[inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter. Follow us to get publishing news, scheduling updates, author information and to talk directly with authors during our live programs. Twitter. Com booktv. Pulitzer prizewinning science and Technology Reporter john markoff, whose work appears in the New York Times, talks about the current and future relationship between humans and robots. John markoff has been seeing around the corners of the future as one of the nations Top Technology writers since he joined the New York Times in 1988. In 2013 he won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting as part of a team of New York Times reporters. Hes a frequent host and moderator for our revolutionary series, and we love john for all of these reasons. But we have a special affection for john for other reasons as well. He is a child of Silicon Valley. He grew up and went to high school here. He started covering technology in Silicon Valley in 1976. His vivid book, what the doormouse said, illuminated the influence of the 60s counterculture of the valley on the personal computing revolution, and he did so in a way no one else had or has. And now once more he looks around the corner toward a new future of technology with his brilliant book machines of loving grace the quest for Common Ground between humans and robots. If youre keen enough to catch the literary reference in the phrase what the doormouse said, you may also understand the cultural reference of this books title. It comes from a 1967 poem by Richard Brodigan which in its entirety said this i like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters and all watched over by machines of loving grace. [laughter] if that was brodigans vision almost 50 years ago when he was resident poet at cal tech, were here tonight to probe the proto socktive question provocative question loving grace or Something Else . Please join me in welcoming john markoff. [applause] welcome. Thank you. Youre among friends. This is the home team. Hey, hi. [applause] a little excited. I should be in that seat, shouldnt i . Well, you mostly are. And, of course, my nightmare is you were going to start asking can me questions, which is just going to be a disaster because i dont know anything about this, john. Youre the expert. You know, i mentioned that youre a child of Silicon Valley, and youve mentioned it a lot when youve been here. Its often something that gets interjected into your interviews, and i just want to ask you what has it meant to you to be a Technology Writer with so much of your personal dna coming from Silicon Valley . Well, what has it meant to me . It took me a long time, i mean, as a kid i didnt realize i was in a special place. I had no idea. I actually played in the hewletts house when i was in the first grade. I delivered papers at the house that steve jobs and larry page lived in. I like to say there goes the neighborhood. [laughter] and, you know, i actually wrote my last book, doormouse, because i left the bay area and went to the northwest for almost a decade, and it was kind of an antiautobiography. I came back, and i discovered there was this amazing new industry, the personal computer industry, and i wanted to find out how it got there. And, you know, it started as a series of oral histories which i love doing. So, you know, its certainly the air breathe in a sense. I grew up with it. You know, its also, its so generational. I grew up with a particular generation, ask now, you know and now, you know, the valleys moved on in a literal sense. Theres a wonderful piece of research that was done about a year ago by Richard Florida whos a sociologist, and what he did was he georotated the center of Silicon Valley by current Venture Capital investments. Once upon a time the center was in santa clara, and now its at the foot of the ill hill. And you can feel that. Its gone from being a Manufacturing Center to a marketing and design center. Its a very different place, and generationally i feel like im barely in touch with it. I went up to the science section this 2010 which is kind of a museum piece at the New York Times culturally. So i look at it, and, you know, i grew up as a reporter, and it was like swimming in this sea. I mean, it was, you know, i was part of a group of people, and now im distant from that sea which is still very much, is very real. And so in that sea, because youve seen a lot of other oceans around the world as youve covered technology and now science, before we get to the robots part of this have you ever been able to discern what it is about Silicon Valley that sets it apart from so many other laces that are trying to capture places that are trying to capture this mojo . Well, there have been moments. Personally, the moment i got Silicon Valley, there was a point in time where i sort of thought i understood it, what sets Silicon Valley apart. It was probably in 1981. The ibm pc had just come out. There was something called the big blue Computer Company big blue, it was a computer hobbyist group. Big blue something. They met at no, it wasnt home brew. It was an ibm pc group, and it met in sunnyville. It had the same flavor as the home brew, but the ibm pc was the new thing on the block. I went to the meeting, captain crunch was wandering around, it was 300 guys in white shirts and pocket protectors. [laughter] and it was guys, you know . And the San Jose Mercury tech reporter, really a great reporter, she basically interviewed this audience of people like you. And at one point she said how many of you people want to start your own company . And threequarters of the hands went up. And i went, oh, i get it. I mean, at that point it was very clear that people felt deeply that if they had a good idea, they could start a company, and that was part of the dna of Silicon Valley. Thats really what stuck with me as sort of what separates the valley. I moon, theres other, theres other bits of history. So i always used to tell the story when people say, you know, why did Silicon Valley happen here . Well, the first point is that shockley came back here because his mother was here, right there so it was this serendipitous thing. And then there was this other point which i think is important, and that is the first at t antitrust lawsuit, one of the deals that at t made with the government in the 1950s was the mandatory free licensing of transistors. That hadnt happened, no Silicon Valley. And then there was this thing that happened in congress that allowed the creation of Venture Capital, and somehow the synergy of those three things, you know, ive always sort of said thats what the valleys about. Except i learned something new from david brock who wrote the biography of gordon moore, moores law, recently. And brock was and this is in my book because i just thought it was the most wonderful piece of research. He was in the archives looking through shockleys papers, and he stumbled across this threepage memo that shockley wrote in, i think, 51 or 52, probably 52, before he left bell labs. And he made this impassioned case for bell labs to build something he called an automatic, trainable robot. And you read this thing, as a matter of fact, rod brooks who started rethink robotics baxter sort of stripped he just gave his employees the text of this document, and nobody could tell, you know, what the date was. I mean, he really sort of laid out the notion of what a device like baxter or like whatever google might be doing now. And so the connection is that makes it important for Silicon Valley is he went to beckman of beckman instruments. He didnt go to him to ask him to make a transistor company, he asked him to make a robotics company. I thought that was striking. And he wanted beckman to build the robots eye. That was the first product he had in mind, and it kind of devolved into a transistor company and was set back. But the original vision the sort of lets go was about robots. So here we are thats fascinating. 50 years later full circle. What a perfect segway into the whole discussion of robots. This book really seems to have captured a big chunk of the national imagination. Your book tour has been extensive, and youve been this a lot of places, and its doing well. I just wonder what is it about our current you seem to have caught a moment where our current fascination with robots has met your expertise as a writer and observer, and why do you think that is right now . Yeah. And just for contrast, my last book involved driving to san jose. [laughter] it was much smaller. So i have a theory, and i cant prove this, but ill throw it out there, and people can tell me what they think of it. And that is you know how we make fun of the japanese for being robot crazy and theyre in love with robots . I actually think americans are as obsessed, we just dont acknowledge it. And the difference is we have this love hate relationship with robots. You cant turn around without seeing some sort of robotobsessed comb point of our component of our society, science fiction, movies, the whole thing. I actually think its episodic. This has happened periodically since the invention of, you know, modern well, initial computers, you know, the book cybernetics was written by Norbert Wiener in 88, and three years later he wrote the human use of human beings, and there was this alarm about the arrival of automation. And he had some very clear views about that as he spelled out the social and economic consequences of it. And then a decade later there was another sense of alarm in the United States and the triple revolution. People wrote their manifesto about automation, there was a fullon government investigation into the impact of automation. You know, the vietnam war happened, and it kind of went away because we got distracted. And then, you know, probably over the next three or four years it spun up again because this new wave of a. I. Technology thats starting to work. A. I. As a field has had the most, you know, has overpromised and underdelivered so many times, and now its starting to deliver this remarkable ways, so thats created a great deal of anxiety. I want to get to that, what you call the rise and fall of a. I. In a minute. Right up front you Say Something very sobering. You say how we design and interact with our increasingly Intelligent Machines will determine the nature of our society and our economy. It will increasingly determine every aspect of our modern world from whether we live in a more or less separate satisfied society to what separatefied society to what it means to be human. Gee, john, too bad you didnt pick a book with some higher stakes around it. [laughter] that is quite a profound statement, and you deliver again and again on that observation. The other day somebody asked me what is it to be human . And i was, like, oh, my god. I kind of have an answer to that question. I mean, you know, humanity, i think, is rooted in the interaction between individuals. I mean, what is human is this thing that is culture. And so now were getting these machines that are increasingly intelligent. And, you know, as a species, you know, we have a propensity to anthromore poise everything. We talk to our cars, we talk to our pets. As the machines we are building begin to talk back to us, i mean, youre going to have to have a science of social relations because its very clear that people treat these thing will treat these things as autonomous, sentient beings whether they are or not. And thats already happening. The designers siri to get something done. But this is a companion 20 million registered users talking about multiple conversations a day then with multiple interactions 50 said theyd you and 20 percent i love you even in creeping out the microsoft designers. [laughter] even before former i am researcher said when we come to your country if it is quiet in china the interactions they have contact all the time it is called total time they go into the bathroom to have long conversations with gel ice this is the world of the her were stepping into her. Another important definition that you make early in the book about Artificial Intelligence you talk about those who believe in a. I. Will run through history so explain why it is important to understand that this is just augmentation. It is a puzzle of course, it is a dichotomy and a paradox because if you are a human you displace humans. I noticed when i was writing dormouse there were two laps underside of the stanford campus. At that time they believed it would take a. I. To perfect a human being on the other senator campus the of the set out to build technology to augment the human beings. It is still philosophically opposed and i was struck by that because those two labs set off to communities in the computing world with the committee and those edison around humans and i realized you solution is to use a. I. Technology designed to augment humans rather than and displace them. I look for examples of people who crossed over from a. I. Over to i. A. Im a failed social scientist. There is a distinct view in the valley that were in the process is to give birth of a. Species of technology some people people will believe him seibald and i think that is poppycock. I am of the school of churchill that reshaped our tools then they shape us. The hammer is a hammer and it is a tool. With that is the perspective that i take the search tools designed by humans with human values imbeded. How much of that often disappointed notion is behind the rise and fall . Have we been expecting all these years we would see robots that would replace us . Yes with this propensity we are surrounded by sciencefiction with provocative notions and for people who subscribe to the notion that i commend to them the outtakes from the robotic challenges 25 of the best robotics researchers in the world for several years with millions of dollars to do the best they could and most of them could not open the first store. The manager whose brainchild wanted to create a contest to focus on designing a machine. His kids said if you are worried about the terminator just keep your door closed. [laughter] that is where we are today. Is a perception that i believe it is episodic we see significant in vantage and its is but there is almost no autonomy there at all they were operated machines a small amount of the economy that he would see the you could draw a circle on the screen around the door knob they might be able to grab the doorknob bin may be opened it able and you literally could keep the door closed and be okay. [laughter] but there are technologies out there now particularly if the database the but it will not be what people think. You call this out in specific ways in this talk about those because theyre getting increasingly familiar especially human replacements vs augmentation. What about the self driving car . We have one downstairs and you seem generally optimistic it will help have been relatively soon with the social benefits. Is that right . I continue to revolve on this. I think the edge cases are killers that will keep us from completely self governed i said to somebody to drove me to dinner in a decade for for now i would pay. Google went down this path it is almost 1 million miles now and their branch point basically said there are problems we cannot solve it is limited at 25 Miles Per Hour because you get into a different Regulatory Regime that the point with no Steering Wheel noah accelerator and it is made out of plastic and the windshield is plastic so when they hit the bicyclist they dont kill them which i thought was interesting but google got so far with the project then they went to hand off and i believe they had these professional drivers who would sit there and lost over the machine then they begin experimenting with cars of to their employers to go home then they discovered distracted behavior up to and including falling asleep. That is a handoff problem he will not solve. I am sorry if you ever have Situational Awareness and a quarter of a second there is no way anybody can solve that problem for a long time and and tell you get the human entirely out of the loop we shouldnt think of self driving cars bin cars that wont crash that is a close sick a classic a. I. Approach and i think the Auto Industry is going that way from gm and tesla we do have some coming through and i think that audi had this already that the car drives a adduce to rise but i think audi in this lowes be driving system the car drives by itself following the traffic behind it you have to touched the wheel within 10 seconds or the lawyers got involved if not it will drop out of that mode. So this will continue and that is great to make driving safer. You talk about safety oriented innovation you say 34,000 people died in Car Accidents 2013 it could be a big benefit but also you point out in the larger area of robotics 3. 8 Million People earn their living as commercial drivers in the United States and there could be as much displacement is the unintended way of safety for people who need that. What is up with that . It might be real as the drivers are still committed to doing research to not replace all of their workers but it is called the earth is into this study in colombia comparing the economics of the robot cars in the urban area like new york compared to a human taxis. The economics are incredibly compelling and it looked lik