Transcripts For CSPAN2 William Davidow Michael Malone The Autonomous Revolution 20240712

Hello and welcome to tonight commonwealth program. Im a Technology Reporter with washington post. Please to be the moderator for tonights program on critical topic. The historical importance of the transformation from on by Artificial Intelligence and virtual environments. As we have seen so acutely the past three months, the covid19 pandemic and social media and the killing of george floyd in minneapolis in the aftermath. Technology in online environments guide every aspect of our lives. Tonight i am pleased to be joined by silicone valley pioneers to discuss these issues further. William davidow and michael malone. Their new book, the autonmous revolution, reclaiming the future to be sold to machines. They dove deeply into the revolution there are living through regarding ai virtual environment. The book could be purchased everywhere including cn. Com. A little bit about tonights features. The cofounder of the capital. Earlier in his career he worked at intel rated and is credited as being one of the pioneers in the hightech markets. Michael malone Current Technology for the san jose rookery news in the 80s. It remains one of the worlds best known Technology Business journalist pretty together david allen loan co. Wrote this book, the virtual corporation. Today theyre here to discuss their latest books pretty is a great trade predict. Reporter to begin, click housekeeping notes. Questions can be submitted for the guess you too, chat feature. The creek post your questions there during the program there will be over did to me and i will get to as many of them as possible. Mustve been pretty the bill, or start with you pretty you helped make Silicon Valley Silicon Valley. In recent years youve written a lot about how the technology is taken wrong turn. In many ways hurting our world and our economy and our society more than is helping predict what made you want to write this book in one out pretty. William davidow well, when i was with intel, what we were doing was that i come to realize kyles play. What we were doing was tinkering with things, to make sure the shop lights worked better. So cash registers added up and then along came the pc. We automated spreadsheets. When you want me to the spreadsheet, but inside of a business in your place, you replace something that people were doing with pencil and paper. Or Something Like that. But the business stayed the same. And when i suddenly 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 forms. This is causing the institution to change. So bank becomes an application on a smart phone. And then i suddenly realized, this had happened twice before the three of humanity. Once in the agricultural revolution and then the industrial revolution. And everybody was saying, this is just another Technology Change only it is faster. And its not that. The transformation of society. You call the change in your book, eight social phase change and then he said, its rare and monumental thing print but can you go into this. What he called a phase change analysis one really different than those other couple of phase changes that you document in history. William davidow will phase changes actually a scientific term. It prefers to a molecule the same molecule having a different physical form. So storm cloud turns into a snowflake. And so when water goes through critical temperature, 32 degrees. It changes form. He goes from being a liquid to a solid read it obeys different roles. We use different tools and water, pumps and pipes in our intuition about water, tells us nothing about pipes or ice. And on top of that, and it comes as the morning with the analogy. Ice breaks pipes. Ice sinks ships like the spot to tenant. So if we dont deal with these changes, it causes problems. What i came to realize what was in society a similar effect. Institutions are changing farm being and obeying different roles in our intuition was failing us. Host and turning to mike, lets talk about the moment were in right now the dimension in the intro, we have coronavirus, and now we have protests and Police Violence and racism in all of this together a lot of things. Scott of accelerating the adoption of these technologies. Were here and so, using zoom right now, to post this very discussion. So is bringing to the forefront, the issues of the technology that you get to in your book. Ibm yesterday nelson is going full out of the recognition business completely the facial recognition because the algorithms actually discriminating against people of color. So theres all this turmoil. What effect does this turbulence could have on this technical logical future that you have outlined. William davidow will this is the type of issue that the change brings about. In other words, im going to switch the subject a little bit. It is like privacy. We used to have a door that we locked. Now privacy has a totally different meaning. One of the challenges i think that we have in Silicon Valley, is we are now at the point where we gotta be very conscious to the psychological and sociological aspects of everything we are doing. And that wasnt the case in the past. Host it is nice to have you back like. In one of the things that you both say the book is that we need to change the way that we are looking at these things. We are looking at them all wrong. And i will be looking at this wrong mike. Michael malone their points of inflection. As bill said, you cannot predict what it looks like on the other side. If you bully lived in a world of liquid water. And youve never seen eyes, you have no idea what ice looks like. You dont even know it is water pretty dont know how its going to behave. It has all sorts of different physical traits. You wouldnt know that what ice floated pretty so many going to one of these days changes. We go into an alternative reality that on the other side, everything is changed. All the rules have changed. Make look a lot of like bill exhibiting aspirated but theres been a substitutional equivalence that is taken place. And it is fundamentally different. So if you are kurtzman and you came across jericho for the first time. You might not even recognize that it was a human structure. You wouldnt understand the society was organized. When and understand anything. And maybe possible that you can never really crossover the jordan to this new world. And we seem to be when the police right now. We have another one in 17 hundreds. If you are out there on the farm working and all of a sudden the factory started rising if you went to work in the city, completely new reality. And it says and bill talks about this a lot is that we have evolved. This is such a profound change. We have evolved. In the physical world. Where time has a certain beach and nature is not planned for us. It is not organized for us. We adapt to the world. The Virtual World is fundamentally different. It was created by companies rated and designed to focus on and manipulate us and hopefully in a positive way. But also setting us up casino predict biologically that he be prepared for this new cyber world that is now spending half of her time and predict. Host you talk may well is are these changes alreadys looking different. It doesnt have to be that way you kinda say that theres two features that we could have predict the utopian one. Michael malone lets take the industrial of revolution. Okay, people at factories we have put up with this world. People at work in the middle and child labor. And the darks of the meals. But on the other hand, Life Expectancy entrance expectancy with upgraded literacy put up. Weve invented more forms of health like healths hospitals and dental care. All of the Technology Rising out of labs have emerged. So we did a little of both. This feels, its still an hour and sprayed. Host so youre not just predicting the future but your book actually pretty good at that predict just on your track record targeted stuff that your predicting it right it is trying to understand how we should come the changes we should be making as a society right now to adapt to it. What can we do. We have Artificial Intelligence and algorithms deciding in a way, our place in society and whether or not we get Health Coverage we want. Or contras of the price we won it. Its already starting to happen. As you see the book. Not all of the stuff is great. So what we do. What are some of the things that we can do art what is a new way of thinking so that we can kind of better adapt. Michael malone i hate to wave my hands. But i am going to. It is hard to believe that probably 200 years ago, work was considered to be a curse right. And now, we are saying not having work is a curse. Eighty some odd years ago, it was written, that this future for our grandchildren, forget that singlet but he predicted that we would be working 15 hours a week. It would have chances to really enjoy life. Were going to end up with a different value system. And these are the things were going to have to be prepared to accept. It is going to be a very different world. There are things that we do that are monetarily valuable that have no social value. The things we do that or social wilsocially valuable that no monetary value to them. Raising kids. If you are willing to pay the money so that i could get childcare so i can go out to get the job. Maybe because think differently about these things and say, hey raising children is so important. Willing to pay people for doing things that are socially valuable we never considered to be compensating a bolt work. And these are the kinds of issues theyre going to have to deal with. I do not do not say that i know the right answers are but if we adopt the attitude that this is the way we did before, and this is the solution that we will apply to the future. I know that is going to work. So my argument would be there can be a conservative solution or progressive solution. With everyone pretty but youve got to look at these things and say, new forms. Theyre going to require new tools and new roles. And you cannot just say, this is the way we did before this is what is going to work again. Host is about Silicon Valley Company Becoming the new empires of this new era. Instead of powerful nations. We have these corporations that dominate our lives. And again, in this Current Crisis plan highlights that phenomenon. Ive been writing about this in the post that google and apple have gotten together and they are essentially deciding how Public Officials he is Smart Phone Technology or cannot use Smart Phone Technology for their efforts to do contact tracing. And they put forth their own solutions. Theyre taking on the role of these institutions that we have all agreed upon. And voted on in society. Is this power that they have, is a good thing. When we need to do about that pretty to either of you. Michael malone will main street america, that may be where things are going. It. William davidow one of the things that occurred to me. In writing the book, if you look at it, think of electricity. And when we distribute electricity, we created utilities. In the application later was delightful. And we had lots of different lightbulb suppliers predict and lots of different foreign suppliers for the gas utilities. And today, what we think about is the physical communication layer as being utility. But you cannot use that layer without the application layer platform that sits on top of that. So what is happened is that apple and google and facebook are in fact utilities now. When they are functioning as private companies. So in the past, we have the electric companies and they were private companies then we turn them into utilities because it made sense only to have one phone Company Supply everybody. Going to to talk about issues like that. My mother was going up in pennsylvania there were three phone companies. And if your friend was on a different phone company, you could not talk to it made no sense. And so we created a utility so we can have one phone company. These are the kinds of issues were going to have to talk about. Host do you agree bill that they are the best of amazon. William davidow i have different feelings about amazon that he loved us. Hes a very smart guy. Host you sent about this phone company so, compared to the empires that you have now. They had a very narrow effect on our lives. These companies are doing everything. How would that create differences. William davidow me, that is part of the big difference. I knew that we have antitrust laws and things that. Maybe, but im not saying that there is anything wrong with that i test laws. There is a technique of the past. And maybe we have to look at these things differently. The reason for that is that also these are institutions. They arent necessarily, facebook or google are operating in germany. So there are an American Company but with this world reach. So you get into issues of how much of what i would single world governments, do you want to have. You may object to me talking about World Governance when you talk about commerce. With about cybercrime. And things like that. Crime was essential essentially local the past pretty had enemy and escape card and the gunman. And today, somebody steals 500 million some real stills 500 million and theyre located nowhere. Host in a millisecond. And he may have an interesting question. Even in your for the antitrust laws are comparatively stronger. Released regulators seem to have that. [silence]. [silence]. [silence]. Because, facebook is fond of saying you own your data. And technically you have a choice. We can use the services or not use them. So that sort of Value Exchange is already there. Weve already all decided that we will give up some are personal data. Our Privacy Exchange for your services. I think that privacy advocates would say that you really have a choice. William davidow and how much of it is enough. Host but if Everybody Needs to use facebook and Everybody Needs to use whatever platform it is, is anyone really going to have the choice to not make that Value Exchange. Will it turns out that s been one of the biggest hoaxes for society. I get all the free speech i wanted to, but nobody listened to me. Nobody could hear me. If i want to talk to a lot of people i had to go through mass media or spend a lot of money, so free speech was expensive. So now we reduced the cost of free speech does your. The thing that was limiting free speech is the free market because people had to pay for it, you have 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 appreciated what i would call a tool for antisocial behavior. So, theres nothing wrong. It used to cost me money to send a letter. Theres no reason why email has to be free. There is 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. Weve also reduced the cost but also made that irresponsible behavior very profitable for a small handful of people. Will to give you an idea how much information youre getting at, is a former microsoft executive. As an experiment he had the tools and he went up and down palo alto, got a tank of gas and then tracked where the data transactions find. Within a week it went to about 50 different servers around the world. Within six months, thanks to several thousand servers. So that was now known by thousands of major corporations and information controlling entities and Everything Else around the world. Imagine we move into the internet of things where your car is talking to the grid, and the thermostat in your house and refrigerator integrating all tracked, and its being shared with everybody including people who want out of things for you or to take advantage. Thats what we are getting into as we give out this information, but it becomes vitally important. There is a certain threshold we are about to cross. You talk about the media in the book that at the same time, they speech has been reduced in cost. You also diminish the earning capacity is especially local news. I couldnt really say the national media, but the local news in places like the publication you work for. Is it too late to get that back or are there ways we can change our thinking on that as well . It transforms somewhat in the digital era, going into television and eventually getting on the web, and the monetization model of the web broke journalism because they started giving it away for free and then when they started charging for it again, nobody wanted to pay. Maybe a few, the washington post, wall street journal, New York Times thats about it. But im a fourthgeneration newspaperman. They are all dying. They are losing their audience. They are being replaced by citizen journalism. There are no professional standards in the world. You dont know if you can trust them or if that blogger with their own opinion but. My hope is that begins to sort itself out as we develop feedback and maintenance in the tools and technique is to determine what is real news in fake news. Its a tough time for us. I think you should be able to say anything you want if 10 Million People are saying everything they want, that is the chaos we are in right now. As Current Events here, donald trump is threatening to take away the protections from Technology Companies through executive order. I dont know if that is possible legally, but he has added that debate for the audience members who dont know what section 230 is, section 230 is the communication decency act. It gets Tech Companies out of any liabilities for what is published on their platform. Thats a big difference between what you did at the mercury news and what i do. I can say whatever cant say wh. I would be sued if i write irresponsible things about people. Maybe some momentum is there, but is that something we need to do . [inaudible] what we have seen is the Tech Companies try to institute these sensors and Everything Else, to keep the bad stuff out and the good stuff in. The trouble is human beings have biases often times you can hardly say looking at the history of who gets locked out of twitter at given times were sealed off and not allowed access on facebook and elsewhere, that has been an entirely unbiased process designed to maximize free speech. Often times the censors dont even know their political positions in the situation. Its ping them picking out what they are allowed to read and chaos. This is limiting our thinking and once you let our thinking and speech are you limited our worldview. Do you think that companies should be viable, and bill, maybe you could weigh in on that. We have generalized it. If someone works on my house and falls off the ladder, the contractor is going to get sued under strict liability, but dating back to [inaudible] i am going to be at the table in the negotiations and i think theres some sort of new Legal Standard that they have to abide by. [inaudible] theyve limited speech. Bill, you were going to say something. With all of this about twitter and putting the tags on trumps email, i had a very perverse idea, and that was supposed but twitter required was for somebody to certify that to the best of his knowledge, what he had written was factually correct and i have to certify that when i publish something. But then i thought what would i be doing if i had to certify that, i was than exposing myself to some liability. You know, im just like a newspaper being exposed to liability. So, i was wondering if twitter couldnt abduct a whole issue by saying hey, we are going to ask you to write this your self as being viable, questionable or strictly fiction, and you can pick one of those three options. I was wondering if that might work. Its an interesting idea and i guess twitter would have to know who those people are. They would have to somehow certify their real identity at some point. But this is the individual, a person that did the post, certify that in his judgment, this was accurate. But if i wanted to spread fake news on twitter i could hide behind anonymity. No one would ever hold me liable, right . The youve got 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 setting 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 com, and my of the people in the audience probably are my age. As you remember, a lot of the good things come of the changes that came out in the 1960s were first verbalized by people shouting things that were considered outrageous and antisocial and Everything Else. And now, here we are 50 years later saying we cant allow that kind of language. We have to suppress antisocial commentary because its not good for us. Well, think back, folks. It was good for us at the time coming and who are we to know now, in retrospect we understand. What about now. In the future we might look back and say the [inaudible] right, but at least then, you knew who they were. They were not people who in the 60s they were not anonymous. They were people standing out, showing their faces saying this is what i believe. Whereas, what we have now is armies of trolls who are disingenuous. The [inaudible] right. We are going to talk a little bit about that, to change gears a little bit, you talk about this promise of technology to create energy efficiency, better healthcare. I read that and i thought it doesnt seem calm and maybe this is the focus of journalists to plan, but that doesnt see it de those are the technologies that are really being prioritized today. In the tech industry, apple for instance, spends more on r d and a quarter than the entire annual budget for International Science foundation, you know, pushing back sort of fundamental research. I was wondering if you think we need to steer innovation in a different direction so that, quote on quote, utopian future is created as opposed to the dystopian one, if that makes sense. First of all, i take a little bit of its youth utopian and dystopian. I think what we see is the fundamental paradox that bill and i keep going into in writing this book. On the one hand, the world becomes more [inaudible] almost no hunger in the world coming and we are going to live in this era of absolute abundance when we have robust control and watering of this kind of stuff. And its done by machines that becomes more efficient. The chances are the world is going to become more prosperous and more healthy, but then on the other hand, there is the existential challenge, which is what constitutes a good life . How do we live, if we are not working, we are not producing something with our lives. Though and i came up with the term zero economic value human being. But at the same time machines are taking over more and more jobs and those people may never have a job again. If they are just sitting in their little studio apartment subsidized by the government and having food delivered, is that a good life . Can you invest a value into that life . Of the [inaudible] but is that the same . Is that this is the challenge in that paradox in this book. Its almost like a time machine and people will living in temples and all that, theyve got everything and get a slave. Bill talks about the danger of robots, not mechanical robots to digital robots. We are being turned to robots little by little. Thats not a future tha the futi want for my kids or my grandkids. I wanted to pronounce the zev because my sons name. [laughter] the you mentioned the word efficiency. That was another interesting point in the book. Economists have always said worker efficiency is a net positive. Its always a good thing. That isnt always the case. Kind of explain that to people, why economists may not have taken everything into account when it comes to inefficiencies created by these technologies. It grew faster than productivity, and when that happened, the wages went up and we created more jobs. You would tend to have different prices and thats what happened with applications and things like that where one source of news satisfies everybodys price drops and things happen. So, the solutions of the past just are not necessarily going to employ in the future. This is where the challenges arise because the way we distribute a 12 for the past, i dont know, im going to say 400 or 500, whether we use your job as a way of distributing wealth to give, and now that technique is going away. So we are going to have to figure out new ways to handle things like that. But in the past, with regards to these transitions, weve always been in times of scarcity. And now, the problem is that these problems are being created by abundance. I mean, a few people can produce only need, and so we are in this utopian world where there is a need for us to break up what isnt working anymore. We certainly ought to be able to figure out ways to harvest utopia from abundance rather than dystopia from it. I wanted to go to some audience questions here and i do encourage if you are watching on youtube to post some questions. This one is for both of you. Computer science, how is a ei trained tguytrained to deal wits reality . I never thought of ai dealing with garbage in garbage out so much as i worry about the false conclusions. Look at it this way, the conclusions ai reaches that leads to just unacceptable result i guess if i think about the fact that there is a way to look at the record and decide that im unemployable based on all these reports into this and that and the other thing, and ive always assumed that wasnt so much a problem with the input data as it was for the problem of the interpretation of the data, so ive been blaming ai for misinterpreting the data or the garbage that it reads. Do you have a take on that . The interesting thing has occurred because of the rise of big data and ai is because we are in a world of statistics where we gather data as a sample and then we extrapolate. Thats usually where the garbage out comes in. We extrapolatin. We extrapolate to the limit to w amount of data and conclusion. One of the interesting things that is happening is we can now sample everything. There is going to be 100 billion sensors out there in the water, oceans, air, the trees. We can map all the trees and amazon. The accuracy of the garbage out is getting better. There is thus garbage coming out. Speak to the conclusion bill came up with a great phrase algorithmic prisons. This is a terrifying thing that isnt discussed in, which is our lives are being circumscribed by a guy. They take our data and they decide what they are able to do and what we are able to experience. Its more visible in china with these social credits if you jaywalk three times you cant go to that concert next month. In the United States its beginning to happen. So if you are offered a deal over here, you dont get to buy that little venture consultant caused ai has figured out you are not worthy of buying that. And the stereotype is you dont even know that there are. You think you have free choice, but they are getting smaller, smaller. That is the garbage off that terrifies me. Another question here is what do you think will be the biggest short and longterm changes brought on by the iso resolution fax for the ai resolution plaques plaques each of these changes produces a different sense of what it means to be a human being. I think living in this time of the world will change our sense of who we are. Its already changing our sense of space. We have a whole new dimension called cyberspace, but that doesnt change our sense fundamentally if we are. I think that at least so many of us define ourselves by the job we have for the profession we have. I think that the difference in work and the difference in the way we deal with that, and the difference in lifestyles that come from that are going to be the really important things. My guess is the 15 hour work week might be a reality. What do people do when they have five days off. Its interesting and i will take more questions as they come in, but right now there isnt one so i am going to ask you on that topic, you know, there are these Technology Companies today that are taking advantage of this abundantly for, cheap labor. They have really kind of deemed this labor source and exploited it, and i think that it is another yes people do have more time and are kind of desperate for work, so how do you kind of squared away those two things. One thing you could do is go gave earned income incentives. Theres no reason why if you are earning less than 15 an hour the government couldnt say for somebody earning, you know, working really hard that they could supplement the income. This goes back to social questions as to whether you believe that is going to destroy the fabric of society. But the we have a problem with income inequality. If the question is if you want to blame somebody, maybe you can blame somebody who is poorer for not having the skills, but or you can blame the rich for grabbing all the money. The problem is that social unrest weve just experienced, that life is going to be not very good for all of us unless we figure out how to solve the problem. So we have to address the problem into with the techniques for doing it. So, maybe some kind of earned income incentives is a way of doing that. And a driver if he was getting in earned income incentives, that wouldnt necessarily be a bad job. What we considered, raising children, you know, coaching a girls soccer team, doing Community Service down at the kitchen, those are voluntary activities that are unpaid and they say you get the personal satisfaction for that work, but in theory, those jobs could be paid, too. Theres a lot of things theoretically could be monetized in such a way that this becomes peoples careers. People that cant find work. We dont have a model for that yet, but my sense is its going to happen. So, you know, back to some of your solutions. I thought some of the solutions are so radical and fascinating. I want to talk about a little more. For instance when you talk about possibly taxing Companies Based on the number of users they have. Can you explain that and what is the reasoning behind that . Well, this goes back to the fact that we had under priced things. So, im not a fan of what is a Conspiracy Theory, so i thought that there are people who engage in Conspiracy Theory as a business, not necessarily because they believe in the conspiracies but because they get a lot of clicks and can sell the advertising. I was sitting there thinking if youve got all these connections and people are so valuable that they want to connect to you, maybe we should think connecting a little more expensive than you could say all right. I have a lot of people connecting. Im going to make them connect and play and you turn it into a different kind of business. So the thinking behind that was if i had thousands of people who wanted to read what i had written, and they were clicking on my blog, you could charge for reading your blog and it would be a real business. Its based on the fundamental notion that the internet was created with a busted Financial Model right out of the gate and the most pernicious thing that happened was the rise of freeware. When you start doing this coming you manipulate kids and casinos and addiction and there is a flaw. They dont have to pay the sociasocial costs of somehow monetizing the internet with some rational way where you have to pay more taxes if you have a bigger footprint and have more of a social impact. In other words, the number of users you have, the number of clicks you get. It is the idea of charging but its supposed to be free until the end of time. If we rationalize the monetization of it, it structures the system in a way that ultimately becomes more fair. Somehow to bring a Financial Model that is realistic and rational and serves larger social good seems necessity. We could have a micro Payment System on the internet so that when i read a blog, i could pay a nickel. And i suspect if you look at a newspaper, paying a nickel, a dying or something story i read. Theres a reason why we dont have that system, because if we have that system, the Google Business model or facebook Business Model wouldnt work nearly as well. Then i thought if you think of the way the system works, you know, i have Capital Equipment. Ive got my computer and iphone and ipod and my sports car, and i drive around and im using my Capital Equipment to produce the information that you sell to somebody else. Im a manufacturer of that, and you take it from me and sell advertising and keep all the money. So, you could conceive of lots of different Business Models. I think part of the problem that we are dealing with is that we came up with a Business Model that distorted everybodys incentives. These Business Models are very lucrative. The companies they are talking about here have a lot of audiences and give money to the right people, which kind of of brings me to this question that i wanted to ask you is this going to take really great leadership to get this stuff done and is there some technology that could invent a really good leadership lacks the great leaders are a lot of civic strength. One of the two. But it is a system that is so distorted now. We have our basically free range to a handful of companies to grow faster and become so valuable more than any enterprises in the history of the world. And we gave them Carte Blanche on this. And its time to start bringing them back in because they are not going to stop. Theyve already shown they are not going to stop, and their influence in distorting everyday life now is becoming, you know, almost unbearable. They know whats going on, but we cant do anything anymore, so its going to take great leadership or, you know, people on the streets again. What do you think is going to come first . I mean, usually the second comes first. In privacy legislation, it seems like its kind of happening on the state level more than the federal level because it has to go through to make it into the capital, and the lobbyists watered down on the way in. There is probably going to have to be an enormous scandal that a whole bunch of personal information given to the wrong person and people died. Didnt we already have that with the Cambridge Analytic a . Yes, we did. We all didnt feel it personally in our lives with this enormous danger, the potential of all of this. Something is going to happen. You can feel it on the horizon. Something is going to happen but its going to be damaging and people are going to rise up to try to stop these large corporations. These are smart groups of guys and women. They are going to start looking ahead and do things in preparation to keep this from happening. They have to make some changes. One last question from the audience. Your prediction hat on. What do you think is coming next in terms of ai . I think these Autonomous Systems and general intelligence type things, the systems are going to get very smart, and i think its going to be different than human intelligence. But, if it is applied to a narrow application area, they can get very, very smart and very capable. They will have very specific domain expertise and they will be very good at the things they do. Tracking a Semi Conductor and its upstream from everything that happens. People are noticing different from Technological Breakthroughs in quantum computing and [inaudible] we are moving to the point where we are going to be able to hold in our hands on with the Computing Power that exists in the world right now. When you harness that through ai, i dont believe that we will ever find consciousness in our machines, but we are going to have an incredible intellectual power in these machines, more than we can imagine. Everything is moving at speeds a lifetime in the secon a second,n that arrives, [inaudible] cant even imagine the applications that emerge. But our children are going to look back on us like we look back. Big changes are coming really fast. We know they are coming that we keep downing it. But it will happen soon. That is all the time we have for todays program. I want to thank bill david outland, william davidow. I am Reed Albergotti and tonights virtual Commonwealth Club has been adjourned. Thanks, everybody. I will cspan has covered every minute of every Political Convention since 1984, and we are not stopping now. This months conventions will be like none other in history. With the corona virus pandemic still looming, plans for gatherings are being altered. The democrats will meet to nominate joe biden as their president ial candidate monday. And President Trump will accept his Party Nomination next week. Watch cspan at 9 p. M. Eastern for live coverage of the Democratic Convention starting monday into the republican Convention Starting next monday, august 24, Live Streaming and ondemand at cspan. Org. Or listen with the free cspan radio app. Cspan, your unfiltered view of politics. Now a discussion with bestselling thriller writer brad thor from 2017. The author of more than 20 books and has appeared on booktv on our in depth series featuring novelists. This is part of the summerlong series featuring wellknown authors from the booktv archives. Host over the course of 18 books, how many people . Guest i lost c a