Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books About Technology 20240713

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 Technology Companies 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 ago interface, putting out a request for somebody, pick up this food, deliver it to this address and the platform is participating in that exchange by recording when the food is picked up and delivered, executing a payment, scheduling, they arrive, giving an address. That portion of the work automated, the delivery, somebody being there to deliver the food thats part of the equation we often arent considering. More increasingly were a wear of it because we can see those folks. If i said that content was part of this labor, i dont think that anybody would know. Content moderation is a job that people do, its absolutely providing another service which is training Artificial Intelligence, and there are people in the computable loop performing this service. Were focused on vast business startups, afternoon business to business, below the service than anything youll see as an end consumer. Thats the world ill talk about today. So any time you got onto a website and had a help window pop up you know its a mixture of script and a person who is assisting you. In thinking about that world of work where you have the person whos doing something on the spot they cant be quite completed by automation, theres probably some points of reference that come to mind and we cover this in the book. Its places to thread together. Theres continuity here and how we treated people who are there for what we imagine will be a moment because automation will come around and they would be replaced. That might look like piecework went in the days of textiles certainly we could have manufacturing knock out the shirt but could add the button, the bow . Known. From white sometime and usually thats a matter of decades, yes itemization made it possible for peace works to go away and textiles in some cases, in other cases greater costs but also the reality of the paradox of automation last miles what we call this the bow its helping too sophisticated for textile machinery to be able to consume through automation met the person was kept around. Its also in the world of federal Contract Labor so we use example of the women who were made famous in the film Hidden Figures who could at the time you brought it to serve as computers which weekend at mit know that was a reference to the people, not the machines, and just as quickly when the need for them, that the man for their services as competition experts eventually disappeared they could be let go. There was no security in that employment but was it less valuable . We had already moved forward an idea of what it was to value work. It was fulltime employment, particular professions and often particular bodies embodied in those professions, men, white made a privilege who had very specific roles to play. Anyone not playing those roles seemed expendable. To continue this lineage, by the 1960s and the investment of staffing and Temp Services that quite literally, at that point you to the beautiful book on the tenth economy, quite literally brokered on the value or the devaluing of womens labor as a resource because they were mostly young women who were now college educated. They made great office girls. Him keeping the thread moving be time to get to the 1980s and 2000s in the outsourcing and offshoring of knowledge work of Office Service work it becomes harder to make the case people are doing something that could so easily be replaced precisely because theyre doing work has been done by workers in the United States. He becomes much more obvious this is a question of labor arbitrage where you can find cheap labor thats just as educated as anyone whos in the location that is generating the request for work. I often limit perhaps to some of my colleagues dismay that the settlement of the case against microsoft that involve microsoft mid we never resolve the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is yes, necessary for a period of time, it might be something we need somebody with a specific kind of expertise, say a language expertise, coding expertise but you know you not need them for more than 12 months. 12 weeks or 12 days. What ways do we have to value that worker . At the time we didnt have a category for that. Its important to note post 2000 Silicon Valley and especially 2001 what happens, we had effectively the. Com bubble burst dot com bubble burst, settled without case law that were going to leave questionable what to do with people who are necessary but not necessary as when holding for a career. What we came up with in the settlement was a set of practices that treat Contract Labor often to vendor management systems, that often dont leave them with the protection beyond that 12 month contract to be able to say im employed as benefits come with my employment. If you think about this history withdrawn and its an argument, in historical trajectory is an argument, that in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of laws around labor protection that mostly assume that ballot over as the work that cant be automated without much projection out about what might win to become a targeted automation. Policies built for assembly lines, and professions ever imagined to be beyond the touch of automation, and the life of Temp Staffing which has driven much of our Economic Activity globally is the growth of the Service Industry in a Temp Staffing industry that serves peoples request for needs more than answers the need to build something. Lastly, to see the shift towards the information economy that involves a lot of people doing Information Service work. Yes, it involves people doing coding and other valuable skills that take a great amount of training but if you think about what it took to code up a a website back in the 2000s. We had to hand code html. Thats now completely done with software. At the time we paid quite a bit of money and be paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. That was some of my first work as a 1099. Keep that that in mind as you k about what can be automated, what is in the work of the creative work, the complex key medication that seems beyond automation. Thats really an open question is what is it that would be constantly on the horizon, requires human touch . For some about the time. So with that money to be how we studied this world. Studying a distributed world of work is not the most obvious thing to do as an anthropologist. It was often hard to figure out where to dig in. We chose four businesses as case studies to be a fight for the identified groups of workers but also these companies to show us the inside of the black box can how to organize this work, what does the workflow look like, and the four companies that really stand in this world for the mechanism that can both build out Artificial Intelligence but also keep humans in the loop. I look at technology continues with the alexis wichowski. She spoke at kramer books in washington, d. C. About the power dynamic between Big Tech Companies and governments around the world. The best we describe what net states are is how it attack but how i can buy twice his book in first place. Back in 2015 there were a number of terrorist attacks across france. And in november of 2015 the was the largest terrorist attack which killed over 130 people and it was found out after the fact that a lot of these attacks are carried out, organized on social media. Social media Companies Really got involved in working with defense agencies to try to forget how do we stop the proliferation of terrorism after terrorist on a platforms, keep them from organizing attacks like this on a platforms. It was a kind of rough start in the beginning. One of the people who was responsible for the attacks was captured about six months later despite the fact he been actively posted on facebook for the entire time. There wasnt a lot of cooperation between governments and Tech Companies at the time. A few days later facebook, google, youtube, amazon and a few others came together for a global forum to talk about how to fight terrorism explicitly. This was something that was just organized by the Tech Industry and for the Tech Industry. It wasnt again a lot of cooperation with the government. Skip forward a few more months. We saw a series of hurricanes in the u. S. , Hurricane Maria hit puerto rico and wiped out their power grid wiped up cell phone coverage, and fema really didnt show up. Who showed up . Tesla came forward to rebuild their electric grid. Google showed up with project balloon, and it was this at this time i thought okay, what is going on with the Tech Industry . Theyre not just making spreadsheets encounters or apps. Theyre getting involved in areas that are away outside ofr core mission and areas they used to be the sole responsible of government. With diplomacy, counterterrorism, defense, infrastructure building, citizens services. I thought there had to be some better way to talk about them than just tech. They seem to have a role to play in the geopolitics. The problem was the term nonstate actor kind of evolved to being just bad guy. I started studying where this term happened. So would think of Mark Zuckerberg as as a terrorist. There is deathly some people think as Tech Companies as bad guys. I just did some research and recently as 2010 the dictionary social science the fine nonstate actors with examples like the u. N. And nato. Even then there were not considered terrorists. It was sometime around 2012 2013 you start seeing this term be used in reference to alqaeda and that eventually with isis. Nonstate actor was taken with bad guys, but these Tech Companies were not nationstates either so thought maybe there s to be another way to talk about them. I introduces concept of net states. Internet companies, internetbased companies who are working outside of their Core Technology missions in areas that used to be the domain of nationstates like defense, diplomacy, infrastructure and citizen services. I wrote the article actually in 2015. People who read it and said i think this a little bit of a stretch, and i put on a show for two years. Then after Hurricane Maria i thought actually i really feel like theres something to this and thats when it put the article out there, wired publisher and it turned into this book. Whats the difference between net states and of the Big Tech Companies who might have philanthropic concerns like donating cancer money are voluntary aid or sister or uber . Its really good question. In the book i dont put twitter in this category which, i do put tesla in this category which might seem surprising in some ways. The reason is a look at how Tech Companies are expanding outside of the Digital Services and into these domains that used to be the territory of governments. You dont see uber getting involved in counterterrorism yet or at the moment. Microsoft is a deeply involved in diplomacy. You dont think of cisco as having a real stake in national treaties. This is sort of the differentiation i make between these two and also people vastly what about other Big International companies . Your cocacola that operates globally, and mcdonalds, but neither one opening a counterterrorism department. Facebook, has a large account chosen department and the state department. It doesnt seem all that strange that they would. I think this is one of the reasons i thought worth paying attention to. So the list of companies that qualify net states is google, amazon, facebook, microsoft, tesla. Why tesla . One of the things i look at in the book is not just a Tech Companies are expanding into governmental domain, and how they are expanding into what i call just in real life, in physical infrastructure and services. This is something that tesla and elon musk and his many Sister Companies of tesla is really doing in some ways more than anyone else with his silver city operation, they are pursuing partnerships with government to provide electricity. He is now moving into space with star link. A lot of endeavors where they are no longer just look at their prime products and Services Like cars but are really changing the way we think about public infrastructure. So for instance, they are producing highspeed rail in chicago, and a mechanism that he objects to. Exactly. One of the questions is we have no private Sector Companies who are in charge of our public infrastructure, what happens when they decide they dont necessarily want to make it available for all . This is one of the reasons that i talk a lot about in the book about teslas work in puerto rico. They stepped in at a time when puerto rico needed someone to step in, when the federal government really did not, but theyre not under any obligation to stay. They dont have the responsibilities the government has to provide equally and fairly access to services. What do they want . You right in the book net states to have the least. What do you mean by that . One of the things i think often distinguishes these companies is that a number of people that work there, a large enough contingent to make a difference, lets say, i driven some ways by this belief that technology should be used for good. We see this with the case of google. They worked with the department of defense on a very small contract called project maven looking at how to apply ai to the Recognition Technology and drones. This is a very small contract. There were a handful of people out of googles empire working on it. When people found out inside google that this was happening, a number of people have resigned in protest. There was a companywide letter circulated saint we do not believe google should be in the defense business. Google backed out. They let go of the contract. They let it expire. So a significant portion of the drive of people who work in these organizations that want to see tech being used to build things, to do good. So the belief is not totally unlike the governments, is constituted to the constituent parts. This is something that i think one of the interesting features of these particular companies that i call net states is of course their interest in the bottom line, interest in making sure they can be successful businesses but you do hear about internal employee protests when the company does something they dont think alliance with these beliefs, their core beliefs that tech should be used for good. Its one of the challenges with this dynamic is that we may cheer them from the sidelines and say hey, google, going to protest. But we dont actually have any role as citizens to directly influence that process which i think makes us the unique phenomenon. Will come back to that in a minute. Based on your experience and a lot of wichita, and a book i want to ask you a bit about the governments relationship to net states. Let me ask you if you can start by recounting this episode you have in the book where, i have not read about before, and meeting from a bunch of the social Media Companies and Tech Companies and the Justice Department about interference before the 2016 election and how that went. So there has been a temp of the Tech Industry up to about 2018 referenced in the book to reach out to law enforcement, to reach out to big federal agencies and try to partner with them, work with them about figuring out how do we meet the challenges that we all face together. The Government Entities have been a little slow to respond. There was a meeting that was held in which the key players, google, facebook and others invited members from the department of Homeland Security and offered a lot of information about their own strategies to deal with terrorism on their platform, the emerging Disinformation Campaign and in response it was sort of met with silence. The next time they convene they didnt invite anyone from government to the table. I think in 2020 we are seeing this shift a little bit especially from the Defense Sector starting to reach out to Tech Companies very aggressively to get them to work with them. But i think the chief Security Officer at facebook who is now at stanford put it really well picky said a local Police Department maybe really hardworking and really strong, but we wouldnt ask a local Police Department to defend against an invading army. Thats sort of whats happening in the tech sector. We are looking at these Tech Companies to stand up their own counterterrorism units and own defense mechanisms, and not really providing the support they need. After that episode and maybe before this cycle is sort of an interesting parable in the book about the risks of government standoffish news. If d. C. And the federal government cant get its act together to participate, and the Tech Companies are just going to do whatever they want to do. Which i thought was a valuable point. At the same time that presents a bit of a problem because we know that d. C. And especially congresspeople more than executive branch does not and cannot keep up with tech and we have all these sick septuagenan lawmakers made the careers in the transport car sales or even medicine or law, but they should do grassroots technology. I just remembered during the zuckerberg during last year Lindsey Graham as to facebook with the same thing as twitter and orrin hatch asked how facebook make money. It was clear he had not been on the platform at all. We could hire better staffers or whatever the fundamental one if you thoughts about the government to be smart about its relationship with netscape, just people overcharge have no idea whether ask for. Thats a very good question i think theres a couple of different ways when you get to get out of there when his we need to make sure were putting people in congress who do understand the importance of engaging with technology. Not just some ancillary locale but really as a power player in both domestically and geopolitically. Thats number one. We are starting to see an influx of younger sort of more Diverse People running for elected office. I have to hope within a few years well see kind of a nature people are representing us start to reflect societies interest more globally. But i also think though the people who are currently in office, its not a surprise that Technology Companies are impacting our daily lives. This is not news in 2020. We have 2014 election Disinformation Campaign from foreign actors. That was a few years ago and weve not seen any congressional action and i think theres no real excuse for it other than a lack of appetite. I dont think its a lack of understanding. Even if the congresspeople themselves dont grasp all the details of technology they certainly have access to resources that they can learn or help inform themselves better about what to do. Its hard to be passionate if you cant grasp it. Apparently Vladimir Putin wants you silenced. Yeah, the campaigns. Talk about the work of these netscape to our staffing up and counterterrorism and antibigotry and prejudice groups. Im wondering what you think about and in balance that exist between the work those Tech Companies, those netscapes candidate and about and what you think theres a certain imbalance in the Playing Field that the First Amendment presents, you know, we have strictures about how we can compared to the eu which can impose regulations were easily. What are your thoughts about that . I was talking with someone from the French Embassy earlier about the fact they have really robust hate speech laws in france and using but we dont anything like the First Amendment, answer this wistful way. I was looking at him and sort this wistful in thinking but wouldnt it be great if we wee somehow to find a middle ground. There needs to be some sort of movement from people who are at the extreme ends of these things. Theres no mistaking really serious hate speech would for anything other than what it is. Its sort of like yelling fire in a crowded theater i think. That extremely egregious examples of hateful content, if we cant break rightly that ine way we can at least the pressure on our Tech Companies to be more aggressive about labeling them if not taking the dumper this is something weve seen with facebook and youtube and google is labeling the content that is problematic. Facebook has been doing this recently with information about the coronavirus, labeling it as it being potentially suspect. This is i think one way to get at making sure consumers are more informed about what theyre seeing without just stripping it away from the internet completely. And do you feel like, do you have any thoughts whether that is working, can work . I think its still early days and will need to study its impact. I think its a start. Its better than nothing. I remember of years ago asking eric schmidt he was ceo of google at the time what the thought was that google about search, whether this should be something that they took a have your hand and identifying hate for a fallback content. He said we dont censor anything but we can rank that kind of content so it doesnt come up first. They are somewhat putting their thumbs on the scale. They comes up to the question of the fact we dont necessarily have visibility into these actions so i think one of the things that makes these companies interesting from a citizens perspective is this. Relative absence of transparency, we are not in a position to say reveal to us your algorithms that show who you are you ranking or flagging or not. We can see the results and hope that youre doing a good job. A reminder of programs you see now are available to watch in their entirety at booktv. Org. Just type the author spain or the book title in the search box at the top of the page youre next in her all the programs on technology Joanne Mcneil speaking at Harvard Book Store in came at massachusetts. She argued internet use has shifted from the individualistic, spontaneous involuntary to being data and advertising driven. At a party and wallflower, sitting in the corner and you can easily be the creed, but people cant necessarily see you watching them. I think its one of those things that it has to do with the elements that make interactions online somewhat unusual physical world interactions and sometimes because we take for granted how much our communication is interwoven in our daily lives, that Court Deference of physical and Digital World interactions i wanted to make clear in that title. Thank you. So you say lurking measure preferred way of interacting with in it. She took a book about i you this or other specific places online that you choose, like you start consider yourself primarily where are you looking these days . I would say probably ive never had a red profile but i spent a lot of time in reddit. Especially like, especially the corners that are actually very sweet and unexpected. I think there are sub reddit that are very toxic and the many problems that there are also sub reddit that are created that people facing homelessness and soldout exchanging resources with a somewhat of a layer of anonymity because thats a place where it is a lot about screen names as opposed to real names necessarily. While i dont participate myself, i have worked around there, were karen meta filter, a lot of communities i find useful information wise. And then its just in the book i go through even a community i was very present, like theres chat rooms and message boards. Before i would delete a post i would definitely spin possibly months making sure i was being full compared. I think, noting the title is lurking and we have folks working at the edge of the room. If you want to choose to sit under welcome to. Just like the internet we will not make you participate in this particular way. But i think the point about reddit is interesting because one of the weird things i also i will admit i am a reddit lurker. I read a fair amount of legal fights as a language is probably a form of like causing sort of like causing myself pain as opposed to viewing other people. I read a fair amount of what is it, im id asshole . Its funny because it is sort of gotten i think a lot of peoples way of interacting with this particular form of internet is through twitter despite the fact its reddit were someone will post like very ridiculous like a mighty asshole post about the people respond on twitter. Totally depart from the context in which the initial post was made. I know. Data such a classic example of like how a conversation that im pretty sure it is usually quite bizarre and he did in its own on reddit but he detected to another platform like twitter where theres always this kind of underlying irony attached to it and the sense you always have to be above the content, and think thats makes twitter distinctive is about you cant really be too sincere about things. What i think is incredibly funny about that and twitter is that in the book i talk about when i first logged on to twitter i was told i was too much of a jerk for the social network. I remember feeling like look at all these nice people sherry with their eating for breakfast and why am i not a nice person who wants to freely share these peaceful moments of my life . Why do have to make my weird jokes . Nowadays i feel like im overwhelmed with that kind of edge, the edge to the content and that everything has to be its almost like an element of distancing yourself from the platform that if you can laugh at everything, you are not so entwined to have some layer of personal distance from what you are doing there. In some ways looking can be a way to distance yourself because you would like im not as invest in people who are choosing to work and i was there some law also is like much of a lurker online, it doesnt come it isnt a lack of, like its not like of investment. Im not less invested in the people who posted in some cases i suspect i more invested in people who post but but i stile get that sense of distance. So you sort of frame the book both in terms of looking but also in terms of this idea of becoming a user. One of the things you talk about a fair amount in the book is facebook which i thought was particularly interesting because of features like the offline profile where basically for those unfamiliar, facebook offline profiles is like the ultimate answer like renaming. What an offline profile is some poor person who decide they didnt want a facebook profile and facebook constructs the profile for them from all of the things they do even though they are not on facebook. More generally how do you think about the ubiquitous tracking on the web and how has it changed the experience of being online generally or looking more specifically . Thats another element of the title, looking as not possible on the net which is designed to track activity and have analytics and those elements that are just part of the function of the social networks, switch or Something Like facebook where its profit is attached to having data on its users. And so thats another element of where the physical has an advantage that you can can leave without a trace. You can walk away and perhaps if we dont have ubiquitous surveillance cameras in the future. [inaudible] sort of leaving without a trace. Sort of to switch topics little bit. One part of the book i read with a lot of interest was a section on a broader chapter which is entitled clash. As someone who at times identified with a label and actively knew many of the disciplines you described, i sort of was appreciating the humility with which you approached it. Specifically, you say, you say youre going to resist the urge to leave a grand unified theory about why women in the Tech Community see more likely than professional feminists commentators inure to address intersectional concerns. So not going to ask you to read the grant a narrative but just to note this seems like made a little bit overly kind to me. I look at the time of tech feminist organizing and see a real lack of attention to race and class analysis, that ended up leading over into what i would call the white women focus type problem abscess diversity box checking and we still see with conferences. And away which theres a particular, its a very different version of white feminism than you mightve seen in a new york come sort of new york professional feminist commentators that your contrasting. But at the same time its a version of white feminism. Certainly there were bright spots. I think you point out the culture. Theres a lot to be said the positive about that. Id be curious about your process in thinking about that chapter is like a real moment where i think you are reflecting on how not to just come off as sort of nostalgic in a way that is a historical about the positive part of the internet and more generally your views on the tech feminist, like it or reflection on the tech feminist stuff. Absolutely. That was an intense moment and an eyeopening one, whereas at the time i was based in new york and i remember as elements of harassment became unavoidable on platforms like twitter and facebook, i found just like the professional feminist media at the time was not necessarily addressing some of the intersectional elements that went into this harassment. Some of the resources that i found that were partnered with things like geek feminism who had that wiki resources that just seemed so much beyond, this being of course kind of like a media presentation of gender equality inequality. So that period of time we can see coincided with the activism, certainly black lives matter. I do remember especially at the womens march in 2016 having a feeling like wow, we really come so far about a lot of basic understandings of inclusion that wouldve been quite radical three years prior, or accepted much more broadly. Im always hesitant to name certain factors more than others as why that might be, but i do think as problematic as twitter is, as these major platforms are, the nature of having Something Like twitter where you had trending topics and someone could create a hashtag and use that to discuss personal experiences of oppression, having that Community Element in a platform thats designed for multiple communities did push forward some more progressive ideas. What i say that with a lot of hesitation because for the most part i feel that those platforms that are designed for everyone are themselves very dangerous. This is one of those tradeoffs, its a tradeoff that because, say you have a twitter account and have many, many different types of people you probably follow if you color people, transpeople, people with with different backgrounds of yours. So seeing their experiences and their arguments as part of a conversation in the part of twitter those having a hashtag, so say solidarity, the white women would be the key, one of the turning points for this hashtag activism, it is something that i dont want to discount, but it dont want to credit too much. I dont want to discount twitters role but it dont want to credit twitter because twitter certainly did nothing for that to happen. Twitter is the company did nothing for that user activism. You are watching booktv on cspan2. We are taking a look at some recent of the programs about technology. Next, from april 2019, sociologist Julie Albright examines the divide between Digital Natives of the generations that precede them. Now we have kids growing up where theres always mobility, what we call mobile devices, smart phones that are internet enabled, ipads, laptops, all that stuff. Kids are now being given these devices at infancy. In 1979 theres a band called the tubes, kind of a park event out of San Francisco, a lot of fun but they had an album cover that was called remote control. The album cover was kind of a wink and nod to think about the evil and facts the television, that people thought the television was going to work kids brings ethics like that and get a tv right indicates face in a little crib. Im going to show your picture now. Now were in 2018 and actually this is a real Product Available on amazon, where the kid has an ipad right at the face from day one. Theres others like this. Theres potty chairs that have the ipad right there, right at the crib. We actually feeding Digital Technologies to children before the acquire their language skills. So neuropsychologist no, neuroscientist know theres something called brain plasticity that childrens brains are malleable like plastic. What you put into them is, the influences and the things theyre exposed to shapes those neural pathways, shapes the brain of children. Whats the outcome . Whats going to happen when we have babies, like you saw, infants that are acquiring Digital Skills before acquiring language . What will be the outcome of that . We dont know yet, that fast simulation of videos you see in youtube, all this input and stimulation happening. Most parents now also say they have the tv on at the same time, and most report they are both going at the same time. Theres always stimulation. Theres always noise or sound or visuals coming in. What does that do to attention and thinking and these neural pathways that are being shared by all that input . We dont know yet and thats going to be to be determined on the horizon. But thats where were at now in terms of Digital Technologies and really a steady diet of them infected children. So we could say that this is rewiring brains, right . That these children are going to think differently than you do, and thats where we are at. Now, i told you that people are coming untethered. Wonder the reasons they are coming untethered is because they have so many choices. And you heard christopher say that ive worked as a researcher with eharmony and help develop some other products and helped the match People Better when i first started coming out with my dissertation. Whats happening now is eharmony was sort of a webbased originally matching service. Now we have phones and perhaps, tender and grinder and bumble and all these things and people are just. It becomes a game. Whats happened is its presented to young people, this idea that you have an unlimited of choices in front of you in terms of romantic relationships. Wouldnt you think with this unlimited sea of choices they would find just the right choice for you, right . But what happens is, and we see this in consumer psychology, that theres a paradox of choice afoot, and the idea is that its kind of funny but the more choices you have, it makes it more difficult to choose. They did a study called the jam study where have you ever been in the store or cosco are some market with a giving out samples of food or cheese or Something Like that . They have a table set up and theyre going to give you something. They set that up with samples of jam, and the first day that 24 varieties of jan. They said hey, heres all these jams, try anyone you want, but then they give a coupon to buy a jar of jam after that. The second day they came back. Instead of 24 varieties, they only gave six varieties, six choices and the same coupon to buy a jar of jam. You know, comets commonsensicau would think the more choices youre going to find just that jam july, apricot or you like strawberry, whatever the gym is that you like, youll find it there. But it turns out that thats not the case. When people were only onetenth of likely to buy any jam at all when they had more choices as opposed to when they had less. Were in a situation now where theres this paradox of choice and thats called choice overload. The more choices we have, it makes it harder for us to choose anything at all. People now are swiping swiping swiping to meet another day. Maybe hell find some of a little hotter, little richard, a little interesting. Maybe someone i dont fight with. So they keep swiping and swiping but you dont end up choosing anyone at all. A new study just came out in fact, last week, half of americans are not in a romantic relationship, and 65 of High School Kids have never had a romantic relationship now. Now, if you go back to world war ii a lot of people buried there High School Sweetheart. You mightve known people he did that. What High School Sweetheart now . I dont have that. Its changing the dynamic of everything. One of the reasons i brought that up, another thing theyre doing by the way with all the swiping, swiping is easy come easy go for dates. You could get a date so easily that people just disappeared. Its called ghosting. They just take off and they dont ever contact the person again. They dont text. Some of you mightve ghosted somebody at one time or another but thats what theyre doing. Guess what. This same idea of the swiping and this choice overload and the ghosting is now happening in the workplace. Because theres this idea, you go on linkedin, theres this endless plethora of Jobs Available that people now are ghosting their employers thinking that they can just get another one and another one and another one. This idea of this endless sea of choices is changing peoples willingness to commit to something because maybe theres something incrementally better out there, the a job or be a romantic relationship its changing the dynamics of the commitment because of this endless sea of choices available. And whats happening is exchanging the qualities of adulthood come changing what adulthood means. There were sociologists have studied the markers of adulthood of the five workers and heres what they are. Completing school, leaving home, the coming Financial Independent with a fulltime job, mirroring and having a child. Now, if we go back to 1960 i age 30, 77 of women and 65 of men had achieved all five of markers by early 30s. If you fast for two now, its less than half of 30yearold women and a third of the men. So in a sense we are living in a time of extended adolescence. Thats part of the qualities of an tethering from all these traditional markers of adulthood. Some people say well, maybe we should just unhook from these devices and things like that but its becoming harder and harder because in one sense they are addictive which is good news like that word but they are now once we got mobile phones available to us, they are baking in qualities that are similar to a one armed bandit slot machine. We talk about gambling addiction, dont we . Have you ever played a slot machine . You pull the arm and ding, ding, ding those things roll and maybe you win a you dont. I dont win. Ill tried again, i tried again. Ding, ding, ding all the coins fall for the lights are going and the sirens because you have one. Thats exactly how instagram works. Facebook works. You are scrolling just like those things are scrolling in front of you on the slot machine. Sometimes the content is interesting, sometimes the content is kind of boring. Nevertheless, it keeps drawing you back in for more. These same behavioral drivers that are the most predictive of people coming back for more are baked into our social media now. It becomes harder and harder to put those phones down. Even the ding of an alert, Message Committee overseeing a ding go often or mac people check if undergraduate . Sometimes people are even feeling of vibration when is that even vibrating. Oh, i thought there was a message. Maybe there was. They just want to keep on checking and checking checking. Some people are checking the phones thousands of times a day. A problem becomes this. Im not to be amish, going back to the horse and buggy days. Im not saying that what im saying is the combination of our devices and our connectivity to that and im talking and destabilizing social structures have left particularly younger people on board. Were seeing the highest rates now things like anxiety, depression. Weve seen in 30 years. I work in the universe you some right at the front lines of this. I see that close. I dont know if you realize this but in college is down a corridor of students are and some kind of psychotropic medication now for some kind of mental disorder. The key here is coming untethered, means coming on board in some ways, that we dont have destabilizing social structures that are stabilizing peoples mental and physical health. We need to sort of reinvent that and how can we do that . As a pull away from the social structures like churches, for example, how can we create new structures to provide some stability for young people. Obviously with a bit of her problem on our hands. To wrap up our look at books about technology lorien pratt who in january of this year discussed the next level of Artificial Intelligence that involve decisionmaking. Unlucky, i went to the computer revolution when i was a kid computers were big old thinks that nobody could use a a mom to know the difference between software and hardware. I had to explain that to her. Weve gone through a massive democratization of computing technology. I believe were in the same place today with ai and data, and that new technology. Ai is done to us but will have control over. Dave is overwhelming. At best we get a date visualization but have the honor of anything and his people as a Technology Analyst for a few years and asking them, what are you frustrated about . If technology could solve one problem for you, what would it be . And over and over and over again i heard a similar answer. It looks sort of like this. This is why, im pretty sure i know what im doing, just background for me. Ive been building Machine Learning applied systems a really long time. Over 30 years. I was funded by the human genome product and graduate school. Ive built hundred Million Dollar budget for the government. Ive built thousands of Machine Learning models mostly supervised learning. Who would have known . I believe that this background has given me an insight that is key, theres something been missing all of these years. That something is missing is we been coming up from the technology instead of putting humans at the center of the equation. Im honored to be about my backside is honored. I like he called intelligence augmentation because you can sort of speak of ai upside down. Its putting she was at the of the equation again. When interviewed all of these people, i found what i thought for a while was a decision architect. What is a decision . Its an action, i thought process that leads to an action. Action in a complex world flies through some stuff, and i dont know but find that scarf or that car will do to the will. Its went up some impact but honestly i dont feel very motivated because i cant see the impact. Its not this role and present for me. It doesnt grab my primate brain in and the weather makes me think i need to buy that hybrid car. I cant see it. The data stack today and ai stack today is in giving that to me. This is my dog. Im training him to be a service dog. I sat in her much his whole life. Hes about 11 months old, and i had this awesome thing happened to me. I have a trainer who is teaching me to train the service dog that you taught me about abc, and my head exploded. Thats exactly what i heard from the humans ive been interviewing, executives. The always talk about an antecedent which is the context, in the kitchen i would say sit. The behavior, my dog sits. The consequence. He gets a cookie. So this is a universal archetype if this isnt just one way to think about how we might use ai and data, and ill tell you how that fits in in a moment. What i think, 30 certain, this is the way to think about because it has the lowest friction to how humans think. The lowest friction to how humans naturally think. Busy people live in complex environments. They dont have much brainpower for methodology or any of those fancy things. We have to meet them where they are at and the fact that were not has created a giant cultural barrier between people at the head of governments, at the hd of businesses, and even me. As they try to make decisions and tried use evidence and data and ai but make sure that those decisions have a Ripple Effect that is good. So farmers im working with in a proposal that you decide what crops to plant down the road they dont know if that crop will make them productive for what would happen because because they have fewer migrant workers, the situation has changed. Businesses might decide where to acquire a company or Product Launch for what price to change, and as they talk that through your much of what my dog years. Theres an antecedent which is a situation. Theres a behavior, were going to launch this product in this price. For us, what makes it special is we can think through long chains of consequences. But thats limited. We need computer help. So again a decision is an imaginative process in our heads as we think through the actions in some context that will lead to some result. If you remember nothing else, remember this template, and whats cool about decision intelligence, which is what the book is about, is because we start with humans, i can teach you some information day you can take him and use mealy. Thats the promise if you stick with the talk. Okay. How to make decisions today . Im sorry to say, i had the sense this was happening, especially in the complex will but going back from Human Evolution we dont really think through the consequences of our decisions very deeply. We are much more likely not to think through things rationally, and instead to use social signaling. Look for some look successful in our society, whose dominant or prestigious and we simply copy the decision of the been baking. It turns out that its reflected. It has been chewed to successful for the human race and the fact its what separates us from many other species were great copiers and cultural revolutionary theory says we develop patterns and behaviors that individuals cant understand but that society like kind of the unconscious process of genetic evolution, we use cultural revolution revolution to come up with these behaviors. This is what we program for where programmed to look at some prestigious or dominant person and do what they do as opposed to thinking through the consequences. That was great for a few millennia. But the situation has changed. First of all if there is a bad actor here or here, and it tells what to do, based on they can subvert our behavior. They can influence others to make decisions that benefit them but not us, if theyre smart about the situation. Second, the context is rapidly changing. We need to be developing new ways of coping with this big ocean that is fundamentally different than our pond because it keeps changing. The water is flowing back and forth. The old ways of thinking to problems that are societal and cloud level are no longer working. These have complex system dynamics, nonlinear, he back affects. We see winner take all, winner take all patterns where Large Companies are large artists get 90 of the benefit, and theres massive inequality. Intangibles are important. Anybody whos worked with the data, we can to focus on things we can measure easily. Money, size, price. We tend to overlook reputation, happiness, morel. And yet ive never built a decision model that didnt have at least one feedback loop that involve something intangible, a soft factor. We must Start Talking to the sociologists, the cultural evolution is at all of those other disciplines to understand those soft factors. The decision intelligence creates a roadmap for how to do that. The other thing i didnt say is the future is no longer like the past, and so you know the work, the blacks what is the problem we assume the past and the future of the same, based on the past we dont realize the situation has changed something all the swans used to be white, theres a black one. What do i do . I believe that ai and di which in quicktime. Com decision intelligence, can solve this problem. I grew up in a time of technology optimism. We all share it all of our code and the internet was going to democratize reality. We could collaborate. Remember we had a dream . I dont think we realize that dream. I think decision intelligence topless go there. I think we have created a number of collaboration come. Come social media and theres one more link that we need to start to make a big difference to have a nonlinear impact, and that is di which will start to talk a little tactically right now. How do we do di . We start with people. We dont say where is the data. We dont say we cant do this a i like think with. Im sorry, date is great but theres huge about of Human Knowledge that is in no data set whatsoever. We are good at knowing about how our actions lead outcomes, and your homework tonight is to go home, ask a friend who didnt come to the stock have think about a complex decision, i promise you they will talk about action, those actions lead to affect and that ultimately will lead to some outcomes and well talk about the context. What i do is sit down with a Diverse Group of experts and diversity is great, old, young, gender, race, and a safe what are the outcomes are trying to achieve . I know so Many Companies that have massively big projects who have never sat down and brainstormed to the outcomes. Get better. You just need a brain scanning process where you think through the outcome you are trying to achieve. As it higher revenue, net revenue after two years . Some kind of military advantage . A military advantage that doesnt create a backlash that will hit us as far as the reputation of our country. What are the outcomes we are trying to achieve . Make sure you ask that question. Second, the actions. Many folks dont take the time to have an open brainstorming session, bad ideas or funny ideas for actions we might take that might achieve those outcomes. All the blood to the creative side of your brain because on that side of the brain over here and separate those two and spend some time being analytical. These triangles are where ai is and in most models as wide as we democratize ai this is the pattern, this is how we do it. A decision i am facing today. I saw greta on tv and she was so compelling. She said we have a Climate Crisis in the way we solve this is really simple. Stop worrying about analysis. At the very least, pay for some trees. Lots organizations take your money and buy trees and those trees will grow and there will be more biomass, perhaps on its own. I havent sent any money to a Tree Organization yet. I cant visualize how money i might send leads to a chain of events to some outcome. If i am going to use ai to benefit me i want a visceral interactive fun experience. This is what i think is the future of ai. It looks like a video game but i hope we can do this in the basement. We can walk through these spaces and we are experimenting with actions we might take and letting the computer help us understand the chain of eventss that sets in motion, valuable at a personal level and highly valuable at an organizational level. You can watch many other discussions about technology online, booktv. Org. Use the search box at the top of the page and Search Technology and books. Tonight on booktv beginning at 8 00 pm eastern highlights from our monthly in depth series followed by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray who details the creation of the bureau and Michelle Malkin offers her thoughts on Us Immigration policy. Watch booktv tonight and over the weekend on cspan2. This memorial day weekend on booktv, saturday at 3 2 05 pm eastern bestselling author James Patterson talks about his efforts to help bookstores impacted by the coronavirus in the house of kennedy and at 4 00 pm Eastern Foundation for liberty and american greatness founder and president nick adams on his book trump and churchill, defendant of western civilization. At 4 30 eastern, time magazines molly ball talks about her latest book pelosi which looks at the career of speaker of the house nancy pelosi. At 9 00 pm on afterwords facebook cofounder chris hughes talks about fair shot about his plan to reduce poverty and strengthen the middle class. On monday at 8 30 p. M. Eastern, bustling thriller