Express appreciation to this evening sponsor, Teresa Crawley dds. [applause] dont get carried away. Shell, you know. [laughter] obviously, i could do this privately come and i have, but i would like to say a public thank to tarry for her sport terry for her support for her advice over the years, including topics. Thanks to her suggestions, so would you please stand up . Tonight speaker, claire l. Evans, has achieved notable success both as a musician and writer. In the former career, she is the lead singer and cofounder of the conceptual pop group yacht and has recently returned from a tour in europe with that group. Career asher second an expert in the area of technology that brings her to us tonight. Cannot regard, she is the former future editor of motherboard and a contributor to vice, the guardian, and wired, among other publications. She is, for example, the Founding Editor of terraform, a sciencefiction article. The thing that particularly commends her to our attention and brings are here tonight is a book she has just written. Ill say more about that in a second, but she has lectured widely about Science Fiction, art, and technology around the the new such venues as museum of contemporary art, uc,ona state university, university of california berkeley, herschel museum, and the Riverside Museum of art in beijing among many others. She lives in los angeles where she runs the l. A. Centric culture app. Accomplishments that brings her here is her book titled broad band the untold story of the women who made the internet. Published in 2018. One read of that work had this to work to say. Thrilling, powerful stuff. An electric feminist history of modern tech and a muchneeded corrective to the hyper mailman apology of Silicon Valley mythology of Silicon Valley. Her readable work restores credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. Evans riveting account of female and innovators from the victorian age to today fills in the gaps in the history we should have had all along and provide unique, enlightening insight into some of the most revolutionary technological advances of our time. Comment on that book that i like the best is this one. This is a quote. Likere evans tells a story a friend who knows you get bored easily. [laughter] a generous sort that pulls the reader in. Welcome with me the multitalented claire evans. [applause] claire hello. Hi, everyone. Im so excited to be here and i know it is a scoop spooky time to be gathering in public so i doubly recognize you for being here in a room with other human beings right now. I hope we are all washing our hands but beyond that, i am very grateful to be part of this auspicious series of lectures about our collective history. To start up the old hard drive before i can Start Talking here. I will do something a little different tonight and is customary for the series. Im not going to be talking about a single individuals contribution to history, but rather talk about a collective thats me in my best steve jobs outfit. A collective of individuals over a couple of generations spanning a couple of years. I did this for two reasons. One, tech history is complicated and by definition, distributed, often coalesces among multiple emergent paths and not so much in a clear and linear way, but i also know because i am trying to tell a feminist story and to me, the opposite or the corrective to your standard great man history is not necessarily a great woman history. It is something a little more nuanced. One that reflects the collective nature of our efforts, our shared goals, and the many subtle ways we influence each other as we go about our lives. Why tell the feminist history of computing at all . For me, it is personal. Millennial, and i grew up in a home that was full of computers. My dad works for Intel Corporation and we always had computers and home. I never felt growing up that computers were for boys or for girls anymore than i thought the television or the toaster was for boys are for girls. It was just an appliance that was in the house. It happened to be an appliance that can transport you to other worlds, as you can see clearly from me as a little girl playing that iom game mist was so obsessed with i forced my father to fill me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. But i loved the computer. Not only because it took me to different worlds inside a story, but because it took me across the world. Thanks to the miracle of the World Wide Web, even when i was shut away in my teenage bedroom, i could make connections with individuals all over the world, which was a radically invigorating thing for an introvert and only child. I grew up feeling the World Wide Web was kind of my native country. Got findplace where i my identity as a young person, learned how to write, learned how to learn, learned how to forge connections with others. It was really a place i thought of as being my home and my country. Something happened in my adulthood between the time this video was taken and the time i stand before you now, and that is that ive changed, of course, but the weather changed social and its web changed too and it felt more inhospitable to meet him when i was young. More inhospitable to me as a person but also as a woman. It stopped feeling safe, it stopped being fun, and it stopped feeling like home. I began to ask myself, had i always been wrong . Had this ever been my country . I looked at the past, as you do. I talked to a lot of older women about their careers in the early computing industry in the first wave of the web and i researched the history of women in computing. In doing so, i found a lot of things. I found a lineage. I found a great of radical grip of radical tech mothers we can all emulate, indie version of the established history that was different than what i have been told. A version which wasnt necessarily just about people like steve jobs and bill gates, but rather about a great number of untold heroes and heroines. The thing i found that was most important, i think, was and i dont know how to say this, really, but i found the seeds of a different future. Well get to that. We should probably start at the beginning. Like the very beginning. The history of women in computing is very long. For the sake of brevity, ive chosen 1892 as our starting point. Lets imagine it is the year 1892 and for the sake of argument, you live in new york city. For context, in january of that year, a new Immigration Processing Center ellis island was open for business and in march, the very first game of basketball was played in springfield, massachusetts thanks to the efforts of this man, a ymca instructor who wanted to keep stir crazy young people from hanging out indoors. Theer is over now and is first of may. Just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. It is long before the screen, mouse, the pixel but before any of this, there is a notification in the classified pages of the new york times. Computer wanted. This is the first instance of the word computer in print. It wasnt placed by a time traveler. It wasnt placed by someone transported to the gilded age. Wasver placed this ad looking for a computer to hire, not a computed r to buy. Job,puter was a person, a someone who performs computations for a living. The same is true for the word calculator. First, you have to take a math test and if you did well enough, on the first day of the job, you would be placed at a seat on a long table Something Like this and spend your whole day working on complicated largescale mathematics problems. You wouldnt work alone, you couldnt, because the problems you would be tackling would be much too large for any individual to handle. Instead, he would break those down into bitesize pieces and work collaboratively with people come across first cross referencing each others work and crunching numbers in parallel. Together with pen and paper, maybe a tabulating machine, you would advance ballistics or maritime navigation or astronomy or pure mathematics. Form the underlying copy additional infrastructure of the early scientific age. You would embody it, quite literally. You would make science possible. S like thesefice word from higher places of learning. They were kind of like stinking factories. Charles babbage called what computers did mental labor. That is a pretty good way of thinking of it. Computing wasnt seen as requiring a lot of intellectual talent for sophistication. It was just work you did with your brain in the same way that hammering a nail was work that you did with your arms. Ultimately, Human Computers did a lot more than hammer nails. They prepared ballistics trajectories for the u. S. Army. They assisted numerical studies on the manhattan project, crunched astronomical data at harvard, crunched cracked nazi code. They did have one thing in common and i think it is easy to guess what that is. They were all women. Thats right. Commuting computing was so much a womans job that by the time computing machines can long, mathematicians populated how long they took the process problems in girl years or described units of machine labor isterms of kilo girls, which pretty remarkable in which. Womenhe beginning the were being paid less than the few men doing the same job. Pickering needed an for stellaromputers data in his lab and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilhelmina fleming. He didnt do this because of some desire to nurture women in his life. He did it because he had a lot of data to process and he needed to employ twice as many workers to code through it all. Women were paid half as much so he could get more for his buck. The harvard computers, who are known to history as pickerings maid, his discovered the horse head constellation. Talentede prodigiously at what they did but their wages to unskillednt workers, between . 25 and . 50 an hour, which is more than a factory worker but less than a clerical worker. Women were not the intelligent workers of synthetic men, and were desk workers earning their way for their skills and numbers. Common in have been the 19th century, but things change in wartime. The major wars have always affected gender and work. The American Civil War brought battlefield widows into office work and the first and second world wars ushered thousands of most into the workplace, famously as mechanics but also as typists, clerks, telephone operators, primarily. Telephone companies with first major employers of a female workforce. In 1891, just one year before that computer wanted ad, 8000 women worked for the Telephone Companies by 1946, nearly a quarter million. Women were capable of working collaboratively, in fluid networks. We still talk about secretarial pools. These are female bodies and minds serving as the physical infrastructure for an emerging technological age. Patching networks which are patched electronically by bots and Automated Systems and, of course, ai, many of which still speak by default and female voices. As for the Human Computers, they began to disappear roughly around the 1940s although in some domains, notably in aeronautics, important cancellations continued to be done by hand and checked well into the 1970s when nasa formally default dissolved its human computing division. Sound work programming the machines which emerged in the Computer Science research during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. These machines, the earliest electromechanical computers, were developed in secret during the war to crunch numbers for the war effort, primarily to run ballistics for the boys at the front. To first people hired operate these machines were the women who had already been doing beforerk for centuries hand, but basically the work of catalytic ballistic trajectories by hand. Because software wasnt really seen a something that was more than handling punchcards and paperwork like a secretary or doing math like a computer, programming was a job that was given to women without much thought. Of course, these women accepted the work i lay because here was finally something they could do with their Mathematics Education that wasnt just becoming a teacher or becoming a secretary. Course, that operating one of these computers was not at all a simple proposition. These were the first of their kind. There was no precedent, there was no instruction manual. There was no information about how to run the things. They were built by engineers and handed off to the operators afterthought. When the mathematician grace hopper, who had a phd from yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark when computer at harvard in 1944, she was given no extracts instruction theshe reverse engineered machine she had been assigned to, working nights, sleeping under her desk, studying wiring diagrams and taking components apart until she felt she understood the workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers who had built the machine. The same was true for the six women assigned to the first electronic programmable computer by the u. S. Army at the university of pennsylvania. Here, were talking about programming at the machine level. When you talk programming now competing sitting at the program, typing symbols. This is not what programming was in the 1940s. This is a computer the size of the room. To program a machine like this, you had to crawl around inside this giant room sized machine making an ephemeral connections in time with touch cables and punchcards. It was something that was very physical, replacing burnedout vacuum tubes, and fixing shorted elections and wiring control boards. By the time they were finished , it could run differential calculus equations, but these women were officially classified in their employment as being so professional. Sub professional. When it was first unveiled to the public in 1946, the women who operated it were never introduced and although the mathematical demonstrations in iran, especially for its first public demonstration of the press, or completely programmed and put on the computer by women, none of them were mentioned in any of the subsequent articles. Contact come the emphasis and a lot of the early press about it this miraculous machine made by brilliant men that could process problems and 15 seconds, not a knology and weeks of labor that went and is setting up those problems and devising how they do work on the machine. Images, theyrical are credited as models and cropped out of the situation. Let me introduce them to you now. Although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contributions, i think eniac 6 would make a infernal girl punk band. Im looking at the front row punk band. All girl im looking at the front row over here. During the war and shortly after, software wasnt a word. Neither was programmer. What these women did was referred to as coding or operating, like a telephone operator. One of the eniac 6 called their job a cross between an architect and a construction engineer. There was no name for what they did or no clear definition. It comes pretty close to defining what programming is like even today. It was through the work of women like betty snyder and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the stateoftheart, how it would work both during and after the war that programming became something with its own value, a value that was separate from the menial mueller collation manipulation of hardware for. Because of them, it became many languages. It became an art form. After the war, grace hopper and her peers went on to careers in the early computer industry, heading up the programming teams of the very first commercial Computer Companies in the u. S. C was responsible for the univac, synonymous with the word computer in the 1950s. People said univac to mean computer in the 1950s. Because the only world in the world who knew how to program are women, they ran the Software Side of things entirely. They headed the Software Side of the operation. Logical the univacs design, wrote its construction set, custom programs for every client at every installation and debugged those programs when necessary. It was a huge workload and it is because they were so overworked doing this job at the beginning of the commercial computer industry that women at grace hopper and her contemporaries first started bush the art of programming forward by looking for ways to streamline what was becoming a tedious and complex process. During the war, they had coded at the machine level using the most elemental instruction sets. Because of their workload, they began to develop the idea of automatic programming, which is a fancy way of saying programmers should be able to step above that helpne level and with the of intermediaries like assemblers and compilers and generators, be able to code a higher level of abstraction. Writing programs that could write other programs to make it easier for human beings and machines to interact. That move toward systems level thinking changed the industry completely and influenced its entire development. Grace hopper spearheaded the effort to create one of the earliest and most important shared computer languages, cobalt, the common businessoriented language, which is nobodys favorite language today, and is partially responsible for the y2k crisis. But it did the job of opening up computing to another generation. The grace hopper and many of her contemporaries understood that computing as it originally developed could never continue to develop different remained in the purview of experts. Of a remained in the hands shadowy priesthood of coders. Grace wanted to see programming made accessible to as many possible regardless of Technical Knowledge and new that could only be possible if users, withs, could communicate computers using Something Like natural language, not just numbers but recognizable words. If that language was hardware independent, meaning it could run as easily on ibm machine as it could univac. This interoperability regardless of expertise is something that comes up again and again in the history of women and computers and what i would like to emphasize to you today as being one of the primary contributions women make. I mentioned at the beginning of this talk to women i came across in writing this book are the seeds of different future. It sounds highfalutin but i mean that. Many timesl you how i found myself reading about a technology or an approach to technology or philosophy that hadnt been implemented early enough that scale, been listened to, would fundamentally have changed how we operate today. These women arent just role models, not the sticker book characters of cool, bass ladies from history. They are glimpses of another way of being and another way of building things that is amicable to the world we live in. We will jump significantly forward in history from the 19 50s to the 1980s. Otherwise, we will never get through it all. This is my friend, stacy horn. When this photo was taken in 1989, she had just founded an Online Community. 1989 is before the World Wide Web, so in those days, online generally meant a Bulletin Board system is exactly what it sounds like. A tech window you would call on the phone and read conversations similar to a Bulletin Board in the back of a coffee shop. The well is often cited as being the first social network. The well was deeply embedded in the technological culture of the bay area and populated mostly by guys, mostly working in the tech industry, mostly emerging from listtechnoutopian commune 1970s attitude about technology and alienating to someone like yorker, awas a new real, cynical new yorker and she could buy all this hippie stuff. And she started her own machine never wanted to talk about computers. She couldnt understand how you logged into a Service Using a Service Using the computer you had to talk about computers. She wanted to connect with people and talk about theater, writing, art, and the things she didnt care about. She didnt want to talk about sex or hardware. She founded echo, the east coast first socialof the networks on the east coast of the u. S. X,was really gen cynical, snarky intellectual, and funny. It in some office funded by big telecom money. She ran it in Greenwich Village surrounded by 20 figurines of gumby and photos of friends. Which is fascinating, but what makes her interesting to my history is that echo was founded at a time in 1989 when the percentage of female users on the internet was vanishingly low. To 15 , which effectively means if you were a woman signing onto the early internet in one of its many guises, youd usually get a lot use toe attention if you female alias. A lot of female years of the early internet would use genderneutral or mail aliases to avoid trouble, which made it hard for women to find one another in these early social spaces of the internet. We didnt know who anybody was which was part of what was beautiful about the early internet. The rich anonymity of it all. It also made it difficult to form a community with people you were looking to find. Echo, during a time when the entire internet was 10 female, almost had gender parity. She was at 40 female users, which made it one of the earliest spaces online to be hospitable to women in any way. Resistedstacy always the idea she created a safe space for women. Bite me, she wrote in 1998. Get women on echo to make it better, not as some concession to women, a refuge, accommodation to a vulnerable population. She understood diversity isnt some favor you do to the under representative, it is an asset that serve the entire community. She was building a system predicated on healthy and exciting communication. She was building a social network and knew if there was more perspective, it would be a more exciting, dynamic conversation and that translated to a better product and it was. Those hehe had all know users because she was actively trying to court women to come online. Women didnt come online in large numbers and should pass the male population of Internet Users until the World Wide Web, significantly later. She would do stuff that was out of the box. She would recruit people from nontechnical spaces that go to Art Galleries and happenings and shows in new york city and find interesting looking people and try to convince them to do the thing that sounded insane at the time, which was spent 100 on a modem and join her fledgling Online Community. If a woman left her service, she would call her personally and ask her what happened. She made access to women free for an entire year. She gave womens groups their own areas of service, she created private spaces on her women tohich allowed communicate with each other in the absence of men the way women do sometimes in the absence of men and also report instances of harassment, if necessary. Out ofght Greenwich Village so a lack of knowledge would be an inhibition. On charlie rose in 1994, teaching charlie rose how to use echo, ever the teacher. Her main strategy for recruiting female users wasnt just an outreach, which worked really well, but was baked into the design of her system. Back in those days, online communities were always moderated by host. We still kind of have this on the internet they were users of the service who were deputized and given free access to the service in exchange for the responsibility of moderating conversation. Although we still have some corners of the internet that have a host like this, most of this role has been outsourced to contract workers. World of traumatized employees that are viewing the worst of humanity all at once. Every conversation always had to hosts. A man and a woman. Logging onto the internet for the very first time, you immediately see yourself represented. This made women less reluctant to jump in and enter the conversation. It was a very a gala terry and space. This still exists today. This is what it looks like. Never made the jump to the World Wide Web. She never even indulged in the when the first web browser came along, she could not afford to create a hypertext interface. She had a paid service that people dial into. She never got rich. She never got famous. Her accomplishment remains massive. She achieved gender parity on a almost completely male dominated internet. Platform has remained online for decades. It nurtures a small but devoted family of users. She cared enough to keep it that way. What her legacy represents to me is a different kind of care. It is not caring about, it is carrying after. Caring for. Continuing the commitment. In Silicon Valley, the professional rounds that are associated with this kind of work tend to be filled with women whose skills are not seen as technical. Care is very much a technical skill. They understand how to translate the messy realities of human life into code. You have to go beyond simple metrics like growth and user accusation and user share. We are living in a world where we are dealing with consequences of the tools that were not kept in mind. Social skills are essential in all of this. Caring about those people. Echow Something Like cannot compete. But i keep coming up to these stories. They represent to me the great lost opportunity. What if the architects of our presentday social media kind ofs had made the efforts at inclusion and representation and mutual withoutthat she made fanfare because it seemed to be the right thing to do . What if those values were baked into the way we made things. Would i be standing here talking about how for me the web is not fun anymore. Or it does not seem like home anymore. I do not think so. Not an outlier. If you are looking for women in the industry, it helps to look where those users are cared for. I will give you another example. This is another 1980s photograph. When this photo was taken, she was a lecturer at the university of southampton. Her field and nationally was mathematics. Until she discovered something now we thinkext about it in the context of the World Wide Web. Hypertext was the larger study of connecting ideas, images, computer systems. Ideawas already a utopian in a way. Hypertext grew ever more complex. Put ita that we might together in a dense web became a utopian concept. She had been turned on to hypertext in the mid80s. Through this totally an acronym take system called the doomsday project. It digitally documented british life. It was released as to video laserdiscs. Were full of something multimedia. It is all available online. It had virtual walks through the british countryside. Images of british studies. Maps and firstperson accounts. Whatitish schoolchildren made this interesting to her was not all of this material. But how it was navigated this is a glimpse of what the interface looks like. This was before the web taught us to pointandclick get images in recognizable areas. This was novel to walk around the screen using visual cues. It made all of the impersonal seeming data. Feel intuitive. It made it comprehensible to people outside of Computer Science. Realized it might make this an Accessible Information accessible to a large number of people. This idea of accessibility. Revolutionary and exciting. She decided to throw herself into this field of hypertext. In the Mathematics Department and later the Computer Science department told her about it. She made it possible for people to Browse Library materials. Began. With the archive at her University Library her team had belted entire system. It demonstrated this new and exciting and intuitive way of it was notnformation like the web. In many ways it was better. The web is full of 404 errors. Average lifespan of a website is nine years. This is not insignificant information. That is metadata and context. It did something different. It did not do this. It kept all of its links separate in a database. All of the links were able to communicate with the underlying document without making a mark on them. It was an overlay rather than a. Structural change to the material. A link could have many different. It could go into directions. Different players could happen. The system was designed to be adaptable to people and to encourage natural human learning and connection. It valued that most important piece. The nature of the connection between things. There were a lot of systems like this in the late 80s and early 90s. They were coming out of Research Labs like apple and ibm. That glamorousk now. But they were exciting and different ways. It was not just hardnosed engineers. People interested in making meaning out of data. All of these systems shared that value. This idea that the association between people was the most important thing. It was so much what the. Iscipline was about very firstsented the demonstration of the World Wide Web at the hypertext 91 conference in san antonio, which was the first time the web was shown in the u. S. , his paper was not even accepted. He had to bring his own demo on his own 10,000 computer. Even then, most people were highly disinterested in what he was showing them. They saw the links were all contextual and embedded into the documents, that mean that could actually break. It was expensive. Easily breakable. One detail that is so wonderful is because this detail was held in the summer in san antonio, one of the prime diversions was a massive margarita fountain in the courtyard outside. The very first time the World Wide Web was being shown to scholars in the u. S. , everybody was outside getting drunk on margaritas. Nobody cared. There is a margarita on the table. This person just wandered in from the courtyard with a margarita in hand. It is such a snapshot. We all know what happens with the web. It very quickly outpaced everything in the hypertext world. This is not usually related to the history but i have to share with you. There is a lot of these videos on youtube. I highly suggest them. Week. He same nobody was clear that they were not overlap. There is no way for us to noah Something Like this could have replaced our web. There is no way to know what would have happened if Something Like echo had had enough funding to make the transition to the World Wide Web. This demonstrates to me the path laid before us. Like how many paths lie before us if we can only look for them. Nothing exists in a vacuum. The technologies do not fall from the sky. They emerge from a continuum of ideas. Social media could not exist without Online Community building on the early internet. We all know about bill gates and steve jobs. Of course those people are remarkable. But they were never alone. They were always surrounded by people with ideas. Making big things requires big communities. We dont see the multiplicity of all of this. Make it so much harder for all of the established community to release to our world. For a few centuries, women working together were hardware. Machines capable of calculations beyond just one individual. The charted the stars computer we know today was named after the people it replaced. In the 1960s, women were half of the workforce in computing. Net of this would be surprising to you. The story is has toy and suggest the process those asian stash professionalization of the field had to make it masculine. Industrywide to rename Programming Software engineering. It came with professional requirements that were more conducive to men. This has been reinforced by decades of marketing and misconception. You would see ads like this all the time. You might see products like these. It was marketed to women to help organize the recipes. Came todescendingly, it add copy like this. Extravagantly condescending language. An entire generation of people grew up with this as a default. I grew up with things like this. A movie about a couple of geeks to design their dream woman using a computer. Boys. Ers were for it was something that made people believe that men were natural to computing. A lot of us are proof. If you remember anything from this talk, remember this. If there is a boys club that dominates Silicon Valley today, it is a historical anachronism. Technological histories are important. Able to and girls are see themselves in the dna of a transformative technology, then they can see themselves more easily in the future. I write about history and i do not know that much about the future. But if we are going to survive and restart, we will need all the help we can get. Thank you. [applause] now we will take some questions. If you raise your hand, we will find as many of you as we can. Thank you. Of your the purpose talk is to say that a womans brain is as good as a mans brain . I would hope. Step one. Intellectually. But halfway through it looks the woman who was selling her product with using sex to sell it. Was that true . That picture of her. Was that a sexual picture . Sitting on the table . Sure. I dont think that is a particularly sexy picture. It is an edgy picture. Women can be intelligent and sexy at the same time. And use whatever power she likes to sell her product. In the 1980s, she was promoted to commodore. Pcs werehe time when deployed everywhere. She was referred to as a computer commodore. She was so focused on making that connection and communicating to people. She would distribute a nanosecond. Her definition it was the distance it takes the speed of light to travel in a nanosecond. About 12 inches. There was a delay in the conversation. Of satellitee transmissions taking time. She was a real rule breaker. She told the people on her team to break the rules. She insisted whenever she went out in public to wear her uniform. She was so proud of serving her country. But that was against the rules. She was one of the greats. Interesting thing about her early career was when she was first given a computer, she was entering a male dominated environment. They referred to the computer as a she, like a boat. Ultimately, the uniforms and the hierarchy were responsible for dissolving gender boundaries. That is why she was so attached to the uniform later in life. Thank you for your talk. It was wonderful. Having a bunch of granddaughters and hoping to lead them into the future. Could you name some of the women who are an inspiration today . Leaders in the tech world . Of course. I read about history so most of my heroes are oldschool. I have a good friend who allows people to block party block people who are harassing them. I love finding ways to create your own solutions. I would hope your granddaughters would be people i can cite in the future. Thank you so much for coming out. I am a big fan of you and your work. I was wondering if you could expand on a point you made earlier about how most of the ai we have is voiced by females. How do we have this widespread acceptance of surveillance . We have google home. Big questions. I was surprised when i was doing the Historical Research that is a clear lineage between female telephone operators and the way we are expected to have female voices in the servile roles. Men respond more positively to a female voice. I think it is a Cultural Association that we now have. It is important for us to deconstruct that quickly. They are teaching us to assume that female voices will be pliant and subservient. That is one problem. A womanly interviewed at google who was developing a new assistant. She worries about that. She built in something where kids have to say please. I dont think that is a root of the problem. These conversations about how do we design a neutral ai . How does . . That come through in a human these are important questions and big design problems. Is more exciting than designing the voice of an ai . What an opportunity to interface i thinkry specific way all of that is a great opportunity. Is thepside of that surveillance aspect of these tools. I dont have an alexa in my house. Phone that syrian my is inescapable. We need to be conscious of consumers. I think it is a slippery slope. My question is somewhat similar. Do you think bias to ai has contributed to that sexism . A lot of ai women are trade in a sexist way. But men can be interfaces. Me that interesting to the most prevalent ai architects are sexy lady boys voice or scary sociopathic ai man boys. We cant tackle these problems until we looked in the mirror. That being said, i do think Science Fiction film and cinema is a very important site for educating the public about what a technology is. Even thinking about an ai and an anthropomorphic way is detrimental to our understanding of how the Technology Actually functions. It is way less sexy. It represents things that i genuinely scary about ai. We will reiterate the inherent biases in our data and inflicts them on a new generation. I think we have a lot of work to do. A question from one of my students. This is a jump to the past. Do you have any information about adel loveless ada lovelace . I skipped it for tonight because she is one of these characters who is often trotted out in this context. She is a fascinating character. She was the daughter of the poet lord byron. She was a valiant mathematician. She had the same kind of reckless poetic ideas of her father. She is responsible for writing the first computer program. She was the first to process understand that computers could process information beyond just numbers. She imagined a world where a computer might operate upon music or colors or abstract entities. Obviously you grew up with technology. We are all marveling as we get our smartphones and you click that you agreed to the terms and so forth. It is kind of like your smart phone knows what youre doing. People who are building that software certainly know what we are doing. They are tracking our consumer habits. Everything is quantified down to the individual second of our time. I am more afraid of the people who build those tools knowing a lot about me rather than the tool itself. We have traded privacy for convenience. We tend to go for the path of least resistance. We are trying to use maps. Oblivious toe are what happened but because we want to be part of the larger world. That is the barrier to entry. Giving up a large measure of our privacy. I dont know if thats a good deal we have made. I think Tech Companies are profiting from that. You said something scary, making sure we say please to alexa like we are going to hurt her feelings. I noticed that as a common thread. You have to constantly treated machine better. Are you hurting the machines feelings . Ofuld there be some kind that make sure we dont have to treat machines like they have feelings . That seems to be where they get out of control. We dont want to get into the habit of being demanding. I know it is corny but i genuinely feel like when im being nice to my series siri or delicate with my computer, it is about being a gentle person. Consistently modeling this kind of empathetic behavior to all things. I want to be a respectful participant in this planet. Siri does not have feelings. But it makes me feel better. Well said. One more. Looking to the future, do you have any information on the gender of the people who are studying in the field . Beyond that, do you detect any buyer bias . That is not my field. There is still a definite inclusion problem intact. Tech. These problems go way back. There are problems in Computer Science programs. Tech is for everybody. Not just for boys. This is starting to question what is technical. Those jobs to me are very technical. They are part of what is making Good Software products. This brick wall we have between front end and back end is very dangerous. It makes for bad products. If there is more fluidity in the definitions, you will see more movement. Men feel like it is stigmatizing for them to work in these ladylike interfacing roles. So they stick to what they think is fourman for men. We have a lot of work to do. It took some generations to get to where we are now. It will probably take another generation to get back to where we were. Let me show you what is coming up thursday. Topics. Very effective speakers. I hope you will be back for that. Check the website. We look forward to that. We look forward to seeing you. You are going to go back and sign some books in the back. Before you do that, lets all show our appreciation. [applause] thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] you are watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Like us on facebook. Our special continues with a visit to the university of texas at San Antonio Special collections. To hear about the southwest Voter Registration education product and the impact it had on