And thats sort of roughly the same i think throughout whether shipping it across country or across townbut what if automation drops like another 90 percent . And its as easy and cheap to send a box of something across town as it is to send a text message. What does the world start to look like then and what kinds of things do people start to do with that . And around the time i was thinking of that i started thinking of what was going on in china with delivery and china basically went through the us 20th century experience with this decline in shipping costs and the increased speedand shipping in like 10 years. So when ali baba started it took three weeks to ship something from their headquarters which i think is in outside shanghai to wuhan or another big city on the other outside of china. And 10 years later that was a 24 hour thing and ali baba has 5 million, or sorry, gd has 2 million. You can do anything in any chinese city and under 24 hours. And on Something Like singles day which is a big holiday in china, icant even remember what the numbers are. Theres 1 billion packaged in 24hours. Its in the book, its a staggering number, i cant remember it. But that kind of growth and that kind of disruptive shift, what it means for how we shopped. What intrigues me is looking beyond what we are experiencing now which is it just means amazon shoveling more crap off theweb. Our throats. And sort of furthering this big box retailing that started with walmart 20 or 30 years ago and hassnowballed. What if it means that my kids who are really into baking can team up with someone whos got a big network of potential customers who are willing to do the decorating or that we can start to build supply chains locally using this cheap distribution. Whether theres other economic modes that might start to develop based on that. So thats actually a lot of the Research Work im doing now is developing scenarios that are trying to understand how we avoid whats happening right now, locking us into this future of what they call the last mile. That leg of the delivery between local people and your home. Its just completely dominated by a handful of global companies. Try to think about more cooperative potentially publicly supported, potentially peter types of models from moving cheaply around local communities and what the role of automation would be in making that possible and driving that cost down. And you know, when it really comes down to it at the end of the day i think if we allow the technology for automated delivery to be dominated and controlled explicitly by a handful of Companies Like amazon and google, thats going to be really bad for local Economic Development that we need to find ways for those systems and Business Improvement districts and even municipal operators. Its an idea. What if seattle like it did 100 years ago was able to somehow be there to establish or start or take control over its own local automated Delivery Network . And offer that service to anybody who wanted to use it at a fair rate that allowedit to cover its costs. It didnt privilege its own business partners. It didnt do all the anticompetitive thing that amazon does what its marketplace customers and it really became like autility. That allowed Small Businesses to connect to each other and to theircustomers. Thats kind of whats at stake and i think its a really big struggle. Were going to be lining up for that battle five or 10 years from now and right now, seeing amazon and walmart duking it out is actually a little reassuring that maybe theres still somebit of competitiveness left in that space. But where is that third model that might allow for some other future stuff to unfold . What have we got left . Future driverless trucking. I talked about that. Imgoing to let that one go. How would privacy worked with Driverless Cars . This is something i read about quite a bit in the beginning of the book. The interior. So i dont think you need to know a lot about driverless vehicles to knowthe exterior of these things are riddled with sensors. Cameras, radar, laser scanners. That are constantly collecting data about whats around them. And its hard to really get a clear sense of how much of that data is analyzed and then discarded and just the results of the analysis are kept. If i take a picture of you walking down the street im a self driving car. Do i just scan it and see if anythingsrelevant and chuck it or just save it . So thats a bigrisk. And i think thats something that people are thinking about and there have been a lot of interesting studies. The truth is theres far more surveillance of whats going on inside the vehicle and if you dig down and think about why does google, by you and china, why does the index which is russias biggest search engine, why are these funding and development of self driving vehicles and why were they the first in and why are they soaggressive . Its because its Just Computers for them. This is the mobile phone. Can years ago, 20 yearsago. Were going to spend more of our time. I like to tease people to say and whats it like to drive a tesla . Its like driving and ipad. Its a computer you get inside of and once youre inside of a computer its constantly scanning and its going to sneak in through some sort of interesting ways. So i read about this in the book that a lot of the ways that Car Companies are going to deal with the issue of driver attention during this transition from human driven to partially full is to monitor you with cameras. To tell whether youre paying attention or not. An argument i make is even after they switched, those cameras are going anywhere and theyre going to stay and theyre going to be profiling you for advertising and other kinds of essentially again, why are Search Companies interested in this . This is the biggest captive audience for search and for ads it has ever been created in the history ofmankind. People inside Automated Vehicles on endless commutes because your sensitivity to distance and travel time and your willingness to talk in traffic is going to be reduced when you dont have to drive and you can use it productively. Its like an incredible future opportunity for them. You are primed to receive whatever it is that they want to pitch to you so i think that thats really but not of it is that they see it as the future of media. The future of computing. And like the inside of the cars is where the action is and its no coincidence. Disney has a Group Already working on what that in car media experience is going to be like. And trying to understand it. And trying to shape it and trying to figure out ways to get in on it. And i think thats all well and good. Theres a lot of value for consumers there when it starts to get hissy is when you start thinking about okay, were in a future world where everything is automated. But say youre no longer allowed to drive a human powered vehicle anymore and wealthy people have their own private self driving vehicles where they turn the internal surveillance off. Its essentially a cloak. They go in there and theyre in a bubble moving through the world, a protected bubble. And then you have people who cant afford that and have to travel in shared vehicles whatever is the future equivalent of uber which is probably a very downmarket thing and its probably supported by advertising revenue but once you step into a vehicle like that youre just being scanned constantly. And you know, youre paying, youre really performing for your ride in a lot of ways and theres just tremendous inequities. In a scenario like that and its not at all far from reality. In many ways its a Business Model for the web ported over to urban mobility so i dont think its crazy to speculate about that as kind of terrible as it sounds. I think thats all the questions. But if anybody has anything else to throw up on the chat board or im sorry, i think we can probably call it a night. Thanks so much anthony, i am candace. Thanks so much for your talk tonight, its very interesting. Particularly in the history, i think its easy to think that all of this is sort of modern but its an interesting statement. Its actually not. I want to thank everybody for watching tonight as well. If youre interested more in covering town hall events you can follow this channel by clicking the follow buttonat the top right of your screen. Please support thirdplace books tonight, if youre interested inbuying a copy of anthonys book , find the book button at the top of the screen. And if youre aside you can donate to townhall over this page youre watching. Thanks again and we willsee you next time. Binge watch book tv this summer. Saturday at 8 pm eastern settle in and watch several hours of your favorite authors. Were featuring author and founder of National ReviewWilliam F Buckley author of over 50 books including up from liberalism, flying high and the reagan i knew and watch saturday, july 18 as we feature journalist and author malcolm gladwell. Binge watch all summer on cspan2. Town halls working with the support of our partners, the real network foundation, the true Brown Foundation and the Waco Foundation northwest that is most of you know townhall is fundamentally a member of a supported organization and i want to thank all our members watching tonight. 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