Programs from our archives that focus on technology. Watch them in their entirety by visiting our website, book tv. Org and use the search function at the top of the major. First from march 2019, nyu Stearns School of business professor argues that Artificial Intelligence is giving too much power to big corporations. My job is to model risk for a living and i primarily focus on technology and i over and over come back to the same companies that control the lions share of patents, that have an extraordinary amount of money, that are able to attract the best talent because they have the best food. That much have the relationships with universities, and it doesnt mean that there arent other Companies Like salesforce or nvidia or uber that arent doing amazing things, but its three the Nine Companies that this throws. And it touches all of these nine. In addition theyre building the frameworks and custom silicon chips and the code basis, 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 to just a handful of companies and a handful of people working at these companies who probably dont look like us and dont have the same world views as us. What are the longer term downstream implications of that look like . Three of those companies are in china. Theyre the back, alibaba and theyre publicly traded companies, i lived in china and also lived in japan, anybody who watches china knows that publicly traded companies are still under the thumb of beijing. So there is no escape. You could be an incredibly if youre an incredibly successful ceo its because youre in lockstep in some ways with the Chinese Government and 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 a very good longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. And you could go back throughout history and look at a lot of their Strategic Initiatives and fiveyear plans and see how a lot of them really never amounted to anything, but i think things are different this time. And theyre different because we have a person in power and a Leadership Team around him who really understand technology. And so, youve probably heard of the belten road initiative. So this seems like an Infrastructure Initiative youre building bridges and roads in exchange for debt diplomacy, all around the world, all along the 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, and physical roads. Theres a digital component as well. So 58 countries are part of the digital side of the bri. Theyre getting 5g. Chinese 5g, Small Cell Technology and something called chinas social credit score system. So 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 you could be obscured, but these systems are very, very smart and they can recognize you by gait, by posture, by how youre walking, and so if youve you know caused an infraction, 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 and if youve done it more than once you might be told to report to a local police precinct. And you are demoted. So your total score as a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. There are opportunities to earn points if youve done something good. Somebody can report meritorious work and you might get a few points up. This is a program intended to be national that hasnt yet rolled out nationally and you may be saying to yourselves, well, thats china. I dont live this, so i dont this is very interesting, but you know, who cares . Well, let me tell you why it matters to you. First of all, this prevented 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets. More than 17 Million People last year couldnt fly, 5 1 2 Million People last year cant buy a train ticket and 300,000 people who really did great jobs at work, their scores were too low and they were as a result disqualified from ascending to management positions. And these arent just ethnic minorities who are being discriminated against. This is a shot at huge social control and again, you may be saying to yourselves, listen, you had me at talking microwaves. I dont know why all of this necessarily matters to me and the reason that 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 theyre vulnerable for any other number of reasons because of climate range or because theyve got political unrest, and they are inching forward authoritarian leaders, the social credit score system is a real good option for those places, it helps keep the populous in control and china is exporting this to various different places. Why in matters is because while were fixated on future wars and building big ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky, we have forgotten to look at what happens if china wages an economic war which effectively blocks us out of places or forces us to come to terms that we dont like or understand. This potentially prevents us from doing business, us from travelling. And it potentially reshapes the world in a sort of new world order where china is not just a pacing threat, a militaristic and economic pacing threat, but china becomes a formidable global threat to all of us. Thats china. In the United States theres an antagonistic relationship, its transactional relationship on good days, but an antagonistic relationship more often than not between the valley and d. C. And so, what wind up happening is theres a lack of understanding, there arent enough relationships, the valley sort of does what it wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologize and then do the same thing again over and over and over again until one day when you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding theyre broken up. You cant break up niece these companies. And there is strategy and nuts and bolts technology. This is not like bell. Remember when the bell company got broken up into baby bells. This is not that. This is not telephony. The companies have multiple divisions and theyre 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 out 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 and in the process of, you know, arguing back and forth, in the process, these companies are competing against each other rather than collaborating. So this sets us up for, you know, 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 garage with the radio up on full volume because somebody who is in part after small group, part of a small ai tribe decided that wre going to optimize my best healthiest life and that i was probably unsafe like youre probably unsafe even though weve never been in car accidents, so i no longer have control over the volume in my car. That seems insignificant, but theres a compounding effect over time, and we are all part now of this process thats unfolding in slow motion. Youve heard the analogy of the frog and the pot and the water slowly every time boiling and you dont realize it until the frog is dead. I dont want to be the dead frog in the pot and i realized 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 way to turn this back. Theres no switch. Theres no singular switch for ai. Theres no Single Person thats in charge and at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President trump issued a and signed an executive order, but that executive order on Artificial Intelligence is not selfexecuting. We do not have budget, we do not have an a singular department in charge. We do not have spread in the federal government. There are a lot of smart people, but not in the right places and in the valley, we have incredibly smart people who i do think want 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 that the big Nine Companies and certainly not the g mafia, our part of the big nine, i dont think theyre evil. I dont think they intend to do harm. I think weve gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken. Weve opened your our archives to look at recent authors on technology. Next, a reporter recalls her experiences working for tech startups. The ceo of the company, the Second Company i worked for, the first in San Francisco, i was 24 when i joined the company, i was 25. Experience, miles beyond. And the company had been through i think its incredibly hard thing to do to run a company full of adults many have dependents and debts and whatever. You selfselect for that position if youre lucky, but i have a lot of sympathy for someone who is growing up at the same time theyre learning how to be a ceo. I think that the reason i dont Name Companies and dont name executives. There are a few of them, but one of them i feel that the behavior that i saw institutionally was sort of an individual failure and i realize its exculpatory narrative or frim framework. She doesnt name any of the companies or people and its very but that is its not to be coy or to be like offer a puzzle for people to solve. Im sure that that kind of. Yeah, but more than i want to suggest what i think is a sort of common leadership style or it has more to do with the incentives of the business moedles than of the industry and to illustrate this i told this anecdote on another reading. I just like, i feel like im walking onto these readings with my own book and im like an American Girl doll. Like. [laughte [laughte [laughter]. Im here with my book. So i think it was in new york someone came up to me after a reading and they had read my book and they mentioned where i talked about early members of my team were in a Conference Room and the manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know, write their names down and we all did this exercise, and then you say, look at your list, why dont they work here . And one was abraham lincoln. Why would they work here . You know, in doesnt make sense, there are so many other useful things to do in the world and interesting things to do in the world. Why would my friends in graduate school well, they probably would make their to tech, but why would people who are smart and talented and interested in other things why should they work at this analytics company. And im here because i dont know my purpose and the health insurance, its hubris and the five smartest people you know should work here because its economic value and this is what i mean about conflation. Anyway do you think that thats the this is the thing, do you think that hubris is endemic to how these things work or thats required to this is the anecdote im telling you now. Sorry. Yes, i totally do, sorry. And i apologize. Much i should have like a oneline that and someone came up to me after this event and shes like the same thing happened in my company and i heard this another woman who worked in San Francisco had texted me to say, this was like deja vu for me, i cant believe this happened to you and they must have read it on a blog post and i, too, was asked to write down the five smartest people i know at a totally different company. And the intellectual culture that they have heavy for itself i would call it people never run a company before, they have suddenly have a ton of money, a ton of accountability to their investors, a ton of responsibility to their employees and try to figure out how to read, so they read a blog post and this is how to get your core team and corral your employees into the Conference Room and ask who the smarters people they know are and push them to recruit, and well give you 5 to 8,000 to recruit and i pushed so hard for the people who were and were not the smartest people i know. And the industry has values. You could speak to this as well, that, you maybe have seen this in your excellent book investigation of uber. Its called super punk by mike isaac, available at this bookstore. Hell be signing afterwards. I think that the company cull yours are shaped by the Business Models and incentives and those are for the Venture Capital so you have the prioritization of speed, scale and whatever, coupled with the sort of like libertarian spirit of the industry that has been incubate, if you will, for, you know, 25 years, 30, 40 years, i dont know, and 2020 longer, 50 years. And you kind of get this like weird cultural products that doesnt value expertise values over consideration and research, has a sort of iterative complex. I dont know what im talking about, im just going for it. Okay. I dont remember, actually. On cspan. So, all right, so fair to say theres a lot in the book, im wondering if there are parts of your experience in some of these companies that you take with you, and appreciate it. A lot of times, i mean, generally, you get this a lot. And a lot of tech folks who think, again, tech is doing good for the world and unabashedly sort of a positive thing and youve been questioning that is kind of dangerous at times. So i guess im wondering for the benefit of that, like if there are parts of the culture or whatever that you appreciated that you took away from your time in tech . If you say there is, this is like the the heart of the book is ambivalence. So i think there was a lot that i appreciated 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 happen to be the right age and have the right yearnings to be a sort of ideal employee in a certain way. In my 20s. Im 32. Like four years ago when it mattered. But, yeah, in my 20s, having just moved here, not knowing anyone from a different city, trying to find meaning, and run with it. I think what i admired and appreciated was the camaraderie, the sort of commitment to a common project, a collective project, if you will. I liked that people had autonomy or seemed to have autonomy at least for a little i think thats part of the problem, people having autonomy that dont necessarily have the authority to have that autonomy or shouldnt necessarily, but there seemed to be some potential in that even though often the people with the most autonomy sort of replicates, you know, power structures that exist externally and have and exciting to me. I think that, theres one more thing that i really did enjoy and appreciate about startup culture, i think its very earnest in that someone who is constantly vacillating between mockery and deep painful earnestness, i dont know if you can relate. [laughter] and anyone who is yeah. [laughte [laughter] that they might be wrong, but i generally believe that people in tech think theyre doing good for the world and i trust them when they say it. I think whats missing, i think the problems are systemic, i dont think theyre necessarily rooted in the individual although id be curious what you make of that given your book on uber and travis my book i wonder, i dont know if youre legally allowed to answer this question, move just to the next one if you want to. Do you feel like i heard some people say uber couldnt exist if it werent for the crazy culture. My question, should it exist. If you dont have that culture and the company doesnt happen, maybe thats fine, but can any of these things do you see that as do you feel that thats where youre going with this . Do you see a structural explanation for his behavior, one thats related to incentives and the incentives of the Business Model or of the industry that could potential i be forgiving of Something Like that or i think that youre getting at the exact right thing. I think the whole like if you boil down how all of this works, youre getting investment in your company. You have to hit the next level or whatever whether its users or revenue or something, and for most companies, it can get kind of desperate so you have to start doing things that maybe not be legal. Or legal, right. And i dont know, i think its just baked into how a lot of this works, but i also think theres justification, the people who already own the space, the incumbents, protected in ways that are not necessarily fair and you can kind of like believe im not saying this is wrong, you can believe you have your own reasons for doing the stuff, so and also to go back on my own argument, i do think that people are in the same structural position and theyre not a holes. Do you have to be a jerk to do well in this industry, right . Depending who the ceo is. Youre watching book tv on cspan2 with author programs on technology, from our archives n department of 2019, microsoft senior researchers mary gray reported on the work force that drives Large TechnologyCompanies Like amazon, google and uber. Youre probably familiar with a category of what well call online off line Platform Services from uber, lyft, dor door dash, theyre use ag