[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> up next on booktv, "after words" with guest host heidi boghosian. cc executive director of the national lawyers guild. this week deputy editor of the futurist magazine patrick tucker

and his new book "the naked future" what happens in a world that anticipates your every move mr. tuckers the communicacommunica tions director for the world future society. he argues that the greater availability of data has created smarter prediction models of individual behavior. he discusses the implications of such accurate models with surprising conclusions. this program is about an hour. >> host: patrick your book has been given worldwide attention to the use of surveillance, data how government and corporations are really keeping track of a lot of what we do. i think your book as an important dimension to the discussion that many civil libertarians are having about how this impacts our privacy. i wanted to mention something you wrote early on in the book,

that we instinctively trust local government as the provider of information during an emergency even when it's an emergency that we are directly involved in. call 911 and ask for services ,-com,-com ma wait for someone to come to where you are and tell you what's happening. you write, this is an inefficient way to collect and distribute information during a time of crisis. and you say how we trust those in authority to have more information than we do. the information we get from government is heavily filtered. it's late in arriving. is there a strategy you can describe in making the shift from trusting those in authority to relying on our friends and our colleagues for information? >> guest: i think we should trust people in positions of authority during times of emergency. it's just that the method of information dispersal at this moment in time is not nearly as efficient as it could be especially considering you're talking about a population that

is carrying around a television station in his pocket all the time and that's one of the problems. what clued me into how efficient it could be was a conversation that i had with an entrepreneur named gordon jones and he made an app called guardian watch. he was a former firefighter and the guardian app works like this. you take a phone in the time of an emergency and take a picture what you see and it sent to a central location and distributdistribut ed across everybody who might be affected by that situation. it actually has the couple of competitors right now so compare that to the way we deal with emergency communication today which is a lot of people all of a sudden turning to one information source that is relying on whatever data it can get to relay information from a distance and then it's just fundamentally an inefficient way to deal with giving everybody the information they need to

make a decision in that moment. that's because we are communicating in that situation. it's sort of an analog format. a bunch of people are talking to a central emergency regulator and they are speaking at the speed at which we speak and that centralized information distributed is speaking back at a slow rate and information we know now comes in a variety of different forms. not just the spoken words so you get much more information from a picture than you do from literal instruction and what we have the capacity to do now is a, collect visual information and times of an emergency and also distribute emergency and at times of an emergency and really cut out the middlemen, the person or the central agency that is in charge of codifying all the incoming data and representing it in a

way that maybe helps that a large number of people but given the limitations of being taxed. this is an example to me of how we have reached a new and critical point where we create much more information in all that we do then we did previously and that changes the tools we have in decision-making. >> host: talk about something called the internet of things. what is that? >> guest: the internet of things is what we are seeing right now where we are embedding computational capabilities into our environment. some technologists disagree. i personally consider the smartphones we carry around with us or 70% of the american population carries around with us to be a trademark example. we are becoming human sensors because we are carrying around an extremely powerful computer in our pocket but it also takes the form of different sensors that exists in the physical world around us.

it takes the form of radio frequency identification readers that we pass underneath when we access easy pass on the new jersey turnpike. it takes the form of weather sensors that are all around us. certainly surveillance of cameras that collect data and send out somewhere else. this is all part of the internet it's basically the impending of computers into our real-world. the idea comes from a guy named mark riser who worked at xerox parc in the 80s. and he envisioned a future where we interact with computers and it's very different. we sit down at a desk and we start creating data with their fingers like typing and directly shoving it in a computer. instead he imagined a future where we interact with computers passably all of the time for our actions and so the presence of technology actually sort of retreated from our lives.

we didn't feel at the same way we do now and this is the future we are just now beginning to walk into as computation becomes smaller, more powerful, less expensive and that's the benefit >> host: now you talk about issues of privacy and how one of the answers to in essence protecting our privacy is for us to get ahold of our data. i wonder was so much of this coming out in terms of how data aggregators like acxiom and trw are collecting our information is a commodity to them or if they want to hold onto it. how do we make that transition to getting access and owning our data? >> guest: it is a commodity that they use but it's also something they create. we are the point of origin for the status of acxiom is a good example. ask acxiom partners with your phone carrier be it verizon or at&t most likely. it partners with your phone

carrier ,-com,-com ma one of those too. you create information about where you are and vocational data and vocational data speaks to different things about you. if you're at a particular place in a particular time you can be lumped in with a lot of people that have that characteristic. acxiom connects with different companies that are trying to sell you stuff on the basis of who you are and where you are. if there are privacy laws that say they can't market specifically ,-com,-com ma they can't you should name so all of that information that you carry and send to axion ms. quote unquote anonymized. that is sort of a nominal consideration considering how easy it is to de-anonymized that information. it's only because they are trying to pay attention to the privacy law and do not market to exactly who you are but they want this category to be as

specific as possible and narrow down on the smallest group of people to reach the most specific advertising and do that at scale over and over again. having said that like i said you are the point of the origin for the data and there's lots of different ways you can understand what they see, when they look at you. for one thing you can download a couple of different apps to log your location and take a look at your activities so that you understand in a way that's much more conscientious where you have been, where you went, what you did there and what that might say about you. you are a better judge of yourself than anybody else. there are a number of apps we can use and services we can use to understand where you fit among other people in terms of your demographic profile. most importantly when you make a decision about what you want to

buy or what you may buy or may not want to buy, just keep in mind that all of those decisions can be remembered by someone somewhere and at some point it will get out to you perhaps in the form of marketing. and so you might feel empowered by that or you might not feel empowered by that and if you remember the interactions where you are direct marketed to indeed there are services that can help you with that as well, then you have taken the first is from protecting yourself from really coercive marketing that targets you based on context and based on where you are and what you are doing. >> host: i think that until the revelations recently by edward snowden many people didn't realize the extent to which the government partners with private industry in collecting and storing and the ways that we don't yet know really how they may use our data. do you think that those revelations have contributed to raising awareness of some of the

things you talked about in your book, how we can possibly use data to improve public safety, public health? was this a good development? >> guest: i think this is absolutely a good development, the revelation. i'm not exactly sure what to make of edward snowden is a person and i'm not able to comment on whether or not he should face charges. i think that's up to someone else but the revelation itself is probably good and i'm in favor of more people knowing more things but more importantly i think that sort of revelation is inevitable. that's the first . for one very important reason that as is this. think of these big institutions having all this data and holding some sort of permanent advantage over all of us, holding some sort of concrete leverage and that's not the case. this data is not like tony him. you can put it in a box or put it in a reactor in order to use

it you are exchanginexchangin g information. it has to get out of the longer you have it more likely it is to get out and that's exactly what we saw particularly with edward snowden. when we think he is a hero or villain or hero who is probably facing prosecution for breaking the law or a villain who should be set free because it's a first amendment issue he's the biggest administrations -- that ever lived. as a contractor for the government. he had a pretty innocuous job as assistant administrator and he was able to do basically the nsa the snipping we feel that the nsa is doing to us, walked out with flash drives full of the most important secrets in the world and that's the nature of this stuff. the more you collect the more likely it is to reach more and more old. yes i think these revelations have raised certainly alarmed. they haven't really raise understanding.

some of the things we have spoken about. it's been revealed that the nsa holds in storage a lot of metadata information particularly telephone metadata information not only foreign citizens which legally they are allowed to do into infinity. we forget this that it's part of the charter to watch and a to watch any foreigner as much as they want whatever signals they can intercept they are allowed by our law but also u.s.. we forget what i talked about at&t, verizon. your carrier has all of this data. they use it to market to you so i would be more comfortable with a private company like at&t and verizon exclusively holding the data in the government exclusively holding the data speaks to a somewhat irrational fear. we are afraid it being misidentified or afraid of

becoming a false positive to a government that falling under the lens of him being accused of something we didn't do. be a running thing is the more dated you have the more likely you are to cut down on false positives. that's the funny thing about it. we don't have the level of alarm about private companies have the state as we expressed in the government holding the state it because the responsibility hasn't been as conspicuous on the part of the private sector. >> host: let me in dread. you're saying the more data that's out there and i guess that goes to the title of the book the future where everything is out there that there's less of a chance for example that i might be stigmatized for my political views and my activities. >> guest: you would be less likely to be missed dignified. you'd be less likely to be accused of something that you didn't do.

you might be stigmatized for something you did do and this is a problem that we have to start talking about right now. heart of the reason i wrote this book is to wake people up to a with tremendous opportunities the big data age presents but also alert them to the fact that unless we start having a conversation about this stuff all of those opportunities turn into threats. that's exactly what we just mentioned. so the future. more people knowing much more about ford's propensity is inevitable. the good news is the actual propensity. >> right now there is a lot of misinformation and things like acxiom. i myself went on and checked about the data.com and it had factual errors about me. >> guest: contributed to a process that was collected. >> host: i did them to have more information. the point is most people don't have the ability to go into

other data aggregators are the government files and correct inaccuracies right now. >> guest: this is another case in point. right now there is a program called pre-check. you sign up and give the government a little bit of informatiinformati on about you and then you can bypass certain lines. this information consists of criminal background history and a few other biographical features. a lot of people were talking about how invasive that feels that we are pushing everyone to a normalized higher level of surveillance but of course we are to have through the irs. it's amazing the amount of data the irs as compared to the amount of data the nsa might have in any individual compared to the amount of data that tsa pre-check has. all all of its a little bit separate and knowledge that is exactly separate but when you look at it together it all becomes more accurate in the context of itself.

that is the process we are playing -- seeing play out right now. they said please correct this data and in so doing they revealed at least to you what they had. that's part of the revelation process. you elected not to corrected but eventually when lots of other people collect data there's a higher chance eventually they will figure out that if there's an anomaly like take your case they will have a better understanding. you played a part now in knowing that. it's an arms race. that's the future we are looking at. this constant escalation of intelligence about who is going to do what and what they will do to me based on what i know i'm going to do in the past opportunity we have in our favor is to become much smarter about ourselves right now. the great news is we can actually do it. >> i want to talk about some specifics because you have one group examples in the range of fields from education to on line

dating and health care. you write that millions of people in this country get the flu every year or get flu shots and still get sick and the cdc even on its own web site admits they can't predict with accuracy what strains of the flu are going to be germane. now you talk about again sharing more and more information to accurately predict what trends may happen. how do you envision a health care movement that serves us and doesn't discriminate against us? if for example i share data and it shows i may have cancer that i'm not denied health insurance. can we protect against that? >> guest: yes but we have to insist on it. this is information that we want everyone to have. we basically want everyone to go when and get their genomes screened and there's a lot of controversy around this but in terms of science in terms of broad science that helps humans

everywhere. the best thing you can do to help this cause is to go in and paid and understand your genome. and send it off so you can be part of a large dataset. is this going to come back and be used to discriminate against degenerative health care? no, because of an extremely foresighted law enacted in 2008 that prevents health insurance providers from discriminating on the basis of your genetics. so there is precedent for pre-legislating against discrimination on the basis of data and what we have to do is demand more laws like that. i think that we can do it when we decide it's a fantastic public good for more people to contribute more data to things like curing disease. when you make that case to the public that it's absolutely essential to increase the amount

of data we have in the research field and in order to treat the major diseases of the 21st century and we can protect you from discriminatory harm than then i think you are going to seed the sort of movement that we want to happen to take place. there is an example specifically of the great organization by john wilbanks. he's a fantastic researcher out of california. what his organization does is it's creating a framework in which people can contribute personal medical information in a way that protects them but that also is useful to science and research. he is very interested in how to make sure those protections are in place that allow this to happen because otherwise the

benefits are borne collectively that the risks are personal and this is something we have to be aware of. >> host: you talk about the over arching theme that right now the risks are shared very personally. i found interesting one example and not sure if this is reality at the talk about a nap that you for example could say my friend jane has the flu right now and what might need the percentage or the chance that i'm going to get it from jane or spread to other people. can we do that yet? >> in a way, yes. the technology to do that exists in the data to do that exists in what we did to our phone all the time. as part of my research i talked to a couple of extremely intelligent researchers from the university of -- in a couple of researchers from johns hopkins. they took a dataset from 600,000 tweets. geo-type sweets from here in new

york and they analyze them semantic weight to train a computer program to know when someone was tweeting about how they were feeling, specifically how they were feeling. it's actually a difficult problem computationally because we use terminology that suggests sickness and thicket of ways. i have fever or i'm sick of justin bieber. so you have had to train the computer program to distinguish between figurative illness and actual bits of illness. >> host: at home today feeling feverish. >> guest: writes so all the strange nuances of the computer language. then they looked at where people were in where they were going and who they said they would be within how long. co-location is a big component in based on this they were able to predict 18% of all the

person-to-person flu transmissions between the people they were looking at. they predicted 18% of one person having another person the flu among this group. that's amazing. that's tremendous resolution when you consider the number of variables that go into where they are going to get the flu next. that number would be higher if more people participated and if we had some wide to understand data on surface clue transmission like where you touch a doorknob or something and you get the flu that way. >> host: the benefits are many including economic. people don't have to miss as much time from work if they were to infect several other people in the office, businesses and nonprofit organizations i imagined would love to be able to use that. >> guest: exactly and this is why we have to have this conversation. even though this is a tremendous capability in knowing the name of the person stuck to give you the flu should be regarded as a

superpower. no one yet has but it soon will be widely distributed and the term super loses its meaning and context but it's an amazing benefit and yet we have to have a big budget discussions about how that's implemented. what's going to show up on your phone is a probability distribution telling you the likelihood of getting the flu based on how long they were sick and that sort of thing. if you're talking about managing that from a perspective for incidents of school principal and you have a couple of kids coming to school with a 20% chance of infecting 30 people at the flu what do you do? do you call their parents and say 20% is a little high in the school has a 10% threshold? what if you are one of the parents of the kids who's going to sit next to that other child? do you call the school and say 20 or send us way too high?

i bring my kid out of class 1 is 10% and why does my kid have to miss a day of class because this other kid's going to show up with a cold? we have to have these discussions. it points to the fact of the problem isn't with technology. the problem is we are not yet smart enough to know what to do with that intelligence. >> host: d. you think the speed with which technology has an danced in the last three decades and with the advent of the internet has meant that policy has lapsed? >> guest: we definitely need a better way to talk about a lot of different policies in the context of information technology and how rapid information technology is changing our lives. i think you can see that clearly in the debates we are having right now around all of the nsa and telephone metadata. because i think there are a lot of people in washington who will

say this is a capability that we need to have and we promise we won't use it that we don't feel like talking about it much. this is where that begins to change behavior. some remarkable ways and among the behaviors that it has changed look around the world at all the different other companies and other governments that have taken money out of silicon valley firms that have abandoned silicon valley because they don't feel like their data secure anymore. i should point out there's a big difference in the way internet service companies have interact with the government around the nsa compared to telephone companies. the telecoms and the government have a much closer relationship than google or yahoo! and this is part of the reason somebody at the nsa felt it was important for the muscular program is called to engineer back doors into google.

>> host: the technological way that law enforcement could get into the hardware? >> guest: it could get at their data. that speaks exactly to this point. what was more secure and google before that bumped up its encryption. yahoo! took tremendous steps to increase encryption but it speaks to the fact -- that's the future. there was data that existed on google and yahoo! servers. the government was able to engineer a backdoor into the government in the conversation. that's the way information works. if works like technology works with all information technology works. it's cheaper and becomes more widely available so the same way computers went from being the size of gymnasiums and you only had one that existed on

university campus in only five people got used to two things that existed by phone and 87% population has one that's 100 times more powerful. the same is true with the information that we are seeing right now. ultimately in that it's going to be, change the way we live for the better. >> host: when you talk about the close relationship to china telecommunications industry and the government i think it's worth noting years ago when news came about the warrantless wiretapping under the bush administration many groups sued but down the government had given immunity to the telecoms. i think that will be changing. we we are going to take a break. i'm really interested when we come back, you talk about things like whether in addition to health and education, important fields where you pause more information that the future will

benefit all of us. we will take a short break and we will be right back. >> host: patrick you write in your book in many ways we are moving backward on the issue of climate change. can you talk about back? >> guest: so in many ways climate research is a real bright spot in the area of analysis but as we learn more about the climate and the information that comes -- becomes more more vulnerable to political vagal reese to political forces that change the way we feel about climate change. case in point the interim pencil

on climate change. this is an enormous body that takes research from around the world and comes up with assessments that we use to talk about the climate. no one is happy that it ever at all. the climate scientists are happy about it because they feel their findings were squished and massage into a consensus finding business is never too happy about it. it's always terrible bad news. i think we are in track to realize a four to six degrees centigrade temperature rise by the year 2100 which is god-awful. the public has different dealings depending on things like how well we are doing economically so in periods where there is robust economic growth we are much more likely to favor what we see as luxury policies curbing co2 whereas during the 2008 recession we saw at the push back away from climate change regulation.

we are kind of moving back on climate change and there's also the data that we used to make climate change assessments from satellite. >> host: and from other countries. >> guest: increasingly from other countries. 13 of the satellites will be out of operation, excuse me half of our 13 satellites will be out of operation and 2016 and we have plans to bring more on line in 2017. there's this great big gap but we are not going to be contributing nearly as much data as we used to and other countries are beginning to increase the amount of data collection that they are able to bring to the question of what's happening to the climate. this has the potential i think to become very politicized. when we start talking about climate change in the future researchers are going to be doing it with a more international array of data and

that lends itself i think if you look at the way the house of representatives works right now and the way the u.s. chamber of commerce works right now that lends to a lot of existence that could increase. even though we know more about the climate and the potential to stave off the worst effects of climate change we are also increasing the possibility of more climate data being politicized. >> host: what do you mean when you save politicized? in ways that may not necessarily be in the best interest of the public? >> guest: yes, exactly. we have a lot of different interests that are competing through climate policy and the bottom line is it's never, regardless of what you hear from people that are really big in the green business movement it's never going to be more

profitable to try to fix our addiction to co2 than it will be to continue it forever. it's just that continuing on our current path of co2 creation right now spells disaster for us. so what i think you are going to see as we become more and more aware of how the economy is changing and as more and more international data feed into that understanding there is an exhaustion by the public. >> host: in the future how can we address that problem? >> guest: the solution, one of the interesting solutions i've found comes from the private sector. there's a business called climate core and what they do is they take a huge abundance of data but instead of the form of an inter-governmental panel on climate change a big report that says by the way death in 2100

instead it outputs to farmers a particular score of how much the weather's going to cost them. as long as they have an insurance contract with climate cord that issues the check before anybody else. >> host: farmers can get reimbursed before they suffer? >> guest: right, farmers are reimbursed on the basis of what the climate is able to do with this data. the checks are issued automatically. it's a great big machine that knows how much money you are about to lose. >> host: the efficient. guess. >> guest: it is efficient. part of the reason is so politicized is it's not something but a lot of folks get. it's not something that you've run by continuous experiments. there are some high school textbook experiments that show

what the greenhouse effect is that you can't run an experiment on the climate. this speaks to part of the reason why like the meteorologist community isn't fully convinced that man-made climate change is happening. they consider themselves experts and yet they don't get to see the data or the supercomputers or be part of the intergovernmental group on climate data. this is the weird a slight suspicion that so easily exploitable by folks in congress and what climate corp. does is a future where we understand exactly the future weather and our actions mean to us. that creates a sense of connection to the broader climate and that is what's going to change. >> host: theoretically ideas

like climate corporations in total with insurance what your disk griping sounds wonderful. i have to mention monsanto. this is a company that markets throughout tolerant seeds to farmers and tolerate aluminum in the soil. how do we deal with the fact that on one hand it seems to be moving away from the politics that you have identified to have created programs like that. when you have corporations that have their bottom line and interest how do we guard against that? i'm guessing you are going to see get more information out and get more people involved. >> i thing get more information out and if monsanto is now the world's largest insurer for farming for agriculture in this speaks to a market that i think is rife for information.

it should be pointed out that i have mixed feelings about monsanto. on one hand i'm not freaked out but the idea of creating genetically novel strains of seeds. this is the broad interest of everybody. i'm opposed to some other business practices. a lot of their businesses practices that the land farmers for things like storing seeds. these practices are kind of gross. this does speak to the point what if you are a farmer and you are having a legal dispute with monsanto over seeds and you need to be the insurance product because it's the best one out there? all i can offer is i think this is a market that is now worth climate corp. need not necessarily be the only insurance corporation that is able to give out checks on the basis of future weather laws. they were looking at a bunch of different models and a lot of us

suffer from whether los all the time. regardless of how i feel about monsanto for the corporate ethics of the corporation. the potential exists to understand what the weather is going to cost a person on an individual basis. that's a good thing. broadly speaking it will connect this with the climate debate. the fact that we can talk about whether or not monsanto should be the only player in town with access to all of that information is also a good thing even though it doesn't necessarily feel like it. >> host: i want to get back a little bit to the subject of data aggregation but with a different angle. you talk about walmart and other retailers and how they triangulate our buying habits and how verizon and at&t factor into that. what i found it i found interesting is how we as

individuals actually influence others. our friends, our communities. are we all unwittingly perhaps in some cases advertising to our friends and colleagues when we use social media such as facebook and twitter wax. >> guest: i think a little bit less on twitter. if there is a big push on facebook to understand exactly the dynamics you just describe. it used to be a long time ago people would have interactions and they would influence one another to buy something or make a consumer decision and all of the data, there's no way to collect it because there are regular human beings walking around. now we increasingly have these exchanges in the medium we are all of that information can be collected and analyzed and used. there's a push at facebook to have the data science team. they have had once for several

years that looks at all of these interactions of vacancy and what they mean. so yes from a simple mathematical -- it's possible to understand looking at interactions on facebook which are a good proxy for interactions in the real world who influences whom among your friends, you and your friends and the people you are with. who exhausts him? >> host: what you mean by back? >> guest: we all have that one friend on facebook that throws out nothing but bragging things about themselves. i'm not sure exactly which friend of mine that is what i think all of my friends probably think it's me. it's like the michael scott thing. if you go to work and you don't know anyone who is michael scott i'm the friend that throws out

breaking things about themselves all the time. if i tried to influence and if you are my friend on facebook i'm sorry. if i try to influence my friends to buy something i would publicly be a loser and someone on facebook could say it's because they're bragging all the time. >> host: it's like the advertiser that saturate the market too much soot as a reverse effect. >> guest: is possible now to observe a that i'm important influence are on my friends decisions. it's possible to see exactly who's going to influence. facebook just looking at these exchanges devoid of the content of the conversations he whether or not two people are in a relationship. there are communication patterns that increase in a particular way and once they are in a relationship that communication patterns drop off.

they don't need to be on facebook as much because they are together. >> host: there's a thing called cloud that measures according to them by points up to 100 how great of an influence ur. >> guest: right, on the broader public. that's how good of an influence ur to everybody through the lens of the internet that what's amazing, facebook is doing is they understand that somebody that i have for snow feelings towards that i have never towards anybody, it can influence me to do something that i could be coerced into doing. >> host: gave me an example. >> guest: what if i have a crush on somebody and on facebook i checked there a file. the next thing you know it turns up. i have had a bunch of people say to me this is actually happening and it's understanding and taking a look at which one of

your friends is the best pitch man or pitch person to you. it's really easy. we trust familiarity more than we trust advertiseadvertise rs. the decisions that your friends make show up in your phone trying to influence you. there's a way to control that. the first step is to be aware. that's part of what i'm trying to do in this book. >> host: i think we are becoming used to corporations using predictive analytics. it sounds as though you are suggesting we could see a shift to having consumers, friends being able to calculate their own metrics. >> guest: yeah because if they can do it we can go too. the simple math is published. most of it is based on some sort of inference.

bayesian inference is a way for understanding probability on the basis of rapidly incoming information. the formula itself shows a lot of different ways but unto itself is not that hard. this is really the mathematical thinking, the mathematical precept that guides all of this stuff. it's understanding how probability is changing on the basis of rapidly incoming new information. because we are the ones creating that information we have much more control than we ever realized. i think he can begin to understand and it's true. facebook doesn't necessarily want you to know how much time you spend on facebook but eventually it's not hard to download an app that will tell you exactly that. facebook has a really important metric which is time onsite renewed it still leads in time

onsite. leading articles like sharing a lot of information. it's a wide variety of information. there is nothing to stop us from understanding exactly how the internet has served us better. even if facebook doesn't give us that opportunity, the question here is how i use facebook. here is how i influence others and that begins to change behavior and accelerates and keeps going. >> host: i want to talk a little bit about crime prediction. you insert -- assert that digital information can help us live more healthily as we discussed and avoiding communities of danger and many cities across the country were using predictive technology such as shots fired to triangulate whether shots have been fired. can you give me an example and one of the ones that have been

highly criticized our surveillance drones of technology you consider to ebay said in the crime field? >> guest: i don't think the technologies are themselves capable of invading. drones are a good example. by the end of 2015 because of a federal order police departments have to figure out how to integrate technology. there are great ways to do it, ways that keep police officers safe that expand situational awareness and there are lots of ways you can send helicopter drones to look into people's windows and do terrible things. the technology by itself is always where it's been which is simply denied. what it does is it amplifies what people are going to do anyway. that is another reason to think it's important to be having this conversation, because the

capabilities of law enforcement to enforce the law are about to go up a lot. how excited are we about all the laws we are capable and forcing? broadly speaking we want people that are public servants to be able to do their job much better much more efficiently at much less cost. we want that at least on paper but now -- so that's progress. autumn lined up by itself as progress. now we have to follow it up with a conversation about how interested are we have really in enforcing marijuana laws and if we had the opportunity to enforce all of them better? immigration laws. we haven't had that conversation yet but roughly speaking police departments working better and more efficiently is something that we want. so in terms of whether or not it can be invasive again i would

point out the more data you have the less light you are to have false positives but they're good case examples and cautionary tales. i would say in terms of police one cautionary tale would be the city of new york which realize tremendous drops in crimes. >> host: with comsat? >> guest: with the use of really old paper and pencil analysis to crime but also got into a lot of trouble and this is being borne out now in the courts with zero tolerance tactics like stop-and-frisk. you don't want to pair predictive capabilities with tactics like stop-and-frisk. that potential is there and that's a decision that somebody makes in the police department. alternative is to -- the way memphis used policing. it's a case of very few people know about in the difference is this.

memphis employed predictive policing like this. they went to different neighborhoods and told them this is what we are looking at. this is what you are telling us and this is how we would like to be involved in the community. they gave away in many ways you can say the element of surprise to continually have conversations with the community here's what he you can do with this new capability. that program hasn't had nearly the same amount of persistence or legal problems you see in new york. there's totally a good way to use predictive policing. i think we are going to see examples out of china soon because they have a completely different decision-making mechanism in place when they think about what policing is. the police have a very different mandate and they also bite into there are going to be the number one surveillance market in the world. >> host: if you had to compare the united states in terms of our policy making vis-a-vis how

we are using technology how do we ranked? >> this is a good question question. how do we rank in terms of how surveilled we are? >> host: how much the example used in memphis where we get committee buy-ins so we are peering comsat with sound policies that don't violate individual civil liberties. do you think we are getting off to a good start in that way? i assume you're look will have a lot toured hopefully encouraging more inclusion in the policymaking arena. >> guest: i see a lot of reasons to be optimistic. this 2008 law that prohibits discrimination, health insurance discrimination on the basis of

genetic information. that's key. everybody needs to learn that. everybody needs to learn first and foremost understand that the information you create is going to expand a lot. once you acknowledge that then you open yourself up to the possibility of using a it much better. having said that i am alarmed by the fact that we are about to increase the capability of the local police departments to enforce more laws and we haven't had a big discussion about that. this is something that gives me a lot of pause. there is a lot of dysfunction i think right now and the way we address a lot of these very simple municipal issues and also broadly speaking national issues. this is part of the reason why we feel right now as though we

give away information through our devices all the time in a language we cannot hear and cannot see. actually the revelations that have come out from june of 2013 about the nsa "washington post" and other outlets while they have been disturbing i think ultimately when you have the data it does get out and the time to have the conversation actually i'm really hopeful it's going to be constructive very at >> host: we only have a few minutes left. and now you interviewed a range of people, scientists, hackers, police. what's the rises you in this process? >> guest: at interviewed a lot of different people and interviewed great people in new york and even one guy who is trying to put sensors in to the new york city system so they could predict when there would be overflows and doing a job that city should do and he tried

to do it on behalf of the city and got in trouble. and also a great ai luminary in the book. ray kurzweil is an interesting example of somebody that was able to do all of this record-keeping on himself far earlier than the rest of us just because he was really good at computer science. this is an example of something that was seen as a strange behavior of and when kurzweil was doing it in the 70s detailed record personal record-keeping now something we can all do but the bigger shock i had was when i listen to gus kant a former chief intelligence officer for the cia get on stage and talk a little bit about how scared he was of the potential government abuse of the

metadata. it really just showed me that no one is in charge of the fact that we now create information like we do. we have that illusion that we are in charge of it but that illusion is temporary. eventually eventually his pass to all of sudden pass to alternate changes everyone's decision-making process. >> host: i want to and briefly talking about future is in general because you are a futurist and i wasn't aware that a lot of large corporations use futurist's consultants. >> guest: they do. i consider myself more of a journalist that writes about the future and i know futurists but at the same time i think that everyone should call themselves a futurist regardless of whether you are a consultant. yergin station that i worked for for a long time the world

teacher society in the futurist magazine really is a neutral clearinghouse of ideas for the future so the other night about the future you should collier so the futurist. having said that what is remarkable right now is that the future really is changing quickly. a few years ago there was and there is thriving markets for people that seem to have a little bit of an advantage when they talk about the future. this is the promise of the professional corporate futurist. i know some that are absolutely terrible. there are an abundance of them and they can fulfill a really important role but there is no human being that has a special access to the future. one of the remarkable things i've seen in putting together this editorial project is that we all through this data and how available it is have the potential to access the future is an idea in a completely new way. so i kind of an folks that i

know see the era of the flashy corporate futurist drawing to a quick close. having said that when it's done correctly the only thing that a corporate futurist can do really well is enable whomever they are speaking to to launch towards opportunities before it's too late. that's all i want to do with this book is remind people that however inhibited you might feel the inevitable fact is you will be creating much more information in the year 2020 and he did today. there's a lot of opportunity there. embrace that opportunity and when that date arrives you will note the very least in terms of the grand terms of history made the right decision. >> host: patrick tucker you have given us hope for the future and are really important book to add to the many others that are commenting on big data. thank you so much. >> guest: thank you for having

me. that was "after words" booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalist public policymakers legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page.

richard viguerie looks at the split in the republican party over the size of government an argument that the author says has existed since teddy roosevelt administration. this program is just under 45 minutes. >> thank you john and thank the heritage foundation and thank the heritage foundation's president jim demint for this opportuniopportuni ty. senator demint was my choice for president in 2008 and 2012. i knew that jim was going to be president great i just didn't know he would be president of the heritage foundation.

they are at its foundation, america's fortunate to have jim demint as its president. jim has been the de facto leader of the conservative movement for many many years. as that later he has understood something that most conservatives quite frankly have an understood and i think it's been to our detriment. that is why he wrote the book. the subtitle of the book is a 100 year war for the soul of the gop and how conservatives can finally win it. ..