All of this. As we continue our look at san joses literary culture, we hear from other john markoff talking about the history between women and computers and his book machines of loving grace. The name of the book is machines of loving grace, the quest for Common Ground between humans and robots. I got into this book. There is a specific reason and broad reason that i had been reporting on ai and robotics for the New York Times for decades and it just became an increasingly hot topic. The whole world became interested in robotics and ai and they were having an impact they hadnt had before. Until it didnt fail and began to succeed and specifically i had written in an earlier book about the prehistory of the personal computer, stuff that happened in stanford between 1965, 1975 leading to the first computer industry and modern internet but i noticed at the dawn of the era of internet thing computing 1962 there were two labs created equidistant from stanford, one was started by john mccarthy, a wellknown Computer Scientist who coined the term Artificial Intelligence 1956 and he came to stanford and created the stanford Artificial Intelligence laboratory in 1962, his goal was to create technology that could replace the human. He actually got money from the pentagon from the think tank that was the blue sky think tank for doing advanced military research and in his first sort of proposal he said he thought he could create a thinking machine in a decade, ten years to build strong ai. On the other side of campus was another laboratory started the same year by Douglas Engle bart. He invented the computer mouse and his project was called the augmentation research center, art. He needed intelligence augmentation lose rather than replace the human he wanted to extend the human was on one side of the campus you had ai and on the other side i a. It was an interesting dichotomy but also a paradox because if you augment a human or extend their capabilities, your human. This is my effort to square the circle as much as possible. Im sitting in front of an early pioneering platform and the name is shaky. It was the first truly autonomous robot, built to allow a new group of researchers to search ai and out of it came a host of technologies that almost everybody uses today, for example you can draw a line from the original Research Done in the 1960s to navigation systems, the stuff you use in your smartphone to navigate with and speech recognition is the first speech recognition was done as a control mechanism and at the time it didnt do much. It would move a little bit and have to move some more but that is where it started. So the two fields, Artificial Intelligence intelligence augmentation, have gone their separate ways and it is basically the reason they havent talked to each other as they have different values. The engineering groups, the ai guys are in love with robots, they are not thinking deeply about the consequences, they want to perfect the symptoms, and in some cases make money from them but often times simply want to push the technology as far as they can and dont think about the consequences. I found the Ia Developers think clearly about what the ethics are and the role of people and that is one of the reasons there hasnt been a lot of communication. As engineering disciplines they have entirely different values. Now a fair amount of credit to the field because as machines of not more powerful even these guys on the ai side realize something is happening that could change society and they are thinking about it and many of them are realizing we have to make these choices and they are making the right ethical choices. An example, the ceo of microsoft has called his company and intelligence augmentation company. He wants to use, he says, Ai Technology to extend humans rather than replace them. What is interesting about the way ai has accelerated into our lives is it comes into Consumer Price points we dont even notice. Going back to 20102011 steve jobs puts theory of the heart of the iphone and hundreds of millions of people use it, use google home. Hundreds of millions use courts on a. Hundreds of millions use amazon ago. It slipped in their. That is one example. Ai is, underneath the fact that machines can listen and understand, there is Software Google offers for free called Google Translate that allows you to give it a document in any number of languages, will give you back a pretty good translation. Not perfect but good enough which is quite remarkable. If you get in a modern car, i have a 2yearold volvo with a camera in it with Ai Technology inside it, able to follow lanes and make intelligent decisions, cars like the tesla have more ai software there is a Company Called mobile i, an Israeli Company that supplies camara and Ai Technology to many carmakers and over the next 510 years cars recently dont know if they will completely drive themselves but increasingly do things that will protect us from our mistakes, making cars safer. That is an example of ia use of Ai Technology. There is Ai Technology in modern cameras the correct and improve the photograph you take without you knowing about it. Everywhere, even in modern weapons increasingly, Ai Technology is being deployed. There is a growing debate in society whether ai systems should make killing decisions but they will be able to. The entire range of Human Behavior is being used by these new devices is going back to 1950, when Computers First came on the scene, every decade and a half as a society we start to get anxious about our relationship to machines and usually about whether we will take our jobs and clearly up until now most of that on a motion happens around blue collar jobs was a long period of time going back farther than the buggy whip machines replaced human labor. Machines are beginning to replace intellectual labor. People have seen this and over the space of three or four years has become an intense debate in society about the rate of change and some people made the case, some Computer Scientists believe technology is moving quickly enough that people put the date at 2045 that machines will be powerful enough to do all human jobs but i think that is wildly optimistic. There are lots and lots of points that which you can say machines are starting to have an impact on society and the economy and jobs but you have to remember there is a wellknown economist named John Maynard Keynes who in the 1930s wrote about automation and at that point he said technology replaces jobs, doesnt replace work and that is true until now and some of the engineers are saying this time it is going to be different, this time it will replace work. That is yet to be proven. One of the striking points that gets overlooked is right now in america there are 145 Million People working, more people at work than had ever been at work in history. We had 30 years of personal computers and technology blowing into society and more jobs. People come back and say yes, but the Labor Participation rate is declining. A number of people at work have looked at that very clearly and it is true, it is not a historic low, but when you pick it apart and say why is this happening to it is not about technology. It is mostly about things like my generation, baby boomers are starting to retire. And it turned out technology is down and if you look at the rest of the workforce that is what is happening, casts are being taken over, machines, jobs will change and wont go away. The question whether we will be transformed as an species by ai is something we need to start thinking about right now. A Computer Scientist who was one of the pioneers of personal computing has a really good way of thinking about the way we might shape or be shaped by these systems. He talks about the fact we are living with these conversational system and have to make a decision whether we are going to be their masters or they are going to be our masters or whether we will be partners and that is the human decision and increasingly we are going to talk to machines and take advice from them. One thing i worry about in terms of how humanity might be changed by this technology in the near term, i come from a generation the didnt want to take instructions from anyone and in San Francisco where i live half of the people are Walking Around looking at the palm of their hand. That cant be the end of progress lose something has to come after that but that is the way we interface with machines. There is a generation of young people who take instructions from the palm of their hand whether it is which corian foods to order or who to marry and i think that is potentially an insidious change, right now a kind of robotics called cloud robotics. One of the Amazing Things about interconnected robots is if you teach something to one robot they can all know it instantly. Getting information from one human to another takes a while but if we are all interconnected, think about the Obama Administration started something called the Obama Brain Initiative and the goal of the Obama Brain Initiative is not only to simultaneously read from 1 million neurons but to write to 1 million neurons in the human brain and that raises the possibility, totally sciencefiction but people are starting to touch on the idea of control. Maybe it is passing information but think about us being connected as species like the robots and this has been totally the realm of Science Fiction and we have to think about it. Cyborg is part human part machine, a term coined by nasa in 1961 and you have seen star trek and know about the board, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated, we have to be careful about the way we connect this technology to us. If we are going to offer humans intellectual prosthesis it is important to take them off because i think our humanity is about our independence and if we are all interconnected it might be some better thing but it wont be about humanity. I got into this book thinking about the question of what is our relationship with these machines a decade from now and how can we make it a good one and not a destructive one and came away thinking it is not an open and shut case but the reason to be optimistic is it is a human choice how we design these machines and we can going two directions, make machines that are incredibly destructive or machines that survey us, take away our privacy, kill us or we can build machines that care for aging humans, help surgeons to a better job, help lawyers make better decisions, two directions. The reason im optimistic is it comes down to human choice. I think the possibility the machines may make society much better. The cspan cities tour apple tv applicant san jose continues. Next a trip to Santa Clara University as we go inside their special elections. We are here in special collections at Santa Clara University library, Santa Clara University. Special collections are not only the keepers of the University Library rare books collection but also keepers of santa claras collective memory reflected in its record is and where we are particularly lucky, in this