Best talent because they are the best food. You know, that have the relationships with universities and it doesnt mean there arent other Companies Like salesforce or uber that are doing Amazing Things but it is these Nine Companies that Everything Else flows. The entire ai ecosystem, in some way or the other, touches these nine. In addition to all the things that i just mentioned they are building the framework and the custom silicone tips and they have the code bases. All roads lead to these Nine Companies in the challenge that i have is that if it is the case that Artificial Intelligence is not just being built to create a better microwave although that is cool that 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 worldviews as us and what are the longerterm downstream invocations of that look like . Three of the companies are in china. They are backed by ali baba [inaudible] in public he traded companies but i lived in china and in japan and anyone who watches china knows that publicly traded companies are still under the thumb of beijing. There is no escape. You can be an incredibly if you are an incredibly 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 is very, very smart and a very effective leader and a very good longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. You can go back throughout history and look at their big Strategic Initiatives and their fiveyear plans and see how a lot of them really never amounted to anything but i think these are different this time for they are different because we have a person in power and a Leadership Team around him who really understand technology and so you probably heard of the belt and wrote initiative okay, this seems like an Infrastructure Initiative and you are building bridges and roads and in exchange for diplomacy and all around the world and deep into latin america and africa. What most people dont realize is that this isnt just about pulling physical bridges. Or physical roads. Theres a digital component as well. Fiftyeight countries are part of the digital side of the bri and they are getting 5g, chinese 5g. Theyre getting Small Cell Technology and they are also getting 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 j walk which is illegal there smart cameras placed around the intersection will recognize who you are. You can have your face covered or you can be obscured but these systems are very, very smart and they cant recognize you by gait and posture and by how you are walking and so if you cause 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 you have done it more than once you might be told to report to a local Police Precinct and you are devoted so your total score as a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches but there are opportunities to earn points if you have done something good. Somebody can report meritorious work and then you may get a few points up this is a program that is intended to be national that hasnt yet rolled out nationally. You may be saying to yourselves well, thats china. I dont live there so this is very interesting but you know, who cares . Let me tell you why this matters to you. First of all, this system already has prevented 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets. More than 17 Million People last year cannot fly, 5. 5 Million People cannot buy a train ticket and 300,000 people who did really great jobs at work there scores were too low and were as a result disqualified from ascending to management positions. These arent just ethnic minorities who are being discriminated against. This is a shot at huge social control again, you may say to yourself listen, you had me at talking microwaves and i dont know why all of this necessarily matters to me the reason it matters is that bri. If it is the case that china is aligning itself with all of these countries around the world many of which are economically vulnerable or they are vulnerable for any other number of reasons because of Climate Change or because they got political unrest and they are inching towards authoritarian leaders, the social credit score system is a real good option for those places. It helps keep the populace and control in china is already exporting this to various different places. Why this matters is because while we are fixating on future wars and building big ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky what we have forgotten to look at is 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 connect this potentially prevents us from doing business in us from traveling and it potentially reshapes the world in a sort of new world order were china is not just a pacing threat but a military and economic pacing threat but china has become a form formidable global threat to all of us. That is china. In the United States theres an antagonistic relationship and theres a transactional relationship on good days but an antagonistic relationship more than not between the valley and dc. What winds up happening is, theres a lot of actors standing and there arent enough relationships and the valley does what it is or wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologize and then they do the same thing again. Over and over and over again. This is until one day when you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding they are broken up. You cant break up these companies. They are many reasons why some of them have to do with strategy and the nuts and bolt of technology but this is not like bell. Jew member when the bell company got broken up into baby bells connect this is not that. This is not telephones but these companies have multiple divisions and are intertwined in a very completed and if the United States will continue to defund science and if it will continue to defund our Education System and technology then who will 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. In the process of, you know, arguing back and forth, in the process these companies are competing against each other rather than collaborating with the sets us up for, you know, inch by inch, little by little, your daily permissions being taken away. I no longer have the ability to back my car into my garage with the radio up on full volume. That is because nobody who has been a part of a small group was part of a small ai tribe decided that they were going to optimize my best healthiest life and that was probably unsafe, like you are probably unsafe, even though weve never been in a car accident so i no longer have control over the volume in my car. It seems insignificant but theres a compounding effect over time. We are all apart now of this process that is unfolding in slow motion. Youve heard the analogy of the frog in the pot in the the water slowly, over time, boiling and you dont realize until the frog is dead. I dont want to be the frog dead in the pot. I know that sounds like hyperbole but there some way things happening that we turn a blind eye to that it at some point there is no way to turn this back and there is no switch, no singular switch for ai and no Single Person that is in charge and at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue but President Trump issued a and signed an executive order but that executive order on Artificial Intelligence is not self executing. We do not have budgets and we do not have a singular department in charge. We do not have Institutional Knowledge spread throughout our federal government. We have a lot of smart people but they are 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. Let me be clear on this. I dont think that the big Nine Companies and certainly not the g mafia which is our part of the big nine, i dont think theyre evil. I dont think they intend to do harm but i think weve gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken. Weve opened up our archives to look at recent author programs about technology. Next, reporter anna weiner recalls her experiences working for Tech Startups the next ceo of the company i worked for in San Francisco was 24 when i joined the company and i was 25. Obviously worldly experienced. [laughter] he had been mike, nadir and i think is incredibly hard thing to do to run a company full of adults, many who have dependents or debts or whatever and i think i do not envy anyone in that position. Obviously you self select for that position if you are lucky but i have a lot of sympathy for someone who was growing up at the same time that they are learning how to be a ceo. I think that the reason i dont Name Companies and i dont name the executives and if youre number one of them is that i feel that the behavior i saw institutionally, as well as individually, was more a result of a structural position that any individual failure. I realize thats also exculpatory narrative or scope of tory framework but [audio difficulties] its very google. It has more to do with the incentives of the Business Model than the industry and another reading. I feel like i am with my own book, like im an American Girl doll. [laughter] they read my book and mentioned how early numbers, my injury asked us to who are the five smartest people you know . Write their names down. We all did the frigates it was like, why dont they work here . [laughter] i was like why would they work here . This doesnt make sense. Theres so many other interesting things to do in the world, why would my friends from graduate school, they probably make their way to tech but why would these people who are smart and talented and interested in other things, why should they work in this company . Im here because i dont know what my purpose is in life. But is this idea that the five people you think should work here because of economic value. Do think this could work . [laughter] yes, i totally do. He should have a one line answer for these. So she was like the same thing happened at my company. As my first time i had heard this. They tested me to say this was my day job for me, they must have all credit on the blog post because i was also pulled into her room and asked who the five smartest people were i knew. I feel like this happens in this culture has to do with the intellectual culture which i recall anti inflectional, has to do with more people need business advice, there a ton of accountability to the investors and responsibility to their employers so they read a blog post thats like heres how you can scale hiring get people that will set the tone for the rest of the company. Ask them who the smartest people they know are and push them to recruit them and say we will pay five to 8000. I tried so hard to recruit people who were and were not the smartest people i know for anyway. [laughter] i think the industry has values, you could speak as well, maybe you have seen this in your investigation of uber. Its available at this bookstore. I think the Company Cultures are shaped by the Business Model and incentives and there either incentives of the cuppercaseletter harvest speed and scale and whatever, coupled with this libertarian spirit of industry thats been incubating for 25 years, sometimes longer, 50 years and you get this weird cultural product, values, over consideration and complex, i dont know what im talking about, i am so sorry. Im just going forth. I dont remember actually. Im wondering if theres parts of your experience that you take with you that might be appreciated. Journalists are typically from a modern, tech is doing good for the world and in questioning fact, its come of this dangerous thing. Im wondering if there are parts of the culture that you appreciated in took away from your time intact. There is. The heart of the book is this, i think theres a lot that i appreciated about working intact, along with my 30s i would go back and appreciate the same things to be honest, i happened to be the right age with the right yearning to be an ideal employee in a certain way but, yes in my 20s. But in my 20s, not knowing anyone from a different city, trying to find meaning, being told heres your meaning, what i admired and appreciated west the camaraderie commitment to a common project, collective project if you will. I liked that people had autono autonomy, at least for a little while, i think thats also part of the problem. People who have autonomy dont necessarily have the authority to have autonomy or shouldnt there seems to be potential in the middle people with the most short of just replicate power structures that exist external externally, i think that theres one more thing i actually did enjoy and appreciate about the culture, i think its very finest not somebody whos constantly battling between deep pain from earnestness. [laughter] i dont know if you can relate they might be wrong but i genuinely believe people seem to think they are doing good for the world. I do think they believe it but i trust them from they say. I think whats missing is more the problem is systemic necessarily rooted in the individual. I do wonder, i dont know if youre legally allowed to answer this but you feel like someone, ive heard people say uber can exist if it didnt have this crazy culture. My question is, should it exist . The culture shouldnt exist and if you dont have a, maybe that is fine. [laughter] you see an explanation for his behavior . One thats related to incentive . That could potentially be forgiving of someone like that . I think yes, youre getting at the right thing. Whether how this works, youre invested in your company, if the next level whatever that is, revenue or something and for most companies, it can be kind of desperate and you do things that maybe might not be and i think it is how a lot of this works but i also think theres justification. The people who are in these spaces, the incumbents protected in ways that are not what is necessarily fair and you can believe, not think this is wrong. My own argument, i do think people are in this same position and they are not a holes. You have to be a jerk do well in this industry, right . Depending on who the ceo is. You are watching book tv on cspan2 with other programs on technology. In september of 2019, microsoft Senior Researcher eric wright reported on the workforce that drives Large TechnologyCompanies Like amazon, google and uber. You are probably familiar a category we will call online and offline Platform Services over in lyft, door, they use the same mechanism. Putting out a request for somebody to pick up this food, delivered to this address and the platform is participating exchange by recording when its picked up and delivered, executing a payment, scheduling, getting an address, that portion of the work is automated but the delivery, the value of somebody being there to deliver the food from the part often are considering. More increasingly, we are aware because them. If i said contact moderation is a form, i dont think anyone would know what i was talking about. You will know contact moderation is a job people do but provides another service for just any Artificial Intelligence there are people who perform very important one. We are focused on this world of business start up business to Business Services below the surface. Anything you will ever see as a consumer and thats what im going to talk about today. Its the world of editor, testing, data lately which might be familiar to some of you, many of these different tasks to drive Artificial Intelligence in the nation, its what helps datasets about being in mit, mostly people dont know what im saying increasingly we see a number of jobs is quite hard to mail that a. I. Thing, people person into this Service Request so anytime you go on tour website and have this pop up from you know its a mixture of script and a person assisting you. Thinking about that for the work you have a person drink something on the spot that cant be quite completed by automation you see reference that come to mind, places to thread together, this is not new. Theres continuity here how we treat people were in a moment because automation will come around and it might look like piecework textiles, we could have manufacturing markup shirt but credit add a button about the bow . No. Usually in a matter of decades, is the important thing. Yes, automation eventually made it possible in some cases and in others, but also the reality paradox of automation, the boat itself being too sophisticated for textile machinery to consume automation. That meant a person was kept around. Its also in the world of Contract Labor so the example of women most famous in the films who c