Good afternoon, my name is Stephen Rodriguez and im a fellow at new American InternationalSecurity Program and today im joined by scott hartley, author of the new book the fuzzy and the techie, and its interesting when scott and i have known each other a little while now and when he first approached me about this, i immediately thought of my freshman year in college and deciding on what i should major in and i love history and i love Political Science but i quickly thought you know, i want to be sure i get a job that doesnt involve academia or writing papers no one cares read about so i decided to meet the professional world halfway and major in business. But when i read this book and i talked to scott about it, it made sense because my career like many of yours as well can make a difference and inturn , i realized that now what i didnt know then is that in many ways the more liberal arts or even business has massive applicability to the technology world, even to innovation in general. So with that i want to turn it over to scott. Before scott can tell you more about his book, i know scott from our time innew york , he like myself as spent some time in the ventral capital world, worked for google, facebook, pretty much has a dream resume and i think important to this book as spent some time as a president ial innovation fellow. So i had the fortune or misfortune of getting some good experience in government and learning about Large Enterprises so maybe to start tell us about yourself and why you had the idea to spend a lot of time writing a book. First of all, thank you do new america and stephen for having me here today and all you guys for spending your lunch with us here. My impetus for writing the book really came out of the observation. I spent my time, i grew up in the bay area during the boom and bust in an era that the this interest in policy and sort of the fuzzier side of things. And yet i found my way into google and into facebook and where i was working at a venturecapital firm. And in the process of vc, your job is effectively to meet with entrepreneurs on a daytoday basis and track where you think innovation maybe going to work with other partners to face investments in those companies you think i promise. The solution i had was sort of odd choice, the narrative coming out of the media and the merit narrative that i saw on a daytoday basis that basically valley was this vanguard and this monolith of techies creating innovation and there was sort of no other contributors to that world. And i think you go back to the 1990s, laying the groundwork and infrastructure for the web and for the technology we have today, it may have been more of a true statement that it was pioneered by techies. But today, as mark said, its been sort of propagated by the media that the stock is leading the world and i would look back and say competing the world and its become the application there is about how we apply that meaningfully. And its no longer the case that you have to be the techie in order to participate in Silicon Valley so in meeting today with different entrepreneurs, weve seen at least half of those entrepreneurs were people that were coming from fashion to finance to media. They were coming out of different academic backgrounds, applying what they had known from sociology, anthropology or economics, partnering with a techie often to push the mutual old problem, things that they understood deeply but i sort of realized in this sort of thesis of the book is that as code has become more monetized , its an advantage on how we apply meaningfully comes from the people coming from these other backgrounds, these other disciplines and has the passion and interest has been to apply the technology to what they know. So the true integrity for the techie, they actually come back from the 1960s, 1970s on stanford campus and it was this lighthearted association, this lighthearted monitor of or you more of a fuzzy or techie and really it was just a jocular sort of term and fuzzies referred to people that studied the arts, humanities and social sciences and the techies were more explanatory people that were from the engineering world or social science and the book also is not about the opposites of these two, its that im a fuzzy or youre a techie or one of the other because if you look within these programs and in the social sciences for example youve got software that you have to master these days, big data and data sets. Youre engaging with independent variables and in these deterrents youre working with game theory and things like that so the fuzzy subjects are not uniformly fuzzy and you go to the techie side and you look at Mechanical Engineering these days and youve got the advent of Design Thinking which is basically user psychology. Theres a lot about User Experience design and sort of know your customer, Customer Experience interviews which are kind of sociological or anthropological in how they work. And then feeling that these terms you realize actually we are all a bit of both and its about the consolation of these two things. And the sort of secondary part of the book which refers to how the liberal arts rule the digital world, this paints that digital arts is been to some degree earned at the bottom. In Silicon Valley for example, it might be as recent as he said that these are the soft skills that working in a shoe store, nothing against shoe stores by dont think thats true. I dont think english majors will necessarily be buttresses or one of the condors of microsystems is basically the liberal are you arts is ill valued in the future. First of all, if we look at the kind of classic definition of what the liberal arts are, they incorporate logic. They incorporate the Natural Sciences so you will look at some of the most emerging fields in the Venture Capital world for example , christopher and gene sequencing and its these things that come out of the Natural Sciences, they come out of biology without direct vocational application but the passion, tugging on the mind and those are usually the premises of the liberal arts and i mean when i say these are the things that will rule the digital world. Thats sort of the i guess the rationale behind why i wrote the book and overarching thesis. So if you listen to a podcast or tech websites or watch any of the Major News Networks you would feel we are in a world where its not consumed by software, its consumed by ai and automation. And where people including the Administration Talk about the role of automation in taking jobs away or bringing jobs here. So kind of piggybacking off of the comments you made, how or why should a world thats consumed in Artificial Intelligence and automated processes even care about liberal arts and things related to anthropology or history or Political Science . So looking empirically across the valley and when i see Silicon Valley, i dont mean the geographic location. I mean kind of writ large, thetechnological layer. 1776 down the street from dc, youre seeing in places like lexington kentucky and chattanooga a number of Denver Colorado places, seeing really the access to information and the democratization of a lot of these tools has really not to mention the application layer of these technologies has meant wevegot sort of much more broadening of where technology fits. But for the reason that i think it still matters, if you look at from 2014, oxford came out with a study that said 47 percent of us jobs were at high risk of losing to automation and this was sort of the rise of the robots in the book and thinking about the reality that there was so many jobs that were at risk. In january of this year, the Global Industry came out with a followup where they looked at a little more granular level and said wait a minute. Lets look at 800 occupations. Lets look at what comprises occupations because all our jobs consist of many tasks and if you divvy up occupation by tax task then we attempt to match tasks with basically what machines can currently do and we what we project them to be able to do down the road we find that based on this type percent which is still a nontrivial number, five percent has massive implications for all sorts of social reasons and questions of basic incomes and questions of other commonly held parts of the media but its not 47 percent. What they also found was 60 percent of jobs, 30 percent of the tasks in those jobs that were things that would change over an eight to 20 year time so the reality that where living in is much more about this coming wave of automation and sort of new automation and ai taking over jobs and its more about when you switch from Artificial Intelligence, ai to intelligence augmentation, ia. Thats something to think about. In the automotive world, we looked at self driving cars and we think okay, over what period time are all our cars going to be humming over the roads by themselves. We can undergoing this process for a long time going back toautomatic transition to antilock brakes. Were starting to see the benefits of guidance and being on the freeway in a particular area with no potholes and good visibility, will start seeing these systems more and more. Its not going to happen overnight and i think if you look at that sort of progression, its much more serial progression that it is sort of all or none. And i think the same is true in our workforce. If you look at Driver Assist for example in the car, youre much more likely to have just the opposite in the office and we are to have robots doing our jobs whole. So thats one of the interesting things is in the book is if you actually unpack this idea and say where are the tasks in our jobs that can be taken away . Really the best practice that we have is going to become a machine practice and what i mean by that is if you have a best practice is generally something thats been done before. You know the process. It can be scripted, if it can be scripted, it can be programmed and if it can be programmed, theres a machine that can do that. If you look within any job and say what are the best practices , generally there the simple tasks and the things that are highly routine, those that are moved away to machines but what that does is it frees up the human in that role to focus on the complex tasks and if you focus on the complex tasks, one of the guys that i interview and talk with, a guy named david deming with the Harvard Graduate School of education, he talks about the basically social skills and soft skills as being this dark matter in the educational world and in the employment world of, its something we cant really quantify. We know its important but how do we put our finger on it . Kind of like dark matter in the universe, we know its out there but we cant put our finger in on it and what he talks about is in this world where all the simple tasks are scripted and eroded by machines and the more complex tasks, we specialize so you may be good at one thing, im good at Something Else and we start concentrating more frequently and in that process of concentrating, we actually encounter friction and in that sort of, theres a transaction process associated with that and what reduces that transaction cost, what reduces the friction is soft skills, social skills, things that you learn through being collaborative, being empathetic and i think its really interesting sort of second deck to this whole wave of ai to say if you do start for example in the legal space, diana remus and frank levy wrote a study that i talked about in the book where they said lets look at legal and figure out in the legal perception, what can we take away . They found 13 percent of legal tasks can be scripted and taken away but that doesnt mean that 13 percent of the employers disappear. It means within each job theres sort of a of tasks like reading a 500 page contract or capital letters or not capital letters, that sort of thing you can obviously outsource to machines. And really i think it gives some of these new scale advantages similar that amazon services, aws has empowered the smaller startups that have this game same scale efficiencies as larger companies. The same way with automation and ai will start to compete with the big law firm because theyre having 50 associates so these are ideas i think around the reason why increasingly i think this training in ways to train collaboration and communication andempathy, some of the soft skills of dark matter. Those become really important in this sort of machinelike world. I can definitely tell you i would personally pay a lot of money for whatever matter to help me read a government contract. That would be a valuable skill. Its interesting you mention ai and automation because i think it could be turning more and more toward International Security. Ive often thought about predator or the reaper or global hawk for these kind of terminator like unmanned tanks that are going to go out and wipe everyone out and i had a conversation with someone recently and it reminded me that for i think its every one or two predators , these unmanned planes that we use for combat and noncombat missions where seeing primarily, i think they said up to 80 people are required to keep those in the air. So maybe by having a predator in the air, certain individuals are no longer to have the chapter they did but now theres this whole new set of job skills that i might add the air force is massively undermanned and filling right now to keep these Unmanned Systems which are actually maybe the word isntunmanned. Maybe its over manned , that no ones can fly itself but i think related to International Security and even in washington dc, who in the government today whether individuals or agencies gets this paradigm in your opinion . You spent time in the president ial innovation fellow, have you run into people here in washington that seem to understand this . Were talking before and i think its an interesting concept of, when todd hart was working with president obama he was the second pto for president obama, he brought this thing to fruition that was the president ial innovation fellow program and the attempt was to bring technologies from outside of washington into the beltway. He brings an outside tech perspective, some of his ability to bring design and Product Innovation in different agencies and to really come in and sort of like the whitehouse Fellows Program the tax along with cto within the various agencies. And work to make the agency a little bit more efficient or think about some of these outside tools they can apply. Focus on Data Visualization or making digitizing physical records like in Different National archives for example. That was an example i think of importing techies in some ways and we were chatting earlier about this idea of whether exporting fuzzies, exporting, i think its more exporting problems and understanding depth of understanding of particular problems from places Like Washington where we have a finger on the pulse of maybe legislation, coming regulation thats walled up in sort of government entities. They could be made open and accessible through application programming interfaces, apis where all search of people type that data into new tools. Those are ways that i think we can start quote unquote exporting the fuzzy as we have imported the techie. I think that a good example of this was the private secretary of defense asked carter in bringing the Defense Industry out to Silicon Valley. Weve been trying through darpa and many programs to try to Bring Technology into washington but i think is an attempt to bring dod and defense out to Silicon Valley was interesting and through the process of creating whats called di us and its Defense Innovation experimental incubator that out in siliconvalley , theyve started creating all sorts of programs, really exporting, understanding of particular needs that the Defense Industry, Security Industry has and one of the sort of outgrowths of that is the partnership between steve blank whos an entrepreneurship professor, a pioneer of the lead startup, hes actually the professor for erica reese who wrote the book and so Steve Burgess is really sort of the pioneer of this build measure learn mentalityand working with two former Army Colonels , steve blank started a program called hacking for defense and theres a second one called hacking for diplomacy and it is courses that rolled out to i think 13 different colleges. You mentioned texas, texas a m. Jm you in virginia as this program as well. Basically, what this does is it takes from particular agencies or teams within the military, for example navy divers needed to have better information about biometric data and it pairs that problem with the team thats mixed between computer scientists, electrical engineers, people from the techie field and science people studying International Relations in these composite teams working together for a 10 week quarter on whatever problem theyre assigned to and the innovations are really amazing in sort of these short sprints by exporting the problem and getting sort of outsourcing if you will, different perspectives on how we can fix them. I think thats one idea that gets to the heart of the book , not just about bringing techies into washington but taking some of the things that we understand here and sort o