Companies, the same companies that control the lions share of patterns, that have an extra amount of my comp that are able to attract the best talent because that the best food, you know, that have the relationships with universities and it doesnt mean there are not other Companies Like salesforce or nvidia uber that are not doing Amazing Things but its through these nine compass Everything Else flows. The entire ai ecosystem in some way or another patches of these nine. In addition to all of the things i just mentioned they also building the frameworks and the custom silicone chips and they have the code bases. All roads lead to these nine companies, and the challenge that i have is that if its the case that Artificial Intelligence is not just been built to create a better microwave, although thats cool, but instead to optimize our lives come 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 who probably dont look like us and dont have the same worldviews as us. What are the longerterm downstream implications of that look like . Three of those companies are in china. They are they are publicly traded companies but i lived in china. I also lived in japan and anybody who watches china knows that obloquy traded companies are still under the thumb of beijing. There is no escape if you could be an incredibly if youre 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 person at the helm. President xi jinping is very, very smart. Hes a a very effectively and a very good longterm planner. China has a culture of longterm planning. You could go back threat is you look at a lot of the big Strategic Initiatives and the fiveyear plans and feel a lot of them really never amount to anything. I think things are different this time and their different because we have a person in power and a Leadership Team around him who really understands technology. Youve probably heard of the belt and road initiative. Okay, so this seems like an infrastructure initiative. Your building bridges and roads in exchange for debt diplomacy all around the world all along the old silk road route as well as deep into latin america and africa. But what most people dont realize is that this isnt just about billing physical bridges and physical roads. Percentage component as well. 58 countries are part of the digital side of the bri. Getting ig. Chinese i keep it there getting Small Technology and also getting something called chinas social credit score system . So the 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 intersection will recognize who you are if you can have your face covered or you could be obscured but the systems are very, very smart and they can recognize you by kate, my posture, eye how you are walking. If you have 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. If you have done it more than once you might be told to report to a local police precinct. You are demoted so your total score as a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches. There are opportunities to earn points if you done something good come somebody can report meritorious work and did you might get a few points up. This is a program that is intended to be national but hasnt yet ruled out nationally and you may be saying to yourselves, well, thats china. I dont live there so i dont is very interesting but who cares. Let me tell you why this matters to you. First of all this system already has prevented 17. 5 17. 5 Million People from buying airplane tickets. More than 17 Million People last year couldnt fly. 5. 5 billion people would buy a train ticket and 300,000 people who did really great jobs at work, their scores were too low and they were as a result disqualified from ascending to mention positions. These are not just ethnic miners hoping discriminate against this is a shot at huge social control. Control. And again he may be saying to yourself, listen, you had me at talking microwave. I dont know what all of this matters to me come at the recent matter is that bri. So if thats the case of china is aligning itself with all of these countries around the world, many of which are economically vulnerable, or theyre vulnerable for any of the number of reasons because of Climate Change or because theyve got political unrest and they are inching toward authoritarian leaders, the social credit score system is a real good option for those places. It helps keep the populist in control and china is already exporting this to various different places. Why this matters is because while were fixating on future wars and building fake ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky, we have forgotten to look at is what happens if china wages and economic war which effectively blocks us out the places or forces us to come to terms that we dont like or understand. This potentially prevents us from doing business, us from traveling, and a 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, the china has become a formidable global threat to all of us thats china. In the United States theres an antagonistic relationship theres a transactional relationship on good days, but antagonistic relationship more often than not between the valley and d. C. What winds up happening is theres a lack of understanding, there are not enough relationships, the valley does what it wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologized and then to do the same thing again over and over and over again. Until one day when you somebody like Elizabeth Warren who starts demanding that they are broken up. You cant break up these companies. There are many reasons why some of them have to do with strategy, some of them have to do with the nuts and bolts of technology but this is not like bell, remember when the bell company got broken up into baby bell . This is not that. This is not telephoning. These companies have multiple divisions and their intertwined and very complicated and if the United States is going to continue to defund science and if is going to continue to defund our Education System and technology, then who is going to build up the future of an eye among of the parts of science and tech and Everything Else . You cant just break these apart. It doesnt work that way. In the process of arguing back and forth, in the process these companies are competing against each other rather than collaborative. This sets us up for 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 grudge with the radio up on full volume. Thats because somebody the garage. Someone who is part of a small ai tribe decided theyre going to optimize the best healthiest life and that i 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. That seems insignificant, but theres a compound effect over time. We are all part now of this process thats unfolding in slow motion. You for the analogy of the frog in the pot and the water sold over time boiling and you dont realize it until the frog is dead, i dont want to be the dead frog in the pot. I realize that sounds like hyperbole, but theres so many things that are happening that we turned a blind eye to that at some point there is no way to turn this back, no switch, no singular switch for ai, no Single Person thats in charge. And at the moment we have no National Leadership on this issue. President trump issued and signed an executive order but that executive order on Artificial Intelligence is not self executing. We do not have budget. We give up a singular department in charge we do not have Institutional Knowledge spread throughout our federal government. We have a lot of smart people but theyre not in the right places, and in the valley we have incredibly smart people who i do think 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 the Big Nine Companies and serving not the g mafia which is our part of the big nine, i dont think they are evil. I dont think you intent to do harm. I think weve gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken. Weve opened up our archives to look at recent other programs about technology. Next, reporter anna wiener recalls her experiences working for tech startups. The ceo of the company the secretary work for in San Francisco was 24 when i joined joined the company. I was 25. Obviously worldly experience miles beyond him. He had been, the company had been through my company. Its in a cold hard thing to run a company full of adults, many of whom have dependents or debt or whatever. I think, i do not envy anyone in deposition. You self select for the position if youre lucky. I have a lot of sympathy for someone who is going up at the same time their learning how to be a ceo. I think that the reason i dont Name Companies or executives come there are a few of them but one of them is i feel the behavior of us all well as individually with more result of a sort of structural position that any individual failure i realized that souls like a sort of exculpatory narrative or exculpatory framework, but [inaudible] but that, not to be coy or chillax offer a puzzle for people to solve, although im sure that [inaudible] im not against puzzles. More than i want to suggest i think is a sort of common leadership style. It is more to do with the incentives of the Business Models and of the industry, and to illustrate this i told us anecdote at another reading. [inaudible] i feel like i go to these readings with my own book and i am like an American Girl doll. Like, here i am with my book. So i read i think was in new york so we come up to me after reading and they read my book and imagine the scene in which i talk about how early members of my team were brought into the Conference Room and our manager asked us who are the five smartest people that you know . Right to your name stand. Did this exercise. And then look at your list. Why dont they work your . Was one of them Abraham Lincoln . [laughing] i was just like in why would they work here . This doesnt make sense. You are so many other useful things to do in the world, interesting things to do in the world. Why would my friends who are in graduate school well, they probably would make their way to tack but why would these people who are smart and talented interested in other things, why should they be working at this analytics company. Im here because i do know what i purpose is in life. Its this idea that the five smartest people you to work your because it is economic valley. Do you think that you think that hubris is [inaudible] or required to speed it fits in the anecdote im here to tell you. I totally do. Its a very long story, i apologize. I should have like like a one e answer for everything. This woman came up to me after this, and she was like the same thing happen in my company. It wasnt the first on her this. Another woman who worked at this started in San Francisco texted me to say this was like deja vu for me. I cant believe this happened deeper they must have all read it on a blog post because i was pulled into room and asked to write down the names of the five source people i know at a totally different company. I feel like theres a thing that happens in this culture has to do with the intellectual culture that i would call antiintellectual but theres more about that in the book. That has to do more with like people read business advice, it never run business before. They have a ton of money and a ton of accountability and attentive responsibly to their employees and attentive to get how to they read a blog post i get real good people for your core team that will set the tone for the rest of the company, corralled your employees into Conference Room and asked him who the smartest people they know and then push them to recruit the mincey wheel pages 8000 per recruit. I tried so hard to recruit people who were or were not the smartest people that i know. [laughing] anyway, so i think that industry has value. You could speak to this as well. You may have seen this in your excellent book length investigation of uber. Its called super pumped by mike isaac. Available at this bookstore. He will be signing afterwards. I think that the Company Cultures are shaped by the Business Model action in the business incentives and those are shaped by the incentives of interest of Venture Capital say of her decision of speed and skill and acceleration and whatever, coupled with a sort of like libertarian spirit of industry that has been incubating, if you will, for 5 years, 30, 40 years. 2020, longer. 50 years. You can get this weird culture product that doesnt value expertise, values speed of a a consideration and research, has this iterative conflict. I dont know what its talking about, im so sorry. Im just going for it. What was the question . I dont member, actually. Is this on cspan . [laughing] i guess im wondering if theres parts of your experience that you take with you like really appreciated. I mean, general think about, you get this, a lot of tech folks who think that again, tech is doing good for the world and unabashedly sort of a positive thing. Even questioning that is kind of dangerous sometimes. I guess im wondering for the benefit of that, like if there are parts of the world that you appreciate it, that you took away from your time in tack . In tech. I think there was a lot that appreciate about working in tech. I dont know in my 30s if i 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 sort of an ideal employee in a certain way. In my 20s. Im 32. Like four years ago. When it might have mattered. But jack im in my 20s having just moved here not knowing anyone from a different city, trying to find many, being told here is your meaning, run with it. I think what i admired and appreciate was the camaraderie, the third commitment to a common project, a collective project if you will. I like that people had autonomy or seem to have autonomy at least for a little while. I think actually that is part of the problem is people have the autonomy who dont necessarily have the authority of the autonomy or shouldnt necessarily but this seems to be some potential in that even though often like the people with the most autonomy just replicate like you know, power structures that exist externall externally, and its exciting to me. I think that there was one more thing i really did enjoy and appreciate about startup culture. Oh, i think its very earnest, so it was constantly vacillating between like detached mockery and deep painful earnestness. I dont know if you can relate. [inaudible] anyone who is yeah. They might be wrong but i genuinely believe the people in texas think theyre doing good for the world, i believe they believe it and i trust them when they say it. And to think that whats missing is more of like, i think the problems are systemic. I dont think they are necessarily rude individual. Id be curious of what you would think of that underreporting on uber. I do wonder, like i dont actually know if youre legally allowed to answer this question. You just moved here and thats fine if you want to but do you feel like someone, ive heard people say that uber couldnt exist if it didnt have this crazy culture. My question is like should it exist . Obviously that culture, that culture should exist and be done of the culture and doesnt have, like maybe thats fine. But. Can any of you do you do you feel that is that we are going with this . Do you feel like your behavior is written sentence and incentives or of the industry that could potentially be forgiven someone like that . I think youre getting at the exact right thing. I think like if you boil down how all this works, youre getting invested in your company. You have to hit the next level whatever that is whether its users or revenue or something, and for most companies who get kind of desperate so you have to start doing things that may not be legal, right. I dont know, i think its just make into a lot of this works but i also think i think theres justification. The people who are already in the space, the incumbents are protected in ways that are not necessarily fair and you can kind of like unless think this is wrong. Theres reasons reason for doit of this stuff. And also just to go back on my own argument, i do think people are in the same structural position and theyre not ass calls. Not calling anyone specific and ass call. If you are a jerk to the industry, depending on who the ceo is pick. You are watching booktv on cspan2 with other programs on technology archives. In september of 2019 microsoft Senior Research mary gray report on workforce that tries Large TechnologyCompanies Like amazon, google and uber. Youre probably familiar with the category that we call online offline Platform Services thats anything from uber, let, door dash of using the same mechanism. Its an api putting out a request for somebody come pick up this to come deliver to this address and a platform is in that exchange by recording when the food is picked up and delivered, executing a payment, scheduling, giving an address. That portion of the work is autom