Is the sixth annual boston book festival. Youre the expert or she will see Panel Discussions on how mayors can affect National Politics and it is an inside look of the Digital World and the study of the brain and human consciousness. We will start with a debate on the uses of Technology Today and in the future. My mic is on. Thats good. I am Sacha Pfeiffer from wbur and im pretty excited for this panel because you are going to hear very different views on what the future holds. So we have here and we have talked a lot about the right order in which to bring our speakers up and we have decided you should probably hear from the optimists first about the future and then we will go to the pessimists. So the most optimistic person we have here is david rose sitting in the center. He has written a book called enchanted objects and next to me is our pessimist nick carr and andy mcafee or other optimists. Andy and david are colleagues at m. I. T. David and the metal, his whole work is basically been focused on how we make the physical environment interface with the digital environment. Its sort of Human Machine Interface so when davids mind he looks at his house on the whole thing is an untapped app store. He thinks why isnt my umbrella glowing if its going to rain later today so i know to take it with me . Why are my pills somehow notifying me when its time to take them . David is an instructor at the m. I. T. Media lab lab. His the ceo at ditto labs which is an Image RecognitionSoftware Company that scanned social media photos for potential brands and products. Its truly evil. Say that again. A chilly though. Svinicki was previously the ceo of vitality. You find it a express scrips in cvs and walgreens. He founded a Company Called ambient devices which pioneered collapsible technology where youre embedding the internet into everyday things like mirrors and things like meros and goggle potentially im imagining. This is david. We will hear the most optimistic view from david. Coming up next will be andy mcafee and m. I. T. Colleague of david. And these were basically focuses on how Information Technology affects businesses how they operate, how they compete how computerization affects society. He is incredibly positive. Many people think we are in this period of economic stagnation of the more we computerized the more that takes away jobs unlike the first machine age the steam engine swear and increase productivity increased wages and employment many people think the opposite is happening. And he thinks we are on the cusp of an explosion of what Digital Technology can do for the economy. Nick here are technopessimist i just want to tell you theres a mixed attitude. Nick with an attitude called is google making us us stupid cleckley think that sums up up next view of this. He writes about technology and culture. You could have read them in the New York Times in the atlantic the guardian the new republic m. I. T. Tech review. His work has been included in mythologies like the best American Science and nature writing and i cant not note in nicks bio, he also says in the early 1980s he was a Founding Member of the universally unnoticed connecticut punk tha that punk band called the adrenaline voice. Before we begin speaking i want to give you a sense of some of the banter we were having. When andy and these guys know each other pretty well. When andy and nick saw each other and he said he and nick had to disagree for more than a decade. Nick does that describes andy describes nick as a walking bummer. [laughter] we are going to start you out with the positive which is dated. There is no pessimism in davids view. Andy is a bit more moderate and then we will hear the gloom and doom scenario from neck. So david was it you start us off and david is the author of enchanted objects. I want to start by showing you an image of my living room so i brought a video. It was actually done by the New York Times. Its a couple of minutes and that will illustrate many of the products i talk about in the book. Enchanted objects are ordinary things that have the same functionality they have before except now they can talk. They are connected. These are ordinary things that have extraordinary capabilities. When we are creating technology for the home really do want to make something thats seamless and transparent and as opposed to having things sort of callout enjoyer attention to it. They get a more ambient experience. Loop will continue to behave for those everyday objects as we do in the world and we can remain focused on connectivity between two people. What we are seeing now is this proliferation of different devices that are moving out from the cell phone and onto our bodies. In the middle of our living room is a coffee table that has google earth embedded in the coffee table. I just found that having access to this amazing observable map completely changes how often we talk about travel and how often we talk about the world and how often we look of places that are mentioned. Its really nice to have this beautiful large reference objects sitting in the middle of our living space. Devices can be a lot simpler and the interactions can be simpler. Internet connected umbrella can be an umbrella that only shows whether its going to rain. You dont need to tap on an icon or do anything that seems artificial. We come from a town in which we need to adapt to our house and not the other way round so what if our home could be a platform that we personalize and customize flex the key is how do we create this ecosystem that allows us to move from one experience to the other in a more seamless way . Some people might think that connects at home is overwhelming that therell be so much information in the home that is just a cacophonous environment. I think about how we decorate our homes today. We put photographs everywhere. We put paintings up and post it notes up. Theres a lot of decoration and adornment in the home. I think if enchanted objects can be designed in the right way we are going to want hundreds of them around us. What we are going to see is a new renaissance for designers as well as scientists are going to make a big impact in the type of technology we see at home. The history of computers have mostly been about efficiency. I think one of the things that is changing its enchanted objects can be about adding motion and magic to the fabric of our everyday lives and experiences. So isnt he cute, my son . In the book i describe our relationship to technology and how theres a huge wave that sweeping, thats taking technology from these blowing glass lapses seem to me monopolizing her attention with a call and response back and forth. These things were designed to be the interfaces for smartphones were designed in ages where we had dos prompts. We do something in the computer do Something Back to it than you do something and theres a huge opportunity now to have devices that ill have a little bit of technology in them, little bit of Artificial Intelligence that can really simplify our relationship to technology. As you can see in terms of the embedded pill bottle caps and desks and furniture and jewelry and all the things that will have embeddedness. I hope you appreciate that from the examples that i showed that this will Impact Health and a positive way, impact transportation in a positive way, impact housing. Did you see the apartments, the city Home Apartments at m. I. T. M. I. T. . Would have gopal is like a furniture dispenser so your bed comes out in the table comes out so well the space hogs that you have before can now be vested away so you can live downtown in new york or singapore or boston for less than 1. 3 million which is the cost of Square Footage today. So i guess the second part of the book is illustrated in this poster which i brought for you all is a the way to think about what should we make now that technology is affordable enough and small enough to embedded in everything . It made this periodic table of enchantment and divided up the things that we could embed technology and based on human desires. Echo fairytales, spy culture and comic books and think about what our human aspirations that could be satisfied with new technology . I talk about objects for omniscience. About half of these are real and available and have them are prototypes from the media lab and other places. Their desire to be allknowing. Their desire to be for humantohuman connection like that little skype cabinet that my 6yearold can talk to my parents who were in wisconsin as often as they want to. I dont have to set up a skype connection or call my parents. They just open the portal and the other person is there. Or her desire for safekeeping or a desire for immortality, these objects that help us understand ourselves and our Health Behaviors and give us a digital selfportrait of what we are doing that hopefully nudges us towards being healthier versions of ourselves or teleportation, objects that make travel easy for the last one is objects for personal expression. Once the other desires are being satisfied by the robot that would make and spend more time, this is my optimistic view, we can spend more time with personal expression like things are objects that make painting easier or guitar hero which made musicmaking easier or legal mind storm bricks which i worked on which make making sculptures are inventing robots easier. So that quickly is the view of the book. One is to think about our position towards technology and the second one is to think about what could we invent with these new coming internet of things; enchanted objects. Thanks. David has a number of posters so feel free to engage and take a look. [applause] next up is andy mcafee and hes the Principle Research scientist at the center for Digital Business at m. I. T. He was previously at Harvard BusinessSchool Professor. Now he and david are colleagues at m. I. T. Thanks very much and thank you all for coming out. This is already really good day for me because i am described as the optimist in the group. Our book came out in january called the second machine age ive spent the years essentially being called dr. Doom about Technological Progress. I want to talk about where the doctor doom part comes from the first of all i want to underscore davids optimism about this world we are creating so quickly with Digital Technologies. The reason im incredibly optimistic is that economic history tells me that i should be. Honestly i found this hard to believe myself. The single biggest change in Human History came in the late started in the late 18th century and has been going on ever since. Its a story about what happens when really powerful technologies entered Human History because we have really good evidence going back hundreds if not thousands of years and it tells us there was essentially no economic growth, almost no population growth and no advance in the state of our civilizations for honestly thousands of years until the late 18th century at which point the graph of Human History went like this and just went from horizontal to vertical. The story about why that happens is that technology story. The main thing that changes the family had steam power that let us overcome the limitations of our muscles. That hair braided technology continued in the late 19th early 20th centuries with the electrical power and internal Combustion Engine and honestly it benefited the planet like nothing else. The fantastic part about Technological Progress it starts in the more affluent parts but it does spread and what we are witnessing now thanks to innovation like the one david talked about is what we call the second machine age where we are overcoming the limitations of our minds and our senses thanks to Digital Technologies to at least a big and extend as we overcame the limitations of our muscles in the first machine age. I cannot conclude anything else except this is going to be the best Economic News on the planet for some time to come. When you hear that you think how are you possibly getting that dr. Doom label . The reason that comes them is as we look around at the evidence is absolutely true the old joke among communist is Technological Progress is the only free lunch that we believe in. The problem is theres no economic law that says tech progress is to benefit everybody equally. The progress progress that d. C. Can very easily be biased towards some people and sort toward some groups away from other people. The main people that its biased against the people who are losing out in the second machine h. R. People who want to offer their labor to the economy but they dont have in demand or differentiated skills. They are finding it really hard to get a job at a wage thats going to be healthy and acceptable for them. When we look at the evidence we see the average American Family is no better off today than they were in the late 1990s and is slowly going backward in some measures as well. The middle class in this country and around the world is very clearly getting hollowed out. The reason people down at the low end of the wage ladder are doing okay they work in the physical world. Their restaurant busboys and gardeners and massage therapist. These are not great great great jobs that they are jobs of the robots cannot do yet so these are still human jobs. Classic middleclass jobs that technology has already been good at those and thats explaining the polarization and the hollowing out and up at the high and we are doing pretty well so far but wait a bit because when we looked around we saw astonishing advances in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Vehicles come in robotics, sciencefiction technology after sciencefiction technology. My favorite quip about that, we need to keep in mind George Jetson actually drove his vehicle to work. [laughter] its not going to happen for very much longer i dont think. While that brings us this amounting amazing bounty the distribution of the pie is becoming problematic in some ways and it really helps me understand the rising inequality in the plight of the average worker and as tech progress races ahead unless we figure out intelligent ways to intervene those trends will continue and i believe they will accelerate instead of spontaneously reversing course. The challenges that i see coming with technology are these economic challenges. I have not listened to david before. I always loved listening to nick because he gave is many things to think about. As sacha explained i find myself are lightly disagreeing with him so get set for around 12 or whatever this is, nick. Andy mcafees book is again the second machine age. Next stop on his book is the glass cage the word cage tells you his perspective on this. The gloom and doom guy should really be up at the pulpit. Im very tempted but maybe not. Let me sum up what we have heard. This is the optimistic case. In the future you wont have a job that you will have a really cool umbrella. [laughter] progress is all about tradeoffs. I would like to take a slightly different view and look at a bit of a different question as we look ahead or even look at whats going on now and think about how computers are changing our lives. The question is and i jotted it down, when we rely on machines to perform our jobs to our talents flourish where do they wear there . Thats a very old question. People have been asking it for at least 2000 years, more than 2000 years back to the ancient greeks and its a question that encapsulates our fundamental ambivalence about labor saving technology. It will save us or it will destroy us. That ambivalence is captured in the title of todays session technology, promise and peril and you see in and in their rather than an order because its always both. I think the question is if anything more salient today than it ever has been whether we are going to flourish in this new environment or whether we are going to see the quality of our lives actually diminish because this and he has said he has provided a lot of evidence about automation through computers and software is moving more and more broadly into the economy and to professional whitecollar jobs. On the other hand automation itself isnt new. The first wave of Industrial Automation happened in the 1950s when we saw manufacturers install lots of electronically controlled machinery. Of course this machinery which was based on technologies that were created during the Second World War were much more efficient. They raise Labor Productivity and make companies more productive and more profitable that the machine is also presented as kind of an emancipator. It would help workers. By taking over routine jobs on the factory floor it would raise workers up, get the more interesting jobs and give them more valuable talent but what we found out in reality was something very different than that promise. A Harvard BusinessSchool Professor named james bright in the 50s when out and actually did exhaust is Exhaustive Research on what was happening in the industrial sector and it went into 13 to 15 Different Companies across a wide range of industries from companies that made automotive engines do one that we