A token we listen to what these the proposal. For a couple only we meet with glued to news makers and talk about the stories that go to 0. Hi im Steve Clements and i have lots of questions today can the same technology that we happily bring into our homes and we keep in our pockets thats making life and connections and knowledge easier to access can this all be turned around and weaponized against us lets get to the bottom line. Usually when someone talks about killer tech people imagine giant killer robots vaporizing people in destroying cities with huge laser beams hollywood style but thats not what were talking about today today were keeping it real we all love to use facial recognition to open our phones but at the same time we know that facial recognition could be used by security agencies to pick us out of a crowd so what does the future hold for us as we freely give away our privacy in exchange for convenience fortunately we have 3 people in the room who have all the answers to these questions larry irving a lawyer by training who has spent his life working on the infrastructure of the internet in September Larry became the 1st africanamerican ever to be inducted into the internet hall of fame congratulations my friend in a free to has been covering the internet since before most of us even used it she is the chief Technology Correspondent for the news website. And then professor holden thorp the editor in chief of Science Magazine and all the journals published by the American Association for the advancement of science so good to have you all here today but you know let me start with you and ask about what weve heard this week about china requiring anyone that buys a future mobile phone of registering their you know through a facial recognition system that will pay. Minutely record the population of china on this is this is this something that scares you is it something that we ought to have some trepidation about i think theres 2 big issues there one is sort of the last erosion of the idea that the internet is anonymous when larry and i started looking at the internet you really could be anonymous and thats really gone away is the notion anyway but i think what facial recognition opens up is you know targeted surveillance so not the idea that what you say will be used against you because i think you know for a lot of people in the public eye you sort of are used to that but the idea that the government can easily track you so one of the things you saw in hong kong was people Wearing Masks so they wouldnt be identified for going to the protest and then the government passed a law against masks so i you know i do think there is this erosion of privacy that is really important and this you know when you combine facial recognition its one thing to use it in a public place but its being used increasingly in private spaces or as a condition of entry into spaces and i think that when we get we have information that is leaked out of china that in places like st john where theres a large were a population that these technologies are brought together to sort of categorize record and to you know penalize imprison detain pop part of the population there but as i was reading about sin john in china and what was going on with facial Recognition Software i was literally reading it as i was going through the line at the airport and the line called clear which is a facial recognition based system that i have paid someone to allow me to skip the line how far are we potentially away from having steps where we look a lot like china and not very far at all i think and i think its going to come if we dont do something its going to come on us much faster than we think and heres the reason theres a lot of devices out with the capability of doing it and very few rules over how the technology is used you have all. Major Tech Companies or at least many of them coming out and saying we actually Want Congress to pass some rules here of how governments use this technology because they want to sell it they want to sell it they dont want to be the ones making the rules but they do believe there should be rules now theyd have a lot to say if those rules were too restrictive but i think we are very close to that youve seen a lot of controversies this year that are worth paying attention to the one i look at the most is over amazons ring these are you know home doorbells the a sensible premise was going to get all the ring ring amazon bought a start up called range and ring was doing these internet connected smart doorbell so you could push a button you could let the u. P. S. Guy drop off a package because you could see it you could buzz im in that technology now when theres a crime in and the police are saying you know hey everyone with a ring turn over your footage well maybe thats good in catching criminals but it can also be used for more blanket surveillance larry you helped give birth to the internet in the United States how much should we blame you for the problems we have today is to blame a lot of sense its funny i was at the 50th anniversary of the internet. Had fits and learned klein iraq who is the guy who sent the 1st messages will be logged in l o one from u. C. L. A. To menlo park and he was saying right then that i want the Manhattan Project to really excited about you do something we have hundreds of great technologically but there are some unintended consequences of all of us looking at it now why didnt we see this why did we understand it and to this point about then your point about how close are always interesting on my way down the coast to recover the internet societies in at home plame then i had to go through a. Camera that was taking my photo to get out of the country now that d. H. Says discontinued that i think last few weeks or so but there was the United States government had a program that it was a scary thing you go to this camera tells you hi larry youre sitting in 18 f. No one expects that when he says its over to the airport that theres some camera that knows who you are by your face i dont know what chicot through my face they knew who i was knew that i was getting into. Not vastly different from were seeing in china and equally scary so it gets into that whole damn community that you were going to if you want to and you kind of want to be right is he dont you know this it cuts down on if you lose a paper ticket if your phone battery dies you still get to see some of your work really represents the tension here that i want to get to today which is in part you coined the term helped popularize the concern about the Digital Divide people being left out and not having access to the internet we talk about this globally today about those that are not yet wired in not connected but if you go into the United States there are communities with children they do not have regular internet and they were on the other hand we have the turbo charge cycle where those of us who have lots of gadgets in sensors and 5 g. Coming and the internet of things where millions of of gadgets will be connected and basically taking stock of everything that we do thats also dangerous so that you sort of got to me represent both sides of the scale here so in new york what do you get it right we havent gotten very close going to right and were not asking the right questions i was in new york last week so university of new york there are little kids a city of us in new york who are doing their term papers on their on their cellphones this and the greatest in the world 250000 students some percent of them are doing this term papers on according to professors and one of the on his cell phones there are more people in new york city without Broadband Access then there are people in houston one out of 3 people in your city dont have Broadband Access and affordability and there are more of them than there are people in houston on the other side every one of those kids is caught up in the internet revolution in a good way in a bad way their faces are in some database the commercial sales of this still buying stuff on amazon there are still things that affect them but were not making policies that equitably distribute this and theres a really sick. Everything what worries me and i dont know holden or have the same concern for those of us who have some amount of wealth can buy our way out of some of the privacy problems folks who dont have much income theyre going to have defrauded to get access to some of the benefits of the internet and thats something we should be very fearful of as you look at developing countries thats even more of a problem because if you dont have money what are you giving those guys for free access even them you giving them access to send you more information to buy stuff or to tell them things about you hold and i think thats something that weve seen with every technological advances that we havent figured out after centuries really to. Be equitably distributed but i definitely agree with letterhead part of is were not asking the right questions you know Silicon Valley and ive covered it for 20 years is great at producing that next big thing doing it just as soon as it can possibly done as an industry and weve seen a lot of discussion over the last year is this is done society the internet industry the Tech Industry its not good at all when it comes to asking should we how should we do this what are the unintended consequences and its funny because you talk to somebody and tech and theyll always say all tech can be used for good or bad which i would agree with but its usually meant to mean there for a while were just going to make it not all technology can be used for bad how are we going to deal with the unintended consequence hold in that what most freaks you out about whats coming well i think doesnt things dont frankly out as much as you might think and the reason is because the whole range of care well in my heart. The scientists are all very devoted to. Saying how to do all of these things ethically i mean for example we ran an editorial a few weeks ago from the person who invented crisper. Where she is talking about how important it is to have the right kinds of regulations on things when it comes to gene editing. In terms of what flows through the. The aaa of the Science Magazine and what we see we see almost everybody concerned about it all the sides of this but where i related who violated the norms of the gene editing work she did yes a scientist in china. Who altered the genes of 2 embryos and i think the learning from that which is only come out in the last few days is that. He did not do something that we require when people publish studies on humans which is that they post the protocol on a server that has all human studies on it so because that has human studies protocol wasnt posted thats how this thing went under the radar for as long as it did so how do we get this right in terms of where how are groups getting it right are there are there any ones that impress you well there are some groups like for example in Artificial Intelligence a bunch of the companies that are serious about making a business out of it also are part of this partnership for a i i mean profit group looking at the pitfalls so there is some work in ai i would say is the one in facial recognition or kind of the areas where i think you know sort of the tech world knew going in that there were going to be ethical issues that needed to be did they know that patterns would come in and sometimes create racist outcomes because of the racist inputs and they were going to get is there a huge problem and it was a post hoc problem i mean you had a group of course mostly men who made some assumptions and then all of a sudden youre discovering that Congressional Black Caucus members it was showing up as criminals because they didnt figure out that oh wait a minute we havent we havent put enough in our sample size doesnt couldnt black people brown people asian people so there is sometimes talk but the good news is once they had a problem they did begin to address it and i did want one of the group is mits ai lab in. And i mean im a stanford guy and i want to border northwestern so i dont always give my t. A lot of credit but mit is probably done the best job of convening people around over the last 5 or 6 years the future of work but also the ethical considerations around Artificial Intelligence and you need those kind of honest brokers because my concern about Industry Groups is that theyve got a profit motive you know that they have a very clear how do we get this to the market as fast as we can and scientists are doing it for the love of science but theres got to be somebody whos an honest broker and industry generally weve learned they want the internet over the last 25 years its leaving Self Governance just to the end it industry probably is going to be a sub optimal lead to soften salinas so yeah i mean i think its been pretty patchwork i think in most areas there is very limited regulation the one you bring up with autos i mean we saw this the most basic information turns out to be really powerful so if you look at where has Technology AidedCrime Fighting a lot of times its told thats on your dashboard and all that does is pay the toll when you go through the bridge but it turns out thats a lot of information for places where somebody goes through a bridge now imagine something that was everywhere youve ever been i think though when you think about it in a lot of times were looking at regulating the technology as important as whether you have a free and open society because we have to assume that information is going to come in what we really need is a fair judicial system nonracist government and you know most of us live in a society that is either very unequal or highly unequal so we dont have that so that makes the technology dangerous i think we should be as worried about making sure we have the right Civil Society and Civil Liberties protections as we are regulating the technology and we just published a paper on algorithms that are used when people come into the hospital of those who gets care and theres nothing explicitly about race and these algorithms. They were clearly. Distributing health care and want to believe by excluding africanamericans when they come to the hospital on this algorithm is being used cross all of. Almost all of American Health care and weve seen this near universally whenever these algorithms have come in and again its whos in the room the group sitting in the room you know maybe 5 well intentioned white men maybe 6 getting together to try and create something and typically what theyre doing is creating taking all the Human Knowledge all the decisions that have been made and computerizing that turns out all youve done is caught a fine bias because racism sexism transphobia homophobia have been part of the Decision Making process so you cant put in bad data and get an approachable outcome should we be worried about deep i mean i think we should and i think theres 2 issues one is the technology that enables that but the other is you know do we have the Critical Thinking our kids being raised with this sort of Media Literacy of knowing to trust and who to trust i think its going to be only that much more necessary when you can make a video that looks like anyone saying anything it already scares me in the world we live in that facts are so debatable right now that there isnt an agreed upon set of truth and then different opinions about what an ideal society should look like based on that i feel like in the last 10 years weve lost that sense of shared truth which is going to be all the more important in an era where again youre going to be able to make a video i can make a video of larry saying you know sacrilege that stanford isnt going to do well this year when i know that thats not true but how am i going to prove it when larry who went there is you know speaking out against it and thats a humorous example but i do think its a serious issue do you when you think about ina fried one day sitting on tape saying that you really love what industry has done with a guy and you have no concerns what are the step. We need to put in place do america any other government need to put in place that that is not permitted to happen i mean theres a variety of things i think it is a combination of there are technologies being developed you know sometimes the solution to technology is more technology sometimes its not you know i think there are these verified path things that would allow you to say that this video came from this source and hasnt been altered along the way thats one piece of it i think Media Literacy and understanding Critical Thinking are really the key is to surviving in a world that has this ability. But you know its going to be tough its going to be a tough problem when you cant trust the photos you look at which is already somewhat true today too you cant trust the audio too you cant trust the video i mean those are big problems but we dont trust each other now and we havent even started i mean the whole question of whether or not were going to teach ethics to computer scientists or ethics to lawyers and technology and even really having that debate at the level we should have the debate but theres a bigger problem and thats that were so used to in the United States and western europe leading the world in technological innovation and in creating the norms well now we have another nation thats got 1200000000 people the norms are very different there and when youre talking ai because they have a larger base theyre going to have more information more knowledge one of the advantage that china h