be saying to yourselves, well, thats china. I dont live there so i dont is very interesting but who cares. Let me tell you why this matters to you. First of all this system already has prevented 17. 5 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets. More than 17 Million People last year couldnt fly. 5. 5 billion people would 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 ascending to mention positions. These are not just ethnic miners hoping discriminate against this is a shot at huge social control. Control. And again he may be saying to yourself, listen, you had me at talking microwave. I dont know what all of this matters to me come at the recent matter is that bri. So if thats the case of china is aligning itself with all of these countries around the world, many of which are economically vulnerable, or theyre vulnerable for any of the number of reasons because of Climate Change or because theyve got political unrest and they are inching toward authoritarian leaders, the social credit score system is a real good option for those places. It helps keep the populist in control and china is already exporting this to various different places. Why this matters is because while were fixating on future wars and building fake ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky, we have forgotten to look at is what happens if china wages and economic war which effectively blocks us out the places or forces us to come to terms that we dont like or understand. This potentially prevents us from doing business, us from traveling, and a potentially reshapes the world in a sort of new world order where china is not just a pacing threat, a militaristic and economic pacing threat, the china has become a formidable global threat to all of us thats china. In the United States theres an antagonistic relationship theres a transactional relationship on good days, but antagonistic relationship more often than not between the valley and d. C. What winds up happening is theres a lack of understanding, there are not enough relationships, the valley does what it wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologized and then to do the same thing again over and over and over again. Until one day when you somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding that they are broken up. You cant break up these companies. There are many reasons why some of them have to do with strategy, some of them have to do with the nuts and bolts of technology but this is not like bell, remember when the bell company got broken up into baby bell . This is not that. This is not telephoning. These companies have multiple divisions and their intertwined and very complicated and if the United States is going to continue to defund science and if is going to continue to defund our Education System and technology, then who is going to build up the future of an eye among of the parts of science and tech and Everything Else . You cant just break these apart. It doesnt work that way. In the process of arguing back and forth, in the process these companies are competing against each other rather than collaborative. This sets us up for inch by inch, little by little your daily permission is being taken away. I no longer have the ability to back my car into the grudge with the radio up on full volume. Thats because somebody the garage. Someone who is part of a small ai tribe decided theyre going to optimize the best healthiest life and that i was probably unsafe, like you are probably unsafe even though weve never been in a car accident, so i no longer have control over the volume in my car. That seems insignificant, but theres a compound effect over time. We are all part now of this process thats unfolding in slow motion. You for the analogy of the frog in the pot and the water sold over time boiling and you dont realize it until the frog is dead, i dont want to be the dead frog in the pot. 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, no switch, no singular switch for ai, no Single Person thats in charge. And at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President trump issued and signed an executive order but that executive order on Artificial Intelligence is not self executing. We do not have budget. We give up a singular department in charge we do not have Institutional Knowledge spread throughout our federal government. We have a lot of smart people but theyre 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 who are instead constantly dealing with market demands. So let me be clear on this. I dont think the Big Nine Companies and serving not the g mafia which is our part of the big nine, i dont think they are evil. I dont think you intent to do harm. I think weve gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken. Weve opened up our archives to look at recent other programs about technology. Next, reporter anna wiener recalls her experiences working for tech startups. The ceo of the company the secretary work for in San Francisco was 24 when i joined joined the company. I was 25. Obviously worldly experience miles beyond him. He had been, the company had been through my company. Its in a cold hard thing to run a company full of adults, many of whom have dependents or debt or whatever. I think, i do not envy anyone in deposition. You self select for the position if youre lucky. I have a lot of sympathy for someone who is going up at the same time their learning how to be a ceo. I think that the reason i dont Name Companies or executives come there are a few of them but one of them is i feel the behavior of us all well as individually with more result of a sort of structural position that any individual failure i realized that souls like a sort of exculpatory narrative or exculpatory framework, but [inaudible] but that, not to be coy or chillax offer a puzzle for people to solve, although im sure that [inaudible] im not against puzzles. More than i want to suggest i think is a sort of common leadership style. It is more to do with the incentives of the Business Models and of the industry, and to illustrate this i told us anecdote at another reading. [inaudible] i feel like i go to these readings with my own book and i am like an American Girl doll. Like, here i am with my book. So i read i think was in new york so we come up to me after reading and they read my book and imagine the scene in which i talk about how early members of my team were brought into the Conference Room and our manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know . Right to your name stand. Did this exercise. And then look at your list. Why dont they work your . Was one of them Abraham Lincoln . [laughing] i was just like in why would they work here . This doesnt make sense. You are so many other useful things to do in the world, interesting things to do in the world. Why would my friends who are in graduate school well, they probably would make their way to tack but why would these people who are smart and talented interested in other things, why should they be working at this analytics company. Im here because i do know what i purpose is in life. Its this idea that the five smartest people you to work your because it is economic valley. Do you think that you think that hubris is [inaudible] or required to speed it fits in the anecdote im here to tell you. I totally do. Its a very long story, i apologize. I should have like like a one e answer for everything. This woman came up to me after this, and she was like the same thing happen in my company. It wasnt the first on her this. Another woman who worked at this started in San Francisco texted me to say this was like deja vu for me. I cant believe this happened deeper they must have all read it on a blog post because i was pulled into room and asked to write down the names of the five source people i know at a totally different company. I feel like theres a thing that happens in this culture has to do with the intellectual culture that i would call antiintellectual but theres more about that in the book. That has to do more with like people read business advice, it never run business before. They have a ton of money and a ton of accountability and attentive responsibly to their employees and attentive to get how to they read a blog post i get real good people for your core team that will set the tone for the rest of the company, corralled your employees into Conference Room and asked him who the smartest people they know and then push them to recruit the mincey wheel pages 8000 per recruit. I tried so hard to recruit people who were or were not the smartest people that i know. [laughing] anyway, so i think that industry has value. You could speak to this as well. You may have seen this in your excellent book length investigation of uber. Its called super pumped by mike isaac. Available at this bookstore. He will be signing afterwards. I think that the Company Cultures are shaped by the Business Model action in the business incentives and those are shaped by the incentives of interest of Venture Capital say of her decision of speed and skill and acceleration and whatever, coupled with a sort of like libertarian spirit of industry that has been incubating, if you will, for 5 years, 30, 40 years. 2020, longer. 50 years. You can get this weird culture product that doesnt value expertise, values speed of a a consideration and research, has this iterative conflict. I dont know what its talking about, im so sorry. Im just going for it. What was the question . I dont member, actually. Is this on cspan . [laughing] i guess im wondering if theres parts of your experience that you take with you like really appreciated. I mean, general think about, you get this, a lot of tech folks who think that again, tech is doing good for the world and unabashedly sort of a positive thing. Even questioning that is kind of dangerous sometimes. I guess im wondering for the benefit of that, like if there are parts of the world that you appreciate it, that you took away from your time in tack . In tech. I think there was a lot that appreciate about working in tech. I dont know in my 30s if i go back and appreciate the same things to be totally honest. I happen to be the right age and have the right yearnings to be sort of an ideal employee in a certain way. In my 20s. Im 32. Like four years ago. When it might have mattered. But jack im in my 20s having just moved here not knowing anyone from a different city, trying to find many, being told here is your meaning, run with it. I think what i admired and appreciate was the camaraderie, the third commitment to a common project, a collective project if you will. I like that people had autonomy or seem to have autonomy at least for a little while. I think actually that is part of the problem is people have the autonomy who dont necessarily have the authority of the autonomy or shouldnt necessarily but this seems to be some potential in that even though often like the people with the most autonomy just replicate like you know, power structures that exist externall externally, and its exciting to me. I think that there was one more thing i really did enjoy and appreciate about startup culture. Oh, i think its very earnest, so it was constantly vacillating between like detached mockery and deep painful earnestness. I dont know if you can relate. [inaudible] anyone who is yeah. They might be wrong but i genuinely believe the people in texas think theyre doing good for the world, i believe they believe it and i trust them when they say it. And to think that whats missing is more of like, i think the problems are systemic. I dont think they are necessarily rude individual. Id be curious of what you would think of that underreporting on uber. I do wonder, like i dont actually know if youre legally allowed to answer this question. You just moved here and thats fine if you want to but do you feel like someone, ive heard people say that uber couldnt exist if it didnt have this crazy culture. My question is like should it exist . Obviously that culture, that culture should exist and be done of the culture and doesnt have, like maybe thats fine. But. Can any of you do you do you feel that is that we are going with this . Do you feel like your behavior is written sentence and incentives or of the industry that could potentially be forgiven someone like that . I think youre getting at the exact right thing. I think like if you boil down how all this works, youre getting invested in your company. You have to hit the next level whatever that is whether its users or revenue or something, and for most companies who get kind of desperate so you have to start doing things that may not be legal, right. I dont know, i think its just make into a lot of this works but i also think i think theres justification. The people who are already in the space, the incumbents are protected in ways that are not necessarily fair and you can kind of like unless think this is wrong. Theres reasons reason for doit of this stuff. And also just to go back on my own argument, i do think people are in the same structural position and theyre not ass calls. Not calling anyone specific and ass call. If you are a jerk to the industry, depending on who the ceo is pick. You are watching booktv on cspan2 with other programs on technology archives. In september of 2019 microsoft Senior Research mary gray report on workforce that tries Large Technology Companies Like amazon, google and uber. Youre probably familiar with the category that we call online offline Platform Services thats anything from uber, let, door dash of using the same mechanism. Its an api putting out a request for somebody come pick up this to come deliver to this address and a platform is in that exchange by recording when the food is picked up and delivered, executing a payment, scheduling, giving an address. That portion of the work is automated but the delivery, the valley of somebody being there to deliver the food, thats the part of the equation we often are not considering. More increasingly we are aware that because we can see those folks, if i fit content moderation was a form of this labor, i dont think anybody would of known what i was talking about until cambridge analytica. Tonight all of the content moderation is a job that people do. Its absolutely providing another service which is training Artificial Intelligence but importantly those are people in a competition executable loop or perform a very important service. We are focused on this vast world of business startups often businesstobusiness services that are below the Service Everything youll ever see as into consumer. Thats the rule of work and would talk about today. Its the world of editing, its a world of usability testing, data enabling which might be familiar perhaps some of you in the room. Many of these different tasks you drive Artificial Intelligence innovation. They are what help structure a clean data set, and i love being at mit dicks most of you in the room to what im saying when i say that. But importantly an increasingly seen the number of job saying its quite hard to mail that a i think, which is going to keep a person threaded into a moment of the Service Request that is perhaps texasbased it anytimeu perhaps have gone to a website and had a little help window 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 had a person who is doing something on the spot that cant be quite completed by automation, there are probably some points of reference that come to mind and we cover this in the book. Its places to threat together. This is not new. Theres continuity here and how we treated people who are there for what we imagine will be a moment because automation will come around and they will be replaced. That might look like piecework when in the days of textiles certainly we could have manufacturing knockout assured, but could add the button, the bow . No. For quite some time and usually i was a matter of decades and thats important thing to take away. Yes, automation made it possible for piecework to go away and textiles in some cases, in other cases also the rally of the paradox of automation last mile is what we call this, the vote itself being too sophisticated for a text file machinery to be able to consume through automation met a person with kept around. But its also in the world of federal Contract Labor. Use the example of the women who are most famous in the film Hidden Figures who could at the time be brought in to serve as computers who again at mit we know that was a reference to the people are not machines. Quickly, when the need for th, when the demand for their services as competition experts eventually disappeared, they could be let go. There was no security in that employment. Was a less valuable . We didnt have we look at implementing these women as valuable process because we had already moved forward an idea of what it was to value work. It was fulltime employment. It was particular profession and often it was particular bodies embodied in those professions, men, wightman of privilege who had very specific roles to play. So anyone not playing those roles seemed expendable. To continue this lineage, by the 1960s and the advancement of staffing and Temp Services that quite literally, and i would point you to the beautiful book on the tenth economy, quite literally brokered on the value, the devaluing of women labor as a resource because these were mostly young women were now college educated. They make great office girls. They were also expendable. So keeping that thread moving come by the time we get to the 1980s and 2000s and outsourcing and offshoring of knowledge work of Office Service work, it becomes much harder to make the case that people are doing something that can so easily be replaced precisely because theyre doing work is also being done by workers in the United States. It becomes much more obvious that this is question of labor arbitrage. Thats we can find cheap labor that is just as educated as anyone whos in location of generating the request for work. I often lament perhaps to some of my colleagues dismay that the sentiment of the case against microsoft that involve microsoft meant that we never resolve the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is yes, necessary for a period of time, its project driven. It might be something unique and somebody with a specific kind of expertise, language expertise, coding expertise, but you know youre not going to need them for more than 12 months or 12 weeks or 12 days what ways do we have two values that worker . At the time were really didnt have a category for that. Its important to note that post 2000 2000 Silicon Valley and especially 2001 what happens come we had effectively a dot com bubble burst. Its at that moment that we resolve settled without case law that were going to leave questionable what to do with people who are necessary but not necessary as work on hoping for a career and that we came up with in the settlement with a set of practices that treat Contract Labor oftentimes vendor management system, that often dont leave them with the protection beyond that 12 month contract to be able to say i am employed in these benefits come with my employment. So if you think about this history that weve drawn, and it is certainly an argument, any historical trajectory is an argument, that in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of loss of rent labor protection that mostly assume the valuable work is the work that can be automated without much projection out about what might wendy become a target automation. That serves peoples need more than it serves the need to build something and then lastly to see this shift towards information economy that involved a lot of people doing information work. Yes, it involves people doing coding and other really valuable skills with a great amount of training but if you think about what it took to code up a website back in the 2000 and it had the hand code html, how many people in the room know what im talking about . Thats now completely done with software. At that timewe paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. That was months and my first work is a 1099 so keep that in mind as youare thinking about what can be automated. What is the work of the creative work, complex communication that seems beyond automation. Its really an open question is what is it that will be constantly on the horizon that requires the human touch. For some amount of time that we cant see growing into a career. So with that let me give you how we studied this so studying and distributive world of work is not the most obvious thing to do as an anthropologist. It was hard to figure out where to begin. We chose four businesses as case studies to be the sites where we identified the workers but also these companies to show us the inside of their black box. How did they organize this work . What does the workflow look like . And the four companies that are standin for this world of a mechanism that can both build out Artificial Intelligence but also keep humans in the loop our look at other programs about technology continues with alexis what county, deputy chief Technology Officer for new york city. She spoke at cramer books in washington dc about the power dynamic between big tech and governance around the world. The best way todescribe what the states are is to talk about how i came upon the idea to write this book in the first place. So back in 2015 , there were a number of terrorist attacks across them in the november 2015 there was the largest terrorist attack which killed over hundred 30 people and it was found that after the fact that a lot of these attacks were carried out andorganized on social media. So social Media Companies got involved in working with defense agencies to try to figure out how to we slap the proliferation ofterrorists on our platform, how do we keep them from organizing, attacks like this on our platform. And it was kind of a rough start in the beginning. One of the people who was responsible for the attacks was captured about six months later. Despite the fact that he been posting on facebook for the entire time. And there wasnt a lot of cooperation between governments and Tech Companies at the time. A few days later facebook, google and youtube, amazon and a few others came together for a Global Internet forum to talk about how to use, how to fight terrorism explicitly and this is something that was just organized by the Tech Industry and for the Tech Industry. But therewasnt again a lot of cooperation with government. And forward a few more months, we saw a series of hurricanes in the us read Hurricane Maria puerto rico and wiped out their power grid. Wiped out cell phone coverage and fema did not show up area who showed up . Tesla. They came forward torebuild their electric grid. Google showed up with project loom which were these low outs to balloons that provide Internet Telecommunications coverage. And it was just at this time i thought okay what is going on with the Tech Industry you are not just making spreadsheets and calendars. Theyre getting involved in areas that are way outside of their core mission and areas used to be the sole responsibility of government. With pharmacy, counterterrorism , defense, infrastructure and Citizen Services and i thought her has to be a better way to talk about them and just. They seem to have a roleto play in geopolitics. So the problem was the term nonstate actor kind of had already evolved from just bad guy so i started studying where this turn. Someone think of Mark Zuckerberg as a terrorist. Theres some people that think of Tech Companies at the bad guy though i looked into this research and use it asrecently as 2010 , the dictionary of social science defines nonstate actors as with examples like the un and nato so even then we were not considered terrorists and it was sometime around 2012, 2013 you started to see this term be used in reference to al qaeda and eventually with isis so nonstate actor was taken bad guy. But clearly Tech Companies were nationstates either though i thought maybe there needs to be another way to talk about this so i introduced this concept of net states. So internet companies, internetbased company who were working outside of their Core Technology mission. And there is that used to be the noname domain of nationstates. In protector and Citizen Services. And i wrote the article in 2015. People who read it said i think this is a little bit of a stretch and i put it on the shelf for two years. And after Hurricane Maria i thought actually i feel like theres something to this and thats when i put thearticle out there. Wired published it and then it turned into this book. Whats the difference between states and other Big Companies might have philanthropic concerns like donating money or volunteer eight or whatever , cisco or huber or any of those that also major. Its a good question and in the book i dont put twitter in this category which, and i do put tesla in this category which might be surprising in some ways and the reason is im looking at how Tech Companies are expanding outside of the Digital Services into these domains that used to be the territorial government. You dont see huber getting involved in counterterrorism yet or atthe moment. Microsoft is very deeply involved in diplomacy. You dont think of cisco as having a real stake in national treaties. So this is sort of the differentoccasion. And people have asked me what about other Big International companies. You have cocacola that operates globally and mcdonalds neither one ofthem or opening a Counterterrorism Department. Facebook though as a larger Counterterrorism Department than the state department and it doesnt seem all that strange that they would so i think this is one of the reasons i thought its worth paying attention to. The list of companies that qualify as net states is google, amazon, facebook. And microsoft and you anticipated my question, tesla. Why tesla . One of the things i looked at in the book is not just how to companies are expanding intergovernmental domains but how theyre extending into what i call in real life, physical infrastructure and services. And this is something that tesla and elon must and his many sister companies, tesla is doing in some ways more than anyone else which is solar city operations, their pursuing partnerships with governments to fight electricity, you now moving into facebook, their endeavors where they are no longer looking at products and Services Like cars but are really changing the way that we think about Public Infrastructure so for instance with the Boring Company , their producing highspeed rail in chicago. That the branding mechanism that elon musk objects to. One of the questions is if we have now private Sector Companies who are in charge of a Public Infrastructure, what happens when they decide they dont necessarily want to make it available for all . This is one of the reasons why i talk a lot about in the book about teslas work in puerto rico. They stepped in and taught at a time when puerto rico needed someone to step in when the federal government did not but they are not under any obligation to stay. They dont have the responsibility the government has to for instance provide equally and fairly access to services. What do they want . You write in the book net statesdo have the lease, what are their beliefs . One of the things that distinguishes these companies is that a number of people that work there, a large enough contingent to make a difference lets say are driven in some ways by this belief that technology should be used for good so we see this in the case ofgoogle. They worked with the department of defense on a very small contract called project maven looking at how to apply ai to their Recognition Technology with drones. And this is a very small contract and it was a handful ofpeople out of googles empire working on it. But when people found out insidegoogle that this was happening , there was people, on the number of people resigned in protest. There was a companywide letter say we do not believe google should be in the defense business and google backed out they left the contract and let it expire so its significant portions of the drive of people that work in these organizations. What is he being used to build things, to do good. So the belief is not totally unlike a governments is constituted into its constituent parts. This is something i think is one of the interesting features of these particular companies that icon that states is that of course, theyre interested in their bottom line, they are interested in making sure they can be successful businesses that you do hear about internal employee protests when the company does things they dont think aligns withthese beliefs. That tech should be used for good and i think that its one of the challenges with this dynamic is that we may hear them from the sidelines and say google, go ahead and protest. Anything you dont think is right but we dont actually have any role as citizens to directly influence that process which i think is another thing that makes this a unique phenomenon. We will come back to that in a minute. Based on your experience and a lot ofwhat you talk about in the book i want to ask about the governments relationship to net states. Let me ask you if you can start by recounting this episode you have in the book where i had not read about before, a meeting provoked by social Media Companies and Tech Companies with the Justice Department and sec of interference before the 2016 election and how that went. There has been attempts by the Tech Industry up to about 2018 as referenced in the book to reach out to law enforcement, reach out to the federal agencies and try to partner with them,try to work with them in figuring out how do we meet the challenges that we all face together. And the Government Entities have been a little slow to respond. There was a meeting held in which the key players, google, facebook and others invited numbers from the department of Homeland Security and offered a lot of information about their own strategies to deal with terrorists on their platforms. The emerging Misinformation Campaign and in response were met with silence. So the next time they can be a good invite anyone from government to the table. I think in 20 20 where seeing the shift a little bit, especially from the Defense Sector turning to reach out to Tech Companies very aggressivelyto get them to work with them. But i think theres the chief Security Officer at facebook now at stanford but it really well and he said a local Police Department may be really hardworking and strong but we would ask a local Police Department to defend against an invading army. But thats sort of whats happening in the tech sector. Were looking at these Tech Companies to stand up their own counterterrorism units in their own Defense Mechanisms and not really provide any support they need. There theres a disengagement before that episode and this cycle is an interesting parable in the book about the risks of government standoffish this and its the federal government cant get its act together to participate, then the tech company aregoing to do whatever they want to do. So thats a valuable point. But at the same time its a problem because we know that dc and especially Congress Even more than the executive branch does not and cannot keep up with and we have all these lawmakers who made their careers in insurance or even medicine and law. But they show zero grasp of technology. I just remember during the zuckerberg hearing last year when they asked if facebook was the same thing as twitter and warren asked how facebook made money. He clearly had not been on the platform at all. And we could tell these people to be better and hire better staffers or whatever but fundamentally im wondering if you talk about how the government can be smarter about its relationship withnet states if the people in charge of overseeing agencies have no idea what to ask for you. I think that theres a couple of different ways that we need to think about that one is we need to make sure were putting people in congress who do understand the importance of engaging with technology. Not just as some ancillary locale but as a power player in both domestically and geopolitically so thats number one and i think were seeing an influx of younger, sort of more Diverse People running for elected office. So i have to hope that within a few years we will see kind of the nature of people who are representing us to reflect societys interests more globally. But i also think that the people who are currently in office is not asap as surprise that Technology Companies are impacting our daily lives. This is not news in 2020 and we had the 2014 elections and Disinformation Campaign from foreign actors. That was a few years ago and weve not seen any congressional action and i think that theres no real excuse for it other than a lack of appetite. I dont think the lack of understanding and i think even if the congresspeople themselves dont grasp all the details of technology, they certainly 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, but yes. Talk about the work of these net states who are stepping up and counterterrorism and antihistory and present groups. Im wondering what you think about the imbalance that exists between the work those Tech Companies, those net states can do here and abroad and whether you think theres a certain imbalance in the plainfield of the that the First Amendment presents we can , we have precedents and restrictions about how we can silencespeak here compared to the eu which can propose regulations and do lots of things more easily. Its interesting, i was talking about something somebody earlier about the fact that they have robust speech laws and you were saying but we dont have anything like a First Amendment and sort of a wistful way and i was looking at him in this wistful way thinking, wouldnt it be great if we were able to find a middle ground and i think that there would be some sort of, some sort of movement from people who are sort of at the extreme end of these things. Theres no mistaking really serious speech for anything other than what it is. Its sort of the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater. So i think that extremely egregious examples of hateful content are if it cant if you cant regulate them in some way we can at least put pressure on our Tech Companies to be more aggressive about labeling and its not taking them down and this is something we see with facebook and youtube and google is labeling content is problematic. Facebook easily has been doing this with the information about the coronavirus been problematic, legally as being potentially suspect and this is i think one way to get at making sure consumers are more informed about what theyre seeing without just stripping away from theinternet completely. You feel like you have any thoughts about whether that is working, can work . I think its early days and we will need to study impact. I think that its a start. Its better than nothing. I remember a few years ago asking eric schmidt who was the ceo at google what the pot was at google about search, whether or not it should be something that they took a heavier hand in identifying hateful or problematic content and he said we dont sensor anything that we can the right. That kind of content so it doesnt, first though theres sort of giving or putting their thumb on the scales a little bit behind the scenes and again, it comes up to this question of the fact that we dont necessarily have visibility into these actions so i think one of the things that make these companies interesting from our citizens perspective is this. Relative absence of transparency. Not in a position to say the right thing or fighting or not, we just see the results read and hope that they are doing a good job. All the programs youre seeing now are available to walk in their entirety at just like the authors a mobiletype in the search box at the top of the page. Next in our other programs on technology, joann mcneil picking at Harvard Bookstore in cambridge massachusetts. She argued internet use has shifted from being individualistic, spontaneous and voluntarybeing data and advertising driven. At a party, you can easily, okay necessarily see you and i think its one of those things that it has to do with the elements that make interaction online unusual from the physical world interactions. Sometimes because we take for granted how much argument occasions are interwoven in our daily lives, that core difference physical and world interactions i wantedto make clear in the title. You say youre working is your preferred way of interacting with the internet and since you wrote a book about i guess i have to ask is there a specific place online that you sort of consider yourself primarily a lurker. Where are you these days mark. I would say probably ive never had a reddit profile but i will spend a lot of time in reddit and especially , especially the corners that are very sweet and unexpected. I think there are some credits that are very toxic and have many problems. But there are also those that are created for people facing homelessness and its about exchanging resources with a sublayer of anonymity because thats the place is a lot about screenings so while i dont participate myself i have worked around that, i worked around a lot of communities that i just find useful information with. And then, in the book i go through even the communities that are present, how like there are chat rooms and message boards. Before i would leave a post i would definitely stay and learn, making sure. [inaudible] im noting that the title, we do have books looking at the edge of the room so if you want to choose to sit down you are welcome to but just like the internet we wont make you participatein this particular way. But i think at that point about reddit is so interesting because one of the weird things about it, i will admit, i am a reddit lurker. I have read a fair amount of legal advice as a lawyer which is probably. Im probably causing myself pain as opposed to viewing other people and i read a fair amount of what is it . And i the. [bleep] hole with i think is funny because it has actually gotten i think a lot of people its way of interacting with this particular form of the internet is through twitter by the fact that its reddit where someone will post some ridiculous post and a lot of people respond on twitter. Totally departed from the actual context in which the initial post was made. Is such a classic example of how a conversation that im sure is no unusually bizarre and heated in its own way on reddit but if you take it to another platform like twitter where theres already this kind of underlying irony attached to it and in the sense that you always have to be able the content and i think thats what makes twitter kind of distinctive is that he cant really be too sincere about things. And what i think is incredibly funny about that in twitter is that in the book, i talk about when i first went on to twitter, i was told i was too much of a jerkfor the social network. I remember feeling like look at all these nice people sharing what theyre eating for breakfast and why am i not a nice person who can just really share these peaceful moments of my life. Why do i have to make my weird jokes and nowadays i feel like im overwhelmed with that kind of edge. That edge of the content and that everything has to be, its almost as an element of distancing yourself from the platform. If you can laugh at everything, you are not so inclined. You have some layer of personal distance from what youre doing there. I think in some ways working can be a way to distance yourself because you like im not as infested as the people using the post and i will say as someone who is as much of a lurker online, it doesnt , it isnt a lack of life, its not a lack of investment. Im not less invested than the people who post and in some cases in fact i am more invested in the people who post but i still like get thatsense of distance. So you framed the book and arose in terms of looking but also in terms of this idea of becoming a user. And it sort of one of the things you talk about a fair amount in the book is facebook. Which i thought was particularly interesting because of features like the offline profile where basically those who are unfamiliar with facebook, offline profiles are the ultimate in renaming. Its what an online profile is, someone who decided they didnt want a facebook profile and then facebook constructed a profile for them from all of the things they do even though theyre not on facebook. So more generally how you think about ubiquitous tracking on the web. And how does that change the experience of sort of being online generally orlooking more specifically . Thats another element of the title that lurking is not something thats possible on the internet which is designed to track activity and have analytics and all those elements that are just art of the function of these social networks. Especially Something Like facebook where profit is attached to having data on accusers. So thats another element of where it has its advantages, but you can leave without a trace. You can walk away from things and if we dont have ubiquitous surveillance cameras in the future, post interview ai. Is a toy. Our new way of meeting with other states. Those sort of to switch topics a little bit, one part of the book i read with a lot of interest istheir section on tech feminism which is sort of a broader chapter which is entitled clash. So assomeone whos sort of at times identifies with that label , many of the participants you discussed , i sort of was really appreciating the humility with which youapproach it , specifically you would say you say that youre going to resist the urge to leave a grand unified. Around while women in the Tech Community seemed are likely and professional tennis commentators in new york to address intersectional concerns. So im not going to ask you to weave a grand narrative. But just to note that this seems maybe a little bit overly kind to me. I look at the period of text feminist organizing and see a real lack of attention to raise a class analysis. That ended up bleeding over into what i would call all white women focused problem of diversity Fact Checking that we still see with congress and in ways in which there is a particular very different version of white feminism that you might have seen in a new york professional feminist commentators that your contrasting but at the same time still a version of white feminism. Certainly there were bright spots as you point out in the monoculture, theres spots about that but i think that id be curious about your prospects in thinking about that chapter as like a real moment where i think you are reflecting on how not to just come off as sort of nostalgic in a way thats ahistorical about the positive price of the internet and more generally your views onthe tech feminists. That was an intense moment and an eyeopening one where 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 just like the professional feminist media at that time was not necessarily addressing some of the intersectional elements that went into this harassment. And some of the resources i found that were pertinent were things like big feminism who had a wiki of resources that just seemed so much beyond this, but the scene of course a media presentation of gender equality and so that. Of time we can see coincided with activism too. Certainly black lives matter. And i do remember especially the womens march in 2016, having a feeling like we come so far that a lot of basic understandings of inclusion that would have been quite radical three years prior art targeted much more broadly and i think im always hesitant to name certain factors more than others. As to why that might be but i think as problematic as twitter is problematic as the major platforms are, the nature of how having Something Like twitter where you had trending topics someone could create a hashtag and use that to discuss personal experiences of oppression and having that community elements. In a platform thats designed for multiple communities. They pushed forward some more progressive ideas but i see that with a lot of hesitation because for the most part, i feel that theres platforms that are designed for everyone are themselves very dangerous. This is one of those tradeoffs to trade off because they you have a twitter account and you have followed many types of people, you have followed a few trans people, a few people from backgrounds different from yours so seeing those new experiences, seeing their experiences and their arguments as part of the conversation in the part of twitter was having a hashtag so white woman with the key, one of the turning points for this hashtag activism. Its something that i dont want to discount but i want dont want to credit too much. I dont want to discount twitters role but i dont want to credit twitter because twitter is certainly did nothing for that to happen. Twitter the company did nothing for that user activism. Youre watching tv and weretaking a look at some recent author programs about technology. From april 2019, sociologist julie all right examines the divide between digital native and thegenerations that preceded them. Now we have kids growing up where there always was mobility, what we call mobile devices. Our smart phones that are internetenabled. Our ipad, our laptops, all that stuff kids are now being given these devices infancy. In 1979 there a band called the tubes. Theyre kind of a band out of San Francisco but they had and album cover that was called Remote Control and the album cover was kind of a wink and a nod to think about the evilimpacts of television. That people thought that television was going to work kids brains and things like that and they had a tv right in the kids face in a little crib. But im going to show you a picture here now. Now we are in 2018 and actually, this is a real product. Where the kid has an ipad right at their face from day one. Theres others like this, potty cares and how that ipad right there. There right at the grid so were actually feeding Digital Technology to children before they acquire their language skills. So neuropsychologists know that theres something called brain plasticity. That childrens brains are malleable like plastic and what you put into them, the influences and the things they are exposed to she those neural pathways. She the brain of children. Once the outcome was in mark whats going to happen when we have babies like you saw, infants are acquiring Digital Skills for acquiring language . What will be the outcomeof that . We dont know. The relation of videos you see on youtube, all this stimulation happening. Most parents now also say they have the tv on at the same time and most report that they have fulfilling at the same time though theres always emulation. Theres always noise report sound or visuals coming in. What does that do to attention and thinking these neural pathways are being shaped by all that inputs we dont know yet that going to be determined on the horizon. But thats where were at now in terms of Digital Technology and really a steady diet of that being that the children area. So we can say that this is rewiring brains. That these children are going to sleep differently than you do. Thats where were at. I told you that people are coming on tether. One of the reasons theyre becoming untethered is because they have so many choices. And you heard christopher say that i have worked as a researcher with eharmony and i helped develop some of their products and help them apeople better when i first started, and whats happening now is eharmony was sort of a webbased visual matching service. Now we have phones and apps. Tenders the grinders and bubbles and all these things where people arejust slightly. It becomes a game. But whats happened is its presented to young people, this idea that you have an unlimited sea of choices in front of you in terms of romanticrelationships. So wouldnt you think there was this unlimited sea of choices that we find just the right choice for you and mark enhances and we see this in consumer psychology, theres a redox choice. And the idea is that its kind of funny but themore choices you have , it makes it more difficult to choose. We did a study called the jam study where have you ever been in a store or costco or some market or their giving out samples of food, of cheese or Something Like that. I have a table set up and theyre going to give you something to read a set that up with samples of jan the first dayi had 24 varieties of jam. And they said heres all these jams. Tryanyone you want and then they gave a coupon to buy a jar of jam after that. The second day they came back and instead of 24 varieties, they only gave six varieties. And in the same coupon to buy a jar of jam. Commonsensical you would think that the more choices, youre going to find just like jan, you like apricot or strawberry or whatever that jam is that youlike going to find. But it turns out that thats not the case. When people were only attend is likely to buy any jam at all, when they had more choices. As opposed to when they had less. So were in this situation now where theres this paradox of choice that called choice overload. The more choices we have, it makes it harder for usto choose anything at all so people now are sleeping , slightly. Maybe i will find something a little hotter, a little richer, something more interesting. Maybe someone i dont like with so they keep swiping but they dont end up choosing anyoneat all. A new study just cannot and in fact last week, half of americans are not in a romantic relationship. 65 percent of High School Kids have never had a romantic relationship now. If you go back to world war ii, a lot of people married their high school sweethearts. You might have known people that did that. Now they dont have that. So its really changing the dynamics of everything. One of the reasons i brought that up, another thing theyre doing by the way with all the swiping is kind of easy come easy go for dates area you can get a date so easily that people just disappear. Its called ghosting and they take off and they dont ever contact the personagain. They dont text. You might have ghosted somebody at one time or another but thats what theyre doing and guess what . This same idea of disliking this choice overload the ghosting is now having in the workplace. Because theres this idea, you go on monster or link. If this endless Jobs Available for people now who are ghosting their employers thinking they can just get another one and another one. So this idea of this endless sea of choices is changing peoples willingness to commit to something because maybe theres something incrementally better out there. The it a job or be a romantic relationship, its changing the dynamics of commitment because of this endless the choice available and whats happening to is exchanging the qualities of adulthood. Its changing what adulthood means area there were sociologists that studied the markers of adulthood, the five markers and heres what they are. Completingschool. Leaving home. Becoming financially independent with a fulltime job area marrying and having a child. If we go back to 1960, by age 3077 percent of women and 65 percent of men had achieved all five ofthose markers by early 30s. So if you fastforward to now its less than half of 30yearold women and a third of men so in a sense, we are living in a period of extended adolescence and thats part of the qualities of tethering from all these traditional markers of adulthood. Now, some people say well, 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 i didnt used to like that word but they are now, once we got mobile phonesavailable to us. Theyre baking in qualities that are similar to and one armed bandit slot machine and we talk aboutsampling interdiction. Have you ever played a slot machine . You pull the arm and those things role and maybe you win or maybe you dont read i dont win, i will try again and suddenly all the points fall or the lights are going and the sirens because youve won. Thats exactly how instagram works, they spoke works. Your scrolling just like those things are strolling in front of you on the slot machine. Sometimes the concept is interesting and sometimes its boring and nevertheless it keeps drawing you back in for more. So these same behavioral drivers that are most predictive of people coming back for more are baked into our social media so its making things harder and harder to put those phones down area and even the dating of an alert, a message. Have you seen a ding go off and four people check their phones around you . Sometimes people are feeling of vibration when its not even vibrating. I thought there was a message. I want to keep checking and checking. Some people are taking their phones thousands of times a day. So the problem becomes this im not trying to be honest. Going back to the horse and buggy days. Im saying is that the combination of our devices and our connectivity to that and unhooking from these stabilizing social structures has left particularly younger people on board. Were seeing the highest rates of things like anxiety, depression. Weve seen in 30 years and i worked in the university so im right at the front lines of this. I dont know if you realize this but in the college is now a quarter of students are on some kind of psychotropic medication for some kind of mentaldisorder. So the key here is coming untethered means coming on board in someways. That we dont have these stabilizing social structures that are stabilizing peoples mental and physical health. We need to sort of reinvent that and how can we do that . As we pull away from these social structures like churches how can we create new structures to provide some stability for young people because obviously we have a little bit of a problem on our hands its part of our look at books about technology with lori and pratt who in january discussed the next level of artificialintelligence that involved decisionmaking. Im lucky i went through the computer revolution and when i was a kid computers were big old things nobody can use and my mom didnt know the difference between software and hardware. Weve gone through amassive democratization of computing technology. Were in the same trouble today with ai and data and that new technology stock. Ai is done to us but we dont have controlover it. Data is overwhelming at a distance, at best we 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 . With it technology could solve one problem what would it be . And over and over again, i heard a similar answer. And it looked sort of like this. This is why im pretty sure i know what im doing. Just background for me. Ive been building Machine Learning applied systems a long time. Over 30 years. Though i was funded by the human genome project and graduate school. I dont hundred Million Dollars budget for the government. I dont thousands of Machine Learning models, mostly supervised learning. Back then who would have known we be back so many years later, my Machine Learning friends know what im talking about so i believe that this ground has given me an insight that is key. Theres something weve been missing all these years. And thats something thats missing is weve been coming up from the technology instead of putting humans at the center of the equation. Im honored to be about two dug into this chair. My backside is honored and thereare women here who worked closely with doug. I like that he called it intelligence commutation because you can think of ai flipping upside down. Its putting humans at the center of the equation again. And when i interviewed all these people, i found what i called for a while a decision archetype area and what is a decision that can mark it in action its a thought process that leads to an action but an action in a complex world. I dont know what buying that scar for buying that car is going to do tothe world. Its going to have some impact but honestly i dont feel very motivated because i cant see the impact. Its not the several for me. It doesnt grab my primate brain in a way thatmakes me think gosh, i really need to buy that hybrid car. I cant see it. And the data stack today, the ai step today isnt giving that to me. This is my dog. His name is bowie. Im training him to be a service dog and ive had him pretty much his whole life. Hes about 11 months old and i have this odd thing happened to me. I have a trainer who is teaching me to train the service dog and she taught me about abc and the behavior consequence and my head exploded. Thats exactly what i heard from the humans that ive been interviewing, the executives that im talking to. Theyre always talking about an antecedent which is the context. In the kitchen i say sit area of behavior. My dog sits. A consequence, he gets a cookie area this is a reversal archetype, this isnt just one way to think about how we might use ai and data and ill tell you a little bit how that fits in in a moment read what i think , im pretty certain is the way to think about it because it has the lowest friction to how humans think. The lowest friction to howhumans naturally think. Busy people live in complex environments. They dont have much brainpower to learn optimization or inference methodology or any of those fancy things. We have to meet them where theyre at and the fact that we are not has created a giant cultural barrier between people at the head of governments, at the head of businessesand even me. As i try to make decisions and use evidence and data and aito help make sure that those decisions have a Ripple Effect that is good. The farmers im working with at an nsf proposal have to decide what crop to plant. They dont know if that crop will make them productive or whats going to happen because they have fewer migrant workers. The situation has changed. They might decide where to acquire a company what products to launch or what price to change and as a punch that through you hear much of what i say here, theres an antecedent, theres a behavior, were going to launch this product and down the road somewhere, for my dog its immediate. Hes a dog but for us and what makes this special is we can thinkthrough long chains of consequences. But thats limited and we need computer help. So again a decision is an imaginative process in our heads as we think through the actions in some context that will lead to some results. If you remember nothing else remember this template. And whats cool about decision intelligence which is what the book is about is because we start with humans, i can teach you something today you can take home and use immediately. Thats my promise if youstick with the talk. How do we make decisions today . Im sorry to say and i recently learned this, i had a sense this was happening especially in a complex world but going back through Human Evolution wedont really think through the consequences of our decisions very deeply. We are much more likely not to think through things and rationally and instead to use social signaling. You look for someone who looks successful in our society. Whose dominant or prestigious and we copied the decision theyve been making. Turns out thats very effective. It had been hugely successful for the human race and its what separates us from many other species area that we are great copiers and cultural evolution theory says we develop behaviors and patterns that any individual cant understand but that the society like the unconscious process of genetic evolution we use cultural evolution to come up with these behaviors. This is what we are programmed for. We are programmed to look at some prestigious or dominant person and do what they do as opposed to thinking through the consequences and that worked great for a few millennia. But thesituation has changed. First of all, if theres a bad actor here or here and they tell us what to do and they are smart they can subvert our behaviors. They can influence us to make decisions that benefit them but not us. If theyre smart about the situation. Second, the context is markedly changing. We need to be developing new ways of coping with this big ocean thats fundamentally different than our pond because it keeps changing. The water is flowing back and forth and the old ways of thinking through problems in a societal and crowd level are no longer working. We have complex system dynamics, we see winner take all, winner take all competitions where large artists get 90 percent of the benefits and theres massive inequality. Action at a distance we talked about. Intangibles are important too. Anybody who worked with data, we tend to focus on the things we can measure easily. Money, size, price. We tend to overlook reputation, happiness, morale. Yet ive never built a decision model that didnt have at least one feedback loop thatinvolved something intangible. A soft factor. We must Start Talking to the sociologists, the cultural evolutionists and all those other disciplinesto understand those softfactors. The decision intelligence creates a roadmap for how to do that. The other thing i didnt say is the future is no longer like the past so we have seen that the path to the future are the same and when youre based on the path you dont realize the situation has changed suddenly what do i do . I believe that ai which im going to tell you about, decision intelligencewill solve this problem. I grew up in a period of Technology Optimism area we were all showing our code and the internet was going to democratize reality. We were going to collaborate. We had a dream. And i dont think weve realized that dream. I think decision intelligence will help us go there. I think weve created a number of links in the chain, data machines, learning collaboration, social media and theres one more link that we need to start to make a big difference, to have a nonlinear impact and thats di which we will start to talk aboutpractically right now. How do we do di . We start with people. We dont say wheres the data. We dont say we cant do this ai like thing without data. Data is great, but theres a huge amount of Human Knowledge that is in no data set whatsoever. Were good at knowing how our actions lead to outcomes and in your homework for tonight is to go home, ask a friend who didnt come to the talk how they think about a complex decision. Well talk about action, those actions will lead to intermediate effects and ultimately will lead to outcomes and then we will talk about the context so what i do is i sit down with a Diverse Group of experts and all the great, young, gender, race and i say what outcomesyoure trying to achieve . There are so Many Companies that have massively big projects who have never sat down and brainstormed through the outcomes. I go and i consult with Many Organizations and i say what are you trying to achieve . And the list of outcomes is different for each person. Let me tell you, you dont need technology to get better. You just need to have a brainstorming process where you think through whatare the outcomes were trying to achieve as a team . Is it higher revenue, net revenue after two years . Is it some kind of a military advantage . You want a military advantage that doesnt create a backlash that will hit us10 years later in terms of the psychological reputation of our country. What are the outcomes we are trying to achieve . Make sure you ask that question. Second brainstormed through their actions. Many dont take the time to have an open brainstorming session where they allow bad ideas and funny ideas for the actions we can take that might change those outcomes. Do that. Move all the blood to the creative side of your brain because when the blood from the creative side and analytical side of your brain which i think is over here , we dont have room for the creative side so separate those two. Spend time being creative and spend time being analytical. These triangles here are where ai fits in. And most decision models i believe as we democratize ai, this is the pattern area this is how we will do it. So let me talk about the decision im facing today. I thought greta on tv and she was so compelling area she said weve got a Climate Crisis and the way we solve this, its really simple. Stop worrying about analysis. At the very least pay for some trees. The organizations around the world will take money and buy trees and those trees will grow so there will be more biomass that will sequester carbon and if enough people do this perhaps on its own, i dont know if she said trees alone but she said it would make a big difference area i havent said any money to its reorganization yet. I cant visualize how the money i might send leads to a tree chain of events to some outcome. Im going to use ai to benefit me. I want a visceral interactive, fun experience area so this is what i think is the future of ai. Its goingto look like a videogame and i hope we can do some of this. In the because we can do this in vr. What are the spaces and what do you in the spaces . We are experimenting with actual actions we take and letting the computer help us understand the chain of events that set in motion to lead to the consequences. Value at a personal level, also highly valuable organizational level. Once all the programs you see here and many other discussions about Technology Online booktv. Org. Access archived by using the search bar andsearch technology in books. Tonight on book tv, political leaders getting at 8 pm eastern, Time Magazine National Political correspondent molly wall discusses the career on House Speaker nancy policy. Followed by a discussion on what donald trump and Winston Churchill have in common. Then talk about the character and motivations of north koreas kim jong. Watch book tv tonight and over the weekend on cspan2. Biographies of every president , organized by their ranking by noted historians confessed worse. And features perspectives into the lives of our nations keep executives and leadership styles visit our website,