Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Innovators 201

CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Innovators January 24, 2015

If you havent read Walter Isaacson it is a delight to read and because he connects us with devices that connect our lives. Everyone of you is carrying around something that has dozens and dozens of technological streams that have merged to get it to give us the connectivity we assume it today. Walter is the best person i know. Alter is the best person i know at explaining the connections that lead to the things that change our lives. In his new book the innovators how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution walters drinks together not just the hero stories but the stories that you wouldnt here because these things are not made by individuals. Walter does of phenomenal job explaining how the team work involved and the history is exciting and reverting. I will go back to my script for one thing i could not say better. I will quote salon. Com and say if anyone in america understands genius, it is Walter Isaacson. [applause] thank you very much, jim. Notice he didnt say i was a genius ive just written about a few people who are. And its great to be back here at the miami book festival something ive loved for many many years. Now that tom healey has taken it over thats great, and i particularly want to thank jim mckelvey and the president of miamidade Community College this great place because they are doing in their own different ways something that is very important for the digital revolution which is make it inclusive. Make sure everybody can be part of this revolution. And you may know that jim has created something called launch code. Launch code started in st. Louis, its going to be here in miami, soon all over the world. But its a very easy time. In six weeks for free, you can learn coding, you can be part of the revolution. And likewise, i think this is the greatest Community College this america and i want to thank eduardo for hosting us. [applause] ive been working on this book, the innovators, for really 20 years off and on. It began when i ran Digital Media for Time Magazine back in the days before we knew what Digital Media was, before we could even get directly on the internet and before there was web browsers in the early 1990s. But when the web browsers and the idea of putting the magazine on the internet calm along, we started came along, we started to do it, and i got called in by my boss, the president of time inc. , and he asked me a very simple question which was who owns the internet in i mean like who built it, who runs it, whos in charge of it, and i realized besides being a clueless question, i did not know the answer to that question. [laughter] and i started gathering string because the good thing about running Digital Media was i got to meet all these people, people i never heard of but really should be heroes of a revolution. People like bob khan who did the internet protocalls and rick lick lite, and they all lead up to people like steve jobs bill gates, larry page, sergey brin, the people who we all know as leaders of this revolution. And i was lucky enough to be able to meet these people, and i started gathering string started collecting stories about them. Id say to them, gordon moore, you know when you founded intel and got to moores law, tell me that story. I come from louisiana which like southern florida, is a place filled with storytellers, and its always great to be a journalist because you can ask the simplest of all questions which is tell me a story tell me your story. So i put it aside, as you may know when steve jobs called. I had done a biography of Benjamin Franklin, one of albert einstein. Steve called and said why dont you do me next. [laughter] i must admit my first reaction was, because hes my age. But then when i was told he was fighting off cancer, i realized it would be a great chance of being part of being up to close to somebody who had really been a revolutionary. He was a revolutionary and we biographers know that we distort history a little bit. We make it seem like theres a vision their, you know, edison or a morse or a steve jobs or a bill gates or an einstein in a garrett of a garage and they have a lightbulb moment, and all of a sudden innovation occurs. One of the things about studying steve jobs was i realized he was a visionary. He was somebody that really pushed the world forward, made a dent by his creative vision. But he also did it collaboratively. He was a strong cup of tea, sometimes hard to work with, but everybody i talked to said yes, he drove me crazy, but i wouldnt have given up the chance to have worked with him because he drove me to do things i didnt know id be able to do. So at the end of my time with steve when it was, he was stepping down from apple and he was sick, i asked him a question which was what product are you most proud of . And i thought he would say the original mcinfinish or the ipod or the iphone. And he said, you werent listening. He was always a bit tough. He said those are hard products to create, but whats really hard is to create a team that endures and continues to create great product. The product im most proud of is apple. And thats when i realized as jim said in his introduction, is this is not just about lone geniuses, but how to create teams. We realize we bounce ideas around with people, we each play our roles some person might be the visionary some person might be good at execution you need to put these people together. [laughter] you need to put steve jobs and Steve Wozniak with, also, a whole lot of engineers who can build the mac or create apple. And so that was the first lesson i learned. The second lesson i learned from steve jobs was when i had my first long walk with him, and we talked about the fact that he was a a humanities kid as he put it growing up. He loved the arts he loved literature, he loved novels. He said, but i was also an electronics geek and i thought that was kind of strange. I kind of related to that not that im steve jobs, but i was one of those kids that knew how to make circuits and use a sautering iron and not mess things up too much, but i was basically a humanities kid. And he i learned that the people who stand at the intersection of the arts and the sciences are going to be the place where creativity occurs. Thats what were learning in our education today. Its not just about s. T. E. M. , its about humanities and the arts, but also those of us in the humanities and the arts ought to make sure that we understand the technology so that we dont cede that ground to the engineers. So by that point i had a framework for the book, and my daughter who was then about whatever it is, youre applying to college 16 or 17, she was applying to college anding with the type of parent and being the type of parents my wife and i are we thought we were supposed to be involved, we were supposed to hover, arent we supposed to read your entrance essay and she being the type of daughter she was was having none of that. And one day she said aye done it. And i said what did you do . Ada lovelace. Remind me again . Lord byrons daughter, she was the first computer programmer. And i realized that she was a good frame for the book i was trying to write, because ada lovelace, which is where the book begins and ends, was as i said lord byrons daughter. And in the early 1800s she is growing up with a poetical streak because her fathers a great romantic poet. But her mother, lady byron is a mathematician, and her mother does not want ada to grow up to be like her father. Those of you who know anything about lord byron would know that lady byron at that point thought he was too much of a romantic poet [laughter] he had wandered off never to be seen again, so she had ada tutored in mathematics as if that was an antidote to being poetic or romantic. [laughter] it didnt quite work because ada lovelace combines poetry with mathematics. She stands at that intersection that i mention that steve jobs had talked about. And soon as i read that i remembered that intersection that was on the slides that Steve Jobs Used to show at every Product Launch. Go to youtube, and you can find it. And on the screen behind him when the Product Launch was over thered just be a street sign that said liberal arts technology, and he would say thats where we stand at apple, at that intersection. So i was thinking of ada standing at that intersection and reading about her because she wandered around Industrial Revolution england in the 1830s, and she saw the mechanical loons that were using punchcards to do beautiful patterns. They were mechanized looms. Her father lord byron was a luddite. And i mean that literally. His only speech in the house of lords was defending the follow ors of the man smashing the mechanical looms on the theory that the technology was putting people out of work. Back in the 1830s they thought that technology would put people out of work. They were wrong then theyre wrong now when they think that. But ada knew they were wrong and she looked at the punchcards that were doing these looms, and she had a friend named charles who was making a numerical calculator, and it was using punchcards. And she came up with a concept that is basically the heart of what the computer revolution is all about. With any type of programming, you can make a numerical machine do anything, she put it, anything that can be noted in symbols. Words, she said music art, patterns. And so she calm up and even came up and even showed in a published scientific paper which at that period was not usual for a woman to be plushing in scientific journals. She describes how this would work, and she even publishes step by step in a chart the first Computer Programming how you would instruct a machine to do a particular task that she had undertaken. And it is a program that goes step by step but has recursive loops and all sorts of embedded things. Something a c coder at miamidade would look at and say, i get it, thats what we do. So in other words, shes a pioneer computer programmer. It also amazed me there were so many women at the beginning of this revolution that had been somewhat written out of history. And so i leap forward 100 years to the 1930s, late 1930s when Real Computers finally come into existence. And to me, this is the beginning of a revolution, but its like the Industrial Revolution because two things happen. Its not just the steam engine and mechanical processes the way the industrial i mean the Industrial Revolution is not just a steam engine or mechanical processes its combining the two. When you start combining a steam engine with mechanical processes, you get an Industrial Revolution. And what happened for the digital revolution was the combination of computers with networks. The personal computer and the internet eventually. And to me, it was a true revolution. And i realized i had been writing about revolutions in the past. I wrote about the scientific revolution certainly the American Revolution we all know about. And i did Benjamin Franklin because i felt you should know the heros of that revolution because if you want to understand the values of america, where were coming there and where were going, it helps to know how our founders got us started. And yet there was nobody who had sort of tried to tie it all together and say here are the unknown heroes of that revolution. I got an email about an hour ago from a friend of mine i went to college with who had read the book, and he said, you know youre writing the history of our generation just like other people wrote the history of, you know, vietnam or world war ii or the depression generations, because the history of our generation the revolution of our generation was not political, not military, it was a digital revolution. And so i leap to the 1930s, having set it up with ada lovelace, and you get to an amazing character who youre going to learn a lot more about next week because i wanted to take him out of the shadows of history. His name is alan turing. So i worked very hard, but next week Benedict Cumberbatch will do it a thousand times better than ill be able to do, and its a really cool movie called the imitation game. And what alan turing did was threefold. First of all, he loves history. He understands ada lovelace. He builds on ada lovelace and the notion of a general purpose computer because he has to solve a very complicated math problem. As much as i love math, i wont burden you with the problem except its how you figure out whether things are provable or not in math. And he wants to figure it out and he does a mechanical process to do so. And to do it he comes up with the concept of a machine that can compute any logical sequence. Its basically universal. It can do anything. He uses it to solve the math problem but frankly the math problem except for a few math geeks here is not the more important part. The more important part was this concept of the univ. Al or total universal or total logical machine that could do anything. Then he goes to england secretly where theyre trying to break the german wartime codes. And there he works hes very much a loaner. Hes a Long Distance loner hes a Long Distance runner thats sent off to boarding school. His parents had gone to india in the Foreign Service hes left alone. He rides his boil for two days bicycle for two days to go to boarding school. At boarding school he discovers hes gay has a crush on a boy who dies of tuberculosis. So by the time alan turing gets to england, hes quite a loner, but he learns its all about collaboration, all about teamwork. Hes got to have people who have his back if hes going to do these things. So what they do is they break the german wartime codes which may have done more than anything else to help us win world war ii. And finally, coming out of it because hes wrestled with this question both of his homosexuality, free will are we programmed, are we are whoer because were like machines that are preprogrammed or do we have free will he wrestles with what he calls lady lovelaces objection. Because ada lovelace at the end of her paper saying machines can do everything and anything had a caveat. She said the one thing they wont be able to do is have imagination. They wont be able to originate thought. Machines will never think. Machines are different from humans. Alan turing says how would we know that . How can we test that . Alan turing is wrestling with this notion are we fundamentally different from machines . So alan turing, um comes up with what he calls the imitation game. As i said its name of the movie. We now call it the turing test, but its simply a way to decide whether or not a machine is thinking. You take a machine and put it in a different room with a human, you send in questions, and if after a while you cant tell the difference between the answers coming back from one side and the answer coming back from the other side you cant tell which is the machine and which is the human, he says that theres no reason to believe that a machine isnt thinking. Now, if youre in the philosophy department, you can argue all about consciousness and whether or not thats a good test, but it has become the defining test of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence of the digital age. And it sets up two strands of the digital revolution. The people like ada lovelace who believed that the point was to connect humans and Technology Humanities and science that the imagination and creativity of of us humans connected to the Processing Power of machines would each augment each other and that that partnership a symbiosis as she called it, would always be stronger than machines alone. And those who believe in the quest of Artificial Intelligence and believe were going to have robots that will not need us and therell be a singularity and well all be useless, i tend to be an optimist. Im on adas side. I believe that the combinations of humans and machines has always been more powerful than the quest for strict or pure Artificial Intelligence. I dont know what will happen in the future, but i always know that ever since alan turing wrote the imitation game paper, people have said in 20 years well have Artificial Intelligence. You can read that in any story in the 1950s, and you can go to the very beginning of this year and you can still say in 20 years well have Artificial Intelligence. Theres a wonderful guy in my book named j. C. R. Lickliter. Maybe so, but in the moon time why meantime, why dont we connect ourselves more closely to our machines because thats going to be more useful. So in all the data points we have has been that the combination that ada envisioned of the humanities and technology of humans and machines has always proved more fruitful than the quest for pure Artificial Intelligence. Now, alan turings own life in some ways is tragic heroic and somewhat of a reminder that maybe we arent machines. After he does the imitation game, he debates it with people. People keep saying, you know, thats not how it works. You have to have impulses consciousness, sexual desires. He went silent during those parts of the debate because at that time he was engaged when those bbc debates were happening that was so human, a machine would have found them incomprehensible. Hed picked up a 19yearold young man, moved in, they formed a relationship, gets burglarized, he admits to the police that they have a sexual relationship, and i think the police somewhat reluctantly because he is somewhat of a National Hero arrest him for it because it was still illegal back then. Very tragic. And they sentence him to, as if he were a machine have hormone treatments to change his orientation. Its really weird. Its as if you could reprogram the basic essence of who we are as humans. Totally wrong. But he goes along with it, takes it in stride for a while but th

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