Hello and welcome to tonight commonwealth program. Im a Technology Reporter with washington post. Please to be the moderator for tonights program on critical topic. The historical importance of the transformation from on by Artificial Intelligence and virtual environments. As we have seen so acutely the past three months, the covid19 pandemic and social media and the killing of george floyd in minneapolis in the aftermath. Technology in online environments guide every aspect of our lives. Tonight i am pleased to be joined by silicone valley pioneers to discuss these issues further. William davidow and michael malone. Their new book, the autonmous revolution, reclaiming the future to be sold to machines. They dove deeply into the revolution there are living through regarding ai virtual environment. The book could be purchased everywhere including cn. Com. A little bit about tonights features. The cofounder of the capital. Earlier in his career he worked at intel rated and is credited as being one of the pioneers in the hightech markets. Michael malone Current Technology for the san jose rookery news in the 80s. It remains one of the worlds best known Technology Business journalist pretty together david allen loan co. Wrote this book, the virtual corporation. Today theyre here to discuss their latest books pretty is a great trade predict. Reporter to begin, click housekeeping notes. Questions can be submitted for the guess you too, chat feature. The creek post your questions there during the program there will be over did to me and i will get to as many of them as possible. Mustve been pretty the bill, or start with you pretty you helped make Silicon ValleySilicon Valley. In recent years youve written a lot about how the technology is taken wrong turn. In many ways hurting our world and our economy and our society more than is helping predict what made you want to write this book in one out pretty. William davidow well, when i was with intel, what we were doing was that i come to realize kyles play. What we were doing was tinkering with things, to make sure the shop lights worked better. So cash registers added up and then along came the pc. We automated spreadsheets. When you want me to the spreadsheet, but inside of a business in your place, you replace something that people were doing with pencil and paper. Or Something Like that. But the business stayed the same. And when i suddenly came to realize is that what was different about this technology was that it was transforming the form of our institutions. So that if you look at it, what we did is we automated existing forms. This is causing the institution to change. So bank becomes an application on a smart phone. And then i suddenly realized, this had happened twice before the three of humanity. Once in the agricultural revolution and then the industrial revolution. And everybody was saying, this is just another Technology Change only it is faster. And its not that. The transformation of society. You call the change in your book, eight social phase change and then he said, its rare and monumental thing print but can you go into this. What he called a phase change analysis one really different than those other couple of phase changes that you document in history. William davidow will phase changes actually a scientific term. It prefers to a molecule the same molecule having a different physical form. So storm cloud turns into a snowflake. And so when water goes through critical temperature, 32 degrees. It changes form. He goes from being a liquid to a solid read it obeys different roles. We use different tools and water, pumps and pipes in our intuition about water, tells us nothing about pipes or ice. And on top of that, and it comes as the morning with the analogy. Ice breaks pipes. Ice sinks ships like the spot to tenant. So if we dont deal with these changes, it causes problems. What i came to realize what was in society a similar effect. Institutions are changing farm being and obeying different roles in our intuition was failing us. Host and turning to mike, lets talk about the moment were in right now the dimension in the intro, we have coronavirus, and now we have protests and Police Violence and racism in all of this together a lot of things. Scott of accelerating the adoption of these technologies. Were here and so, using zoom right now, to post this very discussion. So is bringing to the forefront, the issues of the technology that you get to in your book. Ibm yesterday nelson is going full out of the recognition business completely the facial recognition because the algorithms actually discriminating against people of color. So theres all this turmoil. What effect does this turbulence could have on this technical logical future that you have outlined. William davidow will this is the type of issue that the change brings about. In other words, im going to switch the subject a little bit. It is like privacy. We used to have a door that we locked. Now privacy has a totally different meaning. One of the challenges i think that we have in Silicon Valley, is we are now at the point where we gotta be very conscious to the psychological and sociological aspects of everything we are doing. And that wasnt the case in the past. Host it is nice to have you back like. In one of the things that you both say the book is that we need to change the way that we are looking at these things. We are looking at them all wrong. And i will be looking at this wrong mike. Michael malone their points of inflection. As bill said, you cannot predict what it looks like on the other side. If you bully lived in a world of liquid water. And youve never seen eyes, you have no idea what ice looks like. You dont even know it is water pretty dont know how its going to behave. It has all sorts of different physical traits. You wouldnt know that what ice floated pretty so many going to one of these days changes. We go into an alternative reality that on the other side, everything is changed. All the rules have changed. Make look a lot of like bill exhibiting aspirated but theres been a substitutional equivalence that is taken place. And it is fundamentally different. So if you are kurtzman and you came across jericho for the first time. You might not even recognize that it was a human structure. You wouldnt understand the society was organized. When and understand anything. And maybe possible that you can never really crossover the jordan to this new world. And we seem to be when the police right now. We have another one in 17 hundreds. If you are out there on the farm working and all of a sudden the factory started rising if you went to work in the city, completely new reality. And it says and bill talks about this a lot is that we have evolved. This is such a profound change. We have evolved. In the physical world. Where time has a certain beach and nature is not planned for us. It is not organized for us. We adapt to the world. The Virtual World is fundamentally different. It was created by companies rated and designed to focus on and manipulate us and hopefully in a positive way. But also setting us up casino predict biologically that he be prepared for this new cyber world that is now spending half of her time and predict. Host you talk may well is are these changes alreadys looking different. It doesnt have to be that way you kinda say that theres two features that we could have predict the utopian one. Michael malone lets take the industrial of revolution. Okay, people at factories we have put up with this world. People at work in the middle and child labor. And the darks of the meals. But on the other hand, Life Expectancy entrance expectancy with upgraded literacy put up. Weve invented more forms of health like healths hospitals and dental care. All of the Technology Rising out of labs have emerged. So we did a little of both. This feels, its still an hour and sprayed. Host so youre not just predicting the future but your book actually pretty good at that predict just on your track record targeted stuff that your predicting it right it is trying to understand how we should come the changes we should be making as a society right now to adapt to it. What can we do. We have Artificial Intelligence and algorithms deciding in a way, our place in society and whether or not we get Health Coverage we want. Or contras of the price we won it. Its already starting to happen. As you see the book. Not all of the stuff is great. So what we do. What are some of the things that we can do art what is a new way of thinking so that we can kind of better adapt. Michael malone i hate to wave my hands. But i am going to. It is hard to believe that probably 200 years ago, work was considered to be a curse right. And now, we are saying not having work is a curse. Eighty some odd years ago, it was written, that this future for our grandchildren, forget that singlet but he predicted that we would be working 15 hours a week. It would have chances to really enjoy life. Were going to end up with a different value system. And these are the things were going to have to be prepared to accept. It is going to be a very different world. There are things that we do that are monetarily valuable that have no social value. The things we do that or social wilsocially valuable that no monetary value to them. Raising kids. If you are willing to pay the money so that i could get childcare so i can go out to get the job. Maybe because think differently about these things and say, hey raising children is so important. Willing to pay people for doing things that are socially valuable we never considered to be compensating a bolt work. And these are the kinds of issues theyre going to have to deal with. I do not do not say that i know the right answers are but if we adopt the attitude that this is the way we did before, and this is the solution that we will apply to the future. I know that is going to work. So my argument would be there can be a conservative solution or progressive solution. With everyone pretty but youve got to look at these things and say, new forms. Theyre going to require new tools and new roles. And you cannot just say, this is the way we did before this is what is going to work again. Host is about Silicon ValleyCompany Becoming the new empires of this new era. Instead of powerful nations. We have these corporations that dominate our lives. And again, in this Current Crisis plan highlights that phenomenon. Ive been writing about this in the post that google and apple have gotten together and they are essentially deciding how Public Officials he is Smart Phone Technology or cannot use Smart Phone Technology for their efforts to do contact tracing. And they put forth their own solutions. Theyre taking on the role of these institutions that we have all agreed upon. And voted on in society. Is this power that they have, is a good thing. When we need to do about that pretty to either of you. Michael malone will main street america, that may be where things are going. It. William davidow one of the things that occurred to me. In writing the book, if you look at it, think of electricity. And when we distribute electricity, we created utilities. In the application later was delightful. And we had lots of different lightbulb suppliers predict and lots of different foreign suppliers for the gas utilities. And today, what we think about is the physical communication layer as being utility. But you cannot use that layer without the application layer platform that sits on top of that. So what is happened is that apple and google and facebook are in fact utilities now. When they are functioning as private companies. So in the past, we have the electric companies and they were private companies then we turn them into utilities because it made sense only to have one phone Company Supply everybody. Going to to talk about issues like that. My mother was going up in pennsylvania there were three phone companies. And if your friend was on a different phone company, you could not talk to it made no sense. And so we created a utility so we can have one phone company. These are the kinds of issues were going to have to talk about. Host do you agree bill that they are the best of amazon. William davidow i have different feelings about amazon that he loved us. Hes a very smart guy. Host you sent about this phone company so, compared to the empires that you have now. They had a very narrow effect on our lives. These companies are doing everything. How would that create differences. William davidow me, that is part of the big difference. I knew that we have antitrust laws and things that. Maybe, but im not saying that there is anything wrong with that i test laws. There is a technique of the past. And maybe we have to look at these things differently. The reason for that is that also these are institutions. They arent necessarily, facebook or google are operating in germany. So there are an American Company but with this world reach. So you get into issues of how much of what i would single world governments, do you want to have. You may object to me talking about World Governance when you talk about commerce. With about cybercrime. And things like that. Crime was essential essentially local the past pretty had enemy and escape card and the gunman. And today, somebody steals 500 million some real stills 500 million and theyre located nowhere. Host in a millisecond. And he may have an interesting question. Even in your for the antitrust laws are comparatively stronger. Released regulators seem to have that. [silence]. [silence]. [silence]. Because, facebook is fond of saying you own your data. And technically you have a choice. We can use the services or not use them. So that sort of Value Exchange is already there. Weve already all decided that we will give up some are personal data. Our Privacy Exchange for your services. I think that privacy advocates would say that you really have a choice. William davidow and how much of it is enough. Host but if Everybody Needs to use facebook and Everybody Needs to use whatever platform it is, is anyone really going to have the choice to not make that Value Exchange. Will it turns out that s been one of the biggest hoaxes for society. I get all the free speech i wanted to, but nobody listened to me. Nobody could hear me. If i want to talk to a lot of people i had to go through mass media or spend a lot of money, so free speech was expensive. So now we reduced the cost of free speech does your. The thing that was limiting free speech is the free market because people had to pay for it, you have to pay to get your message out and when we reduced the cost of free speech to zero, we underpriced something that was extremely valuable and appreciated what i would call a tool for antisocial behavior. So, theres nothing wrong. It used to cost me money to send a letter. Theres no reason why email has to be free. There is no reason why reaching thousands of people on the internet has to be free. And if it costs a little bit to do that, we behave more responsibly, but because we are giving away something of great value for zero, we are encouraging tremendous amounts of irresponsible behavior. Weve also reduced the cost but also made that irresponsible behavior very profitable for a small handful of people. Will to give you an idea how much information youre getting at, is a former microsoft executive. As an experiment he had the tools and he went up and down palo alto, got a tank of gas and then tracked where the data transactions find. Within a week it went to about 50 different servers around the world. Within six months, thanks to several thousand servers. So that was now known by thousands of major corporations and information controlling entities and Everything Else around the world. Imagine we move into the internet of things where your car is talking to the grid, and the thermostat in your house and refrigerator integrating all tracked, and its being shared with everybody including people who want out of things for you or to take advantage. Thats what we are getting into as we give out this information, but it becomes vitally important. There is a certain threshold we are about to cross. You talk about the media in the book that at the same time, they speech has been reduced in cost. You also diminish the earning capacity is especially local news. I couldnt really say the national media, but the local news in places like the publication you work for. Is it too late to get that back or are there ways we can change our thinking on that as well . It transforms somewhat in the digital era, going into television and eventually getting on the web, and the monetization model of the web broke journalism because they started giving it away for free and then when they started charging for it again, nobody wanted to pay. Maybe a few, the washington post, wall street journal, New York Times thats about it. But im a fourthgeneration newspaperman. They are all dying. They are losing their audience. They are being replaced by citizen journalism. There are no professional standards in the world. You dont know if you can trust them or if that blogger with their own opinion but. My hope is that begins to sort itself out as we develop feedback and maintenance in the tools and technique is to determine what is real news in fake news. Its a tough time for us. I think you should be able to say anything you want if 10 Million People are saying everything they want, that is the chaos we are in right now. As Current Events here, donald trump is threatening to take away the protections from Technology Companies through executive order. I dont know if that is possible legally, but he has added that debate for the audience members who dont know what section 230 is, section 230 is the communication decency act. It gets Tech Compa