Transcripts For CSPAN2 William Davidow Michael Malone The Autonomous Revolution 20240712

Hello and welcome to tonight virtual commonwealth program. My name is reed im a Technology Reporter with the Washington Post for employees to be the moderator for tonights program on a critical topic historical importance of the transformation brought on by artificial intelligent and virtual environments. As we have seen so acutely over the past three months with the covid19 pandemic in the social media with the killing of george floyd in minneapolis and its aftermath technology in online environments guide every aspect of our lives. Tonight i am pleased to be joined by two Silicon Valley pioneers to discuss these issues further. William davidow and Michael Malone, their new book the atoll must revolution was out now it delves deeply into the revolution we are living through regarding ai, the virtual environment. It can be purchased everywhere including bn. Com. A little bit about our speakers, William Davidow he earlier career worked at intel was credited to being one of the pioneers in hightech marketing. Michael malone covered technology for the San Jose Mercury news in the 1980s and remains one of the worlds bestknown Technology Business journalists. Together they wrote the influential book the Virtual Corporation and today they are here to discuss their latest book. I must say it is a great read. Now before jumping into some quick housekeeping notes, questions can be submitted by the gas via the youtube chat feature poster question there during the program theyll be forwarded to me. I will get to his many of them as possible. Lets jump into night. Phil i want to start with you. You helped make Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. In recent years youve written a lot about how the Technology Industry is taken a wrong turn. In many ways its hurting our world, ark economy, our society more than it is helping. What made you want to write this book . And why now . Guest when i was with intel, what we were doing, ive come to realize childs play. What we were doing was tinkering with things. We are making stoplights work better, we had cash registers so they added up and along came the pc, and the automated spreadsheets, when you automated a spreadsheet, it went inside a business and you replace something people were doing with pencil and paper or Something Like that. But the business stayed the same when it came to realize what was different about this technology was it was transforming the form of our institution. If you look at it if you look we automate existing format causes the form of the institution to change so a bank becomes an application on a smart phone. And then, he suddenly realized this had happened twice before inhumanity once in the agricultural revolution and then the industrial revolution. What everyone was saying was, this is just another Technology Change only is faster. Its not that it is a transformation of society. Now you call that change in your book, a social phase change. You said it is this a rare and monumental thing. Can you go into a little bit why do you call it a phase change . And how is this one really different than those other couple of phase changes you document in history . Well phase changes in actual scientific term. It refers to a model the same molecule having a different physical form so a storm cloud turns into a snowflake. And when water goes through a critical temperature, 32 degrees, changes form goes from being a liquid to a solid it obeys different rules, we use different tools on water pumps and pipes. Enter intuition about water tells us nothing about ice. And on top of that comes as according with the analogy. Ice breaks pipes. An ice sinks ships like the titanic. that we are in right now that connection in the intro we have coronavirus, we now have protest and Police Violence and racism and all of this together is doing a lot of things. Its kind of accelerating the adoption of these technologies. We are here on zoom using zoom right now to post this discussion. Its also kind of just bringing to the forefront of some of these issues with the technology that you get to in your book. For instance, i began yesterday announced that its going to call out of the facial recognition business completely. Because the algorithms that they use are actually discriminating against people of color. Theres all this turmoil and chaos you guys, what effect do the of the turbulence do think this will have on the future this is the type of issue that change brings about. In other words, im going to switch the subject on you. Its like privacy, privacy we used to have a door we lock. Now privacy has a totally different meaning. One of the challenges i think that we have in Silicon Valley is that we are now at the point where weve got to be very conscious of the psychological and sociological aspects of everything we are doing that was never the case in the past. Nice to have you back. One of the things you both say in the book is that we need to change the way we are looking at these things. We are looking at them all wrong. How are we looking at this wrong. . Societal phase changes are pointing to reflection if you only lived in a world of liquid water you lived on the equator you never see nice you know have no idea what ice looks like. You know its going to behave all the different. awhen we go to the phase changes we go to alternate reality that on the other side all the rules have changed and things may look a lot alike. Buildings and Everything Else but there is been a substitutional equivalent taking place what we do is fundamentally different. If youre a herdsman out in the advance and you came across jericho for the first time, you might not even recognize human structure in the city. In one understand how society was organized. You wouldnt understand anything and it may be possible you could never really cross over the jordan to this new world. We seem to be in one of these right now. We had another one in the 1700s, if you are out there working on the farm and all of a sudden the factory started arising he went to work in the city completely new reality. Our senses bill talks about this a lot is that we have evolved. This is such a profound change going on, weve evolved in the physical world where time has a certain speed and scope. Nature is not planned for us. Its not organized for us. We adapt to the world. The Virtual World is fundamentally different. It was created by companies and designed to focus on us, manipulate us hopefully in positive ways but also managing us like casino. We are biologically not even prepared for this new cyber world that we spend half of our time in now. You document very well that some of these changes are already starting to look dystopia. But it doesnt have to be that way. You kind of say, theres two features we could have. Adobe and one in utopian one and. Lets look at the balance. Take the industrial revolution. People left the farm and went to work in factories. We ended up with a dickensian world in the city of people laboring in the mills and child labor the dark satanic mills and all that. On the other hand, like the expenses he went up, literacy went up. We invented new forms of health like hospitals and medical care, and technology. Coming out of labs that emerged during the industrial revolution. We did a little bit of both and how the scales are going to end up is still not determined. Its more than just predicting the future, which i think both of you are is pretty good trying to understand how we should the changes we should be making and the algorithms and dividing in a way our place in society whether or not we get the Health Coverage we want or the Car Insurance at the price we want it. Its already starting to happen in the book. Not all of this is great. So what do we do . What are some of the things that we can do or what is a new way of thinking so we can better adapt . I hate to wave my hands but im going to. Its hard to believe probably 200 years ago work was considered to be a curse. Now we are saying, not having work as a curse. Roughly 80 some years ago George Maynard kings wrote this future for our grandchildren, i forget the thing he protected we might be working 15 hours a week and would have chances to really enjoy life. We are going to end up with a different value system. These are the things we are going to have to be prepared to accept and its going to be a very different world stop there are things that we do that are monetarily valuable that have no social value. There are things we do that are socially valuable that have no monetary value to their name. Like raising kids. If you are willing to pay the money so that i can get childcare so i can go out and get a job, maybe we need to think differently about these things and say, raising children is so important, we are willing to pay people for doing things that are socially valuable that we never considered to be compensated bulwark. These are the kinds of issues we are going to have to deal with i do not purport to know what the right answers are. If we adopt the attitude as this is the way we did it before and this is the solution we will apply to the future, i know thats not going to work. My argument would be, there can be a conservative solution or a progressive solution, whatever you want. But youve got to look at these things and say, new farms are gonna require new tools and new rules. And you cant just say this is the way we did it before, this is whats gonna work again. You talk about Silicon Valley companies becoming the new empires of this new era instead of powerful nations. We have these corporations that dominate our lives. This Current Crisis highlights that phenomenon. Ive been writing about this post google and apple have got together and they are essentially deciding how Public Health officials can use a Smart Phone Technology or cannot use Smart Phone Technology for their efforts to do contact tracing. Google and apple put forth their own solutions they are taking on the role of these institutions that we have all agreed upon and voted on as a society. Is this power that they have a good thing . And what do we need to do about that . You will note today all got richer during the pandemic. Mainstream america got. That might be where things are going. One of the things that occurred to me in writing the book, if you look at it, ab when we distributed electricity we created utilities. Then the application layer was the lightbulb and we had we had lots of different lightbulb suppliers or lots of different furnace suppliers for the gas utilities. Today we think about the physical communication layer as being the utility. You cant use that layer without the application layer of the platform that sits on top of that. Whats happened is that apple and google and facebook are in fact utilities now they are functioning as private companies. In the past we have the electric companies and they were private companies and then we turned that into utilities because it made sense to only have one phone Company Supply everybody. We are going to have to talk about issues like that. When my mother was growing up in reading pennsylvania there was free from companies and if your friend was on a different phone company you couldnt talk to them. It made no sense. Recreated the utilities so we can have one phone company. These are the kinds of issues we have to talk about. Bill committee agreed with elon to bust up amazon . I have different feelings about amazon then elon does but hes a very smart guy. [laughter] the phone companies though, compared to the empires that you write about now, they had a very narrow effect on our lives. These companies are doing everything for us. How does that create differences . To me, that is part of the big difference. We have antitrust laws and thing like that. And im not saying theres anything wrong with antitrust laws but antitrust laws are the meek of the past and maybe we have to look at these things differently. The reason for that is also these are borderless institutions. They arent necessarily ab facebook or google are operating in germany. They are an American Company but with this world breach. So you get into the issues of how much what i would say World Governments do you want to have you may object to me talking about World Governance when you talk about commerce but what about cybercrime crime was essentially local in the past. You had to have a gun and escape car. Today somebody steals 500 million, citadel steals 500 million and located nowhere. In a millisecond. He may have an interesting question though. Even in europe where the antitrust laws are comparatively stronger or at least regulators seem to have more power or aggressiveness in going after these companies, there hasnt actually been, there have been big fines that hasnt actually been any sort of change that created change in behavior in the companies. Raise the question and what leverage does society actually have over these companies . Thats a good question we saw the nba curl up when there was a problem with china a massive investment, we know hollywood cannot make a movie and say anything negative about china because theres massive amounts of investments. We are already seeing the effect, its changing what we are allowed to see. Fundamentally i believe what i would call the Business Model of the internet is wrong. Legislation could change that, for example, if you gave me ownership of all my personal data, that would change things dramatically. We get into that writing the book. We have to own our own data. It seems more and more apparent that bill has been a great advocate of that for years. Now i think everybody is beginning to understand, giving up our data for atheir surfaces was a very bad contract. This is where i might push back a little bit in one area i might push back on this or prod this thesis a little bit. Facebook is fond of saying, you own your own data. Technically you do have a choice and we can use these services or not use them. So that Value Exchange is already there weve already all decided were to give up some of our personal data or privacy in exchange for these services. I think privacy advocates would say, do you really have a choice . [inaudible] if Everyone Needs to use facebook, Everyone Needs to use whatever platform du jour is is anyone really going to have a choice to not make that Value Exchange . That partially baked into the algorithm. Let me give you an example we reduced the cost of one to many communications 20, it used to be that you told me i had free speech and its written right there, i can say anything i want, it turns out that thats been one of the biggest hoaxes folks wasted on society forever. I have all the free speech i want but nobody listened to me. Nobody could hear me. If i wanted to talk to a lot of people i had to go out through mass media or had to spend a lot of money. So free speech was expensive. So now we reduce the cost of free speech 20. The thing that was limiting free speech was the free market because people had to pay for it. You had to pay to get your message out. When we reduce the cost of free speech 20 we underpriced something that was extremely valuable and we created what i would call a tool for antisocial behavior. A productivity tool for antisocial behavior. There is nothing wrong, it used to cost me money to send a letter. There is no reason why email has to be free. There is no reason why reaching thousands of people on the internet has to be free. 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 made, reduce the cost of free speech but also made that irresponsible behavior very profitable for a small handful of people. To give you an idea just how much information you are giving up, there is a gentleman named abformer microsoft executive now head of the Digital Cities project of standard. As experiment he had the tools to do the tracing he went down to downtown palo alto bought a stick of gum, lunch, and to take the gifts. Then he tracked where that data come about those transactions went and within a week it had already gone out to about 50 different servers around the world within six months it was several thousand servers. That stick of gum that was bought was now known by thousands of major corporations and information control entities and Everything Else around the world. Imagine as we move into the internet of things where your car is talking to the grid and the thermostat in your house and your refrigerator and Everything Else are all tracking you, they know where you are and thats being shared with everybody, including people who want bad things from you and to take advantage of you. Thats where we are heading into as we give up the free information that we think isnt that important. But it becomes vitally important and there some threshold we are about to cross where it becomes really dangerous. Since we are on the topic of free speech i did want to ask you mike about, you talk about the media in the book. But at the same time as free speech has been reduced in cost, you also kinda diminish the earning capacity of, especially local news. I would really say the National Media but local news in places like the publication you work for. Is it too late to get that back . Or are they some worries we can change thinking on that as well. Remember the newspaper is largely a phenomenon of the industrial revolution. He managed to transform somewhat by the digital era going into television and eventually on the web but the monetization model of the web wrote journalism. Because they started giving it away for free and when they try to start charging for it yet, nobody wanted to pay it. Maybe the Washington Post or new york times. For the most part, im a fourthgeneration newspaperman. They are all losing their audience. Their being replaced by citizen journalism but there are no professional standards in the world. You dont know if you can trust that or if that reporter has its own website or the blogger with their own opinions. Its its happening right now. My hope is that it begins to sort itself out as we develop feedback functions and basically make tools and techniques to determine what is real news and what is fake news. Its a tough time for our First Amendment absolutists like myself worry i feel you should be able to say anything you want but 10,000 people are sending everything they want now weve got a mess. Thats the chaos we are in right now. As a current event here, donald trump is now threatening to take away the section 230 protections from Technology Companies. The executive order. I dont know if thats possible legally but he certainly has added fuel to that debate and for audience members who dont know what section 230 is, section 230 the Communications Decency act basically gives Tech Companies out of any low liability over what published on their platform. Thats a big difference between what you did in mercury news and what i do. I cant just say whatever i want i will be sued by right irresponsible things about people. Maybe the momentum is there to get rid of that is that something we need to do. The problem is who guards the guardians . What we see is Tech Companies trying to institute the boards and or editorial centers and Everything Else. Trying to keep the bad stuff out with the good stuff in. The trouble with human beings have biases often times they are unconscious of. You can hardly say looking at the history of who gets blocked out of twitter at different times or sealed off and not allowed access on facebook and elsewhere that that has been an entirely unbiased process designed to maximize free speech. Often times the sensors dont even know their censorious they dont know their bringing their own political positions into the situation. Theres a choice between them picking out what we are allowed to read and just chaos. As much is i dont like it, this is losing our thinking. Limiting our speech and our worldview. You dont think these companies should be liable and maybe you can wait in on that, bill. We have general liability. If a guy works on my house and falls off a ladder, the contractor is going to get sued under strict liability but dating back to the days of large farms, my house, im going to be at the table in the negotiations because i will have general liability. I think there is some sort of new Legal Standard that they are going to have to abide by. [inaudible] bill, you are going to say something. With all of this about twitter putting the tags on ab i had a very perverse idea, that was, suppose that what twitter required was for somebody to certify that to the best of his knowledge what he had written was factually correct and that i had to certify that when i publish something. Then i thought, hey, what i would be doing if i had to certify that was i was then exposing myself to some liability. Just like a newspaper is being exposed to the liability. I was wondering if twitter couldnt abduct the whole issue by saying, we are going to ask you to rate yourself and you can rate yourself as this is extremely reliable, questionable or strictly fiction. You can pick one of those three options and i was wondering if that might work. Is an interesting idea. 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 certifying, this is the person who did post certifying that in his judgment this was accurate or highly accurate. But if i just wanted to spread fake news on twitter i could hide behind anonymity and certify this is accurate, no ones ever going to hold you liable. You got the problem that we have to figure out who you are but on the other hand, there are people who we know who they are on twitter who are spreading falsehoods. I suspect they would be very cautious if they had to rate themselves one of the things that bothers me, im old enough to see the 60s and i know it may be people in the audience are my age if you remember, a lot of the good things and good changes that came out of the 1960s were first verbalized by people who were shouting things that were considered outrageous and antisocial and anarchistic in Everything Else. Now here we are 50 years later and saying we cant allow that kind of language. We have to suppress antisocial commentary because its not good for us. Think back, folks, it was quite good for us at the time. In retrospect we understand. In the future we look back and say suppressing this kind of speech actually limited our options . Right. But at least then you knew who they were. They were people in the 60s they want anonymous. They were people standing out showing their faces and saying, this is what i believe where and what you have now is box and armies of trolls who spread disingenuous. In abon the internet nobody knows youre a dog. To change gears a little bit to talk about this promise of technology to create abundance and energy efficiency, better healthcare. I read that and i thought, it doesnt seem to me, maybe this is the focus of journalists and we are to blame for this but doesnt seem to me that those of the technologies that are really being prioritized today in the tech industry. Apple, for instance, spends more on r d in a fourth than the entire annual budget for the National Science foundation. Pushes back fundamental research. I was wondering if you think that we need to steer innovation in a new direction so that utopian future is created as opposed to the use toby in one if that makes sense. First of all, i take a little bit of issue with utopian and dystopian. I think what weve seen is the fundamental paradox that bill and i keep banging into and we write in this book which is on the one hand the world becomes more ahealthcare better, almost no hunger in the world because we are going to live in an era of absolute abundance when we have robots and picking fruit and growing things and controlling water and all the stuff. Whats done by machine 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 this existential challenge which is, what constitutes a good life . How do we live before not working if were not producing something with our lives and we are just abwe came up with the term, zest, zero economic value human beings. That it some point machines are taking over more and more jobs and those people may never have a job again. Do we give them a guaranteed annual income . Perhaps. But if theyre just sitting in their little studio apartment which costs subsidized by the government watching a wall size tv for free and having food delivered, is that a good life . Can you invest enough value into that life . This is the challenge that paradox that we encounter writing this book. Its almost like the time machine that People Living up in the grecian temples and all that, theyve got everything. Yet they have nothing. They are slaves, bill talks about this the danger of robots is not mechanical robots or digital robots, is that we are being turned into robots. By little. Thats not the future i want for my kids or my grandkids. And wanted to pronounce z ev because thats actually my sons name. [laughter] i hope this doesnt become a thing. [laughter] you mention the word efficiency there and that was another interesting point in the book that economists have always said that worker efficiency is a net positive. Its always a good thing. That isnt always the case. You talk about that and im wondering if you can kind of explain that the people why economists might not have taken everything into account here when it comes to the efficiencies created by these technologies. What has always happened in the past from 1922 1970 whenever we increase productivity Gross National product basically grew faster than productivity group. When that happened wages went up and created more jobs. We are playing around with kids play for productivity. If you have massive increases in productivity you tend to have very low prices and markets shrink in size. Thats what happened to publications and things like that were one source of news satisfy everybody so that the price of news drops and things like that happen. The solutions in the past just arent necessarily going to apply in the future and this is where the challenges arise because the way we distributed well for the past 400 to 500 years was we used your job as a way of distributing wealth to you. Now that technique is going away. We are going to have to figure out new ways to handle things like that but in the past when we put onto these transitions we always have been in times of scarcity and now the problem is that these problems are being created by abundance. If you people can produce all we need. We are in this utopian world where there is a need for us to break our backs 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. I do encourage if youre watching on youtube to post some questions. This one is for both of you. Computer science has an introductory phrase, garbage in, garbage out. How is ai software trained to deal with this constant data reality . Ive never thought of ai dealing with garbage in, garbage out, so much as i worry about the false conclusions, let me put it this way, the conclusions ai reaches that lead to just unacceptable results. I guess if i think about the fact that ai, there is a way to look at my employment record and for ai to decide im unemployable based on all these reports and this and that and the other thing, 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 more than ive been blaming the garbage that it reads. Mike, do you have take on that . One of the few things that occur because of the rise of fake data in ai is that weve always lived in a world of statistics where we gather up data, a sample and we extrapolate. Thats garbage outcome comes in is where we extrapolate from a limited amount of bad data and get bad inclusions. One of the interesting things thats happening here is we can now sample everything. There is nearly 100 billion sensors out there in the water and the oceans in the air and trees. We can now map every single tree in the amazon. The accuracy of the garbage out is getting better. Theres less garbage coming out the trouble is the conclusions it draws doesnt include what it means to be a human being had bill came up with a great phrase commit algorithmic prisons. This is a terrifying thing that isnt discussed enough, which is our lives are now being circumscribed by ai. They take our data and decide what we are able to do and what we are able to experience. It is most visible in china we can see social checks and jay walked three times you cant go to the concert next month. Even the United States is beginning to happen. You dont get offered that deal over here. You dont get to buy that level of insurance. All because ai has figured out that you are not worthy of buying that. Youre not a safe risk. In the scary part is, you dont even know that there are boundaries on your life. You think you have free choice but those choices are getting smaller, smaller, smaller. Thats the garbage out that terrifies me. Another question here is, what do you think will be the biggest short and longterm changes brought in by the ab revolution. . Or the ai revolution i guess. I think each one of these major changes these changes produce a different sense of what it means to be a human being. I think living with intelligent machines, and this new autonomous world will change our sense of who we are. Its already changing our sense of time and space. But we have a whole new dimension in our universe called cyberspace but its gonna change our sense of fundamentally who we are. I think that so many of us define ourselves by the job we have or by the profession we have. I think 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 that the 15 hour workweek might be a reality so what do people do when they have five days off a week and we are learning that we have trouble dealing with that right now. Its interesting. I will take more reader questions as they come in but right now theres not anyone there so im going to on that topic there is this Technology Companies today are taking advantage of this abundant labor the cheap labor. Uber, amazon, they really kind of seen this labor source and exploited it. I think thats another, people on the one hand have more time, on the other hand kind of desperate for work. How do you square those two . One thing you could do is give the earned income incentives. There is no reason why if you are earning less than 15 an hour the government could say for somebody whos earning working really hard that they couldnt supplement that income. This gets back to social questions as to whether you believe that is going to destroy the fabric of society or if we have a problem with income inequality. The question is, if you want to blame somebody, maybe you can blame somebody who is poor for not having the skills but or blame the rich for grabbing all the money but the problem is, the social unrest we just experienced that life is going to be not very good for all of us unless we figure out how to solve that problem. We are going to have to address that problem and we are going to have two follow techniques for doing that. Maybe some kind of earned income incentive is a way of doing that. And uber driver if he was getting in earned income incentive, that wouldnt be necessarily a bad job. Theres also the notion that what we consider nontangible income raising children, coaching a girls soccer team, doing Community Service done at the soup kitchen. Those are voluntary activities that are on the table and we say, you get the personal satisfaction of doing good work but in theory, those jobs could be paid too. Theres a lot of things we do that theoretically could be monetized in such a way that this becomes peoples careers. People that cant find work because they been displaced by ai. We dont have a model for that yet but my sense is that its going to happen. Back to some of your solutions. I thought some of your solutions were so radical and fascinating. You talk about possibly taxing Companies Based on the number of users they have. Can you explain that whats the reasoning behind that one . This got back to the fact that we had underpriced things. Im not a fan of lets say Conspiracy Theory. There are people who engage in Conspiracy Theory as a business and then not necessarily because they believe in Conspiracy Theory and what the conspiracy is because they get lots of clicks and can sell the advertising. I was sitting there thinking, if youve got all these connections and people are so valuable they want to connect to you, maybe we should make connecting to you a little bit expensive and you could say, hey, all right, got lots of people connecting with me and make them pay to connect with me and you turn it into a different kind of business. So the thinking behind that was that if i had thousands of people who wanted to read what i had written and clicking on my blog i could text you a little bit before that and you would be charged for reading your blog and it would be a real business. Its all based on the fundamental notion that the internet got created with a busted Financial Model write out the gates in most pernicious thing that happened was the rise of freeware because it wasnt freeware. When you start to do it freeware and manipulate teenage kids using techniques learned from casinos and make them addicted to the experience, there was a social cause involved. They are at the moment immune they dont have to pay that social cost. That somehow monetized in the internet some rational way where you have to pay more taxes if you got a bigger footprint and having more social impact. In other words, the number of users you have the number of collections, its supposed to always be free until the end of time but if we rationalize the monetization of it, it structures the system in a way that ultimately becomes much more fair. It could be attempts of us percent or hundred percent per click but somehow to bring a Financial Model to the internet thats realistic and rational and serves the larger social goods seems like a good setting. We could have a micro Payment System on the internet so that when i read a blog i could pay you a nickel and i suspect that if you look at a newspaper and paying a nickel, a dime, something per story i read theres a reason why we dont have that system because if we had that system, the groove of Business Model facebook Business Model will work nearly as well. Then i thought, if you think of the way the system works, i have Capital Equipment and got my computer, my iphone, my ipad and my smartcard 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. If you take it from me and you sell advertising and keep all the money so you could conceive of lots of different Business Models and i think part of the problem 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 that we are talking about here have a lot of lobbyists and gives a lot of money to the right people, which kind of brings me to this question i wanted to ask you is, is this going to take really great leadership to get this stuff done . Is there some technology that could present back really good leadership. Even great leaders or a lot of abone of the two. Its a system that so distorted now. We have allowed basically free reign to a handful of companies to grow faster and become more valuable than any enterprise in the history of the world. We gave them Carte Blanche on this. Its time to start raining them back in because they are not going to stop. Theyre distorting everyday life now is becoming almost unbearable. We know its going on but we can do anything anymore. Its gonna take great leadership or people on the streets again. What you think is gonna come first . Usually the second comes first and then a leader arises. Even privacy legislation it seems like its kind of happening on the state level more than the federal level because a it has to go through case street to make it to the capital. The lobbyists watertown on the way in. Theres probably gonna have to be an enormous scandal that a whole bunch of personal information is given to the wrong person and people die. Didnt we already have that with Cambridge Analytica . Yes. We did. We all did it feel it personally in our lives dealing with this enormous danger and the potential of all of this. Something is going to happen. You can feel it on the horizon. Something big is going to happen that is going to really be damaging. People are going to rise up ands tried to slow stop these large corporations. These are intelligent smart guys men and women. They better start looking ahead and maybe do some things in preparation, to keep it from happening. There you have to make some changes in the way they deal with it. One last question from the audience here. Put your predictor hats on, what you think is coming next in terms of ai . I think these Autonomous Systems general intelligence type things the systems are to get very smart edits can be different than human intelligence but if it supplied to a narrow application area they can get very smart and very capable and they will have very specific domain expertise and will be very good at the things they do. I been tracking the abits always upstream from Everything Else that happens. People are noticing theres been Technological Breakthroughs in quantum computing and atomic level base. We are moving to the point where we are going to be able to hold it in our hands all the Computing Power that exists in the world right now. When you harness the through ai i dont feel like organ find consciousness in our machines but we can have incredible intellectual power in these machines. More than we can imagine. They will be moving at speeds will be doing a lifetime in a second, human lifetime. I cant even imagine the applications that can emerge because this can be other transforms that our children will look back on us big changes are coming really fast. We know they are coming but we keep discounting it when they hit we will go, wait a minute what happened . It will happen soon. Unfortunately, thats all the time we have for todays program. I want to thank William Davidow and Michael Malone for joining todays very interesting Commonwealth Club. I encourage you to purchase their new book, the autonomous revolution, available everywhere. I will show you a picture. Tonights virtual Commonwealth Club has been adjourned. Good night everybody. Thank you. Heres a look at some Publishing Industry news, author and Foreign Correspondent Christopher Dickey died last week at the age of 68. He was the author of seven books including a memoir of his relationship with his father former poet laureate james dickey who authored the bestselling novel deliverance. Joanna cole author of the childrens education series the Magic School Bus also died earlier this month ms. Cole created the series in 1986 which followed a group of schoolchildren on fantastical trips led by their teacher miss rizal. The books were developed into an animated Television Program that airs on pbs for 18 years. Joanna cole died at the age of 75. In other news, lisa lucas has been named the new publisher of pantheon and shocking part of the random house publishing group. Ms. Lucas had been the director of the National Book foundation for the past four years. Also in the news, mpd bookscan provided a list of the bestselling print books for the first half of the year. Six of the top 10 are nonfiction titles including john boltons memoir of his time in the Trump Administration Robin Dangelo and amber mckenzies respective books on race in america and eric larsons recount of Winston Churchills leadership during the london blitz. Barnes and noble bookstore chain focused on reorganizing the departments providing greater selection and making the stores brighter. Booktv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. You can also watch all our i archive programs any time at booktv. Org. Heres the programs to watch out for, other Author Interview program after words democratic congresswoman ab the state of washington talks about her life and political career. Princeton university afroamerican studies professor eddie glob provides james baldwins writings to the current conversation and race in america. Vanity fair committed to reading editor were blue recalls the failed nazi plot to kill fdr, churchill and stalin in 1943 for more information check your Program Guide or visit booktv. Org