the central agency that is in charge of cog any identifying identifying -- representing this data in a way that may be -- bugs a number of people but begin limitations of being texted. this is an example of us reaching a new and critical point. we create much more information in all we do than we did previously, and that changes the tools we have in decisionmaking. >> host: you talk about something called the internet of things. what is that? >> guest: the internet of things are what we're seeing right now, where we're imbedding computational capabilities more and more into our living environment. some technologists disagree but i personally consider the smartphone we all care around with us, at least 70% of the american population carries, to be a trademark example of the internet of things. we are becoming human sensors because we're all contrarying

around an extremely paul computer in our pocket. also takes the form of different sensors that exist in the fill world, the form of radio frequency fives readers that we pass under when he access easy pass on the new jersey turnpike. takes the form of weather sensors. surveillance and cameras that collect data and then send that somewhere else. all part of the internet of thing the imbedding of computers into the real world. the idea comes from a guy named mark riceer, who worked at xerox in the 80s, and he envisioned a future when you interact with computers, it's different than now. we sit down at the desk, and start creating dat with our fingers by typing it into the computer. instead he imagined a future where we interacted with computers possibly, all of the time through our actions, and so

the presence of technology actually sort of retreated from our life. we didn't feel it the same way we do now, and this is the future we're just now beginning to sort of walk into. as computation becomes smaller, more powerful, less expensive, and that's the internet. >> host: 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. >> guest: right. >> host: i wonder with so much just coming out in terms of how dat aggregators, like axiom, trw, are collecting our information, it's a commodity to them. they want to hold on to it. how do we make that transition to getting access, and owning our data? >> guest: it's a commodity they use, but it's also something we create. it's -- we are the point of origin for the data. axiom partners with your phone

carrier, be it verizon or at&t, most likely. partners with your phone carriers if it's one of those two. when you walk around you create information about where you are, and it -- locational data, and that speaks to a lot of different things about you. if you're at a particular place at a particular time, suggests you're a particular person and can be lumped in with a lot of people with that characteristic. axiom connects with different companies who are trying to sell you stuff on the bay otherwise of who you and are where you are. privacy laws say they can't market to you explicitly. can'ty your name. so all of the information your carrier gets and sends to asom is quote-unquote anonymousized. so, it's only because they're trying to pay attention to this

privacy law that you're not explicitly marketing to in terms of exactly who you are but they want this category tagging to be as specific as possible. they want to narrow down on the smallest group of people possible to reach with the most pick advertising and do that at scale, over and over and over again. both weird and we hate it. having said that, like i said, you're the point of origin nor the data and there's a lot of different ways to understand what they see when the look at you. one thingor, you can download a couple of different app0s log your location and take a look another your activities so you understand in a way that is much more conscientious where you have been, where you went, what you did there, and what that might say about you. because you're a better judge of yourself than anybody else. justing in we think of paying tapings to. and there are a number of apps you can use and services you 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, what you may buy or might 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 marking. so you might feel empowered by that, might not, but if you remember these interactions where you're directly marketed to and you are -- services you subscribe to that help you with that as well -- then you've taken a first step in protecting yourself from really coercive marketing that targets you based on context, on where you and are what you're doing. >> host: i think that until the revelations recently by edward snowden, maybe people didn't realize the extent to which the government partners with private industry in collecting, storing, and ways 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 talk about in your book, how we can possibly use data to improve public safety, public health? was this a good development. >> absolutely a good development, the revelation -- i'm not exactly sure what to make of edward snowden as a person, and i'm not able really to comment on whether or not he should face charges. but the revelation itself is probably good. i'm sort of in favor of more people knowing more things, but more importantly, think that sort of revelation is inevitable. that's the first point. for one very important reason. we think of these big institutions having all this data and holding some sort of permanent advantage over all of us, hole something sort of concrete leverage, and that's not the case. this data is not like blew

tonum. you -- plutonium. you can't put it in a reactor and derive use. in order to use it you're exchanging information, it has to get out, and the longer you have it the more likely it is to get out. that's exactly what we saw with, particularly edward snowden. whether you think he is a hero or a villain or hero who should probably face prosecution for breaking the law or a villain who should be set three freeh because of the first amendment issue. but for sure he is the most famous systems administrator who ever lived. hi didn't actually work for the government and he had a pretty innocuous job as a systemses administrator, and yet he was able to do to basically the nsa snooping we now feel the nsa is doing to us, walked out with a flash drive full of most important secrets of the world. that's the nature of this stuff. the more you collect the more luckily hood it will reach more and more people.

so it think these revelations have raised certainly alarm. they haven't really raised understanding. exactly some of the things we have spoken about. it's been revealed that the -- that nsa holds and stores a lot of metadata information, particularly telephone metadata information, on not only foreign citizens, which legally they're allowed to do into infinity. it's part of the charter of the nsa. they get to watch any foreigner as much as they want, however much, whatever untiles they can intercept they're allowed to by our law and also u.s. citizens. we forget exactly what i just talked about. at&t, verizon, your carrier, also has all this data and they use it to market to you. whoa would we be more comfortable with a operate company like at&t and verizon exclusively holing that data and not the government exclusively

holing the data, speaks to a somewhat irrational fear. we're afraid of being misidentified, afraid of becoming a false positive to government, and falling under the lens of government surveillance and being accuse canned of something we didn't do. the "ronic thing the more data you have, the more likelihood to cut down on false positives. instead we're more likely to be a potential customer of a product we may not actually want but could be coerced into buying it. we don't have the level of alarm about private companies holding this data as the government holding this data, because of the irresponsibility hayes not been as conspicuous on the part of private sector. but -- >> host: let me interrupt. you're saying the more data that is out there -- i guess that goes to the todayle of your book, the naked future, where everything is out there. there's less of a chance, for example, that i might be stigmatized for my political views and my activities? >> guest: well you would be less

like lie to be mis-stigmatized. let likely to be accused of something you didn't do. now, you might be stigmatized for something you did do, and that is a problem we have to start talking about right now. part of the reason i wrote the book is to wake people u. 'up to, a., the tremendous opportunities the big data age presentses, and also alert them to the fact that unless we start having a conversation about this stuff, all of those opportunities turn into threats, and that's what we just mentioned. so, the "the naked future" more people knowing much more about your propensities is inevitable. the good news they're your actual propensities. >> host: there's misinformation in axiom. i checked about the data.com and it had factual errors about me. >> guest: right. you contributed to a process wherein that was corrected, and --

>> host: , no, no i didn't correct it because i didn't want them to have more information. the points most people don't have the able to go into other data aggregators or the government files and correct inaccuracies right now. >> guest: no. no. yet -- this is another opinion. there's a program at airports called pre-check you. sign up and you give the government a little bit of information about you, and then you can bypass certain lines, and this information con can cysts -- cop consists of criminal background history and other background features and people worry about how invasive that feels, we pushed everyone to a time when we stabilized surveillance. but we already have through the irs. it's amazing the amount of data the irs has compared to the nsa or that tsa pre-check has. all is a little bit separate and

not always accurate, bet when you look at it is together, it becomes more accurate in the context of itself, all of that data. that's what the process we're seeing play out right now with axiom, they said, please come correct this data, and so doing they revealed, at least you, what they had on you. that part of the revelation process. and you elected not to correct it but eventually, when lots of other people go inspect their data there's a higher chance they'll figure out there's an anomaly in your case, and they'll have a better understanding. but you played a part now in knowing that, and so it's an arms race. right? that's really the future here we're looking at, this constant escalation of intelligence about who is going to do what. what they're going to do to me based on what i know i'm going to do, and the best opportunity we have for moving that in our favor is to become much smarter about our ourselves right now, and the great news is we can

actually do it. >> host: i want to talk about the specifics. you have wonderful examples in a range of feels, from education, to even online dating and health care. you write that millions of people in the country get the flu every year -- or get flu shots and still get sick, and can the cdc, even on its own web site admits they can't predict with accuracy which strains of the flu bill will be germane. you talk about sharing more and more information to more accurately predict what trends might happen. how do you envision a healthcare movement that serves us and doesn't discriminate against us. so if, for example, i share data and it shows may hey have cancer, i'm not denied health insurance. can we protect against that? >> guest: yes, but we have to insist on it. take your genetic data. this is information that we want everyone to have. we basically do want everyone to go in and get their genome

screened and there's been a lot of controversy, but in tens of science, broad science, it helps all humans everywhere. the best thing you -- to help the cause is go in and pay the 23 and understand your genome and then send it off to be part of a large data set. is this going to come back and be used perhaps to discriminate against you in terms of health care? no, because of an extremely foresighted law that was ineighted in 2008 that prevents health insurance provider from discriminating against you on the basis of your genetics, and so there is precedent for pre-legislating against discrimination on the basis of data. what we have to do is demand more laws like that, and 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 that we have in the research field, and in order to treat the major diseases of the 21st century and that we can protect you from discriminatory harm, then i think you're going to see the sort of movement that we want to take place. there's an example of a great organization by john willbanks, and he is a fantastic researcher in california. and what his organization does is it is 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, and he is very interested in how to make sure

that those protections are in place that allow this thing to happen. otherwise the benefits are borne collectively but the ribs are personal, and this is something we all have to be really aware of. >> host: you talk about that overarching theme. that right now, the risks are shared very personally. i found interestingup example -- i'm not sure if this reality but you talk about an app that could say, my friend jane has the flu right now. what might be the chance that i'm gem to get it from jane or spread it to other people? can we do that yet? >> guest: well, in a way, yes. technology to do that already exists and the data to do that exists in what we give to our phone all the time. so, it's part of my research i talk to a couple of extremely intelligent researchers, adam tex university of rochester at the time, now with google, and a

couple researcher at johns hopkins. they took a data seat of 600,000 tweets from here in new york, and they analyzed them semantically to train a computer program to know when someone was tweeting about how they were falling. specifically how they were feeling it's a really difficult problem conversationally because we use terminology that suggests sickness all the anytime figurative ways. look i have bieber fever or sick of justin bieber. those seem lake they should be the same thing but they're not. so you had to train the computer program to distinguish between figurative uses of illness and actual use of illness words, and then -- >> host: at home today feeling -- >> guest: right. >> bieber-ish. >> guest: right. so all of the strange nuances of human language, and then they looked at where people were, where they were going, who they said they were going to be with and to how long. location is a big component. and based on this, they were

able to predict 18% of all the person-to-person food transmissions that occurred between the people they were looking at. so they predicted 18% of one person giving another person flu among this group. that's amazing. tremendous resolution when you consider all of the number of variables that predict where you're going to get the flu next and that number would be even higher if more people had participated, and we had interest way to, through the internet, to perhaps understand data on surface transmission, like where you touch a door knob or touch something and get the flu. >> host: the benefits are many including economicses. people don't have to miss time from work if they were to infect several other people in the office. businesses and nonprofit organizations, i imagine, would love to be able to use that. >> guest: right. exactly. this is a key reason why we have

to have this conversation. even though it's a tremendous capability and knowing the name of the american who is about to give you the flu should be regarded as a superpower. no one yet has the -- but soon will be wide by distributed the term super. it's an amazing benefit that awaits all of us. yet we have to have a big discussion about how to implement it because what will show up on your phone is a probability distribution, telling you the likelihood of getting the flu from somebody based on the amount of time you have with them, based on how long they seem to have been sick, and if you're talking about manning that from the perspective, for instance, let's say a school principal, and you have a couple of kids coming to school with a 20% chance of infecting 30 people but it's not that high. what do you do? you call their parents and say 20% is a little high? this school has a 10% threshold? what if you're one of the

parents of the kid that is going to sit next to the other child you call the school and say 20,% is too high. i bring my kid out of class when they're 10%. why does my kid have to miss a day of class because this other kid will show up with a cold? we have to have these discussions now because otherwise it's going to turn into a nightmare. that's a shame. opinions the fact the problem is not with the technology. the problem is we're not yet smart enough to know what to do with becoming more intelligence. >> host: can do you think that the speed with which technology has advanced in the last, say, three decade, 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 rapidly information technology is changing. we are tremendously behind, and i think you can see that very clearly in the debates we're having right now around all of the nsa and all of this

telephone metadata, because we -- if you -- i think a lot of people in washington are tone deaf and will say, this is a capable that we need to have and we promise we're not abusing it but we don't feel like talking about it. this where is that begins to change behavior, and -- in remarkable ways and among the behavior it's changed, look around the world at all of the different other companies, other governments canner that have taken money out of silicon valley firms, abandoned silicon valley because they don't feel their data is secure. i should point out, too, there's a big difference actually in the way internet service companies have interacted with the government around this nsa thing-compared to telephone companies. the -- the government has a much closer relationship than google or yahoo and this is why somebody at the nsa felt it was

important for the muscular program, it's called to engineer back doors into google and yahoo! >> meaning the way that law enforcement could get into their hardware. >> guest: yes, well, to get at they're data. looking at their network. and that speaks exactly to this point. what was more secure -- google even before that program was revealed, had really bumped up its indescription and their encryption is strong. yahoo! increased encryption. if you have a narrow talking data -- that's the naked future -- there was data that existed on google, on yahoo! servers-the government was able to engineer back-door in and somebody created a back door into the government. information works like technology work but it gets cheaper and then becomes more widely available and so the same way computers went from being

the size of gymnasiums and you only had one and it existed on the university campus and only five people use it, through things that exist in my phone and 70% of the population have one that is more powerful than the one in the gymnasium. ultimately in net, it's going to be changed the way we live for the better. >> host: when you talk about this close relationship between the telecommunications industry and the government, it's worth noting that years ago when news came out about the airportless wire tapping program under the bush administration, many groups sued but found they government had given immunity to telecalms. i think that will be changing. we're going to take a break. i'm really interested when we come back -- you talk about things like weather in addition to health and education, important fields where you posit

that more information, the naked future, will benefit all of us. so we'll take a short break and be right back. >> host: patrick you write that we're moving backwards on the iof lime change. can you talk about that? >> guest: in many ways climate research is a real bright spot in the area of fiscal analysis but as we learn more about the climate, the information becomes more and more vulnerable to political vagueries, to political forces that change the

way we feel about cite change. case in point. the intergovernmental panel on climate changement an enormous body that makes research from all around the world on climate and comes up with an assessment that we use then to talk about the climate and no one is happy about it ever at all. none of the climate scientist are happy because they feel like their findings were squished and massaged into a consensus finding. the businesses never too happy about it. it's always terrible bad news. i think we're on track to realize a four to six degree centigrade temperature rise by the year 2100, which is god awful, and the public has different feels about climate change, depending on things like how well we're doing economically. so, in periods where there's robust economic growth, we're much more likely to favor what we see as luxury policies curbing co2, whereas during the

2008 recession, you saw a big pushback away from climate change regulations. so we're kind of moving back on climate change, and there's also this -- the data that we -- a lot of the dat we use to make climate change assess. s comes from satellites. we have -- >> host: and from other country. >> guest: increasingly from other countries. we have earth monitoring satellites and 13 of these will be out of operation after -- oh-no -- half of the 13 earth's monitoring satellites well be out of operation and 2016 and we have plans to bring more online in 2017 but there's a great big gap where we'll not be contributing nearly as much climate and weather data as we used to and other countries are beginning to increase the amount of data collection they're able to bring to the question of what is happening with the climate, and this has the potential, i think to become very politicized. when we start talking about

climate change in the future researcher will be doing it with a more international array of data, and that lends itself, think, if you look at the way the house of representatives works right now, or the u.s. chamber of commerce works, that lends itself to a lot of resistance that could increase, and so even though we're actually knowing -- we actually know more about the climate and the potential to stave off the worst effect of climbed change, we're also increasing the possibility of more climate data being politicized. >> host: what do you mean be that it? you men in ways that may not necessarily be in the best interests of the public? >> guest: yes, exactly. we have a lot of different interests that are competing to steer climate policy, and the bottom line is, it's never going to -- regardless of what you hear from people that are really

big into sort of like the green business movement, it's never going to be cheaper or more profitable to try and fix our addiction to co2 than it will be to just continue it forever. it's just that continuing on our current path of co2 creation right now spells disaster for us. and so what i think you're going to see is that as we become more and more aware of how the climate is changing, and as more and more international data feed into that understanding, there's a -- an exhaustion opinion with the public, and we have reached it. >> host: in "the naked future" how can we address that problem? >> guest: there are -- the solution that one of the more interesting solutions comes from the private sector. there's a business called climate corp, and they take this huge abundance of data, but instead of outputting their

intergovernmental panel on climate change, big report that says 0, by the year, death in the year 2100, instead it outputs to farmers a particular score of how much the weather is going to cost them, and as long as they have an insurance contract with climate corp, and climate corp just issues a check before anybody else. it's worked like crop insurance. >> host: farmers get reimbursed before they suffer? >> guest: right, reimbursed for future crop losses on the basis of what climate change can do with this data, and the checks are issued automatically. you don't have to haggle over them. a great big machine knows how much money you're about to lose because of the weather. >> host: efficient. >> guest: that what i'm talking about. so climate data is something we think debt -- part of the reason it so easily politicize is it's not something a lot of folks

get. not something you run continuous experiments on there are high school textbook experiments that sort of show what the greenhouse effect is but you can't run an experiment on the climate. you can run an experiment on other things. this speaks to part of the reason that the meteorologist community isn't fully convinced that manumitted climate change is happening because they consider themselves experts and yet they don't get to see the data or be part of the panel on climate change so they're resistant to the notion. we feel like climate data is something that a tiny group of sort of pointy-headed academics comes up with that messes with us. a weird baseline suspension that is so easily exploitable by folks in congress, and what climate corp does and "naked future" portendses, we under what the future weather and our actions mean to us and that creates a sense of connection to

the broader climate debate that is actually personal, and that is going to change things. >> host: now, theoretically, ideas like climb corporation's, we insurance, sounds wonderful. i have to mention monsanto recently bought that, and this is a company that markets drought tolerant seeds to farmers, seeded that tolerate aluminum in the soil. how do we deal with the fact that, well, on the one hand it seems to be moving away from the politics you have identified to have creative programs like that, when you have corporations that have their bottom line at interest, how do we guard against that? i'm guessing you're going to say, have more people involved. >> guest: i think get more information out. create an alternative -- if monsanto is now the world's largest insurer for farming, for

agriculture, then this speaks 0 a market that i think is ripe for innovation. it should be pointed out i have sort of mixed feelings about monsanto. i'm not terribly freaked out by the idea of creating jeanette click novel strains of plants. a. opposed to some of their business practices, a lot of their business practices they lay on farmers for things like copyright infringement for growing seeds. what if you're a farmer and you're having a legal dispute with monsanto over seed and you also use their insurance product because it's the best one out there, and i can -- all i can offer is i think this is thus a market that is now -- where climate corp has been fantastic in pioneering work, may not necessarily be the only insurance corporation that is able to give out checks on the

basis of future weather loss because they're looking at a bunch of different models and a lot of us suffer from loss all the time. the potential is to understand, regardless how i feel about monsanto, regardless of the corporate ethics of the corporation, the potential exists to understand what the weather is going to cause a person on an individual basis, and that is a good thing. broadly speaking. going to connection us with the climate debate in an entirely new way. the fact we can talk about whether or not monsanto should be the only player in town that is accessed to all of that information, is also a good thing. even though it doesn't necessarily feel like it right now. >> host: i wanted to get back to the subject of data aggregation, but with a different angle. you talk about wal-mart and other retailers and how they triangulate our buying habits and how verizon and at&t factor

into that. what 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, twitter? >> guest: i think a little bit less on twitter but a big push at facebook to understand exactly the dynamic that you just described. so, it used to be, a long time ago, people would have interaction and influence one another to buy something, not buy something, make a particular consumer decision, and all of the data on the nine was lost to the either no way to collect it or know it. just regular human beings walking around and our exchanges flow to oblivion as has every conversation before us, and now we increasingly have these exchangeses in a medium where they can -- all of that information can be collected and analyzed and used. so there's a push at facebook to

have a data science team that actually have had one for several years that looks at all of these interactions they can see and what they mean, and so, yes, from a technological perspective, from a simple mathematical perspective, it's possible to understand, looking at people's interactions on facebook -- which are good proxy for our interaction in the real world -- who influences whom among your friends. you and your friend, you and people that you're with, who exhausts whom, and -- what do you mean by that. >> we all have the one friend of facebook that puts up braggy things about themselves. i am not sure exactly which friend of mind that is but i think that all of my friends probably -- kind of like michael scott saying if you good to 0, and you don't know anybody who

is michael scott, you're michael scott. i'm probably the friend that throws up brogy things about myself. so if i tried to influence my friend on facebook, i'm sorry. so, if i tried to influence my friends to buy something, i probably would be sort of a loser and some of -- somebody on the facebook data team could say, it's because they're braggy all the time. >> host: it's like an advertiser that saturates the market too much and has a reverse effect. >> guest: exactly. so all of our -- it's possible now to observe, a., i'm sort of a poor influencer on my friends' decisions or not. it's possible to see who is going to influence drs facebook can look at these exchanges. divorced from little content of the conversation, see whether or not two people are about to enter into a relationship, their communication patterns increase in a particular way, and then once they're in the

relationship, their communication patterns with one another drop off because they don't have to communicate on facebook because they're together. >> host: a think called clout which measures, according to them, by points, up to i think 100, how great an influencer you are. >> guest: right. on the broader public. i also like news lead. news lead does the same thing. that's how good an influence you are to everybody through the lens of the internet. bus what is amazing to me about what facebook is doing, they're going understand that somebody that i maybe have personal feelings towards that i've never expressed towards anybody, can influence me to do something i didn't expect that i would be able -- that i could be coerced into doing. >> host: give an example. >> guest: what if have a crush on somebody and facebook knows because i check their profile ten times. and next thing you know, turns out i've had a bunch of people said this is actually happening

and it's facebook understanding response function and taking a look at which one of your friends is the best pitchman, pitch person, to you, and it's really easy. we talk familiarity much more than we trust celebrity. this is the future of advertising. the decisions your friends make show up in your phone trying to influence you, and there's a way to control that. the first step is to be aware of it. and that's part of what i'm trying to do with this bob. >> host: we're used to or becoming used to corporations using predictive analytics. >> guest: yes. >> host: so, it sounds as though you're suggesting we're going to or could see a shift to having consumers' friends being able to calculate their own metric. >> guest: yes. if they can do it, we can do it, too. simple math gets published. most of it is based on some sort

of inference. bayesian inference is from he work of tom bayes and a way to -- the formula shows up in a lot of different ways but it's not that hard, and this is really the mathematical thinking, the math -- mathematical precept is understanding how probability is changing on the basis of really rapidly incoming new information and because we are creating the information, we have much more control than we realized. you can absolutely begin to understand -- it's true, facebook doesn't necessarily want you to know how much timor spending on facebook but eventually it's not hard to -- an app will tell you that and it's a lot of time. facebook leads on time on site. we think of facebook being old

hat and you communicate mostly with your relatives and not as much inquiry with for your friends but it leads in time on sight, if wore reading articles, sharing information, and a wide variety of information as opposed to twitter. so, there's nothing to stop us from understanding exactly how we're using that service better, and even if facebook doesn't give us that opportunity, it's still an opportunity that is out there. for us to know here's how i use facebook here is who influences me on facebook and here's how i influence others, and that begins to change behavior and that accelerates and keeps going. >> host: i want to talk about prime predicts. you assert that digital information can be used to help us live more healthily and i voiding inconvenience and danger in many cities we're using predetective technology, such as shot spotter, whether a shot can

be triangulated. can you give me an example in the one that has been highly criticized is surveillance drones -- of technology you consider too invasive in the crime field. >> guest: i don't think that technologies by themselves are capable of invading. drones are a good example. we have -- so by the end of 2015, because of federal order, a bunch of different police departments have to figure out how to integrate drone technology into their practices. there's totally great ways to do it, ways that keep police officers safe, that expand situational awareness and didn't infringe on civil liberties and there's lots of ways to send copter drones up to look into people's windows and do terrible thing but the technology is what it has always been and that is benign. it exemplifies what people willl

do anyway. that's why at it important to have this conversation, is because the capabilities of law enforcement to enforce law are about to go up a lot. how excited are we'll all the laws they're capable of enforcing? broadly speaking, we want people that are public servants to do their job much better, much more efficiently and less cost. we all want that on paper. so that progress. bottom line, that by itself is progress. now we have to follow that up with a conversation about how interested are we really in enforcing marijuana laws, if we had the opportunity to enforce all of them a lot better. immigration law. we haven't had that conversation yet. but broadly speaking, police departments working much better and more efficiently, that is something we want.

so, in terms of whether or not it can be invasive -- again, i point out that the more data you have, the less likely you are to have false positives, but there's some good case examples and some cautionary tales. i in terms of predictive policings one cautionary tale would be the city of new york, which realized tremendous drops in crime through they of just old paper and pen statistical analysis applied to crime, and also got into a lot of trouble -- this is being born out now in courts -- with zero tolerance tactics like stop and frisk. you don't can't to compare cape ability with tactics. that's a decision that somebody makes in the police department, and an alternative is the way memphis used predictive

policing, a case very few people know. a sociologist went with the head of police to different neighborhoods and told them, this is what we're sort of looking at. this is what you're telling us. and this is how we'd like to be involved in your community. and so they actually gave away in many ways the element of surprise to continually have conversations with the public, with the community, about here's what you can do with this new capable, and so they have -- that program has not had nearly the same amount of legal problems you have seen in new york. there's totally a good way to use predictive policing and a totally bad way, and i think we're going to see worse case examples out of china. they have a completely different decisionmaking mechanism in place when they think about what policing is. they have a -- the police have a very different mandate and they're also by the end of this year going to be the number one surveillance market in the world. >> host: if you had to compare

the united states in terms of our policymaking vis-a-vis how we're using technology, how do we rank? >> guest: this is a good question. how do we rank in terms of whether -- how centuried we are? >> host: or how much -- the example in memphis, where we get community buy-in and we're pairing concepts with sound policies that don't violate individual severely civil -- individual civil liberties? do you think we're off to a good start that way? i think you're book is encouraging more collusion in the policymaking arena. >> guest: i would say i see a lot of reason be optimistic. this 2008 law that prohibits

discrimination -- health insurance discrimination towards people on the basis their genetic information. that's key. that a precedent. everybody needs to learn that, demand more of that. everybody needs to leadership the memphis case. everybody needs to, i think, first and foremost-understand that the information that you create is going to expand a lot, and once you do -- once you acknowledge that, then you also open yourself up to the possibility of using it much better. having said that, i'm alarmed by the fact that we're about to really increase the capability of, like i said, local police departments to enforce more laws and we haven't had a big discussion about that. so this is something that gives me a lot of pause. there's a lot of dysfunction in the way we address a lot of these very simple municipal issues and also broadly speaking national issues, and this is part of the reason why we feel right now as though we're giving

away information through our devices all the time in a language we cannot hear, to parties we can't see. so, actually the revelations that have come out from june of 2013 on to "the guardian" about the nsa, "washington post" and other outlets-while they've been disturbing, i think that ultimately this regulatory process speaks directly to what i'm talking about, when you have the data, it does get out and the time to have the conversation is now. i'm hopeful it will be constructive. >> host: we only have a few minutes left. i know you interviewed a range of people, scientists, hackers, police. what surprises did you encounter? >> guest: i think -- i did. i interviewed a lot of different people. i interviewed some great folks here in new york. one of guy was trying to put sensors in the new york city sewer systems so they could

predict win there would be sewer overflows and doing a job that cities should do, and when he tried do it he got in trouble. i thought that was an interesting guy. i talk to the guy that created self-driving cars, andrew ming, a great luminary, ray, in the book -- >> host: a.i. being artificial intelligence. >> guest: right. and ray is an interesting example of something that took -- was able to do all of this recordkeeping on himself far earlier than the rest of because us he was really good at computer science. this is an example of michigan that -- something that was seen as a strange behavior when ray was doing it and some of these detailed personal recordkeep canning becoming now something that we can all do. i think the biggest shock i had was when i listened to gus hunt, now the former chief intelligence officer for the

cia. gets on stage and talks about how scared he was of the potential government abuse of the internet. if that guy isn't the government, nobody is. really showed me that really no one is in charge of the fact that we now create information in everything we do. we can have the illusion you're in charge but that illusion is temporary. eventually that information passes to all of us. >> host: i want to end briefly talking about futurists in general. >> guest: okay. >> oo you are futurist, and i wasn't aware but a lot of large corporations use futurists as 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. thes a futurist, regardless

whether or not you're a consultant. the organization i work for a long time, the world future society and the futurist magazine, really just a neutral clearing house of ideas about the future. if you have an idea about the future, call yourself a futurist. having said that, what is remarkable right now is that the future is really changing quickly. a few years ago there was this -- there tips to be a thriving mark for people that seem to have a little bit of ad advantage when they talk about the future, and this is the professional corporate futurists. i know many that are smart, some that are absolutely terrible. there's an abundance of them and they can fulfill an important role but there's no human being that has 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 as an idea in a completely new way. so i kind of, in this -- this might anger some folks i know -- i see the era of the flashy corporate futurist drawing too a quick close. having said that, when it's been correctly. the only thing that a corporate futurist can do really well is enable whomever they're speaking to, to launch towards opportunities before it's too late. and that's all i want to do with this book, is remind people that however inhibited you might feel, the inevitable fact is you're going to be creating much more information the year 2020 than today. there's a lot of opportunity there. embrace that opportunity and then when that date arrives you'll know at lest no terms of the grand trend of history you made the right decision. >> host: you have given us hope

for the future and a really important book to add to many others commenting on big data. thank you very so much. >> guest: thank you for having me. so, friday, june 14th, 1946, was day 155 of the trials of the major war criminals.

more commonly now referred to simply as the nuremberg trial. to the no one in courtroom 600 knew it yet the trial was about halfway over. on day 155, hitler's former chancellor was on the witness stand. as he testified, the third reich's radio -- propaganda chief wrote a letter which the former leader of the hitler youth movement then translated into english. it was addressed to mrs. alma gehrke of 3204, holliday avenue in south st. louis. holding nazi leaders accountable for world war ii was an experiment. at the time there was no legal precedent for framing criminal charges against the perpetrators of a war of aggression.

as early as 1944, allied leaders were hashing out the best way to punish people whose criminal activities were so horrendous that laws barring them didn't technically exist. nuremberg was an improvisation. never before had the international community held a state's major leaders accused and convicted them of conspiring to commit crimes against humanity. the trial of the major war criminals was, in the words of one of its american prosecutors, quote, a benchmark in anywhere balance law and the load star of thought and debate on the great moral and legal questions of war and peace. end quote. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at some books being published this week...

ralph nader discusses thursday people to rally against corporate power. former u.s. congressman senator and presidential candidate, rick santorum, provide his plan to rejuvenate the republican party in blue collar consecutives, remitting to an america that works in so much to do, a full life of business, politics and confronting fiscal crisis, former lieutenant governor of new york, recounsels his career and addresses state budget issues. charles marsh, religious studies professor at the university of virginia, recalls the life of german pastor in strange glory in the reckoning, financial

accountability and the rise and fall of nations, jacob sole, history and accounting professor at the university of southern california, looks at how the tracking of finances has affected civilizations. look for these titles in become stores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on book tv and on booktv.org. ...