Host next on booktv, programs from the archives that focus on technology. You can watch them by visiting the website of booktv. Org my job is to model risk for a living. The same companies that control the lions share of patterns that have an extraordinary amount of money that are able to attract the best talent and fo food. It is something that is Companies Like salesforce that are not doing amazing things. In addition to the things i might mention, they are also building the frameworks and custom chips. If its the case of Artificial Intelligence although that is cool to optimize our lives using data as currency what does it mean when we relegate that to just a handful of companies and handful of people working at these companies. What are the implications of that look like . Three of them are in china and they are back. Anybody that watches china knows they are still under the thumb of beijing. The. Hes very smart and a very effective leader and a longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. You can go back through history and look at the Strategic Initiatives and fiveyear plans and see how a lot of them never really amounted to anything. But i think that things are different this time because we have a person in power and the Leadership Team around him that understand this technology so youve probably heard of the builtin road initiative. This seems like an Infrastructure Initiative building bridges and roads in exchange for deft diplomacy all around the world. It isnt just about building physical bridges. Theres a digital component house also 58 countries are part of the digital side of the bri. They are also getting the social credit score system there are parts you might be at an intersection and if you jaywalk, smart cameras placed around the intersection will recognize who you are. The systems are smart and can recognize you by gait and posture and how you are walking so if you cause an infection in your face gets put on a digital billboard at that intersection. That is transmitted to your employers and family members and if youve done it more than once he might be told to report to a local police precinct. Your total score is a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. There are opportunities to earn points if youve done something good somebody can report the word and you might get a few points up. This is a program that is intended to be national and you may be saying to yourself that china. I dont live there so this is very interesting but who cares. The system already has prevented 17. 5 million from buying airplane tickets. 5. 5 million last year couldnt buy a train ticket and 300,000 have done great jobs at work. Their scores were too low and as a result they were disqualified from ascending to management positions and these are not just ethnic minorities, this is a shot at huge social control and you may be saying to yourself you had me at talking microwave. I dont know why all of this necessarily matters to me and the reason that matters is bri so if it is the case china is allying itself with all these countries around the world. It helps keep the populace in control and china is already exporting this to various different places. Why this matters is why we are fixated on the wars and thinking about missiles in the sky what we have forgotten to look at is what happens if it reaches an economic war that blocks us out of places or forces us to come to terms we dont like or understand. It potentially reshapes any sort of new world order. A militaristic pacing threat china has become a formidable threat to all of us. In the United States there is an antagonistic relationship. Antagonistic more often than not between the valley and dc so what winds up happening the valley sort of does what it wants until somebody gets upset and apologize and then they do the same thing again over and over and over again until one day when you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding that they were broken up. You cant break up these companies. There are many reasons why some have to do with strategy and the nuts and bolts but this isnt like dell. Remember when the company got broken up, this isnt that. These companies have multiple positions and bigger intertwined and complicated. If the United States is going to continue to defend science and if it is going to the fund our Education System and technology, then who is going to go about the future of ai among other parts of science so you cant just break these apart. It doesnt work that way. This can put us up for inch by inch and little by little your daily permission being taken away somebody part of a small group and tribe and see if theyve got the vibe is probably even though weve never been in a car accident that seems insignificant but it is a compounding effect over time and we are part of the process that is unfolding in slow motion. Weve heard the analogy into the water slowly over time boiling and you dont realize it until it is dead. I dont want to beat the dead fraud in the pot. I realize that sounds like hyperbole but theres so many things happening that weve turned a blind eye to that at some point there is no way to turn this back. At the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President trump issued a executive order but then that executive order on the Artificial Intelligence is not self executing. We do not have budget and we do not have a singular department in charge or Institutional Knowledge is spread throughout our federal government. 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 so are instead constantly dealing with market demand so let me be clear on this. I dont think the companies that are our part of the big blind i dont think that they are evil. I dont think they intend to do harm. Obviously worldly experience. Theyve been to my collaborator and i think it is a hard thing to do to run a company full of adults many of whom have debt or whatever and i have a lot of sympathy for someone that is growing up when they are a ceo. I feel that their behavior that i so institutionally as well as individually was more the result of a sort of structural position than the individual failure. The two offer a puzzle. Its more the incentives of the Business Models than the industry and many illustrate i feel like im Walking Around at these ratings with my own book they read my book and mentioned which i talk about how early members of my team are in the Conference Room at the manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know the these people who are smart and talented and interested in other things why should they work it does Analytics Company im here because i dont know my purpose and im trying to figure it out. It is just this idea that they should work here because it has economic value. Do you think that is how these Companies Work . This is the anecdote but im telling. Yes, i totally do. Maybe i should have a one line answer for everything. So, it was the first time that i heard of this. They had texted me to say this was like deja vu for me. They must have read it on the post. If you look theres this thing that happens where it has to do with the intellectual culture that i would call antiintellectual. It has to do with more people need business advice, theyve never ran a company before, they have accountability to their investors and responsibility to their employees so they read a post like here is how you can scale hiring and get good people for your team that will set the tone for the rest of the company into a Conference Room and pushed them to say we can pay you five to 8,000 per recruit. I think that the Company Cultures are shaped by that Business Models and those are shaped by the incentives so you have the prioritization of speed and scale of coupled with the sort of spirit of the industry they have conservation and research is iterative. I dont know what im talking about. Im so sorry. [laughter] its fair to say i guess im wondering if theres parts of the [inaudible] is now they think that they are doing good and unabashedly sort of a positive thing and even questioning that is kind of dangerous sometimes [inaudible] the heart of the book is ambivalence, so i think there was a lot that i appreciated was the intent. I dont know if i would go back and appreciate the same thing to be honest. I happen to be the right age and have the right yearning to be a sort of ideal employee in this certain way that win32. Select four years ago when it mattered. [laughter] but yes, having just moved here not knowing anyone, from a different city, i think what im admired and appreciated was the co moderate and commitment to the common project. I like the people had autonomy at least for a little while. I think it is also par that is e problem is people having autonomy who dont necessarily have the authority there seemed to be potential in that even if it just sort of replicates. There is one more thing that i did appreciate and enjoy it at the start of culture. I think that its very earnest. The deep painful earnestness i dont know if you can relate. [laughter] people in texas think that they are doing good for the world and i think that they believe and trust them when they say it. Its getting the recording. But i do wonder, you dont have to answer this question but ive heard people say that it couldnt exist if it didnt have this crazy culture. My question now because please should it exist and if you dont have that culture and it hasnt happened, thats fine. But one that is related to the incentives ar of the industy that could potentially be forgiving if you boiled down how this works you to the next level whether it is revenue or something and they get desperate and you have to start doing things you might not be [inaudible] i think also there is justification for the incumbents protected and those that are not necessarily fair and i am not saying that this is wrong. Guest delete the people were in the same position. Like depending on who the ceo is. You are watching th book tv n cspan2. You are probably familiar with a category of what people call online offline Platform Services using the same mechanism putting out a request for somebody to come pick up this food and deliver it to this address and the platform is participating in the exchange by recording when its picked up and delivered into executing a payment schedule giving an address. That portion of the work is automated but the delivery and the value of somebody being there to deliver the food is part of the equation we often are not considering. We are more aware because we can see those. If i said content moderation is a form of labor i dont think anybody would have known what i was talking about until cambridge and a ludicrous amount we know it is a job people do it absolutely is providing another service but these are people in the loop performing a very important service. We are focused on this world of startups. Anything that they would ever see as an end consumer and that is the work im going t i goingk about today. It is the world of editing and testing perhaps to some of you in the room. Many of these paths to drive Artificial Intelligence innovation and the arab Health Structure to clean data set. Importantly seeing the number of jobs that say it is quite hard. We are just going to keep a person in this moment of the Service Request that is perhaps text based you know that it is a mixture of script and a person assisting you. Thinking about that world of work when you have a person doing something on that spot that cannot be quite completed by automation as points of reference that come to mind coming and we covered this in the bucket as places to flood together this isnt new, theres continuity new and how we treat people that are there for what we imagine would just be a moment because automation will come around and be replaced. It might look like piecework identities of textile certainly there could be manufacturing knock out a shirbuck out of shid add the buttons, no for quite some time and without a matter of decades and thats the important thing to take away. Automation made it possible for piecework to go away and textiles in some cases and in other cases the labor costs but also the reality of the paradox of automation would be too sophisticated for a textile machinery to be able to consume the automation if a person was kept around. We used the example of the women famous in the film Hidden Figures who could be brought in when the need for them and to demand for the services as computational experts eventually disappear, they could be let go. It wasnt less valuable. Seeing these women is valuable precisely because we had already moved forward the idea of what it was to value work. A often with particular embodiments of the profession that had very specific roles to play so anyone not playing those rules seem expendable. So, to continue this lineage1960s and the advancement of the services i would point you to the beautiful book on this economy quite thoroughly brokered on the devaluing of womens labor as a resource because they were mostly young women that were wee collegeeducated if theyve made great office girls and they were also expendable keeping that living by the time that we get to the 1980s and 2000 in the outsourcing and the shoring of the office work it becomes harder to make the case people are doing something that can so easily be replaced because it is also being done by the workers of the United States. It becomes much more obvious that this is a question of labor arbitrage and where you can find cheap labor that is just as educated as anyone in the location generating the request for work and i often lament perhaps to some of my colleagues dismay that those that involved microsoft never resolved the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is less necessary for the period of time that its project driven but it might be something where you need someone with a specific language expertise coding expertise that you know you are not going to need them for more than 12 months or 12 weeks were 12 days. What ways do we have to value of that worker and at the time we really di didnt have a category for that, so its important to note Silicon Valley and especially 2001 what happens if they have effectively. Com bubble burst and its at that moment we are going to leave questionable what to do with people with weak enough within the settlement was practices that treat Contract Labor and often dont leave them with the protection beyond the 12 month contract to be able to say im inflated these benefits come with my employment. Its certainly an argument in any trajectory is an argument that in this case they mostly assume the valuable work is the work that cant be automated without much projection about a fight one day become the target of automation. And then lastly to see the shift toward all the information economy for that Information Service work. Coding and other valuable skills that take a great amount of training but if you think about wide it took to code website and from what we talk about that is now completely done with software. At that time they paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. So keep that in mind as what can be automated and the complex communication. So what is it will be on the horizon with human touch going into a career . So that distributed wall of work is the thing to do as an anthropologist. We chose for businesses as case studies to identify groups of workers but also to show the inside of their black box how to organize the work and what does it look like. And then to stare at the world of the mechanism of the Artificial Intelligence. The best way to describe is how i came upon the idea how to write this book in the first place so in 2015 there were a number of terrorist attacks across france and in november the largest terrorist attack which killed over 130 people it was found out after the fact that a lot of these were carried out and organized on social media. Social Media Companies got involved working with defense agencies to try to figure out how to stop proliferation of terrorism on her platforms, keep them from organizing and attacks on the platforms that is a rough start in the beginning one of the people responsible for the attacks was captured six months later despite the fact he was actively posting on facebook for the entire time. Is a lot of cooperation between governments and Tech Companies than three years later facebook, google, youtube and amazon and others came together for a Global Internet forum how you fight terrorism specifically. What was organized by and for the Tech Industry so a lot of cooperation. So then we sought hurricanes Hurricane Maria hit puerto rico and wiped out there are power grid and cell phone coverage so who showed up . Tech company came forward to be billed the electric grid google showed up to provide internet and telecommunications coverage and at this time i thought what is going on with Tech Industry . That is making spreadsheets but outside of the core mission in areas that used to be the sole responsibility of government. The counterterrorism infrastructure building Citizen Services i thought there has to be a better way to talk about them than just tech they seem to have a role to play in geopolitics so the term nonstate actor evolved to bad guy so i started to study where the return happened those that think of Tech Companies as the bad guys. [laughter] i just did some research and as recently as 2010 the dictionary defines the nonstate ac