Business professor amy webb argues Artificial Intelligence is giving too much power to big corporations. My job is to model risk and i focus on technology and i come back to the same nine companies. They have relationships with universities and it doesnt mean that there are not other Companies Like salesforce or guber that are not doing Amazing Things they are also building the frameworks and theyve got the code bases. All of the roads lead to this end of the challenge that i have is if it is the case that Artificial Intelligence is not just being built to create a better microwave, although that is cool but to optimize our lives using a. Companies that dont look like us and dont have the same worldview as assess their publicly traded companies but i lived in china and japan and anybody that watches does publicly traded companies are still under the thumb of beijing aso there is no escape. It is because you are in lockstep with the Chinese Government and that matters because they had a brilliant person at the helm. Its a very effective leader and longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. You could go back through history and look at it with the big Strategic Initiatives and fiveyear plans and see how all of them never amounted to anything. We have a person in power and Leadership Team around who really understand technology. It seems like an Infrastructure Initiative in exchange for the deft diplomacy all around the world, silk road as well as latin america and with most people dont realize that this isnt just about the building physical bridges and roads it is a digital component as well. 58 countries are part of the digital side. They are getting chinese five ge and Cell Technology and also getting something called the social credit score system. So there are parts in Southern China right now where he might be at an intersection and if you jaywalk which is a legal, cameras will recognize who you are. You could have your face covered or be obscured, but the systems are very, very smart. And if they can recognize you by foster, i held you are walking. If you cause an interaction, your face gets put up on a digital billboard at that intersection along with your name and where you work and that information is transmitted to your employers and family members and if youve done it more than once, you might be told to report to a local Police Precinct and you are denoted so your total score is a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. Theres opportunities to earn points if youve done something good. Somebody can report the work and then you might get a few points of. This is a program that is intended to be national that hasnt rolled out nationally and you may be saying to yourself i dont live there so this is interesting but who cares. Well, let me tell you why this matters. First of all, the system already has presented 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets. More than 17 Million People last year couldnt fly. 5. 5 million couldnt buy a plane ticket and 300,000 who did a great job at work, their scores were too low and as a result, they were disqualified from standing up to management positions. And these are not just ethnic minorities being discriminated against. This is a shot at huge social control. You had me at talking microwaves. I dont know why all of this necessarily matters to me is the reason that it matters is the bri is if it is the case that they are aligning themselves with all these countries around the world many of which are economically vulnerable or they are vulnerable for any number of reasons because of Climate Change because theyve got political unrest and they are inching towards authoritarian leaders of the social credit score system is a good option for those places. It helps keep the populace in control and china is already exporting this to different places. Why this matters is because while we are fixated on warships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky, but we have forgotten to look at if they wage an economic war which effectively blocks us out of places to terms we dont like or understand. This potentially prevents us from doing business or from traveling and potentially it reshapes the world in any sort of new world order where china isnt just a pacing threat, militaristic but it becomes a formidable global threat to all of us. In the United States, there is an antagonistic relationship. Its a transactional relationship on good days but more often than not between the valley into dc. So, what ends up happening is theres a lack of understanding, there are not enough relationships and the valley does what it wants until somebody gets upset and apologizinapologize and then the same thing again. Until one day when you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding that they are broken up with a. Remember when the company is broken up, this is in fact. These companies have multiple positions and their intertwined in very complicated and if the United States will continue to define this audience and if it is going to continue to be funded the Education System and technology, then who is going to build out the future of ai among other parts of science and Everything Else . You cant just break these apart. It doesnt work that way. And in the process of arguing back and forth in the process, the companies are competing against each other rather than collaborating so this sets us up for inch by inch little by little daily permission being taken away. I no longer have the ability to back the car into the garage with my radio up on full volume. Thats because somebody that is a part of a small group, part of a small d small aei tribe decidy were going to optimize my best healthiest wife and i was probably unsafe like you are probably unsafe even though weve never been in a car accident, so i no longer have control over the volume in my car. That seems insignificant, but there is a compound affect overtime and we are all part now of this process is unfolding in slow motion. Youve heard the analogy of the fraud in the path and the water slowly over time the wailing. I dont want to be the dead frog in the pot. And i realize that sounds like hyperbole, but there are so many things happening that weve turned a blind eye to that at some point there is no ideal way to turn this back. There is a Single Person in charge and at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President of trump issued the order and we do not have the budget o or singular departmentn charge or Institutional Knowledge is spread throughout the federal government. And in the valley we have people that do want to do good by the enforced society but instead are constantly dealing with market demands. I dont think that the companies are evil. I dont think they intended to do harm. Weve gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken. Weve opened up archives to look at programs about technology. Next, anna wiener recalls her experience working for technical startups. The company that i worked for in San Francisco i was 24 and when i joined i was 25. So a worldly experience. And its an incredibly hard thing to do but many of them have dependents or that or whatever. I do not envy anyone in that position. His sympathy. The behavior that i saw institutionally as well as individually was more the result of a structural position than an individual failure. [inaudible] its not to be coy or offer a puzzle more than to suggest the incentives of the Business Model in the industry and i feel like i might do this with my own book like an American Girl doll someone read my book and mentioned i talked about how early members of my team walked into the Conference Room and our manager asked us for the five smartest people that you know. Why would they work here if it doesnt make sense there were so many other interesting things to do. These people are smart and talented and interested in other things, im here because i dont know my purpose in life and im trying to figure it out. They should have an economic value, but anyway this is the anecdotes that im telling in the buck. The first time i heard this texted me to say they must have read it on the blog post and so i feel like there is this thing that happens that has to do with the intellectual culture that i would call antiintellectual. It has to do more with people getting Business Advice and they have a ton of money and accountability to their investors and responsibility to their employees and they read a post this is how you can scale hiring and get people to set the tone for the company. Pay eight debate with five to 8,000 a. The industry has value and in the excellent book and investigation of uber [inaudible] it available at this bookstore. In the Business Model and business incentives they are shaped with Venture Capital and speed and scale within industry that has been here for 25, 30, 40 years or longer and you kind of get this product and expertise over the consideration of the iterative complex. I dont know what im talking about. Im so sorry. Im just kind of going for it. So i guess im wondering if theres parts that you take with you. You get this a lot from folks that i can think its unabashedly positive thing and in questioning that, its kind of dangerous sometimes. [inaudible] this is like the heart of the book. I dont know if i were t would k and appreciate the same things. I happened to be the right age to be a sort of ideal employee. What i admired and appreciated was the come artery into collective project if you will. I think that is also part of the problem but there seemed to be some potential in the one it just replicates how the structures that exist and i think that theres one more thing i did enjoy and appreciate about the startup culture. I think it is very earnest and as someone between the deep painful earnestness they might be wrong but i genuinely believe they think they are doing good for the world and i trust them when they say it and i think what is missing is more of a the problems are systemic. I dont think that they are individual. Do you feel like someone i feel like people say it wouldnt exist if they didnt have this crazy culture. Should it exist [inaudible] do you see one that is related to the incentives are of the industry that could potentially be forgiving of someone like that . You are gaining it back in your company and have to hit the next level whatever that is. For most they can get kind of desperate and have to do things and i dont know i think it is just linked to how this works but i also think this justification. Im not saying this is wrong to have your own reasons for doing a lot of this stuff. I do think that people are in the same position when they are not assholes. Youre probably familiar with they are using the same mechanism pointing out the request for somebody to come pick up this soon, delivered to the address into the platform is participating in the exchange by recording when its picked up and delivered executing a payment scheduling the address. That portion of the work is automated. But considering for increasingly we are aware because we can see those. If i said content moderation i dont think anybody would know what i was talking about. So now you know it is a job people do and provide a service to the training intelligence could certainly we are focused on a vast World Business started conducting businesstobusiness services below the surface of anything that you would ever see of any consumer and that is the work im going to talk about today. Its the world of editing, testing, it might be familiar to some of you in the room. Many of these do drive Artificial Intelligence and the clean data and most of you in the room know what im saying when i say that. But importantly and increasingly seeing the number of jobs it is quite hard. We are just going to keep a person into the moment of the Service Request and textbased so any time youve gone to a website and have a window popup you know that its a mixture of the script. So we had a person doing something on the spot that cant be quite completed some references that come to mind is just places that plug together. Certainly we could have manufacturing but could it add the button and the boat, for quite some time usually a matter of decades that is the important thing to take away. Automation eventually made it possible for us to go away in some cases but in others is the cost and reality of the paradox of automation that we call this being too sophisticated for the textile machinery to be able to consume through automation and a person was kept around. But its also in the world of federal Contract Labor so we used the example of the women that were made famous in the film Hidden Figures who could ask the time be brought in and it was a reference that quickly when they fail as computational experts eventually disappear they could be let go. Was it less valuable or did they even have a way of looking at employment precisely because theyd already moved forward an idea of what it was to value work, it was a particular profession and also a particular embodiment in this profession, white men of privilege with a very specific role to play. So continue this lineage in the staffing and Temp Services i point you to the book of the economy quite literally brokered undervaluing and labor because it was mostly young women who were collegeeducated and they made great office girls at the time but they were also expendable. By the time we get to the 80s and 2000 and off shoring of knowledge work it becomes harder to make the case that people are doing something precisely because they are doing work also being done by workers in the United States. And it becomes much more obvious that this is a question of labor arbitrage just as educated as anyone in the location of generating the request for work. And i often lament the case against microsoft and the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is necessary for a period of time for this project driven and it might be something where you need somebody with a specific kind of language expertise and coding expertise, but you know you are not going to need them for more than 12 months or 12 weeks for 12 days. What role do they have to tell e that worker at the time we get into the category so it is important to note the post 2000, Silicon Valley and especially 2001, what happens effectively we have the. Com bubble burst and there is that moment that was settled without caselaw that will leave questionable what to do with people as they will be held for a career and they came up with this in the settlement with federalist practices that treat the Management Systems that often dont leave them with the protection beyond the 12 month contract to be able to say i am employed and these benefits come with my employment. With the growth of the Service Industry and the staffing industry that serves request for needs. And lastly to see the shift toward all of the information economy that involves people with Information Service work. With coding and other valuable skills that take a great amount of training. But think about what it took to put up a website in the 2000s to hand code html how many do you know what im talking about . Now thats completely done with software. At that time we paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. That was my first work as 1099 so keep that in work of what can be augmented and with that complex communication that is beyond automation that is the question so beyond that cost of horizon for that human touch for some amount of time. So with that studying that which works with the anthropologist its hard to find the words to begin but looking at case studies to identify groups of workers to show the inside of their black box and how they organize the work what does the workflow look like and with the mechanism that can build out the Artificial Intelligence. The best way to describe is to talk about how i came upon the idea to write the book in the first place back in 2015 there were a number of terrorist attacks and the largest terrorist attack which killed over 130 people that it was found out after the fact that a lot of these were organized so they guy involved in working with defense agencies. It was a rough start in the beginning. Despite the fact that they have active on facebook. But a few years later facebook, google, youtube and amazon came together for a Global Internet forum to talk about how you could fight terrorism explicitly. This was something that was organized by the Tech Industry and for the Tech Industry. But again a lot of cooperation with government. That a few more months we saw a series of hurricanes korea hit puerto rico and wiped out the power grid and cell phone coverage nobody showed up who showed up . Those that came forward to build google showed up to provide internet and telecommunications coverage. And at this time i thought what is going on with Tech Industry there are just doing spreadsheets and calendars and app but getting involved in the core mission of used to be the full responsibility of government. Diplomacy counterterrorism Citizen Services and i thought there has to be a better w