that's ultimately what's important to them is reestablishing the racial order that's been destroyed by emancipation. i would hope that people would come away from my book and learn from my book just how critical women were during the civil war, just how much the civil war really changed gender roles. and it did that different in the north and the south. the union, nurses were actually really heavily involved in things like the suffrage movement. they are really quite active. southern women were not so much. it's much more hidden, but it were politically active. they were politically active in white supremacy. i think that's an important lesson to take from all of this. >> as we continue our look at san jose literary culture, or from author john markoff in his book machines of loving grace.

>> the name of the book is machines of loving grace. the quencher, graham between humans and robots. i got into this book, i guess there's a specific reason and a broad reason. i have been reporting on ai and robotics in silicon valley for the new times for a decade, and it just became an increasingly hot topic, the whole world became interested in robotics and ai and him having in fact which they had had before. the field had always failed. angela didn't feel and begin to succeed. and then specifically i had written an earlier book which was about the prehistory of the personal computer, stuff that happened right around stanford between 65-1975 lead to the rest of the personal computer industry and the modern internet. i noticed right at the dawn of the era of internet -- international computing there were two labs that were created,

equidistant from stanford. one was started by man by the name of john mccarthy, and well-known computer scientist and yet coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956. he came to standard any kind the stanford artificial intelligence laboratory in 1962, and his goal was great a technology that could essentially replace a human. he got money from the pentagon from this think tank called the defense advanced research projects agency was a sort of be the sky think tank for doing advanced military research. and in his first sort of proposal he said he thought he could create a thinking machine in a decade bit it would take 10 years to build what's called strong ai. at the same time on the other side of campus there was another laboratory started roughly the same hereby douglas boulevard. he aimed it at the computer mouse and his project was called the augmentation research center, arc.

his goal, he named it intelligence augmentation. rather than replace the human you wanted to extend the human. on one side of campus you and ai and on the other side of the compass you would i ate. i said it's a really interesting dichotomy but is also a paradox because if you augment human origin extend the capabilities, the book is really my effort to kind of square the circle as much as it's possible. i'm actually sitting in front of an early pioneering, called platforms. its name is shaky. as the worlds, it was the world first truly autonomous robot. it was built to allow a new group of researchers to do basic research in ai. out of it cam can whole host ofe technologies that all scuba used today. for example,, you can draw a line from the original research done in the 1960s to

navigation systems, the stuff use in your smart phone to navigate with, and speech recognition, some of the first speech recognition research was done on shaky as a control mechanism. it at the time didn't do much. it would move a little bit and then it would have to look at the world and moves are more. but that's where it all started. so the two fields, artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation, and really gone their separate ways. i think it's basically the reason they haven't talked to each other is they have different values the engineering groups, the ai guys, they're in love with robots, in love with these systems. they're not thinking deeply about the consequences. they just want to protect the systems in use in an powerful ways. in some cases make money from them but oftentimes basically want to push the technology as far as if they can and then don't think so much about the consequences. i found the ia developers really

think clearly about what the ethics are of the systems of what the role of people is. that's one of the reasons there hasn't been a lot of communication. as engineering disciplines they have entirely different values. now i think, i give this deal a fair amount of credit because as regions of got more powerful, even these guys over on the ai side have relies somethings happening that can really change the side and think about it. many of them are basically realizing we have to make ethical choices and they're making the right ethical choices. choices. let me give you an example. the ceo of microsoft has called his company and ia, intelligence augmentation company. he wants to use he says ai technology extent humans rather than replace them. what's interesting about the way ai has accelerated into our lives is that it comes and atkinson price points now and we

don't even notice it. going back to 2010-2011, steve jobs put syria at the very heart of the iphone and the hundreds of millions of people use it. hundreds of millions of people use google holder and submits a people use borton. hundreds of people use amazon echo. it just slipped in and so that's one example. ai is underneath the fact that machines can listen to us and understand. there is software that google offers for free called google translate which allows you to give it a document in any number of languages and microsoft has a similar service, and it will give you back a pretty good translation. not perfect but good enough, which is really quite remarkable. remarkable. if you get in a modern car, i have a two-year-old volvo and it has a camera in it that as a

high technology inside it. it is able to follow lanes. it's able to make intelligent decisions. cars like the castle have even more ai software. there's a company called mobile eye which is an israeli company which supplies camera and sort of ai technology too many carmakers. over the next five to 10 years cars will increase in capital of them completely dry themselves but they were increasingly do things that were perhaps protect us from our mistakes in making our savior. it would be an example of an ia use of ai technology, to make a safer rather than to replace us. and there's ai technology and modern cameras that basically sort of correct and improve the photograph you take without you even knowing about it. everywhere, even in modern weapons increasingly, ai technology is being deployed.

there's sort of a growing debate in society over whether ai system should actually make chilling decisions, but increasingly they will be able to. the entire range of human behavior is now being used by these new devices. when bachus first 1951 when computers first came on the scene, about every decade and a half as a society we start to get anxious about our relationship to machines. each usually about whether they will take our jobs. clearly up until now most of that automation has happened from blue-collar jobs took over long printed going back farther than the buggy whip, machines replaced human labor. what's interesting about this next shift is that machines are beginning to replace intellectual labor. people have seen this, and over the space of three or four years it's become an intense debate in our society about the rate of change.

some people and made the case, some computer scientists billy technology is moving quickly enough that people put that date at 2045 that they will build machines powerful enough to do all human jobs. i think that is wildly optimistic. there are lots and lots of points at which you can say machines are starting to have an impact on society, and the economy and our jobs, but you have to remember there was a well-known economist whose name was john maynard keynes who in the 1930s wrote about automation. at the point he said technology replaces jobs, it doesn't replace work. that's been true up until now. some of the engineers are saying this time it's going to be different. this time it's going to replace work. i think that is yet to be proven. one of the striking point that gets overlooked, right now in america that are 145 million people working. that's what people at work then

had ever been at work in american history. we've had 30 years of personal computers and all kinds of technology and are still more jobs. i say that, people come back and say yes, but, the labor participation rate is declining. that's the relationship, the size of the working population and the number of people at work. i looked at that very clearly. and it's true. it's not a historic low but it is low. but when you start to pick it apart and say why is this happening, why are people dropping out of the workforce? it's mostly about things like my generation, the baby boomers are starting to retire. there are other reasons and it turned out that technology is way down in the stack. if you look around the rest of the workforce, that's basically what's happening. tasks are being taken over by machines. jobs are being taken over, they won't go away. the question whether we will be transformed as a species by ai

is one that we need to start thinking about right now. alan kay is a computer scientist was one of the pioneers of personal computers and i think he is a really good way of thinking about the way we might either shape or be shaped in terms by these systems. he talks about the fact that we are increasingly living with these conversational systems that talk to us, and we had to make a decision about whether we will be their masters or whether they are going to be our masters or whether we will be partners. i think that's a human decision. increasingly, we are going to be talking to his machines and taking advice from them. wonder the things i worry about about in terms of how humanity might be changed by this technology in relatively near-term kauai, from a generation didn't want to take instructions from anyone. if you're downtown and sever ses where i live, half of the people walking on the streets looking at the palm of their hand.

that can't be the end of progress. something has to come after that the right now that's the way we interface with his machines. there's a generation of young people who take life instructions from the palm of their hand. whether it's which korean food to order or who to marry. i think that that is potentially insidious change. right now, for example, there's a kind of robotics called cloud robotics. one of the amazing things about interconnected robots is speaking teach something to one robot are one robot learn something, they can all know it instantly. humans don't learn that way. getting information from one human to another takes a while. if we are all interconnected, i mean, think about the obama administration in 2014 started something called the obama brain initiative, and the goal of the obama brain initiative is not only to simultaneously rate from

1 million neurons in the human brain but is to be able to write to 1 million neurons in the human brain. that raises the possibility, it's been totally science-fiction but people are starting basically to touch on the idea of control. maybe it's passing information, but think about us all being connected as a species much like the robots. this is been totally in the realm of science fiction, and now we have to think about it. you know the term sideboard, part human part machine people is a term coined by nasa in 1961 you also have seen star trek prop and know about the board, resistance is futile. i think we have to be really careful about the way we connect this technology to us. if we're going to offer humans intellectual prosthesis, it's important they be able to take them off. because i think our humanity is about our independence.

if we are all interconnected it might be some better thing but it won't be about humanity. i get into this book thinking about the question of what our relationship going to be with his machines a decade from now i'm not going make it a good one not indestructible and? i came away from the book thinking it's not an open and shut case, but the reason to be optimistic is, it's a human choice how we designed these machines. i think we can go into different directions. we can make machines that are incredibly destructive. can make machines that surveillance, take away our privacy, tell us or we can build machines that care for aging humans, help surgeons to a better job, help lawyers make better decisions. so there are two directions. the reason i'm optimistic is it comes down to