Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Seventh Sense 20160710

Theyve held long, strongheld views, i think their war against dissent and desire to control has never been answer intense as they are today. Theres something fundamentally different and new. Youwalk this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Next, Joshua Cooper ramos coceo of Kissinger Associates talks about this book the seven inflame the seventh sense. [inaudible conversations] hello. Thank you, everybody, for coming. This is great. As a writer for most of the last two months ive been getting up eave morning saying to my wife, what if nobody reads the book . I woke up this morning, what if nobody comes . So its very nice to come out. And some of you are hear to talk about the buick but the realityes wire fortunate to have two friends of mine who i think will be more interesting and probably more fascinating than many of you. Jacob weisberg is a longtime journalist, published a book on Ronald Reagan i cant recommend highly enough, and mall gladwell, a writer and humorist. Nonfiction best sellers. So well talk about my new book, the seventh sense, and one of the things that ill be able to good over quickly in the conversation, one of the big ideas in the book is theres just so many questions to answer that this bottle of kind of talking to you is not spirally the right model. But we want tone it up to questions and debate and i hope people will talk about the ideas that are interesting. So, with that well well just have a little conversation up here. Jacob will talk to me and well all talk and then well open up for questions. Thank you for coming. Great too see so men people. Very nice of you. [applause] i was good to go say, welcome nyu graduated. I think i know you were probably tempted to celebrate after graduation but coming here and getting a start on your career is figuring out what this thing is all about is a good way to launch your postcollegiate you outperformed pea people out drinking. Or not. I was going to say the least famous person he i decided to be the moderator. So im going to try to just sort of direct the conversation a little bit, at least to get started, and i wanted to start it off just by asking josh a little bit of what he is trying to do in the book and how he got interested and just to get started, josh, what is the seventh sense . So, the historical concept is seventh sense is really this feeling, this instinct for the way in which were enmeshed in all of these networks which change things. When you look around the world and see the most expensive war on terrorism in human history, maybe producing more terrorists. An Economic Policy designed to help the middle class and stabilize the economy that appears to be kind of accelerating instability and fragility and causing deflation. You look at the political environment, all these things happening that are unexpected. My idea was to roll up my sleeves and understand what was driving that. Ill i came at imfrom a couple of different perspectives. One was a very interesting experience back when you and i were first getting into know each other in the 90s. I had briefly run an internet Startup Company that failed so i got that experience under my belt. And in the process of shutting it down i got a phone call from this guy i never heard of from moore. Mike morris. And mike said, you dont know me. Used to be a journalist and ive now moved into the Venture Capital business. Would you mind getting on a plane and coming tout Silicon Valley . I think theres a company you ought to think about joining. I was got to join time and i said, ill go out. So i fly out and mike, my First Encounter i was not prepared for what i got but future encounters with Venture Capitalists would not be that dissimilar. Showed up in San Francisco away in his convert rebel mercedes and took me down to a warehouse where three guys were sitting around, starting a company, and i said this where is you ought to work. Do i do this or go to Time Magazine which seemed like that was the icon of every possible dream you could have in journalism. So, i said, the opportunity to be employee number four at a Company Called yahoo. Theft not going anywhere, and i got on an airplane and now back to new york city think, thank goodness i missed that one. Have the civility of Time Magazine. So once opposite you make an 800 million mistake like that, you enif you have vision to you say to yourself, what was it i missed . And it was clear to me that there was this dynamic and this possibility of creation of incredible new basins of prosperity, information, ideas that came from just connection itself. So part of it part of where the seventh sense came from whats sense of gee i wish i had it back then and part of it was, look around the world. So many businesses the world we lived in, journalism, are being disrupt bid huge horses. I saw when i left journalism ten or 12 years ago and win into the advisory business and moved to china, these forces are really working out all over sever site. The things that have happened are happening to military affairs and economics and ideas are being overturned. So my question was, was there some way could i really get to the root of understanding this . We all know basic idea which is the connection connected phone, connected to journalists. Its just different being connected to an economy. I wanted to figure out what was underneath that and was there a certain sensibility. What i saw is there were people travis looked a a car and sees Something Different that produces uber and i just see a car. The story of the instinct. Its a learnable instinct, something that is usable because people have it but it does often kind of challenge traditional ways of thinking. Just to be very literal minded we know what the five senses are, and sixth sense is a sense of history. Thats right. The description of napoleon. Nietzsche. He used to kind nietzsches view, of the industry revolution, this is so crazy that my five sense are not enough and were going to go crazy. Nietzsche did anyhow. But we need an additional sense, this idea that you sort of had a sense of where this change was on the ebb and flow of human hoyt. It would give you something to grab on to the idea of the seventh sense we still knee the five senses and sixth sense also need a sense of what is mean to how does that change things. So its understanding of networks. Silicon valley people say they divide the world into people who get and it people who dont get it. People who get it, theyre talking about people who have this understanding of how connection changes the nature of business and just the nature of politics, changes the nature of everything, and people who take advantage of that. What i tried to do in the book is say that ability to understand networks is a piece but also incorporates a different element, which is that its not enough to understand the work. You have to understand the world in which theyre moving so i think i almost have a sense of kind of the world one way to look at its on the one hand you have a group of people who have a tremendous amount of power in politics and media, who dont understand how Networks Work and the process of trying to solve problems often make them worse. Then a group of people understand Networks Real and they tend to younger and silt the heart of companies where you can make the case, the google algorithm, the most powerful handles assembled in human hoyt and that group, who i talk about in the book and spend time with, doesnt necessarily understand the larger social construct. The idea of whether its the classical is in sol caval or the idea of what makes an economy or society function. So the rest of us are stuck in the middle. The cultivation of the seventh sense, maybe we can duck later about the issue odd around Artificial Intelligence. Were not machines. We have to understand both the networks and the history and ideas that surround them and that really havary path forward. Often this manifests itself and you tell these stories in a reversal of an existing power dynamic for asymmetry. Isis, you describe as the seventh sense phenomenon. Donald trump with just his little old his twitter account versus the republican establishment and that effect doesnt happen because some person or organization shows up and uses it differently. The networks permit you they change the way in which these forces behave. So when somebody looked at isis and thought these are just a bunch of yahoos with a truck. They discover when youre part of a connected system that ability to make these videos, horrible videos of people being behead as a viral power. That traditional power structures have hard time competing with. One more question i was thinking about reading in the book, do these people who are the beneficiaries of the phenomenon people who understand it or just beneficiaries of it . Does donald trump understand networks, understand what youre talking about intuitively or just somehow he has harnessed it. I think it is maybe a little bit of both. Theres this intuitive sense some people have how the Networks Work. And i think theres just there are many things. One thing about networks theyre very contagious. We build them to be we want them to be efficient. One point in the book is the Network Evolves in ways that what the networks want. What they want is to be connected all the time. Want to be super efficient. And so were Building Systems that are hyper contagious without necessarily the kind of foundational belief, structure saying, what are you doing in a very contagious system in this is really germane for better or worse in this kind of world of Foreign Policy and security because the larger historical narrative against which all this take place is when power shifts dramatically, when the way power is structured in a society shifts, that creates incredible disruption. In the book i make this comparison between enlightment and the Industrial Revolution. Wiped out many of the sacred european institutions which were ararchitected for a different idea whoa some be in charge. As you look around the world today there are very few institutions we trust more than we trust ten years ago, almost everything has kind of declined. And thats a worrisome sign. A question about what basis you build a new order. So malcolm, i thought, my god, david and goliath. Your most recent book it bass asymmetries that work out and surprising ways ways and why the are cases i was reading joshs book, how does your theory match up with his theory . Oh. You can tell we didnt prepare for this. Youre completely flummox beside myid flummoxed beside my question. I suppose the network is a lot of what josh is talking about is the deceptive power of networks, because we have an need to focus on a come pope next of a network we miss the kind of hidden power that comes from the connectivity. So in essence it does its a version of a david and goliath argument which is that david is actually much stronger than he appears. Im actually more what im more what i was more interested in after reading the book was the downside of networks. What makes i love for you to explain a little bit more, josh, what they cant do, and so if the opposite of a network is a hierarchy. What is the situations are networks best optimized for and what situations are hierarchies most appropriate for . Other question is i think were so early in this process of figure ought what Network Power means. The other question is, why Certain Networks structure themselves in certain ways, and can we predict in advance with Network Structures are likely to emerge . One classic model is is winner take all Network Structures. In the world we have nine platforms with more than a billion users, facebook, google, microsoft office, microsoft windows, youtube. And what is interesting is these systems have a winner take all effect. The more people who use facebook, the more anymore to use facebook and the more people use facebook. First of all creates natural monopolies are were not used to dealing with. The economic structures its very cheap for facebook to ad additional users so they get more and more profitable and has the effect of concentrating a huge amount of power in few people. If you look at the deal around. If you were fighting a war, you wanted to control the coast, you wanted to control the air space, the mountain passes. Well, to pollies are things that emerge purely as a result of connectivity. The difference between st. Petersburg and moscow is always 450 mileses. But depending on how its connected, it can take you a week or a millisecond to get there. Topologies change shape depending on the nature of the connection x. There are topologies for currencies, facebook has a topology, that famous six degrees of separation idea never heard of it. Yeah, exactly. All kinds of networks have top logical features and designs, and they tend to optimize themself for the design that makes them most efficient. So the interesting question is, you know, are there areas so we know, for instance, why the facebook effect works. Whats interesting is when you look at businesses like amazon that at the beginning, it wasnt inherently clear that a merchandise business was going to have that effect. The more people used amazon, therefore, more people would want to use it. Why couldnt more people use amazon and all these other things . The great Business Insight of jeff bezos was to drive this technology was the more people that used it, the faster the prices went down. Its not easy enough to say, okay, theres hierarchies in topologies or Network Structures which is kind of where i was. What you find is actually there are Different Network designs that serve different needs. And this is particularly interesting. As the great question about this when you talk to people who are designing these systems now are how are Artificial Intelligence systems going to distribute themselves . Theres an argument to be made that if you have access to all of this data, the smarter the a. I. System gets. It gets more data on itself, or more people want to use it so they can take advantage of it. Smarter and smarter. So part of to of the seventh see is what is the right distribution of power. And the last thing ill say about it and the reason thats important is it gets you right at the heart of these questions like how does a democratic system function. Its based on this premise of relatively equal distribution of power. Capitalism functions with this idea of relatively equal participation in the marketplace. What do you do when what the system craves is actually a very different kind of structure. But, i mean, im interested to hear you sort of explain in some specific examples whats different. I mean, we had, we had networks, young call them topologies if you want, you know, in the political structure of the 19th century. A political patronage system is a network. What is the sort of difference, and why is that vulnerable and not durable in relation to the kind of network, you know, president obamas social Media Network that he leveraged in the campaign . So i think its very important to say, actually, networks unlock a huge understanding of a lot of history. In fact, if you look at most of the great empires, you can think of them, in fact, as network systems. The empires that were built on the rivers of asia or india, that were built on the ocean. The British Empire was nothing if not an empire, it just happened to be conducted by ships instead of electrons. And theres a lot of interesting work being done in economics and history with you go back and understand the efficiencies as part of them. The biggest change now is two things. One is the incredible speed at which things happen on networks. Theres a famous line of one german general about a hundred years ago toward the end of the First World War who said, you know, if this negotiations leading up to the war with had been conducted by horseback instead of this damn telegraph, we could have avoided the war. We didnt know what to do about it. So that acceleration of daily life which we all know has spilled into the networks. Thats the first thing, the speed of the networks is unbelievably fast. And that, one of the things when you ask yourself what strives this Movement Towards a winnertakeall system, partly that is efficiency. Theyre much faster. If you had to look for your friends on facebook and myspace, you would discover its an inefficient process. There was a small team at facebook that about three years in when they were sort of at this pivot point, and friendster was still around, figured out this essential agreement which is if you joined facebook and got seven friends in ten days, you were likely to stay. That was the insight that led to this huge acceleration. So one is speed is different than in the past. And the second thing thats different is this kind of winnertakeall system in which the intelligence of the network, the more it sees, the smarter it gets, and so the better et get better it gets. Lets talk about business, politics and Foreign Policy. Now, you speak a lot to business audiences. The marketing world is very engaged in what youre doing. Do you see and you see, you talk to very different kinds of businesses. Do you see businesses that have an understanding of what josh is talking about, having a differential kind of success or picking up on your last question, are there places in the Business World where a much more conventional, hierarchical structure still obtains or still does that . Well, it seems to me that there are lots of businesses that are in a process of transition towards something that is a lot more, looks a lot more like a network and are having difficulty understanding how to adapt to that. So, for example, if you think about a hospital. The traditional understanding of a hospital is that the success of the hospital is driven by the skill of the doctors. You have world class surgeons, thats half the battle. But now when patients are driving decisions and Patient Satisfaction is so important, your Patient Satisfaction may be as much a function of how nice the receptionist was and how nice the person was who answered the phone as the skill of the surgeon. So thats a kind of, you know, if you think about it, now you have 20 different nodes you have to worry about as opposed to one or two. Now, is that what im sort of wrestling with is does that make the hospital a network . Im not sure. It gives it Certain Network qualities, and it changes the way you have to make decisions if youre running the hospital. Because all of a sudden you now have to a more obvious example would be a hotel. If i go to a hotel and i go on yelp and i give it a lousy rating, that may be because i had a bad encounter with one out of 600 employees, right . Thats a network biting you in the behind if youre running the hotel, right . You may have nailed 599 of the components of your network, and you missed out on one, and then somebody hates you for it. So, i mean, is that i dont know. Am i, is that yeah. Its a network vulnerability. I think thats one of the interesting things, in Network Terms they talk about it as expanding the attack surface. One of Things Networks do is highly connected systems have a larger footprint. Theres almost anywhere you can hit them, and you have this incredible asymmetry. Any one fault in the entire network can affect the system. Yeah. Picking up on that, the example of a hospital, used to be attracting the top surgeons was most of your job. Or in a hotel, running a great hotel was most of your job. In fact, i would think network in a slightly different sense, probably more of your success depends on what networks you tie into in what way. So, you know, networks for diagnosis, customer service, relationships to other possible institutions or in the hotel case. Are you on what reservation system are you on, you know . How what sort of accessibility and service do you offer or . Probably matters much more. If you have a terrible hotel, its not, youre not going to be successful over the long term. But you could have a very good hotel and not be very successful if youre not networked properly. Yeah. Well, you know, this actually raises my principal question around the book was the chapter in the book about security. Essentially, Computer Security. The security of Electronic Networks. And its a very, very powerful chapter which makes you very, very afraid. And it made me wonder is security such a crucial question that its deficient to make me want to opt out of networks entirely. If a bank came to me and said im going to be the unnetworked bank, im not even going to be on the internet, if you want to deposit money, you have to show up bank of the stone age. [laughter] or right now we have this phenomenon in hospitals around country are being held up by, theyre paying ransom to electronic thieves, right . Who take the medical records and give them back for 20 million or whatever it is. Why wouldnt the hospitals say, you know what . The threat of being in the network is such that were going to opt out. Is that i mean, i think the problem of security is so large and underappreciated that there are me scenarios where the threat from being in the network is greater than the benefits from being in the network. Do you yeah. I mean, i think the problem with it is that you cant, the costs, everybody has to do this cost benefit analysis. Think about the hospital case. So if you bo to a hospital, you would ideally like of to have the doctor be able to take your blood and immediately run that against the database of 100 Million People or a billion people and see whether or not theres anything interesting there. So it turns out the and as much as itd be fun to go to the hospital of the stone age, you actually want to have access to that information. So it turns out that the crucial decision is exactly this one, which is how connected are you. And how do you manage the gate between the inside and outside turns out to be the central locus of power in these systems. The other thing thats very interesting is that, i talk about this in the book, how did we end up with this incredibly Insecure Network decision . Where, basically, you cannot secure a computer. Theres not a single device in this room that we can safely secure. So one of the reasons the great thing that allowed the internet to grow so quickly with notion of something called postels principle, one of the early founders of the internet, and he was coming from against this sort of at t tradition which, you know, built these gianT Switching Centers and said nobody gets to connect to this unless theyve been approved. Postel, you know, this was the 60s, he said, okay, heres my principle be generous in what you accept, and be careful about what you send. But that fundamental instinct of openness is what allowed the internet to grow so much faster than other structures. The reason you can flip on your phone today and in five minutes get access to everything in the world is because, actually, this philosophical decision to start with a relatively open system. The problem with that is that it is a system that is spirally open. So its not entirely open. So its not architected from the bottom up to be secure. Theyve tried to fix this. Dns sec is a protocol that looks at every single bit of information on the internet and says where did that come from, sort of like a tsa for the internet. And just like the tsa, it has the effect of introducing totally unnecessary inefficiencies into the system. So the challenge is, what we want is more and more and more speed. We want our networks to be faster. So theres a famous try dilemma in manufacturing, which is you can have things any two of cheap, good and fast, right . So if you want to get a couch and youd like it to be fast, and youd like to get it really, really quickly, its probably not going to be very good. So you always have to balance those off. In security you can be open, you can be secure or fast, any two of those. So if you want to be open and you want to be really, really a fast, youre not going to be secure at all. And so its that balancing of those things where we are today. Heres why this is the reason that it kind of lands is that choice of that topology, that choice of the way we design the connected systems is one we made. And its one, i think, we can adjust to. When you talk to people thinking about the next generation of the internet, how do you solve the security problem as a first concern for Network Design . Yeah. Because, you know, when you present it that way, and we take it for granted that fast has to be one of the three, and we also celebrate networks because of their speed. When do we make this decision . What if i dont need networks to be fast . Especially much of the Network Relationships in my life are needlessly fast. You know, google doesnt actually have to get back to me in a fraction of a second. [laughter] im used to it now. When i had a dialup, it was a little slower, same result. Mall if you said, malcolm, im going to increase the amount of time google responds to you, or your bank does, citibanks going to get back to you in five minutes now. Now, if that was my expectation, i could actually and you it d me that would triple the security, i would take that deal in a heartbeat. Yeah. But people crave everything, speed has become the ultimate commodity of competition in the market. Why does m ason amazon need to deliver something to you in two hours as opposed to waiting . But see, josh, you say people crave. People crave that because theyre not properly pricing security. If you explain to every consumer not a single device you own is secure, what would you pay to make it secure, then it might have a very different attitude about fees. Yeah. One of the great technological issues is philosophically it shouldnt be a choice. That you actually, theres a moment which you can design the system. Were forced into that because of the way the system is designed. I think one of the reasons this is why i feel this was an important book to write is were making decisions about how we Design Systems now that are going to endure for decades to some degree. So the decision to have a relatively open system, which had a huge impact on the spread of the internet, introduces another set of costs. So just one quick thing on the security thing, most people think the fix for security is going to be a. I. That, essentially, you will have artificiallyintelligent machines that are serving as security guards on the internet and that are incredibly effective. And the solution is not that we take the existing tcp ip backbone of the internet and load that up with a bunch of tsa officers, but instead build an entirely new approach to that. But your fundamental point which, by the way, somebody who likes to sit and read paper books i share, is we are in this kind of speed loop of acceleration. And it has all kinds of effects. But youre both assuming that this tradeoff exists. But in the be real world where its sort of positing the possibility of security, but our fundamental experience of the last several years has been the total lack of security in the places where with we would most expect it. I mean, you know, government personnel records, you know, defense department, most classified materials, the National Security agency and the state department. I mean, these are the things they werent, they didnt think they were trading off the department of defense. Yeah. So, you know, and if you followed the issue about the iphone, and, or you know, apple making thinking its making the choice of security over, well, i mean, security of the system over accessibility to the criminal justice but, in fact, the fbi if you believe them figured out a way to hack the phone. Is security even possible . You forgotten the paradox of the government going after Hillary Clinton for sending classified emails on her blackberry when blackberrys almost certainly more secure than the u. S. Government which is possibly the most electronically porous we know the government was hacked, we dont know for sure hillarys blackberry was hacked. [laughter] they were essentially angry at her for moving things to a more secure environment. There was this moment when the department of defense sent out this email to all of their employees who had just received an email saying dont open any emails because it might be a phishing attack. Kind of this infinite loop of confusion. I want to go back to something you said, josh. So you said and i dont mean to only talk about Computer Security, but to my mind, that was the most interesting chapter in the book, because its the place where of any of the strands connect, and youre forced to kind of confront that were living in this incredibly networked world. We made a series of choices, and now we have to sort of deal with the consequences of those choices. And the thing about security is that why is it so difficult for us to talk about the downside of networks . Thats essentially what the security argument is about, right . Well, and also to design for it. Ill give you an example. I went to a conference on Artificial Intelligence and ethics. And all anybody wanted to talk about was this kind of canon call a. I. Problem, when the car has to go off the bridge, does it hit the bishop or the child, and how are you going to the bishop. [laughter] exactly. When its a obviously. [laughter] depends on who made the car. So, you know, and what you realize in that context is thats an interesting problem, but the background problem is actually much more interesting which is and the reason i think the Computer Security chapter is important its a metaphor for all the security and network systems. We are so vulnerable because of the design of these systems. One person anywhere on the system can shock the entire system. So one of the thing things thats happened is the nature of what it means to be at war and at peace is changing fairly dramatically. First of all, the distinction between the location of combat which used to always be on the front lines and safety in the rear areas has gone away with. Anything in this room can be weaponized by some hacker. And the second thing thats happened is that has eroded any sense that, okay, were at war or peace now. So when you ask yourself these questions about a. I. And ethics, you have to start by saying, well, we know ethics are very different in a time of war than at a time of peace, the way we approach the rule of law and all these other sorts of things. Think analyzing that question, what do networks do to our fundamental safety, its relevant for two reasons. First of all, we know that security from a political perspective is one of these things as it should be, a dominant psychological concern and causes massive shifts. When people feel insecure, they vote in certain ways, invest in certain ways that actually tend to make them less secure. The more nationalist and well armed a country becomes, the more nationalist and well armed its neighbor becomes. But its also important because we can choose how to design these systems. We can try to e design them that get rid of this false dichotomy and make us more secure. Im reminded, i once had lunch with a bunch of i. T. Security guys from major corporations, and they started talking about the things that scared them, and so i asked how many of them had satellite radio in their cars. None of them. No one told us. [laughter] they were like, are you kidding me . [laughter] not in a million years. This is another point which gets back to why are we getting so much speed. Were to willing to trade off. If you had said to me ten years ago im going to give you this device, its going to track your every movement, and in exchange for that ill save you five minutes in traffic, i would have said thats the ridiculous tradeoff, but thats exactly what my be Android Phone does. What you said oh, sorry. No, go ahead. I was struck by the german general quote that you had that says cant we go back to horseback . In a american sense hes not wrong, because when you do a crucial negotiation, you give each side more chance to think about things more clearly. What hes essentially saying is in the tradeoff between, in this case, speed, thoughtfulness and whatever third one is, im going to i would rather i dont mind a situation that builds in some kind of buffer, Decision Making buffer. And thats another really but its also a Network Design decision, right . So as we think about the networks now, to one of the problems is theres a theory in one of the kind of best established International Relations theories, this idea of whats known as offense defense theory. And this guy bob jury vis whos a professor at columbia essentially says when its very easy to attack, there are more wars. Its like when they invent stirrups on horses, people could suddenly charge mass lines. When they invented walls around fortified cities, the number of wars in europe went down dramatically. When somebody invented artillery that could poke through those walls, they went up dramatically. One of the questions you have to ask yourself today is to what kind of world do we live in . Baby the way, if you get this wrong, world war i. The machine gun, the best offensive weapon ever developed. Have you seen what it does to people . No problem wars going to be over by christmas. Turns out, it was the greatest defensive weapon in history, and it wasnt until the tank was developed that the war came to an end. So were coming out of a period, the nuclear era, when we didnt have wig, massive wars big, massive wars because it was nuclear. Com i canted. Com i cant. Anybody can manufacture a little bug, develop some sort of cyber attack. It also leads to more and more surprise attackses, arms race aring, so there are all these very dangerous conditions. And what you would like to do is step back and say exactly what you said, how to we design some delays into this system, build a network which gives us time to react so that we dont have to knee jerk our way through disaster after disaster . Those are the kinds of decisions that we can make. We can make them now, but were not really seeing it this that context. I mean, in the real world we are dependent on these networks. Were not prepared to abandon them in exchange for some sort of security that would come from not being a part of them. But we need protection. And we need protection in financial networks, we need protection in National Security networks. And you have in your book this idea of gatekeeping as a sort of core idea around Foreign Policy, around International Relations. And you talk about the sort of gatekeeping around the fundamental question whos inside the gate, whos outside the gate. I just want you to elaborate, because i think its such an interesting organizing principle particularly around Foreign Policy. Yeah, sure. I dont know if this is so for starters, i dont know if this is the right answer. One of the things i was trying to do in the book is be like, okay, what do the Networks Tell Us to some degree about how you solve these problems. I think there are a lot of interesting questions. One of the things we know about networks is weve seen in the last 10, 15 years, theyre accelerate accelerants to inequality. Thats an economic problem. Im not a thoughtful enough person in economics to have an idea, but i did try to think in the Foreign Policy perspective what it said. So weve struggled in the last, you know, decade or so really to articulate a grand strategy for the united states. Whats our picture of what the International System ought to the look like in 15, 20 years. Do the Networks Tell Us anything about where thats likely to go. So one of the things you find on these systems is theres such incredible power on deciding whos in or out. These winnertakeall systems again, and maybe even the best example is this one from cybersecurity. So in the future there will be a small number be, maybe even just one, cybersecurity database that outperforms every other database because it sees every disease. Its like a superimmune system. The more it sees, the stronger it gets at spotting these things called zero days which are these flaws built into the code without anybody knowing theyre there, which is kind of the way hackers get in the back doors. So all of us in this room may say, look, id like to sign up for this service so it protects me to some degree. Those systems get more and more powerful by a factor, an exponential factor because of something known as metcalfs law, this way to connect professors together in stanford in the 1970s. Discovered that the more people who connected to it, the power of that system grew exponentially, not just by one additional person. If you have ten people using phones or a hundred using phones, its not going up by a factor of ten, its much more than that. So you have a cybersecurity system, the more people who use it, the smarter it is, the better it is at defending itself. It also turns out that the cost of being outside that system grows even faster. So if you suddenly have a computer thats not connected to this core and its Getting Better and better at defending itself, that computer has no ability to defend itself. So the decision who is sort of inside or outside these gated communities turns out to be an incredibly important decision. And to the extent that being a part of a network which, again, in a choice people can make is possible, is a decision, the choice to be outside becomes very important. And from a Foreign Policy bear spect weve, you could perspective, you could begin to imagine a world of gated communities in which people decide whos in and whos out, and that becomes a nexus of power. So ultimately, small countries have to decide are they behind the u. S. Nato gate, the china gate, the russia gate . I mean, is that how the world evolves, do you think . It may. Because we know the fundamental activity of a nation in the International System is the search for security. And that question, i mean, the great question of our age to some degree for nations and each for individuals which gets to the sort of hospital question is are you the gatekeep or or the gate kept . On what basis are you going to be gate kept . So, yeah, i think thats the process that people are going to have to go through. And understanding this is sort of a speculative view of the world, but does that become a new kind of cold war . And in that framework does, you know, the offensive defensive balance shift towards the sort of mutuallyassured destruction model . I mean, in the early days of this, you know, weve had stuxnet. Weve, i mean, we have ourselves launched Cyber Attacks. But we very much dont like Cyber Attacks that have been directed against us. Right. Do we move towards a kind of global accommodation that the idea of attacking these networks is so terrible that we need to have a sort of mutual tacit or explicit agreement that we dont do that . One interesting finish the other version is does it change the incentive structure so much, people dont want to attack it because they themselves depend on it . I dont know the answer. I think thats what well puzzle our way through. If theres one big, large network, isnt the safest person, the little person not in the network . Remember they used to say years ago that there were far fewer viruses made for apple because apple pcs, because there were so because there were so few of them. So paradoxically, by choosing the less popular computer, you immunized yourself against a large portion of attack. So dont i really want to be switzerland in a world where there are these larging gated commitments . Is a choice and interesting structural ways to do that but thecosis you wouldnt get all these benefits. Im speculating here but the whole question is how choice the target . The reason you dont attack switzerland in the Second World War is the upside is small, the downside is large. You maybe lose x number of men. From a futurist network model, think i would feel less safer by myself. Also happens to touch on one of the deepest ideas of daoist philosophy. The goal is to be a useless tree. And theyve all been turned into boats and floors and beds and then one crooked tree is just kind of there surviving. So its not a bad strategy to deal with the lumberjacks. When you read the book it is frightening and some of the issues or terrifying we have at lest ashare the instinct of time to stock your cabin in the woods. Thats not a very fruitful might end done i think there is a lot of by the way the historical analogy the Industrial Revolution trying wars. People dont give up power easily. Thats the metta historical narrative here. I was out in at the valley last week, talking to somebody who he says the thing that people on the east coast dont really understand very well is that these are all positive sum games. The more people who use it, the better for everybody. Its not like i use it to compete. And the more who use facebook the better it is, and if you believe that philosophy, the question it produces are what kind of political system emerges . I hate to bang this drum but on opposite networks but strucks me that the logic of psychological advancement can lead as much to the rejection of networks as the dish let me give you an example. Two things that scare them are the cars great vulnerability and, two, is the grid. The electrical grid. Terrifies them. What do they want . They want an end to the grid. They think the network is actually incredibly dangerous, but they really want a thousand or even 100,000. Mininetworks so i can crash columbus, ohio, but i dont crash new york city at the same time. Thats what they want. Having seen and lived through a networked experience, they want to use the next duration of technology to liberate is from this this a case where the network was imposed worth security. The security concern is so great theyd rather give up and that enabled by the very same technology that is enabling the strength of other networks. This is why when i read your book i felt both terrified and also optimistic in the sense that it doesnt seem to me that we are logically ever more complex and could also be the exactly opposite direction. How do we choose to design . The question i find so interesting, you have some views on this we know that what happened with the Industrial Revolution realignment, starting with the reformation, everybody gets own access to god, dont have to go through anybody. Have the process after that, fining access to god, access to capital and land and boating and all about the liberation of the individual. So all the political systems there was a point at which having one guy with ten thousand serf was we saw massive replaced by democratic Systems People had access to god. Does a democratic capital him was kind of a model for that. How survive the world where things are happening super fast, small group of people with the ability to manipulate large group ohm without them knowing being it. Interesting question. There is a kind of parallel in american democracy to what youre talking about in that the system is evolving in a really undesigned way. We have a system that was designed, a constitutional system, it was the republican system which was intended to have democracy but with constraints and checks and balances, and thats changed pretty rapidly. Changed slowly over a long time and i think there was a broad social consensus that making the system more democratic was a good thing. We may be seeing now with the current political phenomenon that is transfixing everybody, a way in which an excess ifsively democratic system, a system that ties immediately reflective of mass will, can turn into a kind of majority tyranny, which is the anticipated problem. But its the evolution of the system. Think where theres a parallel to what youre talking about is theres a lot of building first and thinking later. So with these systems, the idea is that security is the afterthought rather than the result of a sort of premeditated design, is what is scary. Everything were going through in the election look different athletes historically where other periods where people decried the end of the American Democratic system . Not i mean, not because its nasty. Its been very nasty in the past. I think it does feel different to me because i think there is what has been exposed is were kind of getting off topic a little bit but i think were seeing a kind of nationalism, undemocratic thinking that has not been part of our political discourse. We talk about it just in relation to violence. I dont think we have had a major Party President ial candidate before who applauded violence and thought violence was a reasonable tactic within the system. The interesting historical to go back and look at the ask yourself the question why countries like spain and italy and japan and germany have this hyper nationalist culture and a theory is that those were societies with the Industrial Revolution with immature political structure and britain and france entered the revolutionings absorbed the shock. Its a very interesting question which is as the shock of the information revolution hits societies what are the ones built to ride that wave out. Can you take a seventh sense view of a country and say this with haun the networks to survive the shock and this one doesnt. Democratic theory, the possibility of immediate democracy, which is in some ways an expression of a jeffersonian was never possible. You couldnt do that in the 18th century. Had to have representative democracy. We now hey the possible of immediate dem democracy. The best democratic system is one in there was electronically on every issue the country confronted several times a day. We could make our decisions that way. I think that would be a very bad idea but we are develop allege lot of habit that emulate that. What people do on social media all day long is express their views. They vote on Different Things and theres a way in which that is happening, and i think that is floating itself. Im very curious about that. Do we imagine in future president ial elections the candidates says youre not just vote fog mr. York voting for my ai. Who do you want to answer the phone at 3 00 a. M. . Theyre like how many elections after that the ai himselfs is running for president. Won five straight championships and you should go with me. The new job of president is gatekeeper. Yes. Should we take some questions. Lets open it up for questions. I think maybe i dont know if we have microphones but if we dont, please speak theres a microphone back there. So walk up to themake crow phone and ask your d microphone and ask you question, just ask one question and make it as much to the point as possible. Michael caldwell. I work at a data and Analytics Company in new york. My question is, generally these networks were talking about are all software companies. Technology companies. Generally a lot of these companies have received Venture Capital investment. At what point shortterm versus longterm do you think this tickets the risk and probability of the security . If a Company Receives an investment and the negotiation is for more a shortterm return versus longterm, how does that effect the security . Not looking for a specific answer but your your thoughts. I think we over in the answer which is that we discover that the investment security is so de minimis compared to the architecture and he nature of the systems. If you watch, as i did in course of reporting this book, hacking competitions and you see these people who at 22yearold kid can cut through a browser built by ph. Ds, its clear the ph. Ds were not focused on security and were focused he how to render graphics and track people. So the nature of this is already optimizes towards features other than security and the Economic Impact is investors want return. I had a conversation with a Venture Capitalist who said it was possible to build an alternate secure internet and it could be fun for maybe 50 million or 100 municipal dollar, and he had a guy who he south to do it. Is he going to do . He said, no, the guy had this idea, something involving shoes and thought it was more going to put it on the shelf for the moment, which is perfectly calculated everything is that it wrong with it. You mentioned that Industrial Revolution did have an impact. And now networking is having a major impact. Id like to know what system you expect after networking to have a major impact. I mean the real question is the answer is obvious has to do with Artificial Intelligence, which is the way in which we interact with the machines. Theres a human in the loop and the speed at which that is progressing in 1997 was the first time a computer, an ibm computer was able to beat a world class chess player, and the week that happened the New York Times wrote a piece saying, this is dramatic thing that happened but its going to be 100 years before they can beat a go player because its too complex. As we know alpha go, the worlds champion go player, four out of five matches in the last few weeks. So, the speed of the development of ai is extraordinary, and we have so little understanding of it, and the world of people doing Ai Development dont want to be regulated. They just want to move as fast as they can. So thats the world of the future. In the book in ai theres two camps of people. The group who the great question new ai is you build un. When is it coming for you . Theres two theories. A group called the box, and the boxers believe you can put ai in a box. You can design it in a way theres to problem getting out. Then another group either the realists or the paranoiaics. No matter how good a box you build, its going to get out. Imagine that a being that was a million times less intelligent than you, tried to break intoure home you would find a way to get out. So, these guys, the famous line of the people who dont belief in the boxers is that connecting an a toye any system is look liking macgunfire in a room with dis discarded tools and say well re be back to get you. The is an interesting question. Were building these things. All you have to do the seeds are being planned in the paper. Yesterday, google io, same thing with the facebook conference they had. And i think thats what youre seeing. Everybody they do believe that the next great platform is ai platform. May be the first have five billion people on it. Nobody wants to miss the Economic Opportunity associated with that. So that world of people is kind of driving news that direction. At the moment with very little supervision and very few people that can understand that. A tiny group of people who understand that. Grumpy old man, if i roll grumpy ai. I always check the example of ai finally betting a human at chess because it strikes me that is an example that precisely analogous to a car beating a human running a race. So, by 1910, an automobile could outpace a human being. But the whole point of races, supposed to be between human beings. Apples and oranges. Of course, a computer can beat us. The right question im had dipper in beijing with the chairmanship of the world go association, id a a dinner with the current children who is chinese and i said in my kind of september dont you node to add a fourth thing to that rotation, going from chinese to japanese and korean and machine. He said its exciting because its going change the human against human game. Theyre not that interested the computerrer is going to beat it, like betting a car. But racing is maybe gets more interesting as a result. Isnt there a huge gap in social and ethical thinking around technology . I mean, a lot of people given what has happened cyber security, what we have been talking about, Artificial Intelligence is terrifying in medicine genetics is integrated into the process. In the forprofit Technology World its not. A huge afterthought. The last chapper of the book begins with plato and appeareds if ai. So how do we educate ourselves in values that will allow to us answer the questions and can we do fast enough . Because the incentive to build these things fasters and fastser. Theres a much of interesting philosophers who are working on the problems of ai and ethics and its what you would expect it to be for something that is five years old. Its very primitive. The work of i think the nature of the age were moving into means everything has to be reassessed the way we run our economies, the way we communicate, have political tours, its exciting bork it doesnt feel like anybody is doing it. Im wondering about ponzi schemes. They dont work in 2036 because theyre anything like ponzi in networks . In. Different Network Designs have different vulnerables. So one of the moments in the history of the internetwas this great engineer from rand, had been asked to solve this problem of how is it that American Military bases communicate with the white house after a Nuclear Attack . So he came to new york city, downtown, where theres the giant at T Switching Center in charge of linking the military bases together. The network there was one switching center so just lad to hit the switching center and the supplier military would be blinded. So rands great instinct was to create a distributive system which became the internet. The interest question about the ponzi scheme, one thing another our Current System it does allow for very rapid propagation of errors and mistakes anywhere in the system. So, the problem of this highly concentrated center where everybody goes to google and facebook. If anything virus that can escape out of facebook, pod injection in your machine, everybody who connects there is influenced. So that is a its again why its not quite rite to say its net one,s very hierarchy. Its not a ponzi scheme but it is a dangerous ways arent internet is a ponzi scheme is another thing. Has the tenth sense always existed and has the seventh sense always existed or just that we finally have a tool or platform where were able to express it, its able to be compared and compete, and then possibly if theres one that becomes dominant, will there be an eight sense . My next book. If you read the book youll see i start the book actually with a tour of ancient chinese philosophy. When i moved to china i had a good friend, one of them was a chinese zenmaster who would say the seventh sense is always here. This feeling for the interconnectedness of all things and what happened in our modern lives is we have become too were all about individual. The great enlightenment, what determine your future werure own dreams and ideas but that made it too focused on ourselves. So the tenth sense did always exist and it isnt getting back to that. Its very backwards looking tos degree and that sort of values informs a lot of the thinking there. One interesting thing is how to actually cultivate it. Not simply by master neuronetworks. Its be getting back to this deeper questions. Im janey hall, a former journalist turned former analyst at linked inlinked inhere in new york. They discussed the fourth Industrial Revolution that could displace five million to ten million jobs in the next number of years. Now theres a big push to get everybody how to get ready for that and learn how to code and which would be an impetus to get you to work for a company or work directly for the companies that leverage these few social metworks, like power, whatever you can learn now. How do you think that sorry dont know how to word this how do you think that we can make that a good push to technology and not push all the power interest just leveraging these few handful of networks or companies. I dont in the answer to that. One thing im always struck by is the way in which people are so confident the jobs will take care of themselves. People say in the Industrial Revolution people would wipe out all the jobs and then people found jobs a nurses and journalists and other things. So i dont know that for sure. Im not confident that an economic structure of a Competitive Labor force where so much work is done by machines continues to be the model. And then you get into core questions, how does a life what is he roll of role of labor in a life . The Industrial Revolution south africas me as too narrow a concept. I think it is actually something completely different. If you look at it in industrial terms you may miss low lake indication of where the changes are happening the location where the changes are happening. Hi. Im speaking more about as a talk a lot about the system and the network. What about people in the sense that you mentioned billions of networks for facebook and twitter, et cetera. Most of those, a lot of them on affection, are about friends, and about being nice, in a sense. Youre not trying to be a negative person in these billions of people. So, im just wondering about connection, and this billions of people now are about how they find compassion, how they find gratitude, in the connection, moving away from a lot of the Security Issues that we talk a lot of macro kind of ideas. How about the people . You literally wrote the book on this. Did i . Exactly. Thinking about how do humans distribute information and friendship and other things on networks. Have you seen any changes in that dynamic has the world becomes more connected . First of all, very artfully hand off to me. Thats the eighth sense. Coming in 2018. I well, thats the Million Dollar question. Do social networks are they simply energizing and accentuate ing existing patterns patterns of social interaction or creating new ones . I always thought it was the former, but like most things i once believed, i think its the latter. I dont know whether i still think theres this more interested in many of these case nets response to trend than the trend itself. So, the more and more that we rely on Electronic Networks to manage our social interactions, the more privileged the old school face to face encount are becomes in a certain way. Now that it used to be that i talked to everyone on the phone. Now i talk to almost no one on the phone. When i do have a phone conversation, its incredibly difficult by virtue of its not. I won novelty. Wonder if well go back to vinyl on many different levels. As i was a person built one of these said the great the building the social networks was about mapping the real connections into the virtual world, and so many people when they started in this internet revolution, im going to make an entire community of people who like cats and thats a giant business for me and it was the seven friends in ten days on facebook that was pulling those ones in. But it is interesting now, you see this kind of hunger for getting back to old school. Make a shameless plug for my wifes business which is into crafting and runs a business which brings together people and what is interesting is they have these craft jams they do and its not theres some preexisting network. There happens to be a group of people in a sewing circle and they use technology to get together to form one. So its kind of pushing it from the virtual back into the real. If you were to believe david brooks, none of us have friends anymore. So, were just sitting at home alone. So that was thats when i call you, you weep. All right. Take maybe one or two last questions. Technologist in the finance industry and nyu grad student. It seems to me that networks over time have developed the ability to create a protective layer that kind of represents the will of the many in the network that see the benefit of network, against the negative effect that a few nodes would inject, and we can see that in the way we drive today. You see one or two people running a redlight but everybody else obediently pauses and stops. We all have unlimited phone minutes but we dont try to call each other and stuff like that. The Financial Market seems to kind of hit some ebbs and tides put they want the same thing. Is there a way is there a finite limit or ability to keep growing our networks, yet still develop the frameworks that protect us . Some of these are imbedded in system. Theres a lot of really fascinating work done systems which is very represent, questions cyber security. What makes a system resilient. Row best u bust against different challenges. The problem is the speedness, from a design perspective. If youre optimizing for speed, youre actually optimizing in some cases to create accelerants for bad behavior all the dangerous behavior because those are things that spread faster. A third kind of gain control of what is in or out turns out to be crucial do you have social structures that actually bring out the best in people . When theyre faceless do you have that shared values. So its interesting, its less how the networks evolve. What gets interesting, Network Science is interesting but so primitive today because mostly were studying single networks. What is really interesting, you understand from the financial work is the interaction of people doing networks and short are term trading and weather forecasting networks that have an impact. So, one of the issues and part of the ron i end the book with plato of all things, this idea that the network cant just have a Technological Network you need a social network that serves to control the pace of this, to stop infections but if you just build a Technological Network theres no way to protect itself. That is worn off by the speed and friction of these. Maybe one last question. My name is nancy. Im super fascinated by the concept our weak the networks are. We brought up the electric grid is one of the i. T. Guys biggest during struck me that nobody has talk about Climate Change and the fact that is our biggest threat against these networks, these gatekeeping societies, so when governments how do we break down the walls and come together on the biggest threat of all that is threatening humankind and how could toe use the trends and upticks to come together as one network and fight the overall threat of Climate Change. Its actually there are there were maybe three questions i started the book with and they were derived from the issue of