Coming age of mobility what do you mean by that . Guest well, its an information revolution, and weve been watching it for the last halfcentury. It spread into computers and overwhelmed media and advertising, and then it spread into telephones and we were carrying around the internet wherever we went. In this next stage the internet and the mobile machines will be carrying us around. Its going to be an age in which all kinds of new choices are going to surface for us and going to be able were going to be able to go a lot of places and it will have a big effect on our cities. And at the same Time Companies and city governments are going to be able to manage our movements, and that will raise all kinds of questions about privacy. So its just the next stage of the internet revolution. Host imagine a scenario, something you write about in your book, los angeles 2028. What should we expect . Guest well, one thing about information revolutions is you cant bet on dates. Weve seen it before with cell phones. John rossant and i, michael author, were in paris at the turnofthecentury around the year 2000 and were predicting smart phones were going to change communication i 2003. It turned out we were way early. They didnt come until 2007. But the changes are still important. So los angeles in 2028, what other going to see . We are going to see a lot more choices. They are going to have spent billions of dollars on public transportation. Theres going to be cars that are semiautonomous running in certain parts of los angeles. I dont think were going to have, i dont think by that point we will have fully Autonomous Cars going around that vast space, that we will have some other. And it could be airships Like Networks of small robotic drones that carry people hither in jans across los angeles. Host and you spend some time with mayor garcetti out there and you talked about the olympics and what theyre planning to do for that time. Guest yet. They have a lot of big projects they hope to get in gear by 2028 for the olympics. But it think the big thing is, and the big thing about los angeles is, people are really set up more than ever with traffic in los angeles, and they are so fed up that they decided to tax themselves, raising gas taxes to fund Public Transit. The hope for many of them is if we fund Public Transit, many of the people will leave the roads and things will move faster. Host with these billions of dollars that are being spent in los angeles, are they being spent on Smart Transportation or just more roads, more vehicles . Guest they are not being spent on more roads and more vehicles. They are being spent on a dramatic expansion of the metro system, more buses, more electric buses. They are looking at los angeles as of this testbed for all canes of all kinds of new technology. So the opening up and are telling people if you set up your new company, whether its scooters or Autonomous Cars were flying ships, you can try it out in los angeles. Host and that have met actual in santa monica, didnt it, with the bird scooter . Guest yeah, and a lot of people unhappy about it because one day the bird scooters just appeared on the sidewalks in santa monica and people looked at them and they saw how they could use their phones to activate them. The next thing you know they are writing around without helmets, getting in the way of some traffic and making some people very mad. And the funny thing about it was that the guy who set up bird had previously worked at uber, and the way that uber tradition has worked is barge in, offer your service, get a lot of people who like it, and then deal with the government once youve got a constituency and the fan base. And thats what bird did, andt angered officials in santa monica. But i was just there a few days ago and lots of people are sitting around on all kinds of scooters. Host now, in hop, skip, go you write this, if governments fail to assert their control with taxes and regulation, cheap ubiquitous Mobility Services could overwhelm the entire region much the way the automobile did. But, mr. Baker, some would argue that cheap Ubiquitous Service is what we want. Guest well, it is to a degree, but if its so cheap and ubiquitous, you might send a car 20 miles to pick up a special type of panini that you like. And so people, if its too cheap and get overused and overwhelm the infrastructure. It involves moving molecules, and you wont have a certain number of molecules you can move in a certain physical space. Host so what do you see as the role of the government in this coming mobility age . Guest well, garbage is going to have to take a much more active role than they did, then had in the internet revolution, and much more active than they did a century ago when cars came in. If you think about cars coming into our cities over the last century, they basically colonized our cities. As i was describing with bird, they develop their constituency, all motorists around the world, and then the motorists and the car industry forced cities to build immense infrastructure. All these roads and basically to pave much of the planet. In this next stage, its a chance for a do over. Cities that we visited in writing this book from los angeles, dubai, shanghai, each one has a different approach to it. What they have to do is figure out how to make things work efficiently, cleanly, and also giving everybody a chance to move around, and not just the rich. So there are questions of equity as well. Host so how is the approach in los angeles to the mobility generation different than that in dubai . Guest well, los angeles is a really hard place to govern. There are scores of different municipalities within los angeles county. Theres a lot of freedom, and thats part of what makes the United States and especially california unique. And so its a hard place to govern, whereas dubai, theres a Central Authority that has a lot of power. And so dubai is organizing things so that they can control movement. They are investing in all kinds of new technology, and like los angeles they are looking to become a testbed for flying machines, for robotic cars and all the rest. But all of the david in dubai is going to go to a command center, and that command center the goal in that command center is to move people and their things run as efficiently as the items at an amazon warehouse. Host you say in your book guest and so its a question of freedom. Its a a question of freedom versus efficiency. Host you say guest into by and the china they are going to have a lot of efficiency, and the question in the United States is going to be, how do we achieve that efficiency while still respecting peoples of data and giving them the freedom that we are used to . Host so in a sense in an authoritarian government like that in dubai, has an easier time of it . Guest yes. I mean i think thats true about all kinds of things with authoritarian governments. They have an easier time controlling things until people rise up. Host so into by you compare it to being on the jetsons. Guest well, its not there yet but thats the vision. The vision is to have flying airships early in this coming decade, and not just a few of them carrying people around carrying around which people do golf courses and luxury hotels. They want to have the flying airships carrying all kinds of people at the want of a fly metro, like a metro system with little stops all of her dubai with flying machines carrying people back and forth. Host what have they developed already . Guest well, they havent really develop anything. What theyve done is theyve opened their doors and theyve done test flights with a German Company where drones terry people across the city. But they are not at a point where its happening yet. They have a goal, or stretch goal of 2022 for these flying machines, but as i was saying earlier, cant count on dates for technology revolutions. If those machines dont prove to be safe, they cant go with it here they cant go with it yet. Host from your book, whoever controls the data will be in a position to manage movement. What data are we talking about and who should control it . Guest well, if you think about an autonomous car, its a huge data machine. It will have the equivalent of supercomputers in each car calculating each turn and recording everything thats happening in that car. And much of that information comes up on the networks. At the same time even scooters, bikes, all these machines are networked machines sensors. So theres a vast amount of data that will be recording every movement that humanity makes in the city. So who should have access to it . Thats going to be one of the big battles in this coming decade. Ill give an example. If you had ford wants to offer all kinds of great services, Digital Services in their cars. They want to have voice commands and interface with music and entertainment and maps and all the rest. So they could develop that technology themselves, or they could team up with amazon and give people alexa in the car. So if they get people alexa in the car, all of a sudden amazon has access to all this mobility data. Ford has access to less of it. So thats the decision that carmakers are going to have to make is, how much of the data do i want the Tech Companies to control . Because the Tech Companies are better at data and they of services that people want. Host but you go further in hop, skip, go and suggest that perhaps that data at the Tech Companies have should be turned over to governments. For efficiency sake. Guest well, i dont know if it should be turned over to government. I mean, one thing in helsinki what did you come in helsinki is one of the cities that we focus on, they dont turn the data over to government. What they do is they stipulate that every conveyance, whether its a bike share or a car share or a bus or a metro has to provide, has to provide mobility data with the same standard so that any company that wants to manage mobility and offer Mobility Services has access to this anonymized data and can use to provide services. And so thats a case where the government does control the data, but the government puts anonymized data and makes it available to entrepreneurs and companies. Host mr. Baker, you mentioned earlier ford motor company. In your book youre right that piece by piece Software Firms are out to conquer the car. And one of the characters in your book is chris thomas. Who is he . Guest well, chris thomas is a young man. He still a young man who went to ford. He was a graduate student at yale andy from detroit, and he asked for internship at ford. He went to ford and got the most or internship you could imagine. So he sent emails to all the top executives at ford saying that i just have a half hour of your time to talk about what i want out of this internship . He gets to talk for half an hour with the chairman of ford, billy ford, and tells him how boring is internship is and just bakes in for an interesting job. Billy ford eventually puts him in this project, which is a skunk works which you to scope out the future transportation in megacities. And so chris thomas sees this mobility revolution that we are talking about, and he convinces billy ford and others to set up a venture fund that will and vast in all of these new technologies. And so thats what he did. When we wrote the book, he was still doing that, but later he quit the venture fund called font malice i discussed discusp an education, basically a new university to develop the brainpower for new mobility in detroit. The idea being that they need to have the talent for these new technologies, robotics and other new technologies to keep the auto business in detroit. Host has he made any profit from what hes been doing since he left ford . Guest well, i imagine he did very well. Its a venture fund and its had a good lot of its investments in robotics and other mobility technologies. So i think hes done just fine. I dont think is making a ton of money with his education venture. The education i dont think is a huge profit maker. I think hes doing it to try to help detroit. Host a lot of the Mobility Technology that is being developed now has that seeing a return. Is that correct . Guest right. Whats happening is we are in the boom phase of a nascent industry. So money is pouring in to all kinds of startups and pictures. And Silicon Valley is just full of all kinds of mobility startups. At some point this boom phase will end and the investors will start asking difficult questions about whether the companies are making money, and that will lead as weve seen in previous iterations of the internet to some kind of a bubble bursting. Many of the companies, including im sure some of the companies that we profiled in this book, are likely to fail. Because thats what happens when booms and. And the others, the victors, the survivors, will pick up the brainpower, the code, the patterns and grow with it. Host mr. Baker, whats going on in china right now when it comes to the Mobility Technology . Guest china is all over this technology. They have got massive government funded investments in artificial intelligence, which is at the heart of many of these mobility technologies. They want to become leaders in robotic cars and autonomous vehicles. They are really big on airships. A want it all and they want china to be the leader in the technology, and also they want it to improve life in chinese cities. Because chinese cities are, like shanghai and beijing, are covered in smog and the traffic is miserable. If they can organize this right, they can make their cities much more attractive and vibrant, and at the same time become a a ler in perhaps the most Important Technology in the next ten or 20 years. Host youre right that china has by far the biggest and richest data sets on earth. Guest right. They dont have any citizen action groups that are decrying this or asking for anonymized data for all the rest. The chinese have access to the data and they can do with it what they want, and that gives them a big step up. Its quite a bit like to buy. Host and that makes a lot of americans suspicious, doesnt it . Guest yeah. No, its going to be a huge issue in this country, how do we reap the benefits of this revolution while maintaining our freedom and our privacy . Host stephen baker, in hop, skip, go you list three different items that you think Data Collection and this Technology Needs to be judged on. Open standards, algorithm audits, and Net Neutrality. Could you walk us through those, please . Guest sure. If you want a really vibrant Mobility System in a city where you can go what you want to go and everything works well, you need to have standards so that everybody has the same type of data. Its what i i was describing earlier about helsinki. If you remember, the cell phones back in the 90s and early 2000s, we had different standards and some cell phones couldnt talk to each other, and europe moved way ahead of us because they had a common standard. You could go from finland to portugal and make calls anywhere you wanted in europe. We need that kind of open standard in mobility so that everybody can build together and not have a fractured ecosystem. As far as audits go, theres all kinds of ways that companies and governments can misuse this data. And they could conceivably make things happen so that poor people cant move as fast as richer people, for example. Or they discriminate against certain types of people because they are not as economic, they dont provide the economic return. So what you want is an audit to make sure that the algorithms are fair. And what was the 13 . I forgot. Host Net Neutrality. Guest yeah. Well, Net Neutrality is related to the audits but the idea is that everybody should have equal access to the mobility, to move around in cities. Host have you found already inequality when it comes to mobility . Guest well, i think the world is full of inequality. We have cities that have transit deserts where people cant get Public Transit to get to a Job Interview or go to a school. And the idea is that we could perhaps use this nextgeneration mobility to provide more opportunities for this country people. This could all change real estate in cities. Because mobility deserts, people move from mobility deserts in part because the rate is low, at the rate is low because its such a pain to get anywhere. So there are areas in cities that would be fine and full of potential if they were not mobility deserts. And so if you had a system in which people could move around, whether its with car share, by chair, metro, whatever it is, and had access to more areas of the city, then it would have a big effect on the real estate markets in the cities. Host stephen baker, in hop, skip, go you have a futuristic vision where some of the highways, perhaps even the 405 in l. A. Would be a bike path or or a walking path or return to nature. Guest right. I think its going to be a while before the hundred five becomes a bike path, but yeah, the idea is, and helsinki is doing this. The idea is that if you have more people not using cars, using other options to move around, then you wont need as many parking lots. The county of los angeles has an immense amount of parking. I think its five times the area of paris in parking lots in san francisco. I mean come in los angeles. Thats an enormous opportunity for parks, schools, swimming pools, malls, whatever you want that doesnt have to be like that. In helsinki they have this venture thats called mobility as as a service, and the idea is that you open an app on a cell phone. It tells you how to get someplace and it has all the connections and theyve got a lot of transit in helsinki. And its all paid for with a monthly subscription. The idea is that you can use information this way and package it, people wont need the cars as much. And if people dont need their cars as much, then you can start turning highways into bike paths and greenways. Host how is it that helsinki became part of the cutting edge of the mobility revolution . Guest the finns are very advanced in technology