Nine companies, the same companies that control the lions share of patents, that of an extraordinary of money that are able to attract the best talent because of the best food, you know, that have the relationships with universities here it doesnt mean there are not other Companies Like salesforce or nvidia over for not doing Amazing Things but its through these Nine Companies that Everything Else flows. The entire ai ecosystem in some way or another touches these nine. In addition to all of the things i just mentioned, they are also building the frameworks and the custom silicone chips and they have the code bases. All roads lead to these Nine Companies, and the challenge that i have is that if its the case that Artificial Intelligence is not just being built to create a better microwave, although thats cool, but instead to optimize our lives using data as currency, what does it mean when we relegate that are just a handful of companies and handful of people working at these companies who probably dont look like us and dont have the same worldviews as us, what are the longerterm downstream implications of that look like . Three of us companies are in china. They are publicly traded companies but i lived in china, i also lived in japan anybody who watches china knows that publicly took companies are still under the thumb of beijing. There is no escape. You could be an incredibly, if you are an kindly successful ceo it is because you are in lockstep in some ways with the chinese government. That matters because china currently has a brilliant brilliant person at the helm. President xi jinping is very, very smart. Hes a very effective leader and is a a very good longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning, and you could go back to register a look at a lot of their big Strategic Initiatives and a fiveyear plans and felt lot of them really never amount to anything. But i think things are different this time because we have a person in power and a Leadership Team around him who really understand technology. Youve probably heard of the belt and road initiative. So this seems like an Infrastructure Initiative figure building bridges and roads in exchange for debt diplomacy all around the world, all along the old silk road route as well as deep into latin america and africa. But what most people dont realize is that this isnt just about building physical bridges, physical roads. This is a digital component as well. So 58 countries are part of the digital side of the pri. Theyre getting 5g. Chinese psyche. Theyre getting Small Cell Technology and also getting something called chinese social credit score system. There are parts in Southern China right now where you might be at an intersection and if you jaywalk, which is illegal there, smart cameras placed around the intersection will recognize who you are. You can have your face covered or be obscured by the systems are very, very smart and they can recognize you by gait, posture, eye how your walking. So if youve caused an fraction your face gets thrown 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 to your family members. If youve done it more than once you might be told to report to a local police precinct. You are demoted. Your total score as a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. The opportunities to earn points if you have done something good. Somebody report meritorious work and then you might get a few points up. This is a program that is intended to be national that hasnt yet rolled out nationally and you may be saying to yourselves, well, thats china. I dont live there so this is very interesting, but who cares . Let me tell you why this matters to you. First of all, the system already has prevented 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets. More than 17 Million People last year couldnt fly. 5. 5 Million People couldnt buy a train ticket and 300,000 who did really great jobs at work, their scores were too low and they were as a result disqualified from ascending to management positions. These are not just ethnic minorities are being discriminated against. This is a shot at huge social control. And again you may be saying to yourself, listen, you had me at talking microwaves. I dont know what all of this necessarily matters to me, and the reason it matters is that bri. If its the case that china is aligning itself with all of these countries around the world, many of which are economically vulnerable or theyr available for any other number of reasons because of Climate Change or because they have political unrest, and they are inching toward authoritarian leaders. The social credit score system is a real good option for those places. It helps keep the populace in control and china is exporting this to various different places. Places. Why this matters because while we fix it on teacher wars and building big ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky, what we forgotten to look at this what happens if china wages and economic war which effectively blocks this at a places or forces us to come to terms that we dont like or understand . This potentially prevents us from doing business come from us traveling, and it potentially reshapes the world in a new world order or china is that just a pacing threat, a militaristic and economic pacing threat, but china becomes a formidable global threat to all of us here thats china. In the United States there is an antagonistic relationship, a transactional relationship on good days but an antagonistic relationship more often than not between the valley and d. C. What winds up happening is that lack of understanding, there are not enough relationships, the valley does what it wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologize and then they do the same thing again over and over and over again, until one day when you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding that they are broken up. You cant break up these companies. There are many reasons why some of them have to do with strategy, some of them have to do with the nuts and bolts of technology but this is not like bell. Remember when the bell company got broken up into baby bells . This is not telephoning. These companies have multiple divisions and their intertwined and very complicated, and if the United States is going to continue to defund science and if its going to continue to defund our Education System and technology, then who is going to build up the future of ai among other parts of science and tech and Everything Else . You cant just break these apart. It doesnt work that way. In the process of arguing back and forth, in the process these companies are competing against each other rather than collaborating. This sets us up inch by inch, little by little your daily permission is being taken away. I no longer have the ability to back my car into the crotch with rate upon footballing because somebody whos and a part of a small group was part of a small ai tribe decided it would going to optimize my best, healthiest life, and is probably unsafe, like you were probably unsafe even though weve never been in a car accident, so i dont have control over the balding in my car. That seems insignificant but theres a compounding effect over time. We are all part now of this process thats unfolding in slow motion here you heard the of the frog in the pot and the water slowly over time boiling and you dont realize it until the frog is dead. I dont want to be the dead frog in the pot. I realized that some slight hyperbole but there so many things that are happening that we turned a blind eye to that at some point there is no way to turned turn this back, theres a switch, though singular switch for ai. Theres no Single Person in charge and at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President trump issued an site and second order but that order on Artificial Intelligence is not selfexecuting. We do not have budgets. We do not have singular department of charge. We do not have Institutional Knowledge spread throughout our federal government. We have a lot of smart people but theyre not in the right places, and in the valley we have incredibly smart people who i do think what to do good by and for society, but who are instead constantly dealing with market demands. So let me be clear on this. I dont think the big Nine Companies and certainly not the g mafia which is our part of the big nine, i dont think they are evil. I dont think they intend to do more. I think weve got herself into a situation where the system is broken. Weve opened up our archives to look at recent other programs about technology next, reporter anna wiener recalls her expenses working for tech startups. The ceo of the company in seller cisco was 24 when entering the company. I was 25 so worldly experienced miles beyond him. He had been the company that traffic isnt terribly hard thing to do to run a company full of adults come completed m have dependence or debt or whatever. I didnt envy anyone in a position. You self select for the position if youre lucky. I have a lot of sympathy for someone who is growing up at the same time they are learning how to be a ceo. The reason i dont Name Companies or executives, one of them is i feel the behavior that i saw institutionally as was individually was more a result of a sort of structural position that any individual failure. I realize thats an exculpatory narrative or exculpatory framework, but [inaudible] but thats its not to be coy or offer a puzzle for people to solve, although im sure that [inaudible] im not against puzzles. I think its a sort of common leadership style or more to do with incentives with the Business Models than of the industry, and then to maybe illustrate this, i told this anecdote at another reading. [inaudible] i feel like im walking into these readings with my own book and its like im an American Girl doll. Like, here i am with my book. [laughing] so i read anyway, i think is in new york so we came up to and after reading and they had read my book and images a scene in which i talk about how early members of my team were brought into a Conference Room and our manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know . Bite their names down. We all did this exercise. Then look at your list. Why dont they were care . Was one of them Abraham Lincoln . [laughing] i was like why would they were care . This doesnt make sense. Theyre assuming of useful the useful things to the world, interesting things do in the world. Why would like my friends were in graduate school well, not that they would make their way to tech, but why would these people who are smart and talented an interest in other thinks the why should they be working at this Analytics Company . Im here because i dont know what my purpose is in life. Its that hubris and idea that these five smart people should work and because it economic value. Heres the thing come to think that hubris is how it is conducive to work . This is the anecdote on telly in my book. Sorry. Its a long story, i apologize. I feel like i i should have one line answer for everything. This woman came up to and me ar this event and she was like, the same thing happened at my company. Actually i was at the first i heard this. Another woman texted me to say this was like deja vu for me. I cant believe this happened either they must have all read it on a i was told in the room and asked to write down the names of the five smartest people i know at a totally Different Company unrelated come ceos probably are not friends. If you like theres a thing that happens in this culture that has to do with the intellectual culture that tech has fashioned herself which i would call antiintellectual but is more about that in the book, too. But that has to do more with people revisit advice, theyve never run a company before. They have a ton of money and a ton of accountability and attentive responsibly to their employees. How to lead so they read a a bg post that heres a you can scale hiring and get really good people for your core team that will set the team for the rest of your company. Corral your employees and a competent and asked them who the smartest people they know a push them to accoutrements he will pay you five or 8000 per recruiter i tried so hard to recruit people who were or were not the smartest people i know. [laughing] anyway, i think that the industry has values. You can speak to this as well, you may have seen this in your excellent book like investigation of uber. Its called super pumped by mike isaac that he will be signing afterwards. I think the Company Cultures assayed by the Business Model action in the business incentives and those are shaped by the incentives of the interest of Venture Capital say the participation speed and scale and acceleration coupled with the libertarian spirit of industry that has been incubating for 25 years, 30, 40 years. 2020, longer, 50 years. You kind of get this weird cultural product i dont know what im talking back, im sorry. Im just for it. Im going to touch isnt this on cspan . All right. Its fair to say theres a lot of i guess im wondering if theres parts of your experience that you take with you that others might appreciate. [inaudible] a lot of tech folks who think again, tech is doing good for the world and unabashedly a positive thing. Even questioning that, kind of dangerous sometimes. I guess im wondering, like if there are parts that you appreciated that you took away from your time in tech . And if you say no, thats fine. No, there is. This is like, i think the heart of the book is ambivalence, so i think there was a lot that i appreciate about working in tech. I dont know if in my 30s i would go back and appreciate the same things to be totally honest. I havent be the right agent have the right yearnings to be sort of an ideal employee in a certain way. But in my 20s having just moved here not knowing anyone from a different city, being told fusion meaning, run with it. It. I think what i admired and appreciated was the camaraderie, the sort of commitment to a, project, the collective project if you will. I liked that people seem to have autonomy for a little while. I think thats also part of the problem is people have autonomy who dont necessarily have the authority to have that autonomy or shouldnt necessarily, but there seems to be some potential in that he will often like the people with the most autonomy just replicates, you know, power structures that exist. Initially that was exciting to me. There was one more thing that it really did enjoy and appreciate about startup culture. I think its earnest in the sum who is constantly vacillating between like detached mockery and like deep painful earnestness. I i dont know if you can relat. [inaudible] anyone who yeah. They might be wrong but i genuinely believe people in tech you think theyre doing good for the world, believe they believe it and i dont trust them when they say. I think whats missing is more of like, i think the problems assistant. I dont think they are necessarily at the individual but of the curious what you think about that given your reporting on uber. But i do wonder, like do you, i dont know if youre legally supposed to answer this question, you just moved here but did you like someone i heard someone say that uber couldnt exist if it didnt have this basic culture my question is like, should it exist . Obviously that culture, that culture shouldnt exist and if you do that culture and the comp doesnt happen, maybe thats fine. But [inaudible] is that when youre going with this . [laughing] i think youre getting at the exact right thing. I think like, if you boil down how all of this works, youre getting investment in your company. You have to hit the next level, whatever that is what is users or raven or something, and for most Companies Get canned contes have to start doing things that might not be legal, right. I dont know, i think it is just make into a lot of this works, i also think, i think theres justification. Like the people who are already in the space, the encumbrance, protected in ways that are not necessarily fair and you can kind of like believe, im not saying this is wrong. Theres your own reason for doing a lot of this stuff. And also just go back to my own argument, i do think people are in this same structural position and they are not ass calls. Im not calling them with specific you have to be a jerk to do well in industry, depending on who the ceo is. You are watching booktv on cspan2 with other programs on technology from our archive. In september of 2019 microsoft Senior Researcher mary gray report on the workforce that drives Large TechnologyCompanies Like amazon, google and uber. You are probably familiar with the category of what will call online offline Platform Services anything from uber, lip, stored as come use the same mechanism. If the api Application Program interface put at the request for somebody come pick up the suit, deliver to this address and the platform is participate in that exchange by recording when the food is picked up and delivered come executing a payment, scheduling, giving an address. That portion of the work is automated. The delivery, the value of somebody being there to deliver the food, asked the party question we often are not considering. Or more increasing we are aware of it because we can see those folks. If id said content moderatio