If you havent read Walter Isaacson it is a delight to read and because he connects us with devices that connect our lives. Everyone of you is carrying around something that has dozens and dozens of technological streams that have merged to get it to give us the connectivity we assume it today. Walter is the best person i know. Alter is the best person i know at explaining the connections that lead to the things that change our lives. In his new book the innovators how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution walters drinks together not just the hero stories but the stories that you wouldnt here because these things are not made by individuals. Walter does of phenomenal job explaining how the team work involved and the history is exciting and reverting. I will go back to my script for one thing i could not say better. I will quote salon. Com and say if anyone in america understands genius, it is Walter Isaacson. [applause] thank you very much, jim. Notice he didnt say i was a genius ive just written about a few people who are. And its great to be back here at the miami book festival something ive loved for many many years. Now that tom healey has taken it over thats great, and i particularly want to thank jim mckelvey and the president of miamidade Community College this great place because they are doing in their own different ways something that is very important for the digital revolution which is make it inclusive. Make sure everybody can be part of this revolution. And you may know that jim has created something called launch code. Launch code started in st. Louis, its going to be here in miami, soon all over the world. But its a very easy time. In six weeks for free, you can learn coding, you can be part of the revolution. And likewise, i think this is the greatest Community College this america and i want to thank eduardo for hosting us. [applause] ive been working on this book, the innovators, for really 20 years off and on. It began when i ran Digital Media for Time Magazine back in the days before we knew what Digital Media was, before we could even get directly on the internet and before there was web browsers in the early 1990s. But when the web browsers and the idea of putting the magazine on the internet calm along, we started came along, we started to do it, and i got called in by my boss, the president of time inc. , and he asked me a very simple question which was who owns the internet in i mean like who built it, who runs it, whos in charge of it, and i realized besides being a clueless question, i did not know the answer to that question. [laughter] and i started gathering string because the good thing about running Digital Media was i got to meet all these people, people i never heard of but really should be heroes of a revolution. People like bob khan who did the internet protocalls and rick lick lite, and they all lead up to people like steve jobs bill gates, larry page, sergey brin, the people who we all know as leaders of this revolution. And i was lucky enough to be able to meet these people, and i started gathering string started collecting stories about them. Id say to them, gordon moore, you know when you founded intel and got to moores law, tell me that story. I come from louisiana which like southern florida, is a place filled with storytellers, and its always great to be a journalist because you can ask the simplest of all questions which is tell me a story tell me your story. So i put it aside, as you may know when steve jobs called. I had done a biography of Benjamin Franklin, one of albert einstein. Steve called and said why dont you do me next. [laughter] i must admit my first reaction was, because hes my age. But then when i was told he was fighting off cancer, i realized it would be a great chance of being part of being up to close to somebody who had really been a revolutionary. He was a revolutionary and we biographers know that we distort history a little bit. We make it seem like theres a vision their, you know, edison or a morse or a steve jobs or a bill gates or an einstein in a garrett of a garage and they have a lightbulb moment, and all of a sudden innovation occurs. One of the things about studying steve jobs was i realized he was a visionary. He was somebody that really pushed the world forward, made a dent by his creative vision. But he also did it collaboratively. He was a strong cup of tea, sometimes hard to work with, but everybody i talked to said yes, he drove me crazy, but i wouldnt have given up the chance to have worked with him because he drove me to do things i didnt know id be able to do. So at the end of my time with steve when it was, he was stepping down from apple and he was sick, i asked him a question which was what product are you most proud of . And i thought he would say the original mcinfinish or the ipod or the iphone. And he said, you werent listening. He was always a bit tough. He said those are hard products to create, but whats really hard is to create a team that endures and continues to create great product. The product im most proud of is apple. And thats when i realized as jim said in his introduction, is this is not just about lone geniuses, but how to create teams. We realize we bounce ideas around with people, we each play our roles some person might be the visionary some person might be good at execution you need to put these people together. [laughter] you need to put steve jobs and Steve Wozniak with, also, a whole lot of engineers who can build the mac or create apple. And so that was the first lesson i learned. The second lesson i learned from steve jobs was when i had my first long walk with him, and we talked about the fact that he was a a humanities kid as he put it growing up. He loved the arts he loved literature, he loved novels. He said, but i was also an electronics geek and i thought that was kind of strange. I kind of related to that not that im steve jobs, but i was one of those kids that knew how to make circuits and use a sautering iron and not mess things up too much, but i was basically a humanities kid. And he i learned that the people who stand at the intersection of the arts and the sciences are going to be the place where creativity occurs. Thats what were learning in our education today. Its not just about s. T. E. M. , its about humanities and the arts, but also those of us in the humanities and the arts ought to make sure that we understand the technology so that we dont cede that ground to the engineers. So by that point i had a framework for the book, and my daughter who was then about whatever it is, youre applying to college 16 or 17, she was applying to college anding with the type of parent and being the type of parents my wife and i are we thought we were supposed to be involved, we were supposed to hover, arent we supposed to read your entrance essay and she being the type of daughter she was was having none of that. And one day she said aye done it. And i said what did you do . Ada lovelace. Remind me again . Lord byrons daughter, she was the first computer programmer. And i realized that she was a good frame for the book i was trying to write, because ada lovelace, which is where the book begins and ends, was as i said lord byrons daughter. And in the early 1800s she is growing up with a poetical streak because her fathers a great romantic poet. But her mother, lady byron is a mathematician, and her mother does not want ada to grow up to be like her father. Those of you who know anything about lord byron would know that lady byron at that point thought he was too much of a romantic poet [laughter] he had wandered off never to be seen again, so she had ada tutored in mathematics as if that was an antidote to being poetic or romantic. [laughter] it didnt quite work because ada lovelace combines poetry with mathematics. She stands at that intersection that i mention that steve jobs had talked about. And soon as i read that i remembered that intersection that was on the slides that Steve Jobs Used to show at every Product Launch. Go to youtube, and you can find it. And on the screen behind him when the Product Launch was over thered just be a street sign that said liberal arts technology, and he would say thats where we stand at apple, at that intersection. So i was thinking of ada standing at that intersection and reading about her because she wandered around Industrial Revolution england in the 1830s, and she saw the mechanical loons that were using punchcards to do beautiful patterns. They were mechanized looms. Her father lord byron was a luddite. And i mean that literally. His only speech in the house of lords was defending the follow ors of the man smashing the mechanical looms on the theory that the technology was putting people out of work. Back in the 1830s they thought that technology would put people out of work. They were wrong then theyre wrong now when they think that. But ada knew they were wrong and she looked at the punchcards that were doing these looms, and she had a friend named charles who was making a numerical calculator, and it was using punchcards. And she came up with a concept that is basically the heart of what the computer revolution is all about. With any type of programming, you can make a numerical machine do anything, she put it, anything that can be noted in symbols. Words, she said music art, patterns. And so she calm up and even came up and even showed in a published scientific paper which at that period was not usual for a woman to be plushing in scientific journals. She describes how this would work, and she even publishes step by step in a chart the first Computer Programming how you would instruct a machine to do a particular task that she had undertaken. And it is a program that goes step by step but has recursive loops and all sorts of embedded things. Something a c coder at miamidade would look at and say, i get it, thats what we do. So in other words, shes a pioneer computer programmer. It also amazed me there were so many women at the beginning of this revolution that had been somewhat written out of history. And so i leap forward 100 years to the 1930s, late 1930s when Real Computers finally come into existence. And to me, this is the beginning of a revolution, but its like the Industrial Revolution because two things happen. Its not just the steam engine and mechanical processes the way the industrial i mean the Industrial Revolution is not just a steam engine or mechanical processes its combining the two. When you start combining a steam engine with mechanical processes, you get an Industrial Revolution. And what happened for the digital revolution was the combination of computers with networks. The personal computer and the internet eventually. And to me, it was a true revolution. And i realized i had been writing about revolutions in the past. I wrote about the scientific revolution certainly the American Revolution we all know about. And i did Benjamin Franklin because i felt you should know the heros of that revolution because if you want to understand the values of america, where were coming there and where were going, it helps to know how our founders got us started. And yet there was nobody who had sort of tried to tie it all together and say here are the unknown heroes of that revolution. I got an email about an hour ago from a friend of mine i went to college with who had read the book, and he said, you know youre writing the history of our generation just like other people wrote the history of, you know, vietnam or world war ii or the depression generations, because the history of our generation the revolution of our generation was not political, not military, it was a digital revolution. And so i leap to the 1930s, having set it up with ada lovelace, and you get to an amazing character who youre going to learn a lot more about next week because i wanted to take him out of the shadows of history. His name is alan turing. So i worked very hard, but next week Benedict Cumberbatch will do it a thousand times better than ill be able to do, and its a really cool movie called the imitation game. And what alan turing did was threefold. First of all, he loves history. He understands ada lovelace. He builds on ada lovelace and the notion of a general purpose computer because he has to solve a very complicated math problem. As much as i love math, i wont burden you with the problem except its how you figure out whether things are provable or not in math. And he wants to figure it out and he does a mechanical process to do so. And to do it he comes up with the concept of a machine that can compute any logical sequence. Its basically universal. It can do anything. He uses it to solve the math problem but frankly the math problem except for a few math geeks here is not the more important part. The more important part was this concept of the univ. Al or total universal or total logical machine that could do anything. Then he goes to england secretly where theyre trying to break the german wartime codes. And there he works hes very much a loaner. Hes a Long Distance loner hes a Long Distance runner thats sent off to boarding school. His parents had gone to india in the Foreign Service hes left alone. He rides his boil for two days bicycle for two days to go to boarding school. At boarding school he discovers hes gay has a crush on a boy who dies of tuberculosis. So by the time alan turing gets to england, hes quite a loner, but he learns its all about collaboration, all about teamwork. Hes got to have people who have his back if hes going to do these things. So what they do is they break the german wartime codes which may have done more than anything else to help us win world war ii. And finally, coming out of it because hes wrestled with this question both of his homosexuality, free will are we programmed, are we are whoer because were like machines that are preprogrammed or do we have free will he wrestles with what he calls lady lovelaces objection. Because ada lovelace at the end of her paper saying machines can do everything and anything had a caveat. She said the one thing they wont be able to do is have imagination. They wont be able to originate thought. Machines will never think. Machines are different from humans. Alan turing says how would we know that . How can we test that . Alan turing is wrestling with this notion are we fundamentally different from machines . So alan turing, um comes up with what he calls the imitation game. As i said its name of the movie. We now call it the turing test, but its simply a way to decide whether or not a machine is thinking. You take a machine and put it in a different room with a human, you send in questions, and if after a while you cant tell the difference between the answers coming back from one side and the answer coming back from the other side you cant tell which is the machine and which is the human, he says that theres no reason to believe that a machine isnt thinking. Now, if youre in the philosophy department, you can argue all about consciousness and whether or not thats a good test, but it has become the defining test of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence of the digital age. And it sets up two strands of the digital revolution. The people like ada lovelace who believed that the point was to connect humans and Technology Humanities and science that the imagination and creativity of of us humans connected to the Processing Power of machines would each augment each other and that that partnership a symbiosis as she called it, would always be stronger than machines alone. And those who believe in the quest of Artificial Intelligence and believe were going to have robots that will not need us and therell be a singularity and well all be useless, i tend to be an optimist. Im on adas side. I believe that the combinations of humans and machines has always been more powerful than the quest for strict or pure Artificial Intelligence. I dont know what will happen in the future, but i always know that ever since alan turing wrote the imitation game paper, people have said in 20 years well have Artificial Intelligence. You can read that in any story in the 1950s, and you can go to the very beginning of this year and you can still say in 20 years well have Artificial Intelligence. Theres a wonderful guy in my book named j. C. R. Lickliter. Maybe so, but in the moon time why meantime, why dont we connect ourselves more closely to our machines because thats going to be more useful. So in all the data points we have has been that the combination that ada envisioned of the humanities and technology of humans and machines has always proved more fruitful than the quest for pure Artificial Intelligence. Now, alan turings own life in some ways is tragic heroic and somewhat of a reminder that maybe we arent machines. After he does the imitation game, he debates it with people. People keep saying, you know, thats not how it works. You have to have impulses consciousness, sexual desires. He went silent during those parts of the debate because at that time he was engaged when those bbc debates were happening that was so human, a machine would have found them incomprehensible. Hed picked up a 19yearold young man, moved in, they formed a relationship, gets burglarized, he admits to the police that they have a sexual relationship, and i think the police somewhat reluctantly because he is somewhat of a National Hero arrest him for it because it was still illegal back then. Very tragic. And they sentence him to, as if he were a machine have hormone treatments to change his orientation. Its really weird. Its as if you could reprogram the basic essence of who we are as humans. Totally wrong. But he goes along with it, takes it in stride for a while but then one night he takes an apple, dips it in cyanide bites into it and commits suicide. Thats not something a machine would have done. The imitation game was over. It was clear, alan turing was human. And to me, thats an inspirational thing which is a great heroic person who makes us understand the nature of our humanity and how we have to respect each aspect of our humanity. That ma between that he machine that he built with his team Tommy Flowers and others in england, was a great electronic machine called colossus which helped break the code. But it wasnt, oddly enough what you would call a turingcomplete machine, because it only had one purpose which was breaking the german codes. To be a real computer can because i ask myself in the book who did the first computer who invented the computer. And you would think it would be easy since its one of the most important inventions of our time, is it bell, edison, morse whos the guy or gal who invented the computer. Besides the computer in england there are two that are really in contention in the United States for this. Theres one in germany by herman siewz saw, but it gets bombed by the allies during the war, he never completes it. Or the one that would be a full electronic computer. Theres a guy at iowa state named john vincent attar nas soft. And this illustrates the difference between the loners and the people who know how to build teams. He built an electronic machine that he hoped would be a computer in the basement of the Physics Building in at iowa state. He had only one graduate student, he would get in his olds mobile and take long drives from iowa. Actually, he often drove to the illinois border because in illinois you could buy liquor by the drink which you couldnt do in iowa, so hed have a few drinks and clarify his thoughts that way. He comes back and pretty much gets the machine conceptualized, but it doesnt fully work. Why . Because he doesnt have mechanics, he doesnt have a team the punchcard burners kind of jam, other parts of the process dont work, and as a mechanical element. And in 1942 he gets called off and goes into the navy, and he leaves the machine in the basement of the building, and a year later it gets dismantled by somebody else who didnt know what this contraption was and throws it away. It would be lost to history because, as i say, creativity is a collaborative and team sport. Had it not been for the other person who i actually think is the foremost visionary of the computer in america and somebody you probably havent heard of, but i think is an exemplar of what the digital revolution was about. A guy named john mockly who from washington, d. C. Was part of that crowd of people who loved sharing ideas. He was part of the smithsonian and things, he was part of the carnegie institute. He loved going to woodpaneled buildings and book festivals and everything elsewhere he could be around and listen to people and share paper. So he goes around trying to figure out how do i make a computer. He visits bell labs, he goes to the 1939 worlds fair and sees things, he goes up to dartmouth he goes to harvard where theres a mach i computer, and he even hears about this guy out in iowa. So mockley takes his poor 9yearold kid and puts him in a car and drives all the way out to iowa state to visit this computer. And he spends four days there kind of looking at the computer learning what he can from it. This becomes a bonanza for those of you in this room who are intellectual property or patent lawyers because it ends up being a fight for 20 years of did he steal things. For me, its not about stealing. As steve jobs said, good artists barrow, great artists steal. You really have to pick up ideas from all over the place. Thats what innovation is, is saying i found this idea, im combining it with this idea. As ada lovelace said, imagination is a combining facility. So mockley gets back to the university of pennsylvania with all of these ideas, and he says but im going to need a team. So he hires not hires we partners with a great mechanic and engineer whos i think, one of his grandfather or something had invented the turkish taffy machine, so he knows how to, you know make machines that dont get all gummed up or whatever. There are all sorts of mechanics, there are people who do information theory helping him, him, and there are actually two sixth grade women mathematicians who are there to program it just in the tradition of ada lovelace. They were great women mathematicians because one of the things that surprised me, grace hopper, for example, who was doing this at harvard got her ph. D. In math from yale. And it stunned me to know that more women got ph. D. S in the math in the 1930s than a generation later both in proportion and absolute numbers. The before women were told they didnt know how to do math so they are at the fore front of this revolution. And what they do is the programming. And the boys with their toys you know,ing earth and mockley and all, they think that the hardwares the important thing. But the women actually know its not just how its wired, you have to be able to reprogram it because its doing Ballistic Missile tests atom bomb explosions and they write programming languages collaboratively. They create things like cobalt and in the end its the programming languages that become more important whether its this honeywell or sperryrand or univac hardware. The unfortunate thing is that women have often been written off the out of the history of Computer Programming. The day they finally unveil this machine at penn that this team created, its valentines day of 1946 because the war is finally over. They dont have to be secret about this machine. They have a huge demonstration for the press and all the dignitaries from washington and the women have to stay up, two of them Jean Jennings whose book pioneer programmer, a memoir, came out a couple years ago right after she died. Its a great little book describing what it was like to go from missouri to be programming the first computer. All these women, they program a wonderful demonstration that makes the front page of the new york times. Its a historic thing. All of the lights blinking. And then everybody goes off to houston hall at penn for this great candle lit dinner with the dignitaries, but the six women are not invited. They take their bus back to their apartments on valentines day of 1946 a cold february night. And you see after that the role of women begins to decline a bit in computing. Even in 1984 i think close to 40 of undergraduates studying Computer Science at american universities were women. Nowadays its 17 . Its gone in the wrong direction. There are many reasons for that which you all, you know, can encourage people to write books on. My only slice at this is that women didnt have enough role models in a way. As my daughter said when i asked her about ada lovelace, she said yeah, until i heard of ada lovelace, you know, she was a math person she loved computers, she said until i heard of ada lovelace, the only woman programmer id ever heard about was a character in a batman comic. So its useful since my father was an electrical engineer i had those role models and loved electronics. Its useful for people to have role models if theyre going to be inspiring or innovators. And thats, indeed, what we do when we write this book. We say these are your people who can be role models these are people who can help you understand what innovation is all about. Now, the computer is a pretty cool thing but iniac had, i think, 17,400 vacuum tubes. In order to make a great revolution it had to be made personal because thats the narrative arc of the digital revolution is taking a wonderful device and doing what ada lovelace said connecting them more intimately to us, making them more personal. So you have to have things like the computer. You have to have people like rick lickliter. As i said, hes one of the heroes in the book. He was at mit. It was right after world war ii and there was something that happened right after world war ii that really helped america become the powerhouse of the digital age, and that was that there was a collaboration between government funding and government, universities and private companies. It was a threeway collaboration in which from bell labs to bbn and other places, to sri and stanford and rand you had these laces in which the places in which the government was no longer Building Research labs like with the atom bomb but, instead, Funding Research at universities. Universities and government were collaborating with private companies to put it into practice. Thats now sort of blown up. Weve cut our research funding, were destroying the seed corn for future inventions. But also that sense that were all in this together. Now corporations think theyre at war with the government, and universities. But j. C. R. Lickliter and the Eisenhower Administration was the heyday of this combination. Realizes a few things. One is if youre going to have a good air defense system, you have to have quick interactive computers. Things that ive told you about these were big old compute ors and usually you had to bring your punch cards as if you were offering them to an oracle. I remember that punch cards and then the next day youd get your answer back. That doesnt work when the missile is coming in. [laughter] you need interactivity. Secondly, you need really good graphical user interfaces. By that i mean what you see on the screen has got to be really easy to understand. Cant be all those little command lines. Soic so lick litter helps create a screen in which you can tell the difference between a plane, a missile and a pigeon which is useful and a console jockey can do it right away. We dont think of that as being that important but that is the key to doing what i said was the tradition, making us more comfortable with our machines block and finally he knows that we have to network all these air Defense Systems together. He is a funny guy from missouri. Loves giving credit more than taking it so he calls it the intergalactic computer network. He the head of the Processing Division and it become this backbone of the internet, and he delegates this to all the people so that it is a collaborative process. He was like everybody in my book deeply into art music because he believed that the connection between art and science was what creativity is about. He used to go to museum with some of his engineers and they would stand in front of a picture for maybe an hour one of them said, and they would look at each brush stroke, and they would say, okay how did that add to the creativity . What was the artist thinking . He said he tried to create that in engineering but it was a collaborative process to create the internet. What he does is all the Research Centers now being fund by the pentagon as part of the try angle, theyre told they have to be part of this network and figure out how their computers going to communicate with the what are called ms, but pact switches or routers sent to the university and being great universities, they do what professors at great universities do they delegated this task to their graduate students. So you have a group of graduate students at ucla, with and sri next to stanford and university of utah, all the university of california, Santa Barbara the original sites and came bridge, mass, where theyre making the switches and routers, and in order to do it, they decide to make very collaborative. Theres a guy named steve clocker who i ran into years ago. Ill explain why. He was one of the two graduate students who helped write down what they were doing in the early days of the rules for this new network. And he said that he wanted to make sure that everybody felt included. He did not want it to be top down. I want node hierarchy no bosses no commands. It was all going to done collaboratively. He is stan neglect shower at his girlfriends parents house and he doesnt want to call them the protocols or instructions or plans or the proposals even for how you would take say a packet, break it up, put a header block on, have the header block to tell the packets to recombine when they got to the destination. Those type of things. He says how can i do it so everybody feels included. He finally comes up with the idea of calling it request for comment. They write these out decide how to get it done and call it a request for comment. Everybody feels theyre part of it. The interesting thing is dna is imbred into the internet today. Theres no central hub. Theres no command. Nobody runs the thing, as i should have told my boss back then when the first asked me. Nobody has a switch. Theres no hub like a phone system. Or even regional hubs like an airline system. Every single node on the internet has equal power to transmit receive, whatever store packets, and at one point we at Time Magazine wrote the reason it was done this way is so it would survive a soviet attack. That if the soviets bomb the hub of any system it could take out the Communication System but by having a distributed packet switch network, which this was, nobody could take it out. You bomb any of the nodes the internet routes around it. The internet routes around it. So we wrote in Time Magazine it was designed to survive a nuclear attack. We get a letter from steven crocker, whom i had never heard of. He said, i was there. Note not why we designed it. He wrote a letter explaining why. Time magazine back then believe it or not was somewhat arrogant. So it wrote him back and said were not going to print your alert because we have better sources than you. And our sources tell us is was dub to survive a nuclear attack. I was. This found it amusing. When i was writing this book i walked the cat back. I went back to files of Time Magazine. A guy named steven lukacich ran the office in the pentagon, and he said that we did it even though the people who were building it didnt know we were dooring it and getting the funding from congress and from the colonels in the pentagon because it was going to be a survivable command structure in case of a nuclear attack. So you can tell Steve Crocker that i was on top and he was on the bottom so he didnt really know what was happening. I had coffee with Steve Crocker one day and i mentioned it to him. He said you can tell steve i was on the bottom, and he was on the top, so he didnt know what was happening. And in some ways theyre both right. That the beauty of the internet. It is distributed and collaborative. Now in order to make a two revolution happen you had to connect the network to the computer. The computers had become these big old things but the kept getting smaller and smaller, and eventually you have the personal computer. Gets boring. It gets born in the early 1970s in a really cool way. A lot of tribed that come together especially in california and the bay area. People are hippies, people with the electric cool laid acid test people in communes and reading the whole earth catalogue too often and believe that at the tools should be controlled by people, not by the government or the pentagon or corporations. The Free Speech Movement at berkeley. A lot of electronic hackers and people from the electronic industry and people trying to hack into the phone company and rip off ma bell. All these people in the bay area and along with Community Organizers who want to bring Computing Power to the people. What happens is they all yearn for a personal computer, something the big corporations dont think theres any need for. But after a while, few hobbyists come up, including most notably the alter, a hobbiess computeunder you could solder from a kit and make a computer. It was lame. A few lights in front, toggle switches but you believed you had a computer. It gets on the cover of Popular Electronics and a couple things happen. One is at harvard i was there unfortunately somebody a little younger than me a little cooler than me bill gates convinced his friend, pal paul allen, to drop out of college, come live in cambridge. Paul allen sees the Popular Science in december 1973. And runs to courier house through the snow and says, this revolution is happening without us. They built a personal computer. We have to be in on this. Bill gates blows off all four of his exams and spent seven weeks with paul allen in a coding frenzy and creates basic and drops out of harvard to join the revolution. The al tear with basic, is brought rained. Theyre showing it off in places and is brought to something called the Home Brew Computer Club of pool. The Home Brew Computer Club by its name an amalgam of tribes, who earth catalogue types, electronic geeks people who want control of their tool and they show off the altar. A couple things happen. People have been waiting for programming because they knew the programming is more important than he hardware. They find bill gates basic and they take the tape and make 70 copies and give it away for free. That was the hacker mentality, software should be free. Another thing happens which steve woes wozniak says this is lame and he creates a Circuit Board that can connect a computer circuit and he can connect it to a tv monitor and a keyboard. Much bert than the stupid altar. So he does and it gets his friend steve jobs from from down the street to hundred lug the tv to a couple meetings and was being one of those hacker information should be free is handing out the spec sheets for his new compute for anybody who wants him. And then his friend steve jobs says, wait a minute articulation welcome go parents garage and make these things and still them. And thus out of that one small explosion there you see the birth of microsoft and the birth of apple. The home computer. But initially these computers are mainly used as personal devices. All these hackers, geeks commune types dont want to share their computers with the whole world. They want something they can take into the woods or whatever and have their own create different tool. Even why the 1990ss, personal computers were not connected to the networks. The real revolution had not happened. The steam engine had nonabout connected with the mechanical device. But in 1993 or so right when im there a few things happen. One of which is to give al gore his due. Its a joke when she says he invented the internet. He passes the gore act, which says that the internet should be open to anybody who can get online instead of just being for people at Research Institutions it should be public, open and free. And so until then, we were on things like America Online and exam come pew serve. It was illegal go directly to the internet. You dial up and but glory a garden but in 1994, very very beginning of the year, the web comes along, tim burners invented mark aye andreson invents the browser comes together with the gore act, government pool si, and soon instead of just being online you go out in something this worldwide win. Its really cool and helps bring it together. We in the Media Business made a couple bad mistakes then. We started pouring old wine into new bottles. We should have realized what were being doing on the Online Services were creating commune. Aristotle knew this. Were a social animal. We use our tiles to create communicate. Online services were doing that with Bulletin Boards and chat rooms and then we started dumping Time Magazine online but cool things happen because the street find its own uses for things. Theres a kid i met back then he said youre doing it all wrong help was a sophomore in college, named justin hall. And he said youre doing it all wrong. Youre turning this into a publishing medium. Site should be a community medium where people get to express himselfs and everybody is part of it. So he was keeping a list of cool web sites and also kept a log he called its web log, of his activities, what girls would date him exactly what happened when it did pictures of his private parts, a poem about his fathers suicide. It really skirted the line of too much information. But it became the way we communicated online and soon other people were doing web blogs. They everbal live shortened the name to blogs, and all of a sudden the street found its use for this web and it becomes once again a community medium. I give that whole story this way and then ill open it up for questions in a moment or two, because if you see everything ive talked about has been Ada Lovelaces vision we end up connecting more carefully, more closely, more intimately with our machines instead of creating machines that as lord byron would say, will replace us and get rid of us, and people say, well, havent we gotten near Artificial Intelligence when machines can think in ways we cant and that isnt that what say, wikipedia is it has all this information. You can find anything there. I say no, wikipedia is simply the connection of a great piece of software, wiki software, with human creativity. Millions of humans who are creating things after day for wikipedia. I remember the wonders of cloud sourcing and when wikipedia came i was writing my einstein book, and early on in the process, i did being a geek start editing stories on wikipedia and i get involved with the einstein story on wikipedia. Which is actually very great, the article on einstein except it had one passage that said, in 1937 einstein secretly traveled to albania so that the king could give him a visa to escape the nazis. Everything in that sentence is wrong. He didnt go to albania, he didnt travel on an albanian visa. So i took it out being anybody can edit on wikipedia and, boom, it comes back. So i take it out again and it comes right back in. I think this is ridiculous. Hard core albanian partisans are proud of this and they can point to some web site where some uncle somewhere said that his cousin told him that they saw einstein on the street in albania, and whatever. And so i keep finally im about to give up. Then all of a sudden its no longer there. I do not attribute there is to the wisdom of crowds. The wisdom of crowds was messed up. It was me. I helped fix that. Then it slowly dawned on me im just part of the crowd, one little person adding my tiny bit of wisdom occasionally to a crowd source medium and thats why Something Like wikipedia work. Even with google first of all, you can ask google a really really hard question, and it will what is the depth of the red sea i dont know, but will say 5347 feast whatever. Thats something your smartest friend doesnt know. If you ask it an ease request question, like can the crocodile play basketball, you maybe get the gators schedule. But you dont get anything close to an answer. But something a fouryearold could give you an answer. So machines are still fundamentally different from the human mind and theres no reason to separate them. The ada connection makes things work. And on a government funded project, back when it still worked that Government Research private company, university collaboration, and they realized, having a web caller go out and find out the answer to everything, you find out what other people, real humans made as links on their web sites and it combine this thought and wisdom and links of millions of people who create web pages with a computer algorithm and that has always been sort of the strength of our digital revolution. So the upshot of this story is as ive said at the beginning, its always important to be able to stand at that intersection of where humaninlaws meet technology because itself with cede ito engineers it wont be beautiful, the beautiful fontses on the original mac. Wont be creative. And indeed as we figure out our education we have to make sure people are curious, they question authority because thats the one thing innovate temperatures have in common, they always say, how do we know that . Question authority, whether its einstein looking at the first paragraph of newton that tells us time marches along irrespective of how we observe. I he would say how do we test that . As steve said in this unbelievably beautiful 1997 ad when he came back to apple, heres to the misfits this rebels the round pegness the square holes, the ones who think different, the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. And so its that notion of questioning authority, being a rebel, being having that sense of art and humanities that is very important, but the other reason i wrote this book it is works both ways. A lot of you are nodding itch can tell the people nodding most vigorously are the humanis, the ones who go to the museums, the ones who believe in the importance of art. But those of white us in that camp who bee acalled that one would say i dont note what a picasso is. I dont know the difference between hamlet and macbeth and you say, what but people like that sometimes are willing to joke that they dont know the difference between a gene and a chromosome or the difference between an integral or the differential equation or the difference between a transistor and capacitor. Theyre hard but not as hard as hamlet or macbeth or picassos painting. Those on the humanities art side i hope youll make an effort to see how beautiful it is that an elooktron stands on a piece of silicon and becomes a Semi Conductor and how you can dope it witch impurities to become an on off switch. I hope you understand the creativity of the engineers just as they should understand the creativity of the humanist, because, as i said if you like ada and you stan at the intersection you can be like her. You can understand the beauty of a piece of poetry, like one of her dads lines and visualize it. She walks in beauty like the night. You visualize that. Even though its a hard line to understand. But like ada she can also visualize what an algorithm did, what a mathematical equation would do because she knew that a feat of engineering or a piece of coding or mathematical equation was just as much as a piece of poetry the good lords brush stroke for painting something in our universe and that to me is the lesson of the digital revolution. Thank you all. [applause] applause. I see people lining up. This is good. It means theyre here to correct me and say why did you leave out so and so which is a great thing i regret. I think bob metcalf is here. He should have been in the book more too. Theres so many heros and i hope everybody can add to the book go ahead, sir. Yes, walter. My name is cia bird ki asked bird. I know you. As an author i always wondered how you can write so many books and still have a fulltime job. But well, your friend i dont work that hard at the institute. But more seriously on your current boo what is your take on Edward Snowdens revelations and what how are we going to save ourselves our privacy from the internet . Well, i am an optimist as you can tell and i think that i dont really approve of what Edward Snowden does but i can certainly see the Silver Linings that come from the fact that what is happening now. Weve having a great debate. Laws are being passed or not passed and people are agonizing over it. You have written about this a lot. Can we keep a step ahead of our technology . Will our moral sensibilities keep up with our technological advances . The answer starting when aristotle and socrates and plato are worrying about writing helping destroy memory and our minds, yes we tend to keep up with technology with a few bad mistakes like the atom bomb. Didnt think it through but now we have thought it enthusiasm its amazing that we wrestle with these things we are moral animal. So now were wrestling with the balance of privacy versus security and other things. I think we got the balance wrong, obviously well, shouldnt say obviously but i think even the head of the nsa would say we got the balance wrong, and we got the balance wrong. Why i am an optimist is i think this debate is happening in public, we live in a country where an Edward Snowden is being prosecutedded but we can stand up and say he shouldnt be, and we can have Michael Thain hayden, another person who what done these seek credit is wrong, but i wouldnt put him in jail because the reason we were doing that at the nsa was to protect the freedoms and liberties of our country. So we got the balance wrong. But well have to struggle to get it right. Its a messy process but im kind of i love living in a world where we can be debating Edward Snowden because it uses ill end this part by saying you need to have the humanities the philosophy, the politics and history. Those are the muscles you have to use to combine with technology, such as we can. Well, what witness dedean we had the postal system, what did your friend say about read ago peoples mail . We have to sort that out but it helps to know history, it helps to know the humanities in order to do them and philosophy to do the moral wrestling we have to do every single day whether it is being the head of a cabhailing app that can then track people where theyre going and what they do with it. Every day we got figure out what is right and what is wrong. Yes, sir. Yes walter im brad watson and we met at your as spend Aspen Institute in 2004 at the einstein conference i. Think your book came ought right after that. My question is ive just recently finished a Research Paper entitled planet series, god ecals seventh floor algorithm or toed equals 64, that is the theory of everything includesunder nit umbrella unified strings theory mitchell question is, can i just give you a copy of this . Sure. Bring it up and i promise i will not understand it because on his death bed dr. Einstein was still trying to figure out the unified theory and he sat there until the lines went off the paper. Ill give it to my friend brian green. Yes, sir. Thank you, i have no paper for you. My question is, for about the last eight years, twothirds of the American Public has felt the country is on the wrong track. I want you to know what role you think rapid technological change plays in that and do you have any advice for People Living with innovation and change at the pace its happening. Yes, embrace innovation, embrace change embrace technology and understand technology. I wrote this book partly because if your alienated from your technology, if you think your iphone is magic and dont quite know how the gps works youll be a little bet detached maybe alienated and maybe not understand and it be able to deal with it. We should try to understand our technology because our technology is just a tool and its only as good or as bad as we are. Im quite optimistic. I come i live in washington, dc trust me. This is a town where everybody thinks everything is coming apart at the seams. Its not. Were still the most creative country, still pops up with whether its going or facebook or apple that still has an economy that even though we couldnt get congress do figure out what the heck to do somehow the American People got an economy that is now growing much faster than europe, where everybody thought they knew what to do. We have unemployment going down if the problem we most face in this country is not that everything is going really bad in this country. Its that we have finally a new sense of prosperity but not everybody is sharing equally in it. We have to include people of color, women others. Thats why i love the coding project that jim was doing, launch code. We need to make sure that every kid in america understands the arts understands the humanities understands technology, and learns how to code and then theyre going to feel comfortable and our moral sense will be able to keep up with our technology. Yes, maam. Hi, walter. I didnt write anything either but im the daughter of a man who he majored in philosophy in college, went to graduate school, was trying to get a ph. D in philosophy at penn and was told, there are no jobs out there for philosophers. So, he left with a masters degree instead of a ph. D and then started to work in the telephone industry independent telephony specifically and had no training in Electrical Engineering but was trained as an apprentice in the industry and ended up inventing a number of machines for the telephone industry. So there he was a humanities person and was trained in all of this. So my question for you is, how can we encourage this today without a degree in engineering. He was a maybe of ieee guest i think one of the lessons from the story is that he was able to embrace engineering and apply what he thought about philosophy to it. I will say im not probably at his level but i was going to become a philadelphiaer. I got a graduate degree in philosophy and i went back to the blame i got my degree and talked to professors and said id like to pursue a course in philosophy journalism, and they both read my dissertation and both said i would be a good journalist. So i was in juvenilism instead of academic philadelphiaer. I think the understanding of philosophy helps me understand wrestling with free will. Einstein wondering if the god plays dice with the universe and everything is by chance and so i think we got to get unsilod. The people who study philosophy have to learn some engineering passion who have engineering backgrounds should embrace festival. You. I have two sets of friends, and you had a brilliant throwaway comment that said hackers and people who write software give it away for free thats their culture. Right. And you can get the chink in the armor and ultimately get a sixfigure job rewriting their code but the idea of commodification of these innovations, i also have friends who are trying to pay off their Student Loans by just writing an app. Let me write the app. So my question is from your perspective looking at centuries of genius and scientific innovators, does the current culture today of what i view as a price tag on genius does the current culture that i view as a price tag of ingenious affect genius . When i asked steve jobs about that he said if you are motivated mainly by making a profit you will cut corners, you will make the third Circuit Board inside a little ugly year because nobody will see it but if you care about your product you will even care about the products and seen. The Circuit Board will look beautiful. That may not seem like the best way to make a profit but in the end he will have a more lasting more profitable enterprise that will create more value. To me we all have to take pride in whatever we do and keep our eye on what we put in the river of history as steve jobs said instead of what we take out of the river. I will let senator gramm, one last question, will answer the question. And the wrenching hour. Everything you have written. Maybe will tell us what your next book will be. I am now retired and attorney, represented Many Companies and individuals. I am getting the hook. Dont worry about the hook. You know okay. An aspect of your book that deals to the key in an aside a book Marketing High Technology and went to more adventures said it is marketers that create products. Let me take that on. Steve and all the people i looked at said you have to have the product first and be a visionary. Is important to have legal people and marketers that Companies Get in trouble where the people running it care more about being a the marketer than being the person who just has a passion for the product. I dont say that to bob graham, one of my heroes who said can i ask you a question . I will do real quick last question from the senator. Congratulations on your daughter becoming a new member of congress. [applause] i am stunned. The last gentleman objected, what is your next project . I am not a absolutely sure but heres what i am chewing on. The question is what is the next project. I have always been interested in the intersection of art and technology. For many years i have been interested in the person who best exemplifies that in Human History and it would take a long time to climb that mountain because a lot of people have written about him, especially his art. If you look at the last page of this book you will see a drawing of true the in man. Lee and not a da vincis trying in which art and science are brought together in a thing of beauty. I would like to spend a decade or so halftime in florence. Kind of like venice. I would like to try to capture what it was like in the renaissance to not just combine art and science but to believe that there was no real difference between art and science. Thank you all. [applause] every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more on cspan2. Watch any of our past programs online at booktv. Org. Saturday january 24th is being called National Readathon day. What is that . A date in january, coming the january 24th when all across america we are inviting readers to commit to spend the afternoon reading any book that they like. You can do it at home or many of the venues participating across the country which include libraries and bookstores and