Hello and welcome to tonight's virtual Commonwealth Club program
My name is Reed Albert daddy, and I'm a technology reporter with the Washington Post
I'm pleased to be the moderator for tonight's program on a critical topic the historical importance of the
transformation brought on by artificial intelligence and virtual environments as
We have seen so acutely over the past three months with the koban 19
pandemic and with social media with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and it's aftermath
Technology and online environments guide every aspect of our lives
Tonight. I'm pleased to be joined by two Silicon Valley pioneers to discuss these issues further
William David out and Michael Malone their new book the autonomous revolution reclaiming the future
We've sold two machines is out now and delves deeply into the revolution
We are living through regarding AI and virtual environments. The book can be purchased everywhere
including BN com a
Little bit about tonight's speakers bill davidow is the co-founder of the venture capital firm or David. Ow earlier in his career
He worked at Intel and is credited with being one of the pioneers in high-tech marketing
Michael Malone covered technology for the San Jose Mercury News in the 1980s and remains one of the world's best-known
technology business journalists
together David Allen Malone co-wrote the influential book the virtual corporation and today they're here to discuss their latest book and I must say
It's a great read now before jumping in just some quick housekeeping notes
Questions can be submitted for the guests via the YouTube chat feature
so
Please post your questions there during the program and they'll be forwarded to me and then I'll get to as many of them as possible
Okay, let's jump in now bill. I want to start with you
You helped make Silicon Valley Silicon Valley
But in recent years you've written a lot about how the technology industry has taken a wrong turn
And in many ways is hurting our world our economy our society more than its helping
And what made you want to write this book? And why now?
well
When I was with Intel
What we were doing was I come to realize child's play
You know, what we were doing was tinkering with things. We were thinking
stoplights work better
We made cash registers so they added up and and then Along Came the PC and we automated
spreadsheets and when you automated a spreadsheet
It went inside a business and you replaced something that people were doing with
pencil and paper or
Something like that but the business stayed the same and
What 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 form
this is causing the form of the institution to change so a bank becomes an application on a smartphone and
Then I suddenly realized this had happened twice before in the history of humanity
Once the Agricultural Revolution and then that's the Industrial Revolution
and
while
Everybody was saying was well
this is just another technology change only it's faster and it isn't that it's
it's a
transformation of society
Now you call that change in your book
Excuse me. You call that change in your book a social phase change
And as you said, it's this rare and and monumental thing
But can you go into a little bit of why do you call that a phase change?
And and how is this one really different than those other a couple of phase changes that you document in?
History. Well, well phase change is an actual scientific term and
It refers to
a molecule
The same molecule having a different physical form
So a storm cloud turns into a snowflake and when water goes through a critical temperature
32° it changes form. It goes from being a liquid to a solid
It obeys different rules fluid flow for water. No
We use different tools on water pumps and pipes and our intuition about water
tells us nothing about ice and on top of that and
It comes as a warning with the analogy
You know ice breaks pipes and icing ships like the Titanic
So we we've got a if we don't deal with these phase changes
It causes problems and while I came to realize was that what was going on in society was a similar thing
Our institutions were changing form
Obeying different rules. We were using different tools and our intuition was failing us
That's creating and
You know, I throw this out to Mike, but let's talk about the the moment that we're in right now
I mean as I mentioned in the in the intro, you know, we have coronavirus
we now have protests against police violence and racism and you know, all of this together is
That doing a lot of a lot of things. So one is it's kind of accelerating
The adoption of these technologies. I mean we're here on on zoom using zoom right now to to post this very discussion
but it's also kind of just bringing to the fore some of these issues with the technology that you
Get too in your book. For instance IBM yesterday announced that it's going to pull out of the facial-recognition
business completely
because the algorithms that
That they use are actually discriminating against people of color
So there's all this turmoil and I just won't ask you guys
What what effect do you think this turbulence is going to have on this?
technological future that you you outline
you know, but this is the
type of issue that phase change
brings about
You know in in other words the things
and I'm
Switch the subject a little bit on you, but it's like privacy
you know privacy we used to have a door that we locked and now
Privacy has a totally different meaning one of the challenges. I think that we have in Silicon Valley is
That we're now at the point
where
We've gotta
Be very conscious to the psychological and sociological aspects of everything we're doing
That was number the case in the past
Right and I and nice to have you back Mike
you know one of the in one of the things you both say in the book is that
We need to change the way that we're looking at these things
I mean we're we're looking at them all wrong and you know, so, how are we looking at this at this wrong?
Like can you can you well?
phase changes societal phase changes or points of inflection
as bill said
you can't predict what it looks like on the other side if you've only lived in a world of liquid water you live on the
Equator and you've never seen ice. You have no idea. What ice is it? Looks like you wouldn't even know is water
You don't know how it's gonna behave it has all sorts of different physical traits
You wouldn't know that ice floated so when we go into one of these phase changes
We go into an alternative reality that on the other side
everything has changed all the rules have changed things may look alike a lot of like
You know buildings and everything else, but there's been a substitutional equivalence
It's in place and let's replace what we knew is fundamentally different
so if you were a herdsman out in the levant and you came across
Jericho, for the first time you might not even recognize that it was a human structure called the city
You wouldn't understand how the society was organized
You wouldn't understand anything and it may be possible that you could never really cross over
You know the Jordan into this new world and we seem to be in one of these right now. We had another one the
1700s if you were out there working on the farm and all of a sudden the factories started
arising and you went to work in the city a
Completely new reality and our census bill talks about this a lot is that we have evolved
This is such a profound change going on we've evolved for the physical world
Where time has a certain speeds there's a certain scope?
Nature is not planned for us. It's not organized for us
We adapt to the world. The virtual world is fundamentally different. It was created by
Companies and is designed to focus on us?
manipulate us hopefully in positive ways, but it's also
managing us like a casino and we're
biologically not even prepared
For this new cyber world that we spend now half of our time, you know
And you document very well that some of these changes are already starting to look sort of dystopian
But it doesn't have to be that way
right and you you kind of say there's two futures that we could have the dystopian one in the utopian one and
it's
Let's look at the balance. I mean, let's take the Industrial Revolution
Okay
People left the farm went to work for factories. We ended up with a Dickensian
world in the cities of people laboring in the mills and child labor
You know the dark satanic Mills in all of that, but on the other hand
life expectancy went up
Literacy went up we invented new forms of Health like hospitals and medical care all of the in
Technology rising out of labs that emerge during the industrial revolutions
So we get a little bit of both and how do the scales are gonna end up is still not determined
still in our hands, but
it's more than just predicting the future which I think both of you are actually pretty good at just based on your on your
Track record, but it's not it's not just addicting it, right
It's it's trying to understand how we should the changes
we should be making as a society right now to adapt to it and
You know, what? What can we do? I mean we have all these new, you know, we have artificial intelligence algorithms sort of deciding
in a way our place in in society whether or not we get the health coverage we want or
The car insurance at the price. We want it. It's already starting to happen as you say in the book and you
Know what not. All this stuff is great. So what do we do?
What are some of the things that we?
That we can do or what's it what's a new way of thinking so that we can kind of?
better adapt
Well, I mean, I hate to wave my hands, but I'm going to
Yeah, I mean
It's hard to believe that
probably 200 years ago work was considered to be a curse, right and
and and now we're saying not having work as a curse and
You know roughly 80 some odd years ago George Maynard Keynes wrote
This
future for our grandchildren and I forget the thing where he predicted that we might be working 15 hours a week and
would have
Chances to to really enjoy life. We are going to end up with a different value system and
These are the things we're going to have to be prepared to accept and you know
It's going to be a very different world. There are things that we do that
are
Monetarily valuable that have no social value
There are things we do that are socially valuable that have no monetary value today
Child raising kids and
so
You know if you're willing to to pay me
money
So I could get childcare so I can go out you get a job
Maybe we better think differently about these things and say hey raising children is so important
We're willing to pay people for doing things that are socially valuable that we never considered to be
compensated we'll work and
These are the kinds of issues. We're going to have to deal with and
and if I
Do not purport to know what the right answers are but
if
we adopt the attitude is this is the way we did it before and
This is the the solution we're going to apply to the future
I know that isn't going to work
So my argument would be hey there can be a conservative solution or a progressive
solution whatever you want
but you've got to look at these things and say new forms are going to require new tools and new rules and
And you can't just say this is the way we did it before this is what's gonna work again
You talk about Silicon Valley companies becoming the new empires of this new era
Instead of powerful, you know nations. We have these corporations that dominate our our lives and again,
I mean this current crisis just kind of highlights that that phenomenon
I mean I've been writing about this for the post but Google and Apple have gotten together and
They are essentially deciding how public health officials can use smartphone technology or cannot use
Smartphone technology for their you know efforts to to do contact tracing and Google and Apple have put forth their own
Their own solutions. So they're taking on the role of these institutions that we've all
that we've all agreed upon right and voted on in society and
You know, I just where is this power that they have a good thing?
And and what do we need to do about that?
The throw that went out to either of you you'll note they all got richer during the pandemic. Well, Main Street America decimal
Maybe where things are going, you know, one of the things that it it occurred to me
In in writing the book, but if you look at it think about electricity and when
We distributed electricity. We created utilities and then
the application layer was the light bulb and we had all of the
you know and we had lots of different light bulb suppliers or
lots of different furnace suppliers for the gas utilities
today
you know what we think about is we we think about the physical communication layer as
Being the utility, but you can't use that later
without the application
layer or the platform that sits on top of that and so what has happened is that that
Apple and Google and Facebook are in fact
Utilities now and
and
We we that were there functioning as private companies. So in the past
We we had the electric companies and they were private companies and then we turned them into utilities because
It made sense to only have one phone company
supply
everybody and
We're going to have to talk about issues like that when my when my mother was growing up in Reading, Pennsylvania
There were three phone companies and you you you you if your friend was on a different phone company
You can talk to them it made no sense. And so we created a utility so we could have one phone company and
You know, these are the kinds of issues
We're going to have to talk about so bill you agree with Elon that they oughta bust up Amazon
I
I have different feelings about Amazon that Elon does but he's a very smart guy
You know does you tilt those phone companies though
They had compared to the empires that you read about now. They had a very narrow
Effect on our lives right at these companies are doing everything for us. I mean they're
You know, how does that?
How does how does that create differences?
Well to me, you see that is that is part of the big difference of you know
I hear that we've got antitrust laws and things like that. Well, you know, maybe
and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with antitrust laws, but antitrust laws are a technique of the past and
You know, we maybe we have to look at these things differently. I mean, it's it's it
The reason for that is that
also, these are
borderless institutions and
and
They aren't necessarily, you know
Facebook or Google or operating in Germany? I mean, it's not one eye
And
so
They're an American company
but
with this this world reach and
So you get into issues of
how much what I would say world governance, do you want to have and
now you may object to me talking about world governance when it you talk about commerce, but what about cybercrime and
And things like that the crime was essentially local in the past
I mean you had to have a yeah, I'd have a gun in an escape car and
today
Somebody steals 500 million dollars Citadel steals five hundred million dollars and they're located nowhere
and
So
What in a millisecond
Now you bring up an interesting question though, I mean even in Europe where the antitrust laws are comparatively
stronger or at least regulators seem to have you know more power or
aggressiveness and going after these companies there hasn't actually been
There have been some big fines. There hasn't actually been
Any sort of change that's that's that's created change in behavior of these companies. So
does um does raise the question of how how
What what governments are?
They beholden to and and what leverage does
Society actually have over these companies
Was a good question we saw the NBA, you know
Curl up the wind. There was a problem with China
It's a massive investment. We know Hollywood now will not make a movie
Negative about China because of the massive amounts of investments
I mean, I think it's it's all we're already seeing the effect and it's changing what we're allowed to see in many ways or think
Yeah, you know fundamentally
I
what I will call the business model of the Internet it it is wrong and
Legislation
could change that, you know, for example
if you gave me ownership of all my personal data that
Would change things dramatically
After that writing the book that
Yeah, we have to own our own data
It just seems more and more apparent and and Bill's been a great advocate of that for years
But now I think everybody is beginning to understand that giving up our data for free for bread and circuses was a very bad
contract
This is where this is where I might push back a little bit one area where I might push back on on
this or prod this thesis a little it because you know
Facebook is fond of saying you know you own your own data
So, you know technically you do have a choice right and we can we can use these services or not use them
So that sort of value exchange is already there. We've already all decided. You know, we're gonna give up some of our
personal data our privacy in exchange for these services
But you know
I think privacy advocates would say well are do you really have a choice? And you really won't how much of you enough?
and right
Right, but if everyone needs to use Facebook and everyone needs to use you know, whatever the platform dujour is
Do is anyone really gonna have the choice to not make that value exchange do not sell their data
you see that's
Partially baked into the algorithm. Let me give you an example
We reduced the cost of one to many communications to zero
It used to be
that you told me that I had free speech and
It's written right there. I
You know, I can say anything I want
This is not doing it turns out that that's been one of the biggest hoaxes folks voiced it on society forever
I could I had all the free speech I wanted to but nobody listened to me and nobody could hear me
So if I wanted to talk to a lot of people I had to go out through mass media
Or I had to spend a lot of money so free speech
was expensive and
so now we reduced the cost of free speech to zero and
The thing that was limiting free speech was the free market because people had to pay for it
You had to pay to get your message out and when we reduced the cost of free speech
to
zero
we under priced something that was extremely valuable and we created what I would call a
tool for anti-social behavior a
Dipity tool for anti-social behavior and
so
There's nothing wrong. It used to cost me money to send a letter
there's no reason why email has to be free and
There's no reason why
reaching thousands of people on the internet has to be free and
If it cost a little bit to do that, we'd behave more responsibly. But because we're giving away something of great value
for zero
We're encouraging tremendous amounts in their responsible behavior
It's funny. We've also made I mean reduce the costs to free speech but also
Made that irresponsible hate behavior, very profitable for a small handful of people
and to give you an idea just
How much information you're giving up? There's a gentleman named Mike Steve former Microsoft executive
He's now Ted of the digital cities project of Stanford
Just as an experiment
he had the tools to do the trace and he went out to downtown Palo Alto and bought a stick of gum and like a
Walgreens bought lunch and got a tank of gas and then he tracked where that data of that train those
Transactions went and within a week it already gone out to about 50 different servers around the world
Within six months it was at several
Thousand servers so that stick a gummi bot was now known by
Thousands of major corporations and
information controlling entities and everything else around the world
Now imagine as we move into the Internet of Things where your car is talking
To the grid and the thermostat in your house and your refrigerator and everything else are all
Tracking you they know where you are and that's being shared with everybody
Including people who want bad things where you were to take advantage
that's what we're heading into as we give up this free information that we think is
isn't that important but it becomes vitally important as
There's some threshold that we're about to cross where it becomes really dangerous
Since we're on the topic of free speech I didn't want to ask you Mike about
You get you talk about the media and in the book
but at the same time is the you know free speech has been reduced in cost you've also
Kind of diminished the the earning capacity of you know, especially local news. I wouldn't really say the national media
But local news in places like like the publication that you worked for
you know and and
how do we
Is that it is it too late to get that back or is there are there are some ways we can change our thinking on?
That as well. Well remember the newspaper is largely a
Phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution it managed to survive
Transformed somewhat by the did by the digital era
going into television and eventually getting on the web but the monetary
monetization model of the web
Broke journalism because they started giving it away for free and then when they tried to start charging for it again
Nobody wanted to pay maybe a few, you know, The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal the New York Times. That's about it
But for the most part all traditional media, and I'm a fourth generation
newspaper man
They're all dying, they're losing their audience or being replaced by citizen journalism
But there are no professional standards in that world
You don't know if you can trust that wrote that reporter with his own website or that blogger with their own opinions
You know
It's a cacophony right now and my hope is it begins to sort itself out as we develop
feedback functions in
basically maintenance
Tools and techniques to determine what is real news. And what is fake news? I mean, it's a tough time for a First Amendment
Absolutist like myself or I think you should be able to say anything you want but if ten
Billion, people are saying everything they want now we got a mess and that's the chaos were in right now
Well, you know and again a current event here
um, you know
Donald Trump is now threatening to take away
The section 230 protections from from technology companies, you know through executive order
I don't know if that's possible legally, but he certainly has added fuel to that debate over, you know
And and for audience members who don't know what section 230 is it's you know section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
basically gives
Gets tech companies out of any liability for what is published on their platform. That's a big difference right between
What you did at the Mercury News what I do, you know, I can't just say whatever I want it
I'll be sued if I if I write
irresponsible things about people and
You know is that
Maybe the momentum is there to get rid of that. But is that something we need to do?
It was you know quiz custodiet Ipsos custodes goes back to rome who guards the Guardians
I mean what we've seen is the tech companies trying to institute these boards and editorial censors and everything else
Trying to keep the bad stuff out let the good stuff in the trouble is
human beings have
biases
oftentimes they are unconscious of and
You can hardly say looking at the history of who gets who gets locked out of Twitter at given times or you know
Sealed off and you know not allowed access on Facebook and elsewhere that that has been an entirely unbiased
process designed to maximize free speech
Oftentimes as the censors don't even know their censorious
They don't know they're bringing their own political positions into the situation
I mean if it's a choice between them picking out what we're allowed to read and
Just chaos. I'll take chaos. I really will as much as I don't like
This is limiting our thinking and when you limit our thinking in our speech you limit our worldview
Because you think that these companies should be liable a bit bill. Maybe you can weigh in on that
Well we have strict and we have general liability if a guy works on my house and he falls off a ladder the contractors gonna
Get sued under strict liability, but dating back to the days of large farms. It's my house. I
have to be I'm gonna be at the table in the
Negotiations because I'll have general liability and I think there's some sort of new legal standard yet
they're gonna have to abide by we gave them carte blanche and I don't
Live well, they've limited speaks rather than improve. Speech
mmm
Bill, you were gonna you were gonna say something. Well, I when all this
about Twitter
Putting
The tags on Trump's email
Started I had a very perverse
Idea, and that was suppose that what Twitter required
was for somebody to certify
That to the best of his knowledge
What he had written was factually, correct?
and
That that I had to certify that when I published something and
Then I thought hey
what I would be doing if I had to certify that was I was then exposing myself to
some
Liability
if
You know, I'm just like a newspaper is being exposed to the liability
so that I was wondering if
If Twitter couldn't have ducked the whole issue
By saying hey
We're going to ask you to rate yourself and you can rate yourself as being this is you know
you know extremely wrong aisle, but, you know be questionable or
Strictly fishing and you could pick one of those three options and I
Was wondering if that might work
It's an interesting idea and I guess Twitter in that scenario. They would have to know who those people are
They would have to somehow certify
Their real identity right at some point
Well, no, but the but this is the individual certifying that and this is the person who did the post. Yeah
certifying that in his judgment
Mm-hmm
This was accurate
Highly accurate
But if I were, but if I just wanted to spread fake news on Twitter
I could just hide behind anonymity and certify that this is accurate. No one's ever gonna hold me liable, right? Well, I
I you've got the problem that we have to figure out who you are, right, but that I
on the other hand
there are people who we know who they are on Twitter, who are
Spreading falsehoods and
I suspect they would be
Very cautious if they had to rate themselves
to
expose themselves for that kind of exposure
Now one of the things that bothers me
I'm old enough now to see the 60s and I'll note that may the people in the audience here at the
Commonwealth Club are my age if you'll remember a
lot of the good things that can change as it came out of the
1960s were first verbalized by people who were shouting things that were considered outrageous and antisocial and
Anarchistic and everything else and now here we are 50 years later. We're saying we can't allow that kind of language
you know we have to
suppress
antisocial
Commentary because it's not good for us. Well
Think back folks. It was quite good for us at the time. And who are we to know now?
In retrospect we understand well about now in the future. We gonna look back and say suppressing this kind of pompous. Speech
Actually limited our options
Right, but right but at least then you knew who they were
They weren't people who were in the sixties. They weren't anonymous, right?
They were people standing out showing their faces and saying, you know, this is what I believe
Where as what you have now is, you know box and armies of trolls who should spread, you know?
Disingenuous. Is that New Yorker cartoon that on the internet? Nobody knows you're a dog
Right, so we're gonna talk a little bit about just to change gears a little bit. You you talk about this promise of
technology to create abundance and energy efficiency better health care
You know, I I read that and I thought you know
it doesn't it doesn't seem to me and maybe this is this is the focus of
Journalists, and we're to blame for this but it doesn't seem to me that those are the technologies that are really being prioritized today
in in the tech industry
I mean Apple for instance spends more on R&D and a quarter than the entire annual budget for the National Science Foundation
Which you know pushes that sort of fundamental research and I was wondering if you think that we need to
steer innovation in a new direction
so that you know, quote-unquote utopian future is
Is created as opposed to the dystopian ones is that if that makes sense?
Well, first of all, I take a little bit of issue with utopian and dystopian. I think what we see this is
fundamental paradox that bill and I could keep
Banging into we're right in this book, which is on the one hand the world becomes more efficient health care
We better you know, they'll be you know
you almost know hunger in the world because we're going to live in an era of absolute abundance when we have robots and
Picking fruit and growing things and controlling the water and all this kind of stuff when it's done by machines
It becomes more efficient. So the chances are the world is going to become more prosperous and more
Healthy, but then there's on the other hand. There's this existential
challenge which is
What constitutes a a good life how do we live if we're not working?
We're not producing something with our lives and we're just reducing it when I came up with the term
Zeb's zero economic
Now you human beings that at some point
Machines are taking over more and more jobs. And those people may never have a job again
So do we give them a guaranteed annual income perhaps, but if they're just sitting in their little studio apartment
which costs next and is subsidized by the government watching wall-sized TV for free and having food delivered is
That a good life
Can can you invest enough value into that life? Yeah, you can fly it
Drone over pets we're remotely on your wall size TV, but is that the same and so I mean, this is the challenge that
Paradox that can counter writing this book. It's almost like the
like the time machine the people living up in the in the
Grecian
Temples and all that. They've got everything and yet they have nothing they're slaves. They're
bill talks about the
Danger of robots is not mechanical robots of Digital robots and said we're being turned into robots
little by little and
That's not the future. I you know, I want for my kids or my grandkids. I
Wanna make I wanted to pronounce Zev the Z V's as opposed to the Zeb's because that's actually my son's name. Oh
I hope this doesn't become a thing
But you know, you you you mention the word efficiency there and
You know, that was another
interesting point in the book that
You know
Economists have always said that worker efficiency is is a net positive
Right, it's always it's always a good thing
And that isn't always the case, right? I mean this this
You kind of talk about that and I'm we kind of explained that for to people why
Why economists might not have taken in everything into account here when it comes to the efficiencies created by these technologies
Well, what is always has and in the past from 1920 to 1970
Whenever we increase productivity
gross national product basically grew faster than productivity it grew and when that happened
Wages went up and you created more jobs
but you
Can we were playing around with kids play for productivity if you have massive increases in productivity?
you tend to have very
Very low prices and markets shrink in size that's what's happened to publications and things like that where you know,
one source of news
satisfies everybody so that the price of new who's drops down and things like that happens and
so
the solutions of the past just aren't necessarily going to apply in the future and
This is where the challenges arise because the way we distributed wealth for the past I
Don't know I'm going to say four hundred five hundred years was we used?
your job as a way of distributing wealth to you and now
that technique is is
is
Going away and so we're going to have to figure out
new ways to handle things like that, but in the past when we've gone through these transitions
We've always been in times of scarcity. And now the problem is that we're that these problems are being created by
abundance, I mean a few people can produce all we need and
So we are in this utopian world where?
there there isn't a need for us to break our backs working anymore and
you know, and we certainly ought to be able to figure out a way to
harvest utopia from abundance
rather than
dystopia from it
but when it's you
Go to some some audience questions here, and I I do encourage if you're watching on YouTube to to post some questions
So this one is uh for both of you
Computer science has an introductory phrase garbage in garbage out
How is AI software trained to deal with this constant data reality?
I
never thought of
AI dealing with garbage in garbage out so much as I'm worried about the false conclusions
or let me put it this way the
conclusions
AI reaches that that
lead to
Just
unacceptable results and and I guess if I think about the fact that
That AI is there's a way to look at my employment record and for AI to
Decide that I'm unemployable
Based on all these in reports and this and that the other thing and I've always assumed that that wasn't
So much a problem with the input data as it was with a problem of the interpretation of the data. So I've been blaming AI
for
Misinterpreting the data more than I've been blaming the garbage that it reads
My to you about give it take on that, yeah
well
the interesting thing is occurred because of the rise of big data and AI is that
We've always lived in a world of Statistics where we gather up data from, you know
A sample and then we extrapolate and that's usually where the garbage outcome
Comes in is where we extrapolate from a limited amount of bad data and get bad conclusions
one of the interesting things is happening is we can now sample everything, you know, there's gonna be
Billion sensors out there in the water and the oceans in the air and trees
We can now map every single tree in the Amazon. So the accuracy of the garbage out is
It's getting better. There's less garbage coming out
Verbalist the conclusions it draws don't include what it means to be a human being and
Neil came up with a great phrase algorithmic prisons and
this is a terrifying thing that we isn't discussed enough, which is
Our lines are now being
circumscribed by a guy
They take our data and they decide what we're able to do and when we're able to experience
Its most visible in China where you get these social credits and you jaywalked three times. You can't go to that concert next month
But our lives are in even the United States, it's beginning to happen. You don't get offered
That deal over here. You don't get to buy that level of insurance all because AI
Has figured out that you are not worthy of buying that you are not a safe risk and the scary part is
You don't even know that there are boundaries on to your life
You think you have free choice, but those choices are getting smaller smaller smaller
That's that's the garbage out that terrifies me. Mm-hmm
another another question here is what do you think will be the biggest short and long term changes brought on by the I
revolution
Or I guess it's the AI revolution maybe
Well for my part, I think it's it's each one of these major changes
these
phase changes produces a different sense of what it means to be a human being and I think living with
Intelligent machines living this new autonomous world will change our sense of who we are. We already know
It's already changing our sense of time and space
I mean
we have a whole new dimension that are eating a verse called cyber space, but it's going to change our sense of
fundamentally of who we are
Now I think that
At least it you know, so many of us defined our
Selves by the job we had or by the profession we had and I
think that
That
The the the difference in work and
The difference in the way we deal with that and the difference in lifestyles that will come from that are
Going to be the the really important things. I mean I
My guess is is that the 15 hour work week might be a reality and
and
You know, so
What do people do when they have
five days off a week and
and
You know, we're learning that we have trouble dealing with that right now
It's interesting and I'll take more reader questions as they come in but that right now it's uh,
There's not a new one there. So I'm gonna
I'm gonna ask you I mean on on that topic. Um
You know there
there is this these technology companies today are
taking advantage of this abundant labor right of
Cheap labor people, you know uber Amazon. They've really they've really kind of like seen this
this
this labor source and you know and
And exploited it, right and and I think that's another it's like people on the one hand. Yes
They do have more time but on the other hand, they're kind of desperate for for work
So how do you kind of square those two things?
well, I
You know one thing you could do is it so give her earned income?
incentives at I mean
I
there's there's no reason why if
You're earning
Less than $15 an hour, the the government couldn't say for somebody who's earning, you know working
really hard that
That they couldn't supplement that income. I
mean
It
and you know this gets back to
Social questions as to whether you believe that that is going to destroy the fabric
of society
but
we have a
problem with income inequality and
it
The question is whose if you want to blame somebody
maybe you can blame somebody who's poor for not having the skills, but
or you can blame the rich for
grabbing all the money, but the problem is that the social unrest we just experience says that
Life is going to be not very good for all of us unless we figure out how to solve that problem
and so we're gonna have to address that problem and
We're gonna have to follow my techniques for doing it and so maybe
Some kind of earned income incentive is a way of doing that and an uber driver
If he was getting an earned income incentive, that wouldn't be necessarily a bad job
There's also the notion that what we consider non tangible
Income, you know
Raising children, you know coaching a girls soccer team
Doing community service down at the soup kitchen. Those are those are
voluntary activities that are unpaid and we say well you you get the personal satisfaction of doing the good work but in
theory
Those jobs could be paid to you know, there's a lot of things we do that
theoretically could be monetize in such a way that
This becomes people's careers
people that can't find work because they've been displaced by the I
We don't have a model for that yet. But my sense is it's going to happen
So, you know back to some of your solutions
I I thought some years are so radical and and fascinating. I want to talk about a little more of I mean for instance
You talk about the possibly taxing companies based on the number of users they have
Can you explain that? What's the reasoning behind fine that one?
Well
You know
this
this got back to the fact that
we had underpriced things and
So I'm
I'm
not a fan of let's say conspiracy theories and
So I
I thought but there are people who engage in
conspiracy theory as a business
Yeah, but and they they agent conspiracy theory not necessarily because they believe in conspiracy
The conspiracies but because they get lots of clicks Kankan sell the advertising so I was sitting there thinking
Hey
The you know, if you've got all these connections and if if people are so valuable that they want to connect to you
um, maybe
We should make connecting to you a little bit expensive and then you could say hey
All right
I've got lots of people connecting with me and
I'm gonna make them pay to connect with me and you turn into a different kind of business and
I
So the thinking behind that was that
if if I had thousands of people who wanted to
Read I had written
And they were clicking on my blog. I could text you a little bit for that and you could charge for
Reading your blog and it would be a real business
It's it's all based on the fundamental notion bill and I both have that the internet got created with a
Busted financial model right out of the gate and the most pernicious thing that happened was the rise of freeware
because it wasn't freeware and that
When you start doing freeware
You're manipulating teenage kids using techniques learned from casinos to make them addicted to the experience
There's a social cost involved
You know that is they are at the moment immune for they don't have to pay that social cost that somehow
Monetizing the Internet in some rational way where you have to pay
More taxes if you got a bigger footprint and you're having more social impact in other words the number of users
You have a number of clicks you get it, you know
It seems an athame to us the idea of charging for the internet suppose
This will always be free until the end of time. But if we rationalize
the monetization of it it structures the system in a way that
Ultimately becomes much more fair
I make it be a tenth of a cent or 100 of a cent per per click, but somehow to bring a
financial model to the internet that's realistic and rational and serves the larger social good just seems like a necessity you
know we could have a micro payment system on the internet so that when I read a blog I
I
could pay you a nickel and
And I suspect that if you looked at a newspaper
I'm paying a nickel a dime or something per story I read and
There there's a reason why we don't have that system because if we had that system
the Google business model and the Facebook business model wouldn't
work
Nearly as well. Oh
And then I thought if you think of the way the system works
You know I have capital equipment
I've got my computer and my iPhone and my iPad and my smart car
And I Drive around and I'm using my capital equipment
To produce the information that you sell to somebody else
I'm a
manufacturer of that and
it you know it you you take it from me and you sell advertising and you keep all the money and
They're there
so that you could conceive of lots of different business models and I
Think part of the problem that we're dealing with is
That we came up with a business model that distorted everybody's incentives
well, these business models are very lucrative and
the
The companies that we're talking about here have have a lot of lobbyists and they give a lot of money to the right
you know people and
Which kind of brings me to this question I wanted to kind of ask you is what is this gonna take?
You know really great leadership to get this stuff done
And you know, is there some technology that could invent that you know, really good leadership?
Well, either great leaders or you know, a lot of civic strife one of the two
But this if the system is so distorted now, I mean we we have allowed
basically free reign to a handful of companies to grow faster and become more valuable than any
enterprises in the history of the world and we gave them carte blanche on this and
It's time to start raining them back in
Because they're not going to stop they've already known they're not going to stop and their influence in distorting
Everyday life now is becoming you know
Was unbearable we know what's going on, but we can't do anything anymore. So it's going to take great leadership or
You know people on the streets again
Again what do you think is gonna come first? I mean
Is it?
Usually the second comes first and then a leader arises
Yeah, I mean like
even privacy legislation it seems like
You know, it's kind of happening on the state level
more than the federal level because yeah, once it it has to go through K Street to make it into the Capitol and
The lobbyists water it down on the way
right, there's gonna there's probably gonna have to be an enormous scandal that a whole bunch of personal information and
given to the wrong person and people die or they didn't we already didn't we already have that with
With Cambridge analytic. I mean, yeah
Yeah, we did it
We we all didn't feel it personally in our lives feeling the enormous danger
Of the potential of all of this one. Something's going to happen. You know, you can feel it on the horizon
something big is gonna happen that's going to
Really be damaging it's gonna people are going to rise up and try to stop these large corporations that they're intelligent. These are smart
So bill, and I have known all of them
You smart smart guys men and women they better start looking ahead and maybe do some things in preparation to keep it
Keep it from having they're gonna have to make some changes in the way they deal with us
So I ask one last question from the audience here
But put your your predictor hats on here. What do you think is coming next in terms of AI?
Well, I I think these autonomous systems and
You know general intelligence type things I mean these systems are gonna
get very smart and
It's going to be different than human intelligence
But if it's applied to a narrow application area
It they they can get very very smart and very very capable and
It they will have very specific domain expertise and they will be very good at the things they do
yeah, I've been tracking the semiconductor industry is this always upstream from everything else that happens and
people aren't noticing that there have been some technological breakthroughs in quantum computing and
atomic level
silicon gaze and
We're moving to the point where we're gonna be able to hold in our hands all the computing power that exists in the world
Right now and when you harness that to AI you're not going to get don't believe we're ever gonna find consciousness in our machines
but we're gonna have
incredible
Intellectual power in these machines more than we can imagine
Yeah, they're gonna be moving at speeds. You'll be doing a lifetime in a second human lifetime and when that arrives
its I can
Imagine the applications have numbers but they're gonna be utterly transformative that our
Children will look back on us. Like we look back on that herds medal event, you know in 4000 BC and
Big changes are coming really fast and they'll hit what we we know they're coming but we keep this counting it
But when they hit we're gonna go wait a minute what happened out that it is so quick and it will happen soon
Well, unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today's program
I want to thank Bill davidow and Michael Malone for joining tonight's very interesting Commonwealth Club program
And again, I encourage you to purchase their new book the autonomous revolution available everywhere. I'll show you a picture
Including be n calm and I'm read Albert Gotti and tonight's
Virtual Commonwealth Club has been adjourned
Thanks everybody
Thank you. Thank you
