Hello and welcome to tonights virtual Commonwealth Club program. My name is read and im a Technology Reporter with the Washington Post and im pleased to be the moderator for tonights program, the historical importance of the transformation brought on by Artificial Intelligence and virtual environment. As we have seen over the last three months with the covid19 pandemic and with social media with the killing of george floyd in minneapolis and the aftermath , technology and online environments that every aspects of our life here tonight i am pleased it to be joined by two Silicon Valley pioneers to discuss these issues. William davidow and Michael Malone, their new book, the autonomous revolution reclaiming the future of the machines is out now and delves deeply into the revolution we are living through regarding a i and virtual environment and it can be purchased everywhere including bn. Com. A bit about tonight speakers, bill david, the cofounder of the earlier in his career he worked at intel and is credited with being one of the pioneers of hightech marketing. Michael malone Cover Technology for the San Jose Mercury news in the 1980s and remains one of the bestknown Technology Business journalists together they cowrote the influential book the Virtual Corporation today they are here to discuss their latest book and i must say its a great read. Before jumping in just some quick housekeeping, questions can be submitted for the guests via the youtube chat feature so post your questions there and they will be forwarded to me and then i will get to as many of them as possible. Lets jump in. Bill, want to start with you. You helped make Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, but in recent years you have written about how the Technology Industry has taken a wrong turn and in many ways hurting our world, economy, society more than its helping. What made you want to write this book and why now . Well, when i was with intel, what we were doing was i have come to realize childs play. What we were doing was tinkering with things, to make stoplights work better. We made Cash Register so they added up and then along came the pc. We automated spreadsheets and when you automated a spreadsheet , it when inside a business and you replaced something people were doing with pencil and paper or Something Like that, but the business stayed the same, and what i came to realize is that what was different about this technology was that it was transforming the form of our institutions so that if you look at it what we did is we automated existing form. This is causing the form of the institution to change, so a bank becomes an application on a smartphone. Then, i suddenly realized this had happened twice before in the history of humanity, once the agricultural revolution and the then the Industrial Revolution. What everyone was saying was, well, this is just another Technology Change only its faster and it isnt that. Is a transformation of society. Now, you call that change in your book a social phase change and as you said, its this rare and monumental thing, but whyd you call that a phase change and how is this one really different than those other couple of phase changes that you documented history . Phase change is an actual scientific term, and it refers to a mall the same molecule having a different physical form , so a storm cloud turns into a snowflake. When water goes through a critical temperature change, 32 degrees it changes form and goes from a liquid to solid. It obeys different rules. We use different tools when water pumps in pipes and our intuition about water tells us nothing about ice and on top of that and it comes as a warning with that analogy you know ice breaks pipes and ice sinks ships like the titanic, so if we dont deal with these phase changes it causes problems and while i came to realize that what was going on in society was a similar thing. Our institutions were changing form of being different rules. We werent using different tools and our intuition was sailing as thats great, and through this out to mike, but lets talk about the moment we are in now, i mean, as i mentioned in the intro when we have coronavirus we now have protests against Police Violence and racism in all of this together is doing a lot of things one is kind of accelerating the adoption of these technologies, i mean, we are here on zoom using zoom to post this very discussion, but its also kind of bringing to the four some of these issues of technology that you get to in your book. For instance ibm yesterday announced its going to pull out of the facial recognition business completely because the algorithms that they use are actually discriminating against people of color. Wanted to ask you guys, what do you think this turbulence will have on this technological future that you outlined . This is the type of issue that phase change brings about. You know, in other words, im going to switch the subject a bit on you, but its like privacy. Privacy, we used it to have a door that we locked and now privacy has a totally different meaning. One of the challenges, i think, that we havent Silicon Valley is that we are now at the point where we have got to be very conscious to the psychological and sociological aspects of everything we are doing. That was never the case in the past. Right and nice to have you back, mike. One of the things you both this handbook is the book is that we need to change the way we are looking at these things, i mean, were looking at the mall wrong, and how are we looking at this wrong, mike cracks. Phase changes societal phase changes are points of reflection. As bill said, you cant predict what it looks like on the other side. If you have only lived in a world of liquid water and you live on the equator and you have never seen ice, you have no idea what ice looks like. You wouldnt even know its water. You dont know how it will behave. It has different physical traits you wouldnt know that ice floats, so when we go into one of these phase changes we going with alternative reality that on the other side everything has changed. All of the rules have changed. Things may look a lot alike you know buildings and Everything Else, but theres a substitutional equivalence thats taken place and lets replace what we knew is fundamentally different. So, if you are herdsmen and you came across jericho for the first time you might not even recognize it was a human structure called a city. You wouldnt understand how the society was organized. You wouldnt understand anything , and maybe possible that you could never really crossover you know the jordan into this new world. We seem to be in one of these right now. We had another one in the 1700s. If you are working on the farm, and all of a sudden the factory started arising and you went to work in the city, completely new reality. Our senses and bill talked about this a lot is that we have evolved. Its such a profound change going on. We have evolved through the physical world where time has a certain speed, a certain scope, nature is not planned for us. Its not organized for us. We adapted to the world. The Virtual World is fundamental in different. It was created by companies in this design to focus on us, manipulate on as hopefully in positive ways, but its also managing us like a casino and we are biologically not even prepared for this new cyber world that we now spend half of our time in. You documented very well that some of these changes are already starting to look sort of dystopian and it doesnt have to be that way. You kind of say there are two futures we could have, the dystopian one in the utopian one look at the balance, i mean, lets take the Industrial Revolution. People left the farm and went to work in factories. We ended up with a dickensian world in the cities and child labor and you know the dark mills and all of that, but on the other hand Life Expectancy went up. Literacy went up. We invented new forms of health like hospitals and medical care, all of the technology coming out of the labs emerged during the Industrial Revolution, so we live did a little bit of both and how the scales are going to end up is still not determined to, its in our hands. Its more than just predicting the future, which i think both of you are pretty good at just a stone your track record, but its not just predicting it. Its trying to understand how we should the changes we should be making as a society right now to adapt. What can we do, i mean, we have all of these new Artificial Intelligence and algorithms sort of deciding in a way our place in society, whether or not we get the Health Coverage we want or the Car Insurance at the price we want it. Its starting to happen. Not all of this stuff is great, so what we do . What are some of the things that we can do or what is a new way of thinking so we can kind of better adapt . Well, i mean, i hate to wave my hands, but im going to. I mean, its hard to believe that probably 200 years ago work was considered to be a curse; right . And now, we say not having work is a curse. Roughly a. D. Some odd years ago george kings wrote this future for our grandchildren, i forget the thing where he predicted we would be working 15 hours a week and would have chances to really enjoy life. We are going to end up with a different value system. These are the things we are going to have to be prepared to accept. Its going to be a very different world. And there are things that we do that are monetarily valuable that have no social value. There are things we do that are socially valuable, but have no monetary value today. Raising kids. So, if youre willing to pay me money so that i can have child care so i can go out and get a job, maybe we have to think differently about these things and say raising children is so important that we are willing to pay people for doing things that are socially valuable that we never considered to be compensate about work and these are the kinds of issues we are going to act a deal with. I do not propose to know what the right answers are, but if we adopt the attitude this is the way we did it before and this is the solution we are going to apply to the future, i know that isnt going to work. My argument would be there could be a conservative solution or a progressive solution, whatever you want, but you have got to look at these things and say new forms are going to require new tools and new rules. You cant just say this is the way we did before, this is whats going to work again. You talk about Silicon Valley companies becoming the new empires of this new era. Instead of powerful nations. We have these corporations that dominate our lives and again, i mean, this Current Crisis just kind of highlights that phenomenon. I have been writing about this, google and apple and got together and they are essentially deciding how Public Health officials can use a Smartphone Technology or cannot use Smartphone Technology for their efforts to do do contact tracing. Apple put forth their own solution, so they are taking on a roll of these institutions that we have all agreed upon and voted on in the society and i just wonder, is this power they have a good thing and what do we need to do about that . You will note they all got richer during the pandemic while main street america got decimated. That may be [inaudible] one of the things that occurred to me in writing the book, but if you look at it, think about electricity. When we distributed electricity we created utilities, and then the application later was the lightbulb and we had all of the you know we had lots of different lightbulb suppliers or lots of different furnace suppliers for gas utilities. Today, we think about is we think about the physical communication layer as being the utility, but you cant use that layer without the application from the platform that sits on top of that. What has happened is that apple and google and facebook are, in fact, utilities now. They are functioning as private companies, so in the past we had the electric companies, and they were private companies and then we turned them into utilities because it made sense to only have one phone Company Supply everyone. We are going to have to talk about issues like that. When my mother was growing up in pennsylvania there were three phone companies and if your friend was on a different phone company you couldnt talk to them. It made no sense, so we created a utility so we would have one phone company. These are the kinds of issues we are going to talk about. Bill, do you agree with you on, amazon . I have different feelings about amazon and elon musk, but hes a very smart guy. You know the phone companies though had compared it to the empires that you write about now, they had a very narrow effect on our lives. These companies are doing everything for us, i mean, you know how does that create differences . Well, to me that is part of the big difference. I hear that we have antitrust laws and things like that, but and im not saying there is anything wrong with antitrust laws, but anti antitrust laws are technic of the past. May be we to look at these things differently, i mean, the reason for that is that also these are borderless institutions. They arent necessarily facebook or google are operating in germany, i mean, its not like so, they are an american company, but with this world reach and so you get into issues of how much what i would say World Governance do you want to have. You may object to me talking about World Governance when you talk about commerce, but what about cybercrime . Crime was essentially local in the past, i mean, you had to have a gun and an escape car. Today, somebody steals 500 million, said adel steals 500 million and they are located nowhere. What . In a millisecond. You bring up an interesting question. Even in europe with antitrust laws are comparatively stronger or at least regulators seem to have more power or aggressiveness in going after these companies. There hasnt actually there have been vague signs, but there has actually been any sort of change thats created change in behavior of these companies, so does raise the question of how what governance are they beholden to and what leverage does Society Action have over these companies . Good question. We saw the nba you know curl up when there was a problem with china, massive investment. We know hollywood now will not make a movie thats negative about china because of the massive investments. I mean, we already see the effects and its changing what we are allowed to see them anyways. Fundamentally, i believe what i will call the Business Model of the internet. Legislation could change that. You know, for example if you gave me ownership up all of my personal data, that would change things dramatically. We had to own our own data. It just seems more and more apparent and bill has been a great advocate of that for years , but i think everyone is now beginning to understand giving up our data for free was a very bad contract. This is where i might push back the one area i may push back on this or prod this thesis a little bit because facebook is fond of saying you own your own data, you know technically you have a choice and we can use these services or not use them. So, that sort of value exchanges there. We have all decided we will give up some of our personal data, our privacy in exchange for the services, but i think privacy advocates would say you really have a choice. And do you really know how much you are giving up and where its going . But, Everyone Needs to use facebook and Everyone Needs to you whatever that platform du jour is. Will anyone really have the choice to not make that value exchange, to not sell their data . You see thats partially baked in to the algorithm. When we give you an example. We reduce the cost of one too many communications to zero. It used to be that you told me i had free speech and its written right there, you know, i can say anything i want. It turns out that its been one of the biggest hoaxes hoisted on society forever. I had all the free speech i wanted to, but no one listened to me and no one could hear me, so if i wanted to talk to a lot of people i had to go out to mass media or had to spend a lot of money, so free speech was expensive. Now, we reduce the cost of free speech to zero. The thing that was limiting free speech was the free market because people had to pay for it you had to pay to get your message out and when we reduced the cost of free speech to zero, we underpriced something that was extremely valuable and we created what i would call a tool for antisocial behavior, a proclivity to zero for antisocial behavior. So, there is nothing. It used to cost me money to send a letter. Theres no reason why email has to be free. Theres no reason why reaching thousands of people on the internet has to be free and if it costs a little bit to do that we behave more responsibly, but because we are giving away something of great value for zero, we are encouraging tremendous amounts of irresponsible behavior. We have also made me reduce the cost of free speech, but also made that irresponsible behavior very profitable for a small handful of people. To give you an idea just how much information you are giving up, there is a gentleman named mike, former microsoft executive now head of the Digital Cities project at stanford and just as an experiment he had the tools to do tracing and he went downtown to palo alto and bought a stick of gum at walgreens, bought lunch and got a tank of gas and then he tracked where that where those transactions went and within a week it had gone out to about 50 different servers around the world and within six months at several thousand servers, so that stick of gum he bought was now known by thousands of major corporations and information controlling entities and Everything Else around the world. Imagine if we move into the internet of things we are cars talking to the grid and the thermostat in your house and the refrigerator and everything is tracking you. They know where you are and thats being shared with everyone including people who want bad things for you to take advantage. Theres some threshold we are about to cross where it becomes really dangerous. Since we are on the topic of free speech i wanted to ask you, mike, you talk about the media in the book, but at the same time is it free speech that has been reduced in costs. You have also kind of diminished earning capacity of you know especially local news. I wouldnt really say the national media, but local news in places like the publication you worked for. Is it too late to get that back or are there some ways we can change our thinking on that as well . The newspaper is largely a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution and managed to survive by the digital era somewhat going into television and eventually getting on the web, but the monetization model of the web broke journalism because they started giving it away for free men when they tried to start charging again no one wanted to pay. May be a few, Washington Post, new york times, washington journal, thats about it but for the most part all traditional media and on the fourthgeneration newspaperman, they are all dying. They are losing their audience replaced by citizen journalism, but there are no professional standards in that world. You dont know if you can trust of them or if that reporter has his own website or the blogger with their own opinion you know, its happening right now in my hope is it begins to sort itself out as we develop feedback functions and basically make tools and techniques to determine what is real news and what is fake news, i mean, its a tough time for us. First amendment absolutist like myself where i think we should be up to say anything we want, but with 10 billion people saying they are thing they want and now, we have a mess and thats the chaos we are now. Again, Current Events here you know donald trump is now threatening to take away this section 230 protection from Technology Companies through executive order. I dont know if that is possible legally, but he has added fuel to that debate over and for audience members members that dont know what section 230 is, section 238 of that medication decency act gets Tech Companies out of any liability for what is published on their platform. Thats a big difference between what you did at the mercury did is and what i do, i mean, i can just say whatever i want. I will be sued if i write irresponsible things about people. You know, is that maybe the momentum is there to get rid of that, but is that something we need to do . This goes back to rome, who guards the guardians . What we have seen is the tech company try to institute these boards and editorial sensors and Everything Else to keep the bad step out and let the good stuff in. The trouble is human beings have biases often times they are unconscious of and you can hardly say looking at the history of who gets locked out of twitter and any given time or field off and not allowed access on facebook and elsewhere, that has been an entirely unbiased process designed to maximize free speech. Often times the sensors dont even know they are censorious. They dont know they are bringing their own political positions and the situation, i mean, a choice between them picking out what we are allowed to read and digest chaos, i will take chaos, i really will. As much as i dont like it. This is limiting our thinking and when we limit our thinking and speech we limit our worldview. Do you think these companies should be liable and bill maybe you can weigh in on that. We have strict and general liability. If a guy works on my house and he falls off of a ladder the contractor will get sued under strict liability, but dating back to the dates of large farms my house i have to be at the table in the negotiation because i will have general liability and i think there is some sort of new Legal Standard that they will have to abide by. We gave them Carte Blanche and i [inaudible] they limited speech or improve speech. Bill, you were going to say something. Putting tags on trumps email started and i had a very perverse idea and that was supposed that what twitter required was for someone to certify that to the best of his knowledge what he had written was factually correct, and that i had to certify that when i published something. Then, i thought hey, what i would be doing if i had to certify that was i was then exposing myself to someone building liability just like in newspaper is being exposed to liability so i was wondering if twitter couldnt have adopt the whole issue by saying hey, we are going to ask you to rate yourself and you can rate your self as being this is extremely reliable, questionable or strictly fiction. You could pick one of those three options. I was wondering if that might work. Its an interesting idea and i guess in that scenario twitter would have to know who those people are somehow certify their real identity at some point. This is the individual certifying. This is the person who did the post certifying that in his judgment this was accurate or highly accurate. But, if i wanted to spread fake news on twitter i could hide the hide anonymity and certify this is accurate or no one will hold me liable; right . You have the problem that we have to figure out who you are, right. On the other hand, there are people who we know who they are on twitter who are spreading falsehoods and i suspect they would be very cautious if they had to rate themselves to expose themselves to that kind of exposure. One of the things that bothers me, im old enough now to have seen the 60s and i will note many of the people in the audience are my age. If you remember a lot of the good things that came out of the 1960s were first verbalized by people who were shouting things that were considered outrageous and antisocial and anarchistic in every thing and now here we are 50 years later saying we cannot allow that kind of language, you know. We had to suppress antisocial commentary because its not good for us. Will, think back, folks. They were quite good for us at the time and who are we to know now in retrospect we understand, what about now . In the future will we look back at this and say suppressing this kind of speech limited our options . But, at least then you knew who they were. They werent people in the 60s they were anonymous. They were people standing out showing their faces saying this is what i believe whereas what you have now is box and armies of trolls who spread disingenuous. Is that new yorker cartoon where on the internet no one knows you are a dog. We will talk a little bit about just to change gears of it , you talk about this promise of technology to create abundance in energy efficiency, Better Health care. I read that and i thought it doesnt seem and maybe this is the focus of journalists and we are to blame for this, but it doesnt seem to me that those are the technologies that are being prioritized today in the tech industry. I mean, apple for instance spends more on rmv and a quarter than the entire annual budget for the National Science foundation which pushes back sort of fundamental research and i was wondering if you think we need to steer innovation in a new direction so that utopian future is created as opposed to the dystopian one. If that makes sense. First of all i take a bit of issue with utopian and dystopian i think what we see is this which is on the one hand the world becomes more fiction, healthcare better you know there will be you almost no hunger in the world because we will live in the era of absolute abundance when we have robots and picking group fruits and growing things and controlling water and all of this kind of stuff. When its done by machine its more efficient so the chances are the world will become more prosperous and more healthy, but on the other hand theres this exit stencil challenge which is what constitutes a good life . How do we live if we are working, if we are producing something and we are just bill and i came up with the term zero economic value human beings that at some point machines will take over more and more jobs and those people never have a job again, so do we give them a guaranteed annual income . Perhaps, but if they are just sitting in their studio apartment which is subsidized by the government watching tv for free and having food delivered, is that a good life . Can you invest in that value into that life . Yeah, you can fly a drone remotely on your wall sized tv, but is that the same . This is the challenge that is the paradox that we encountered writing this book, almost like a time machine that People Living up in the temples and all of that. They have everything and yet they have nothing. They are slaves. Bill talks about this danger of robots is not mechanical robots or digital robots, its that we are turned into robots little by little and thats not the future i want for my kids and my grandkids. I wanted to pronounce that because thats actually my sons name. [laughter] i hope that doesnt become a thing. You know, you mentioned the word efficiency there and that was another interesting point in the book that economists have always said that worker efficiency is a net positive. That was a good thing. That isnt always the case; right . Kind of talk about that and we were kind of explain that to people why economist might not have taken everything into account here when it comes to the efficiencies created by these technologies. Well, whats always happened in the past, from 1920 to 1970, whenever we increased productivity Gross National product basically grew faster than productivity grew. When that happens, we just went up and you created more jobs. But, we were playing around with kids play for productivity. If you have massive increases in productivity, you tended to have very little prices and markets shrink in size and thats whats happened to publications and things like that where one source of news satisfies everyone so the price of news drops down and things like that happen. The solutions of the past just arent necessarily going to apply in the future. This is where the challenges arise because the way we distributed wealth for the past i dont know, im going to say 400 or 500 years was we used your job as a way of distributing wealth to you. Now, that technique is going away and so we are going to have to figure out new ways to handle things like that. In the past, when we have gone through these transitions, we have always been in times of scarcity and now the problem is that these problems are being created by abundance, i mean, a few people could produce all we need and so we are in this utopian world where theres no need to break our backs working anymore and we certainly ought to be able to figure out a way. [no audio] you encourage if you are watching on youtube to post sums some questions. This is for both of you. Computer science has an introductory phrase, garbage in garbage out. How is ai software trained to deal with this constant data reality . Ive never thought of ai dealing with garbage in garbage out so much as i have worried about the false conclusions are limited at this way, the conclusions ai reaches that lead to just unacceptable results. I guess if i think about the fact that ai, theres a way to look at my employment record for ai to decide im unemployable based on all of these reports and this ended that in the other thing and ive always assumed that wasnt so much a problem with the input data as it was with the problem of that interpretation of the data, so i have been blaming ai for misinterpreting the data more than i have been blaming the garbage that it reads. Micah, do you have a take on that . Yeah, one of the interesting at there occurred because of the rising data and ai is that we have always lived in a world of statistics where we gather data you know a sample and then we extrapolate and thats usually where the garbage out comes in is where we extrapolate from a limited amount of bad data and that conclusions. One interesting thing thats happening is we can now sample everything, you know there will be a hundred billion sensors out there in the water come the oceans in the air, the trees. We can now map every single training amazon said the accuracy of the garbage out is Getting Better with less garbage coming out. The conclusions address dont include what it means to be a human being and bill came up with a great phrase. Algorithm in prisons. This is a terrifying thing that isnt discussed enough, which is our lives are now circumscribed by ai. They take our data and they decide what we are able to do and what we are able to experience. Its most visible in china where you have social credits and if you jaywalk three times you cant go to that concert next month, but even in the us is beginning to happen. You dont get offered that deal. You dont get to buy that level of insurance all because ai has figured out that you are not worthy of buying that. You are not a safe risk and the scary part is that you dont even know that there are boundaries on your life. You think you have free choice, but those choices are getting smaller, smaller, smaller. Thats the garbage out that terrifies me. Another question here is, what do you think will be the biggest short and longterm changes brought by brought on by the eye revolution i guess its the ai revolution. For my part i think each one of these major changes, these changes produces a different sense of what it means to be a human being, and i think limiting intelligence machines living in this new autonomous world will change a sense of who we are. Its already changing our sense of time and space, i mean, we have a whole dimension of our universe called cyberspace but it will change our sense fundamentally of who we are. I think that at least you know so many of us defined ourselves by the job we had or by the profession we had, and i think that the difference in work and the difference in the way we deal with that in the difference in the lifestyles that will come from that are going to be the really important things. My guess is that the 15 hour workweek might be a reality, so what do people do when they have five days off a week and we are learning that we have trouble doing dealing with that right now. Its interesting and i will take more reader questions as they come in, but right now theres not a new one there, so im going to ask, i mean, on that topic, you know there are these Technology Companies today taking advantage of this abundant labor, cheap labor, uber, amazon, they have really kind of like seeing it this labor source and, you know, and exploited it and i think thats another, i mean, its like people on the one hand yes, they have more time, but on the other hand they are kind of desperate for work, so had you square those two things . Well, one thing you could do is give earned income incentives , i mean, there is no reason why if you are earning less than 15 an hour the government couldnt say for someone earning you know working really hard that they couldnt supplement that income coming i mean, you know this gets back to social questions as to whether you believe that its going to destroy the fabric of society, but we have a problem with income inequality and the question is if you want to blame someone, maybe you can blame someone whos poor for not having the skills, but or you can blame the rich programming all the money, but the problem is that the social unrest we have just experienced says that life is going to be not very good for all of us unless we figure out how to solve that problem and so we are going to have to address that problem. We are going to have to follow my techniques for doing it, so maybe some kind of earned income incentives is the way of doing that and an uber driver if he was getting an earned income and said that wouldnt necessarily be a bad job. Theres the notion that what we consider non tangible income , raising children, you know coaching a girls soccer team, doing Community Service down at the soup kitchen those are voluntary activities that are unpaid and we say well, you get the personal satisfaction of doing good work, but in theory those jobs could be paid also. Theres a lot of things we do that theoretically could be monetized in such a way that this becomes peoples careers, people that cant find work because they have been displaced. We dont have a model for that yet, but my sense is its going to happen. Back to some of your solutions. I thought some of your solutions were so radical and fascinating. I mean, for instance, you talk about possibly taxing Companies Based on the number of users they have. Can you explain that . Was the reasoning behind that one . Well, this got back to the fact that we had underpriced things. Im not a fan of lets say compute conspiracy theories, but there are people who engage in conspiracy theories, not necessarily because they believe in the conspiracies, but because they get lots of clicks and can sell advertising work i was sitting there thinking, hey, if you have got all these connections and if people are so valuable that they wanted to connect it to you, maybe we should make connecting to you bit expensive and then you could hey, alright i have lots of people connecting with me and im going to make them pay to connect with me and you turn it into a different kind of business. The thinking behind that was that if i had thousands of people who wanted to read what i had written and they were clicking on my blog, i could tax you a bit before that and you could charge for reading your blog and it would be a real business. Its all based on the fundamental notion that bill and i had that the internet got created with a vested Financial Model right out of the gate and the most pernicious things that happened was the rise in freeware because it wasnt freeware and that when you start doing freeware and manipulating teenage kids using techniques learned from casinos and you make them addicted to that experience there is a social cost involved. They are at the moment they dont have to pay that social cost that somehow monetizing the internet in some rational way where you have to pay more taxes if you have a bigger footprint and you have more social impact. In other words, the number of users you have, the number of clicks you get. It seems the idea of charging for the internet. It should always be free until the end of time, but if we rationalize the monetization of it in structures the system in a way that ultimately becomes much more fair and that could be a 10th of a second or 100 per click, but somehow to bring a Financial Model to the internet that is realistic and rational and serves the larger social good. Seems like the necessity. We could have a micro Payment System on the internet so that when i read a blog, i could pay you a nickel. I suspect that if you looked at a news paper im paying nickel, a dime or something per story that i read and theres a reason why we dont have that system because if we had that system, the group of Business Model and the facebook Business Model would it work nearly as well. Then i thought if you think of the way the system works, you know i have Capital Equipment. I have my computer and my iphone and my ipad and my smart car and i drive around and im using my Capital Equipment to produce the information that you sell to someone else. I a manufacturer of that and you take it from me and you sell advertising and you keep all of the money. So that you can conceive of lots of different Business Models and i think part of the problem that we are dealing with is that we came up with a Business Model the distorted everyones incentives. These Business Models are very lucrative, and the companies that we are talking about here have a lot of lobbyists and they give a lot of money to the right people. It kind of brings me too the question ive been wanting to ask you is, is this going to take really great leadership to get the stuff done and is there some technology that could invent that, really good leadership . Either great leaders or a lot of civic strength, one of the two. Its a system that so distorted now, i mean, we have allowed basically free reign to a handful of companies to grow faster and become more valuable than any enterprise in the history of the world and we gave them Carte Blanche and its time to start weaning them back in because they are not going to stop. They have already shown they are not going to stop and their influences distorting everyday life now and is becoming, you know almost unbearable. We know whats going on but we can do anything anymore so its going to take great leadership or people on the streets again. What do you think will come first . Usually the second comes first and then a leader arises of the movement. Even privacy legislation, it seems like its kind of happening on the state level more than the federal level. It has to go through [inaudible] the lobbyists water it down on the way in. Theres probably going to have to be enormous scandal that a whole bunch of personal information is given to the wrong person and people die. Didnt we already have that with Cambridge Analytica . , yeah we did, but we all didnt feel it personally in our lives, feeling this enormous danger that is the potential of all of this. Something will happen. You can feel it on the horizon. Something big is going to happen thats going to really be damaging. People are to up to stop these e corporations. Bill and i have known all of them. These are smart guys, many women they better start looking ahead and maybe do some things in preparation to keep it from happening. They will have to make some changes. One last question from the audience. General intelligence these systems are going to get very smart its good to be different than human intelligence. But if it is applied to a narrow application area they could get very, very smart and very, very capable they will have very specific domain expertise. They will be very good at the things they do. So im in tracking the Semi Conductor and keeping that from Everything Else that happens. People are noticing there been some Technological Breakthroughs and atomic level facilities. We are moving to the point we are going to be able to hold in our hands all of the Computing Power that exists in the world right now. When you harness that their ai, i dont believe we will ever find consciousness in our machines. We are going to have in cool routable intellectual power in these machines. More than we can imagine. Theyre moving at speeds in our lifetime in a secondperiod human lifetime. When that arrives,. [inaudible] you cant imagine the applications that emerge. There will be transformed part our children will look back on us like we look back on that herdsman in 4000 bc. It changes really fast. Say wait a minute have that happen, and it will happen. So will unfortunately thats all the time we have for todays program. I want to thank bill david allen and Michael Malone for this very interesting program. I encourage you to purchase their notebook edits available everywhere i will show you a picture including bm. Com. Tonights virtual wealth club has been adjourned. So thank you. So thank you. Recently on the Author Interview program, after words, we were off her thoughts on what he calls the new face of socialism. I identify it and try to diagnose if you will, this new type of socialism, identities socialism which is a marriage of classic socialism and identity politics. Think of classic socialism as essentially a strategy of marxian division between the rich and the poor, loosely speaking, it is a class divide. For the modern american socialist less left is that but its not just that it is also a race divide black against white. It is a gender divide, mail against female its a Sexual Orientation divide street against yea, and transgender, and its also an immigration divide legal versus illegal. One may say that while marx was trying to carve up society into two groups, the left is trying to slice the American Society into many different across many different lines. Where are they doing this . Theyre doing this because they think if we divide society in these eight different ways, we can assemble a Majority Coalition of a grieved Victim Groups that can come together and then sort of take on everybody else. Trying to get a firm believe that democracy will legitimize them looting and oppressing the other 49 as is with occult democratic socialism to meet the gangsterism. So is the United States of socialism visit booktv. Org click on after words to have two view this and other episodes of after words. So welcome to the Manhattan Institute on race, ryan and the police. Thank you all for joining us for this important and timely conversation. My name is jason riley i am a senior fellow here at the Manhattan Institute. For what you know throughout the program please enter your questions on any of the platforms that you are watching us on. We will either wrap them into the discussion or save them for the q a at the end of the events. I want e
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