Dormouse said influenced the culture on the valley on the personal comcisting revolution and he did so in a way no one else had. Once more he looks around the corner toward a naafuture of technoisiores with his brillnd book, machines of loving grace a quest for calming ground between penmans and relfots. If you arefromeen enough to cath the literary reference in the phrase what the dormouse said, you may also understand the reference of this title. It comes from a 1967 poem which in its entirety said this. I like to think, it has to be, a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors join back to nature, return to our mammal brother and sisters and all watched over by machines of loving grace. [laughter] that was thepeopleision aredost0 years ais w when he was a residt poet at caltech. We are here tonight to the prfor aocative question lfor aig grace, or Something Else . Else . Please join me in welcoming john markoff. [applausse o. Wee. You are among friends, this is the home teams [applause]. I should be a message and i. You mostly are in my niy atmares you will start askig me questions which would be a niy a . Are becausefromnow anythg about this jlitzver u i mention that you are a child of Silicon Valley and you mentioned it a lot and is something thatustets interjey in your interviews. I want to ask what is it meant lppeay writer was so much of your personal dna coming from Silicon Valley . Guest what is it meant to me, it took me a long time. As afromid i didfromnow is a spl place. I played in the house when i was in fg istustrade, is a classmate all the way throuy a. I delivered papers at the house that they lived in. I ay wmucnalmucnal dove aouse because i went to the northwest for almost a decade. Ml it was an anti the eppearaify l i discovered it was an amazing new industry i wanted to findmul out how itustot there. Mucnalmucl the start of the series world histories which i love doing. I grew up with a parti johlarmucnalmucnal generation and nlar in a literal sense it was done about a year ago. What he did was lammated a centl of siliconpeoplealley. One time in the mid80s the the center of siliconpeoplealley wal santa clara. Mucnalmucnal now it is in the hill. You can feel that, it hasustonel from bthink ng a manufacturingml center and generally shall he i feel like im barely in touchmul with it. I went to to themucnall orgience section in 2010 which s kind of a museum piece. Mucnalmul i isiook at it, iustrew up as al reporter and it was like swimming in a c. I was part of austroup of peopll and now ict distance from that seat which is still very much real. Mucnalmucnal host max so in that seat youmucl have seen many around the world. Before we get to the robotmul s. Rt of this h ine you been abl to discern what it is about Silicon Valley that sets itmucnl apart from so many other placesl there have been moments, personally the moment of silicon for aelley there was a point ine that i thobecaht i understood i. It was only in 1981 on the pc had just come out there is something called the bs. H b afe coforeuter company. A computer hobbyist group. A big blue something. It was an ibm pc comcister it hd the same flavor but it was the new thing transition company, he he asked to make a transistor company. I didnt know that. I thought it was striking. He wanted to build the robots i. It kind of divulged. It was about robots. What a. This book has seemed to capture a chunk of the national imagination. Your book to her is doing well. I i wonder what is it about our current. You seem to cap catch a moment where your expertise as a writer and eggs server. My last book tour involved driving to san jose. I have have a theory and i cant prove this but i will throw it out there. You know how we make fun of the japanese for being robot crazy. I think the United States is crazy about it too but we have a lovehate relationship about it. Its everywhere you can turn around without seeing some robot part of our society. I think it is episodic. This has happened periodically since the. Two years later he wrote the human use of human beings. There is is an alarm about the arrival of automation he had very clear views about that than a decade later there was another sense of alarm in the United States people wrote the manifesto about automation. The vietnam war happened a minute kind kind of went away because we got distracted then over the last few years it spun up again because theyre a new wave of technology that is starting to work. Ai as a field is overpromised and underdeveloped as so many times in its history. Now its starting to deliver in remarkable ways. I want to get to what you call the rise of ia. What you say is how we design and interact with our increasing Intelligent Machines will determine the nature of our society and our economy. It it will increasingly determine every aspect of our modern world whether we live in a society and what it means to be human. Gee, john. Too bad. Too bad you didnt pick a book with higher stakes. That is quite a profound statement. You deliver again in the book on that observation. The other day someone asked what is it is to be human . I kind of have an answer to that question. Humanity is rooted in the interaction between individuals. What is human is this thing of culture. Now we are getting these machines that are increasingly intelligent. As a species we have a pretense city to look at everything. We talked to our cars, we talked our pets. As machines we are building to talk back to us you are going to have to have science and social relations. It is clear that people will treat these things as autonomous human beings and that will happen. I just wrote about this microsoft experiment that is going on now in china call gel ice. It is a chat bot. You type it and it talks back to you. It has been around for a long time. They have gradually gotten better over time. Now we are plying the internet, big learning, big learning, big data and there is an uptick. The thing that is interesting and none of them are very believable. Their productivity tools, they built it to get something done. Gel ice is designed as a companion. 20 million registered user, 10 million use it intensively. Multiple conversations per day being composed of multiple interactions. Twenty per 5 of users say i love it. 50 have said thank you. Will replace humans and those that he really does run throughout the history. Its at the very root of the earliest days. Explain why its important to understand that replacement. At the puzzle that got me into this and i will talk about the history but it is a dichotomy in the paradigm. There is no easy way out of it. There were two labs on either side of the campus. John mccarthy created a sale in 1962, 63. At that time he believed building the working ai would take ten years. On the other side of the campus, they set out to build technology to augment and they were philosophically opposed and i was stuck with that because they really touched on two separate communities centered around humans and realized the only solution to the puzzle is to use the technologies that are designed to augment and i look at the people that have crossed over into the sort of interwoven narratives so i was trying to do it through these narratives because im a failed social scientist and and is called a social construction technology. There is a distinct view in the valley that we are here in Silicon Valley in the process of giving birth to a species technology and some people believe that it would devolve completely into a species that would replace them coming and i think that is poppycock. I am of the school churchill and mcclellan we shape our tools and they shape us. Amber is a hammer. Its a very smart hammer and thats the perspective that i take. These are tools designed by humans. How much of that long awaited and often disappointed notion of free placement is behind this rise . Have we been expecting all these years that we were simply going to replace that . This propensity dance we are surrounded by Science Fiction that gives the notion of these machines that would be a thomas. For people that subscribe to this notion that exploration is going to be right around the corner i would commend it to them the outtakes of the challenge that shows the robots fall. Thats a ground truth. 25 of the best robotics researchers in the world funded for several years with millions of dollars doing the best they could and most of them couldnt open the first door. The manager whose brainchild of this was wanted to create a contest to focus on designing a machine. Thats what we are today. Theres this perception thats more more episodic. That the more episodic. We have seen significant advances but truth be told particularly if you read the reports there was almost no economy there at all. They had a small amount of autonomy into the kind of autonomy that you would see you could saw a circle around the screen and if it didnt fall over it couldve been. They had walking behavior that was autonomous. So, you know there are technologies that are out there now particularly the statistical database perception technologies one of the self driving cars of course we had one downstairs. You have seen the prospect that could have been religiously soon and its about the social benefit. So is that right and why is that . I continue to evolve on this. I think that the cases are real killers and that is going to keep us from driving cars for a long time. I think i made a bet on the radio the other day that somebody drove me to dinner decades i would pay for dinner. Google went down that path and its been spectacular it caused a Million Dollars now without a machine accident and yet the branch point in april where they basically said look at the problems we cant solve it created this 25 million hour because they get into a different Regulatory Regime at that point and its got no steering wheel. And its made out of plastic and the reason theyve done that is because when they hit the bicycles they do not tell them which i thought was kind of interesting. Nothing is perfect. But they got so far with the project and then i believe somebody may stand up and contradict me but i believe when they had these professional drivers who would sit there like Airline Pilots and watch over this machine then they began experimenting with giving cars to their employees to go home at the end of a long day and they discovered that destructive behavior and that is a handoff problem youre not going to solve. You will have Situational Awareness theres no way anybody will be able to solve the problem for a long time and until you can get an entirely out of the loop, i think that we shouldnt think about self driving cars but about designing cars that wont crash and i think the Automobile Industry is going down that path. Next year we will have super cruise from tesla and gm and others as well and that is that the car drives on the freeway at freeway speeds and he supervised the way that audi in their slow speed of driving system where the car drives by itself following the car into traffic behind it on the freeway up to and including you have to touch the wheel every ten seconds and if you dont drop out of that mode of those technologies are going to continue to wrapper around. Aerobic driving safer. You talk about this as a safety oriented innovation and youve given some statistics on that. You pointed out another theme that is in this larger area of robotics which is 3. 8 Million People earn their living as is as commercial drivers in the United States and there could be as much displacement and the kind of an intended way as there is safety for the people that need it. Whats up with that . Of course you know uber is committed to this, too. Theres a study at columbia comparing the economics of the robot cars in an urban area like San Francisco and new york compared to human taxes and the economics and efficiencys are incredibly compelling and it looks to me like a completely elevated device that might look in that kind of situation. The average speed is 17 miles an hour and 18 miles in San Francisco so 20,000dollar vehicle is fine to take you around. This has happened forever. The question is does it become a crisis and theres a lot of books written recently arguing that we are precipitating a crisis. But its happening so quickly that this could be largescale discussion. They made a mistake at clearview for a short distance and weve become much more skeptical. Productivity is largely flat. You look at the economists on the subject and it is all over the map. You have the federation of robotics that argues create the biggest job in history. They will be able to do everything that humans do by 2045. Who is right . I read the literature for a long time and its all over the map and im convinced that things will actually make this happen one way or another havent happened yet. Let me give you one example because so many of the books point to this. It is extremely nuanced. Three of the folks implication is 13 programmers displaced 140,000 workers. The proof of that is the competitor that made it across how many jobs came out of the mature internet the best number i can come up with is about 2. 5 million jobs. Its a complicated subject and one more story to that point because im part of the problem it was my reporting in 2010. With paralegals and 400 hour being displaced by software was one of the things that kicked off the frenzy. The economists are basically my hair was on fire about the impact of robotics on china. They said you dont get it. He went out to me that china is a very rapidly aging economy. They will need robust workforce. They have this amazing article about a ghost house. The japanese society. We have immigration and we are somewhat insulated from that. We are spending a billion dollars in the others. If you look at the outtakes of those falling you dont want him anywhere near grandma. [laughter] so we have a lot of work to do. For the people that are worried about this problem how do you explain right now in america more people are working than ever before and they say the Labor Force Participation is declining. You start to to take that apart and yes it is declining but when you read the mainstream economists theres all kinds of other factors and so once again it is very complex. Let me remind everybody in the audience we have question cards on the chair so if you would get involved in the discussion we are collecting those now. You mentioned 2045 and im so glad you did because there is a chapter in the book thats the one you picked to be a really bad year. Theres there is the view of acceleration when we are obsolete. I grew up in Silicon Valley and it gets cheaper faster and the reality is this thing called and asked her if. The doors are coming off. Its not bad. They will get to 14 now but rather how the one generation of the architecture they are there for the longest time. Since he revised it for one interval so for a long time and now look, in 2006 they stopped. More recently we slipped from two years to three years. Is this phenomena called the dark silicon. You cant turn off all the transistors at the same time or it will melt. If you dont have access you will lose some of the efficiencies. Furthermore, everybody in the industry except for intel is saying that the cost has stopped falling. It used to be you would get a design and shrink it the next time around and get free performance. Everybody says thats tops jamaica stops so the similarity im super skeptical about. Its supposed to be 2045. Didnt it say 2023 or 2027 . I was at the stanford affiliate this summer talking about all these problems they were running into and at the end of the meeting i read this architect from harvard because theyve now slowed down and you have to rely on the creativity smarts so there will because things that happen but thought they intel has done it for 25 years so im not saying progress is over but it might become more exotic. Let me ask you this where you have a wide range of places you visit and stories you tell in the book. Where in the world you think the of the think the most important work is being done . Its here in the valley. No question. I keep wondering when it will come. Tom friedman said the world is flat. If it is flat it should be an even playing field. So, 2006. Everything reset and it came back and i expected at some point in the world. The dean of Information School wrote one of the best books to explain for the Network Effects in the culture its still very much alive. One of the things before we get to the questions coming in and a second theres a section in the book for the truly personal assistant can you draw a distinction that i had to go back to the other is the office from microsoft we all rumored to clip. Talk about kind of where we are on a continuum. They believe in this concept and people revolved. It came out of research and development hated it. They called it that fucking clown or something. They just absolutely hated clippie. And the code that would have made it less obnoxious isnt on the distribution desk. There were some design issues in terms of the social interaction that is fundamentally wrong. Nice try but it basically sets back agents a decade. Early, too early and since they suspect that augmented reality it had a similar impact but if you design things correctly, i actually think that it is designed the systems to work with us as partners theres a tremendous amount of attention. 4 is supposed to be what humans do that weve all seen that the systems get better in the half decade as we use them and if im in a quiet room and im not around people, talking to siri is stunning. I remember going over in 1981 and getting a demo of the speech recognition and is called the admiral advisor you could basically see left and right. That is in the space of 50 years we have the conversational system scanning as close to human beings. Those that think maybe it should be better than it is are we just being impatient . Spinnaker think that its coming very quickly and you will see the improvement on a cool deep learning technology. It will get better quickly. What is holding us back . Spinnaker dont think that ive done enough reporting. Im fascinated that i can see but i can see the progress over a very short span of time. The point i would like to make as a partner in the design its one of those things i was proud of finding in the book. Both architects were affected by the knowledge navigator that john scully put together. They left the company to compete and he had to have an idea. He asked him to come up with a book because he didnt think that it existed yet. But he basically came up with the idea to a college that and this notion of intelligence in the form of an avatar that spawned a number of videos. I went to alan and i said where is the idea of the conversational agent and he said its simple i was just challenging him. Thats interesting. He has a reputation for being kind of arrogant. But if you go back to the earlier step a lot of those ideas are there and so i said where did you get this idea and he said it came from gordon. I said who. It goes all the way back hanging out around mit. He had this notion that human intelligence was situated in the conversation between people but i found it very compelling idea so those are the roots of syria. The first question from the audience is and be the next question that i was going to ask which is a happy confidence about robots as tools of warfare. You write in the books humans can be completely designed into or out of weapons systems. What should we make of robots and warfare in the future . I stayed away from it in the book but ive done a fair amount of reporting. The u. S. Has had weapons in the arsenal before. We had to Cruise Missiles that could go over the target with that human intervention and we are about to put a Weapon Systems on the advanced antiship missiles back into the arsenal and its a really interesting weapon because it is designed, its about china becoming a strategic cover and basically the carriers are having to stay further away from the area they have to engage to be safe so we designed a Weapon System that has the capability to fly five or 600 miles 300 of which is entirely out of context if they dont pick the target autonomously it is semiof thomas and there is a memorandum that was written trying to split hairs between what is autonomous and what is not a economist but that Weapon System is making the decision without human intervention when it gets to its target. There are dozens and dozens of countries that are designing similar Weapon Systems. They have an Autonomous System is designed later as an antiradiation within that can hang out over space and it matches a template. I dont think that is Science Fiction. As a matter of fact, if people dont know there are now two blimps that are hanging in the air 10,000 feet above washington, d. C. And they are designed to do 24 hour surveillance against the threat of the Cruise Missile attack on the United States. But you could see all kinds of technologies being put into the design. One of the things that influenced me. He basically can make the case he gave a lecture to the 200 of the worlds best robots saying that they had to take responsibility because the technologies they were designing to do things like the rescue robots could be used in different ways. These are human designed machines secure redesign these technologies operated by soldiers in nevada and florida thats great. What happens when enemies have . It changes the equation in interesting ways leading to the arms races. What happens when the small groups of dictators get these kind of weapons and you can exercise control over the population without with a very small group of people and ive seen some areas that are particularly dark but may also be particularly inevitable . Maybe that is one of the reasons lets lighten it up for a minute because there are other good questions which is what extent will technology alone drive changes in this area and what part is going to be determined by artistic and cultural influences like hollywood . My two best examples of that, both were pioneers. He was the founder of i robot and baxter. Jerry n. Is the cofounder of the company before it was a Computer Security company. Both of them want to do a. I. So i think that from the knowledge navigator to space odyssey once again there is a sort of culture that shapes the views. Theres a wonderful sciencefiction novel about the augmented reality. We highly ric amended rick amended and i thought it was pure Science Fiction. Then i went to florida [inaudible] in the book i wrote about it because the Machine Vision expert who was looking when it was a Startup Company called the metro perception right around the corner here when it was bought by google he didnt go into google he went off to work and he went with the expressed intent of reinventing personal computing and what i mean is im in downtown San Francisco the water and the streets and i swear to you 50 of the population is looking down at the palm of their hand. That cannot be the endpoint of human evolution. Youre looking through it but its overlaying with resolutions that are of the fidelity of reality. Remember the mistake of clearview for the short distance i saw this at the Laboratory Bench basically they were trying to create something called a digital white white fuel that will prevent people like me that get a Virtual Reality sick but there is a creature wandering around in space walking back and forth that was as good as any that i had ever seen and they claim that they are going to get better and that was interesting. I could scale it back and forth. Thats where it got interesting to me than my host ran his son through the object and went transparent. Something was wrong that they cant entirely explain. It was compelling. So their view they want to destroy the entire industry. You will do this and the display will hang. I found that completely compelling. Whose it is natural to sit at a desk and computer. Maybe you just answered this question what are you excited about using our interacting with . Did you see the robot frank . They pretty much nailed it. How is that going to work . Most elders that are in assisted living facilities you can see Robotic Technology reduced for things. This is a Community Bound to replace. We try not to be a booster but i think that would be cool. Ive had two parents i felt the endoflife situations. I talk about this debate between doctor aaronson the university of carolina that is basically saying the problem is not the lack of labor we have huge amounts we are not willing to pay for because the values are all screwed up and i just realized that we will never go back to situations where our inlaws are living with us its not going to happen. And if there is something that will sort of improve the quality of life i think lets go for it. Is this the answer to others when they say we need to be careful about all this . If you take a look at what theyve said its not going to happen in our lifetime. However, autonomy is a real problem. This sort of delegation of Machine Intelligence that can operate independent of human control so i think its great that theyve raised the discussion. We are having a real discussion in society but if i was going to look for in excess digital threats to society right now it would be genetic engineering that allows for the species what could possibly go wrong. Is this your next book . That brings up another question actually. You say in the book about this issue of control. The best way to answer in the world with smart machines is by understanding the values of those who are actually building their systems. How do we do that . Its my belief that these are human designed machines and they carry the value with them in the plaintiff great hope and concern but thats what we cant forget is these are extensions of the human designers. Sometimes a stanford economist wrote this book called the engineers and the price system and his argument was Technical Knowledge was created in the hands of engineers and it didnt kind of work out that way but in fact the designers of these new systems are going to have tremendous power over the shape of society with a plaintive responsibility and an opportunity to design in and out of the future. I ive asked the first question last why did you write this book . It was the nature of the subject that got you interested in the first place . I grew up with the industry and the internet and i watched as they transformed the role. They have their own work and we have a copy of the book right here. Dont worry. I mentioned to some people that crossed over. What began as a paradox for me has a simple answer the solution is inherent and lives in lies in the decisions of engineers and scientists who all have intentionally chosen the human centered design. At the dawn of the computer age they had a sense of the significance of the relationship between humans and the creation. He recognized the benefit but he also worried that the same technology might subjugate humanity. The intervening decades only sharpened the dichotomy that he first identified. This is about us, documents about humans into the kind of world that we will create. We feel so lucky not only have you written this began to shine so much light on the difficult subject but you could write in for us for so long and weve all benefited from it for so many years so thank you for that and for being so good at it. [applause] john will exit stage left and the book signing will happen down there so please go down and say hi and by several books for your friends and relatives. Goodnight everybody. [inaudible conversations] heres the cover of the book we are going to talk about macs next on booktv. The sun also rises. Gregory is a professor at the university of california davis. Professor clark if i could summarize and you tell me if im right it matters to whom you are born. More than half the outcome in life is already determined. It is a topic in a longterm interest and the thing that got me interested in looking at this is a conversation in the New York Times who actually said. If there is the movement then what will happen is very quickly they will become average so what occurred to me is its hard to measure. We need to know the father of the children, that kind of information will only become available very recently but we do know about the state going back to england even in the middle ages so what actually led me on this path with the idea of measuring modern england. What are some of the methods that you use . What is the distribution . If you know those facts over the subsequent generation anytime you can measure the movement. Why dont we look at the name clark and tell us what you discovered. One of the things i did discover is that it should be a surname because in the middle ages it was the name for attorneys and anyone who could write and so he should be the elite of the society but unfortunately, the name also applies to the servants switch without thought to be ev do. It turns out in england they are named after a place. So a name like berkeley for example which is the name of the university and the philosopher is also the name of the bank. You were given a thing because that is where your house was. So everyone is called john that im John Berkeley and so the highclass names in england whereas if im a peasant in a village like berkeley no one calls me John Berkeley. Or else just where your house was so we could petition the names to the high and low status and then we know who went to oxford and cambridge so we know the names of everyone from then until now and thats always representative of the top 1 of English Society so what they do is look at how overrepresented these names and universities are and it turns out you can measure that and that is the correlation of your status there is no social mobility and everything is protectable at first. Nothing is protectable at first so that is what establishes the measure. Most of whats going to have to as a normal time but heres the interesting fact you can do exactly the same for all of those that are completely average but when we look at these there is no change in the social mobility in england over 800 years so the social mobility is always there because the phenomena is always very slow and the editing is it isnt consented by the social institutions. Some people expect for example the land of liberty will be a society. So the land of socialism will be a society. What we find is the social mobility is a little bit higher than in england. There is no Public Education so in that time you have to go to special schools and learn latin [inaudible] so there is a social city that determines the social mobility pretty much everywhere on the planet it seems to operate in the same way across all the societies we could observe. One is communist china and it has roughly the same social mobility. If you are an elite now and the future. The interesting thing is. Theyve actually achieve the mediocrity. Since the book was published when we look at its russia. One is the cause of capitalism looking at the university as a marker to bring about the period of the stability in the period of the social mobility once he returned to the oligarch. Whatever the social system as there are people is there are people that have abilities and energies and they are going to figure out how to get to the talk of the title. So the social system is very different but there are tools. The name means shoemaker. The ancestors Something Like three or four generations back but then his grandfather and father have talent and ability to send and infect his daughter. It would be very different. So i could figure out how to do well. If im going to call for this more vigorously than anyone else and in the right occupations at the right places. Whatever social system you set out. I have to say i am afraid that