[inaudible conversations] >> thank you very much for joining us here to talk about what really drives innovation with two very accomplished and multiplatform talented authors who approached the subject from very different angles, quickly my name is sheila, staff writer at the new yorker, i cover business broadly defined there, i'm also a former hedge fund analyst, i published a book last year called black edge inside information, dirty money and the quest to bring down the most wanted men on wall street which is about a big insider trading investigation involving a group of corrupt hedge funds to innovation of a very different sort, i wanted to quickly mention that our authors' books

will be for sell outside the kiosk outside building and both will be signing immediately following the program, so please at the conclusion go right town there and get in line to get your book signed. so with me simon winchester, the professor and madman, atlantic, crack at the edge of the world, just a few, all of which were new york times best seller and appeared best and notable book lists. in 2006 mr. winchester was made officer of the order of the british empire by her majesty the queen which is very impress i have to me, i don't know, he looks very modest but he lives in western massachusetts, latest book perfectionist, how precision engineers created the modern world. steven johnson is the best-selling author of ten books, is that right?

>> 11. >> 11 now. the queen doesn't know who i am. [laughter] >> you have more twitter followers, i think, you win on that score. just to name a few of them, wonderland, how we got now, where good ideas come from, the ghost map and everything bad is good for you. he's the founder of several influential websites including the online magazine feed, the community site plastic.com and the hyperlocal site outside in. he's the cohost and cocreator of pbs how we got to now, steven lives in california and brooklyn new york, two of my favorite places in the entire world actually with wife and three sons and latest book is far sighted, how we make decisions that math the most. i want to ask you you both approach innovation from very different perspectives, i wanted to start by asking, first,

steven, give us overview of far sided and how it is with innovation? >> somewhat a book that you allude today where good ideas come from and squarely looking at innovation and the lessons were in innovation if you analyzed many different time periods, far sided which i've actually been working on and off for 8 years now which is appropriate for a book about long-term thinking is -- is a look at complex-life decisions, how we make them and in a sense some of the science behind how we make complex decisions and it actually starts with this kind of crazy excerpt from darwin's journals from 1838 in the middle of the period in darwin's period where he's coming with the

theory of natural selection and has all the notes about observations from the beagle and the idea of this, you know, really transformative scientific idea coming to the head on the page in these journals and at some point in the middle of the journals he devotes two pages to slightly different topic, different decision existential, different nature which is should he get married and what he basically does jots down pros and cons list and it's kind of a comical list if you look at it. one side is not mary and the other mary and writes the values he associates with both and hasn't aged particularly well and on the side of not marry, one of the advantages is clever conversation of men in clubs, one of the things he feels le give up if he gets married apparently and on the other side you have things like constant companion and children if it

please god he writes, but he also writes something like an object to be beloved better than a dog anyway. that's the line that he has which is unfortunate. i started because the pros and cons list is techniques that most of us do know for making complex decision in our lives and it actually dates back to ben franklin. so we have this kind of strategy for making complex decision and trying to be creative about coming up with all the potential variables and factors and that strategy has basically been stagnant for 200 years, we haven't seen innovation in terms of tools for making these kinds of choices and turns out that there's very rich literature, some of it scientific but some of it creative, artistic that has developed over the last 30 or 40 years that actually does

help us make more complex decisions and much of it overlaps with the tools and strategies that we use to be more innovative and creative in our lives, farsighted is lots of crazy stories, whole theme running through through it aboue march and novels and parallel simulation that helps us make choices and big analysis, the decision that led up to the raid on bin laden's compound. i think it's the only book, i believe in existences has threat of bin laden. but anyway, out of two weeks ago. >> already helped me make some complicated -- >> good, working. >> simon, could you explain what the perfection is, what you set out -- >> it's almost the same thesis as your book called how we got

and looks machines that work properly and essential element that allows where that came from and included in the manufacturing of things and that's precision, and you can actually fix it, a date 1776 which is very nice for americans but not july the fourth but may the fourth, what i didn't know when i read this book being an old foggy is there's another significance to the date of may the fourth, i'm sure young people here would know exactly may the fourth be with you, it's star wars day which seems wonder fully and it began because

was incapable of making proper cylinders, when you put what he made it leaked steam all over the place and it's insufficient, 70 miles away from where he worked, the english midlands, 70 miles away the welch border, sord of a lunatic called wilkinson who was upset with metallic iron. he melted it and did all sorts of things with it, iron desks, before me too movement if he knew that a las was come he would lie and spring it and surprise her. >> that sounds like an effective seduction. [laughter]

>> he made cannons for the royal navy and developed a technique of drilling the iron, chunks of iron in such a way that the hole through is constant damage throughout and when james met him and tried to sell him a steam engine so that he could drill into the iron instead of hands using steam and showing wilkinson that he didn't know how to make cylinders properly, wilkinson said, i can make one for you, and he did. i should be very brief but introduce critical number into the story. will -- wilkinson how big is the pistol, he said 30-inches, 2 for 6 across. you can make a cylinder 2 for 6 and a little bit that would be perfect. and so he did, he drilled a hole

which was exactly 2-foot 6 and a little bit for about the 5 feet length, turned vertically, lowered the piston into it and once the governor, added to it and lit the fire and set the water boat boiling, so the steam engine started going like crazy without any steam leaking from it and at that moment which was the fourth of may 1776 one can legitimate say the industrial revolution began and the number that i was mentioning is the distance, tolerance between the piston and the edge of cylinder which was for thickness of english chilling which was point one of an inch and so that number marks the beginning of this book and he goes right up to the times where i think one of the most precise mechanical things that's made to this day

is also cylinder in one of the -- i don't know if you know, stands for the laser, gravitation, two of them, one in washington and one in livingston, louisiana, the cylinders are those pieces, they are four of them, polished and measured, they can detect changes in distance of one 10,000 diameter of a -- so you have .1 at the end of the scale and ten minus 19 on the other one and within the story is how we got to now. i should have given it your title. >> the book is organized that way. the chapters get -- the tolerance gets increasingly high, right, you say higher tolerance which is one of the things that is so interesting

when you think about books like, this there isn't a natural organizational structure, you're not just following the chronology of a single life or something like that so when you're writing a book like, this how do i organize this, what's the best way to -- to create what's best architecture for this book and so simon designed the whole book about increasing tolerance levels as you go into the book which is one of the most inventive -- >> sweet of you to mention that, i should go to how it all began, they sent me an e-mail clear water florida, he read my books and liked them and he said i'm a scientific glass blower, makes extraordinarily elegant pieces all over the world and he was fascinated with the idea of precision and i could write a book about it.

i read the story, english chilling and i realized the numbers could tell the story. [laughter] >> you both had really the same theme although you're thinking about it differently, how do you start to figure out what to put in the books -- >> many years ago and the epidemic in london, i thought we could use more intestinal disease today, good to cheer everyone up. it's funny thing about book structure, the book follows the outbreak in london over the

course of two weeks and every chapter is a day during that period and i knew i had this chronology that i had to follow on some level so anchored to that so i knew there was going to be this ticking clock, there's an investigation that's going on that leads to the discovery of the water-borne nature of cholera and during research to have book given the events of each day corresponding to these chapters, there was a way to attach to each chapter one particular theme that i was exploring in the book that mapped on to the events, so there's one chapter tells the story of the tuesday but it's also about the way in which cities recycled their waste and the thursday actually maps on to the biographical history and to this day, i think it's one of the more -- when i came up with the idea that's really clever and this is going to add to the

structure and interesting and add asymmetry to it and i'm very proud of that and no one has ever mentioned it. [laughter] >> in my review of the book, did very nicely. no one has ever picked up on that and i sometimes think that those are -- those are the kind of crucial organizational choices that are processed somewhere by the reader and the book works on some level because the structural decisions have been made, you know, in a smart way but they aren't showing and if the structure is right is flows. after the book came out, maybe the best light that i've gotten from a reader, someone wrote in and said, listen, i did ve -- research in london, soho in

london and i mentioned in the book that marks was there and in residence between the outbreak had happened, he would cross to go, i love this to his fencing lesson because he would work congressman festo or capital or whatever he's working on and he would go take fencing class. the reader imagine if coming back from his fencing class he had been a little thirsty and stop at contaminated well and got sick and died out of the outbreak, thinking of how the course of history would transform because of that. >> i did a book few years ago, a biochemist who fell in love and

had an affair with a chinese lady and didn't leave his wife but maintained household with the two women and learned chinese and ended up writing the longest book on china ever written in english language, 24 volumes, 4 million words, he became civilization in china essentially demonstrating how china int vented almost everything from wheel barrel to air-conditioning and so on, he got himself terribly unstuck during korean war. he was a nudist and accordion player. brilliant fellow as his wife dorothy.

fell under if you like the communist party during korean war and invited to go over to china and korea to prove in quotes that the americans had used biological weapons in the korean war, infected with anthrax in northern part of chinese border and for that he was thrown out of college at cambridge but was banned from the united states. the ban was instituted at the time of mccarthy so he was sort of a communist legitimately banned from the united states. the ban was lifted, by which time he was elderly and master of college at cambridge and

distinction, finally let in and he went to, let in to get honorary degree from the university of chicago and give speeches at north western university, one of the speeches was on chinese gun powder, the view of the west that the chinese used gun powder purely for fireworks and never used it aggressive or military sense. in fact, he found a drawing from the second century ad, if you like to use the phrase, various bonds made by chinese using gun powder and drawing on the black board, very detailed diagram of the chinese bomb, second century, 2,000 years old roughly and sitting in the back was a wild head mathematic student

copying furiously everything he was saying and six weeks later precisely mimicking the design that demonstrated, he sent the first bomb off to someone at the university of michigan which exploded and killed security guard, he was the uni bomber. [laughter] >> so it had not been repealed, the unibomber had never occurred, i'm sorry, it's completely irrelevant. >> that's an amazing story. >> can i just talk about -- the two of us are interested in structure and i believe and i think you do the three key elements for nonfiction books, the principle idea, you might think that the next component in order is fancy s good writing, it's an important thing but it's not as important i'm sure you agree as structure because you

can write about the most wonderful idea and if your structures, you'll lose the intention of the reader and the reader will get asleep and never finish the book. that was the problem with steven's book with brief history of time. proved to be strangely organized and i -- i like you and very interested in organization and for instance when i did a book on the atlantic ocean, big, big subject, i decided to use the 7 ages of man from as you like it so child infancy, school child, soldier, lover, justice, old man returned to childhood, oddly enough you can coral everything you think you know about the atlantic into that structure, works very well, i'm wonder if you also used what you do structures. >> yeah, particularly with books like far farsighted an where ideas comes from, there isn't a

timeline necessarily, good ideas which ultimately being structured on these patterns of innovation that i was seeing in resthearnlg -- research that occurred in different stories and it would be across scales, innovation on the level of neurons. what is your work space and how do people create and on the scale of coffee houses an small clusters and cities and then networks and the internet and i think for like two years as i was researching and starting to write it, i had the structure in my head and i got to eventually when there's kind of this really challenging thing when you're commit today a structure and you start to realize actually you've

kind of been on the wrong horse and, you know, what i loved about the ideas in the book and writing the book is it would jump around a lot and i was too trapped inside the brain and the neuron level chapter and i was trapped inside the city and so i had to rethink the whole thing and that is emotionally draining because you so don't want to have to do that, you know, it's like renovating your house while you're living in it and which i'm kind of doing right now so i feel how painful that is. but i do think you have to get that right and -- and when you do, i do love that part of it, it's one of the things that whenever a friend of mine is writing a book, do you need my help with the structure? [laughter] >> you only get to think about it once every couple of years with the book for myself and it's the one thing that i do

love the imagine how, you know, how a book could open and the book i wrote invention of air which maybe you reviewed for publishers weekly years ago. [laughter] >> very nice of you. >> that could have been very awkward. [laughter] >> now finally i'm getting my revenge on stage. but that book jumps around in time, you start in the 1790's and go back to 1760 and you go back 200 million years, i'm going to write a history book but it's going to be structured like episode of lost, lost was on tv and it was doing all the interesting kind of time jumps and it was definitely one of the structural convexes -- conventions, the shape came into

my head before i figured out how it was going to work with the actual facts to have book or the argument of the book, the inspirations can be really fun. >> while we are on the subject of process can you each explain how long it takes you write a book, simon on the phone the other day outlined this very intimidating one-year research, it's out and what is the sequence and how quickly, at what stage do you start the book, are you working at two in once? >> yes, one is the lesser book. >> the later? >> the lesser? >> at the moment, i hope tomorrow monday being working day and if everyone is back in the office that we will sign the contract for the next book for which i've said i'll deliver, fairly long, 175,000 words, 400 pages, more than that.

>> yeah. >> on the 31st of march 2020 and hope that it can be published later or early 2021. so once i've got -- you are going to hate, maybe you do exactly the same in which case -- >> i'm not going to hate you. it's safe space. >> you gave a good review. [laughter] >> you can never hate me for the rest of your days. i did the research obviously what you're doing when writing proposal, so you are when you sign the contract and some money starts coming into your account, you're hitting the ground running, but i will start writing that book in, let me see due march 2020, at the end of, middle of -- yeah. june 2019, given me nine months to finish. , what i do always is i put it

at the top-left-hand side of my screen, 175,000 words, 180 days it is, do the math, 104 words a day or something and every day say i see machines that you see in hotels with your head behind -- >> is that on a post-it? >> top left -- sort of post-it. >> on the screen and you have countdown. >> i change it every day. if i'm really virtuous and i'm four days ahead i will take a bit of time off. thus far -- did you ever work for a newspaper? you worked for a mag seen and you had to have deadlines, the new yorker is flexible. [laughter] >> sorry, you shouldn't be here.

[laughter] >> i have my laptop. yes -- >> i worked for the essentially correspondence and you're sitting in places where i lived and you know what the deadline is for the addition of the paper that's coming out in london, and you have a meeting. can i say a story? >> please, you're here to tell stories. i was covering the war which gave us bangladesh, east pakistan and india in 1971 and india is 5 and a half hours ahead of london, 10:30, 6:00 o'clock deadline, it was 11:30 p.m. we would send stories to london, one circuit sort of every hour and so we had an agreement among us that whichever foreign city

we got through to which ever foreign newspaper, that we would download all the copy and in london or new york would pass it on and there was no competition. we've all got -- you have long strips, probably no one here knows what italics machine is, you round it around your hand, so you had the bizarre scene of 12 or 15 foreign correspondents wondering around the hotel lobby what looks like big bandages on their hands, all they want to do a beer and shower and go to bed and coffee but the telex machine does not spring into life about 11:30 on deadline. it does and all of us craned over it to see was it bbc london, ny times new york or which was the foreign rodent

that was going to talk to us, it was none of those. >> i recognized it to my horror it was my father in company in london typing one finger at the time, mother and i greatly enjoying stories you sending from india. it was so humiliating and embarrassing and ended up with deadly sign, mother says, simon while in india take care to keep off the salads. [laughter] >> my approach to generating these things which is i have and this is umbrella topic of innovation, i think, which is i always have -- really at least three projects simultaneously going in different stages, so i

try to have one book that i'm kind of wrapping up and in copy-editing mode and it just come out and i'm still thinking about it a lot and then one book i'm actually writing or researching and then usually two or three ideas that are kind of planes on approach into an appropriate, you can see the lights out there, you know they are coming, you're not totally sure what they are but you have some sense that you will write a book about this general topic and research in the background. and there's an efficiency reason to do that because there's down time, once you send the first manuscript, you don't have nothing to do a month or two while you edit and if you have another project you can work on that. what really is important about that is you get all the interesting collisions between the projects even if they are on completely different topics, in fact, they are the most interested because they are on

different topics, so you're working on one thing but on the side you've got the side hustle on the side that you're working on and something that n that research triggers the idea that you bring over and put to work in the active man swipt or whatever it is, so and i just finished a draft of kind of ghost-map like single historical thread story about a pirate, true story about a pirate and i was researching and begin to go write as i was finishing up farsighted and a lot of what far sighted is talking about is the drama that -- literary drama of great decisions. you see interior perspective of someone making a choice. those are the dramatic history in narrative when someone is faced with cross roads and what solution they will come up to this problem and who are they

going to choose and i was writing about this and finishing up this book and then i'm writing the story about a pirate and i began to realize, oh, it's really good as a trick in this book at each of the points where some of the characters do have a choice to really slow down the narrative and the description and walk the reader through what was confronting this character at that particular moment, you know, in the middle of the indian ocean trying to decide whether to go after this ship and what all the factors were and to take, you know, to pause in a sense for four pages and take the readers through that choice so that when they actually do make the choice, they understand the full stake of it and i think it's actually -- i'm at a draft of the book, adds to the drama of it and i only got to that technique because i was simultaneously writing this other book and that is the story of innovation in many cases, if you look at a lot

of the people that i've written about and it's true of you, simon too, one of the most creative people they have a lot of hobbies and interesting on different things, they are working on one big idea and they are dabbling -- think of darwin, darwin had a million side hobbies that he was working on and in various different ways played into the big and influenced him. having those multiple frames of reference is multiple interest, i think, is a good strategy whether you're writing books or doing anything else. >> there used to be one every saturday. do you have a grasshopper mind? it should cure you, the affliction.

people like you darwin, if you don't mind -- >> thank you. >> do grass hopper minds. [laughter] >> i'm surely glad i didn't or we couldn't afford it. >> there's a darwin story about collection, collection among many he studied. i think it was beatles. i can't remember. he was constantly going off to study his beatles and his son had seen as given that this is what father did, they had a whole wing devote today beatle collection and son goes over to friend's house, where does your dad do his beatles? what we aretalking -- are you talking about kid? [laughter] >> we had innovation in the rise of tech companies, now we have

these giant tech companies like google and facebook and amazon and apple and microsoft, a lot of anxiety is coming out about those and a long time we were celebrating them changing the wave we live and people are anxious about the power and there's concern that they just through their sheer size are stifling innovation, i was curious to know what you thought about that? what is the downside of innovation, when can it cause a problem? >> well, you know, i talk about this a little bit in farsighted, there's a really interesting exercise that gary klein the psychologist came up with years ago in helping people making momentous decisions and he calls it a premortem and the idea is once you've gotten to that stage where you have decided whether it's a personal decision to get

married or corporate decision to release a new product into the world and a technology company or whatever it is, once you've decided this is the path we are going to go, run this exercise as a group really, run the premortem exercise, opposite of postmortem, the patient is dead, and explain the future death of the patient and you're about the make decision, take the time telling the story how and ends up unlocking a lot of creative inside that you wouldn't normally have. take a look at the decision that you're about to make, what are the flaws on this model and the choice you're making, it looks great, i'm excited, we've decided this is the path that we

will take, if you ask them to tell the story about how it turns out to be catastrophic failure they end up seeing flaws that they wouldn't have otherwise seen. even if they don't end up doing they aware of potential pitfalls of the past and i bring that because that's the exercise that i think every -- every start-up or big corporation that's in kind of disruptive space that is messing with the way that people communicate or the way that political values are shared or whatever it is, they need to be running those internal premortem commerces, that's what facebook and twitter i think kind of failed to do, right, they just kind of, hey, we will connect everyone, fantastic, we are able to share what we had for breakfast, what can go wrong, no, seriously, what could go wrong, let's imagine how these new technologies or how new

features could be exploited by bad-faith actors and thinking of alternate more damaging scenarios and taking them for seriously, by the way, we are starting to see happen before and debate of artificial intelligence, a lot of discussion of how can this be abused or how could it in 30 or 40 years turn into something that's threatening to us, the fact that we are conversations i think is a sign of progress. >> yes, my book is rather a little bit more limited but i look at the way fantasizing precision and wondering whether it is as good for us as we would like to think. i mean, i look at both mechanical position and electronic position, in the mechanical world there was a classic case 6 or 7 years ago with an air bus 380 taking off, one of the dobl-decker planes, 380 taking off from singapore on

its way to sidney and they had four rolls-royce trenton 900 engines and it wanted to get very high, once it was over in indonesia and as it was doing the engine exploded and took 5 pilots and manage today get aircraft back to singapore and didn't have any brakes, running on metal wheels, fuel gushing out of the wing, could have been awful, 500 people on board, in the end everyone lived and it was all right.

100-millimeter and that plane had taken off because every plane is monitored in this case headquarters in sidney and they saw it take off in los angeles, but it survived and landed in london. london and singapore and then this take frawf singapore suddenly this tinny bit too narrow or thin a wall fractured aircraft, 1600 celsius, one begins to wonder whether we are machining things to tolerances that are beyond human abilities to deal with them and so why don't we say why don't we leave

it to machines to make machines and artificial intelligence will look after it, i'm not so sure. billion not million. the initial one was about the size of my fist and now so many of them, the statistic which still intrigues me is that there are now more working in the world today than there are leaves on all the trees in all the world, incredible number, 13 trillion and operating at such tinny tolerances if one can use that word, atomic level where things behave in peculiar fashions. and can precision on this scale

really continue to operate without it becoming mysterious and weird. well, they say, don't worry, optical computer and quantum computer will take care of it. in korea i have just come back from and in china, they still give awards to this day, government awards and pensions to what they call living national treasures, usually elderly men and women who spend their lives not making anything precise, not making microchips but working in ceramics, metal ware and societies that regard bamboo with the same degree that we regardty tan -- regard

titanium. >> we are going to questions. i'm not sure if there are mics or people are just going to shout. >> there are mics. >> are people going to bring in the mics? hang on one second. we have a microphone. [inaudible] >> okay. third -- [laughter] >> i understand. third row. >> hi, there, i really enjoyed the talk. i want you to get comment on the time and space in which it occurs, seems to have a certain pattern in space and time and can you comment on that? >> well, one of the spaces that i keep writing about, in fact, for a while i had post-it no

more writing about the 18th century coffee house. it's where the enlightenment happened. it comes up so much because it is where we have a third space, it's not work, it's not home and when these coffee houses appeared, you had flourishing of new ideas that happened in particularly in england in the late 1600's and early 1700's, when they took off they were so popular that charles the second issued official decree banning coffee houses, 1670 or something like that, the new spaces are distracting men from their lawful calling and affairs and that ban lasted one week because everyone was already so hooked on the coffee. what was important is he was exactly wrong. it led to the invention of magazines and a lot of the

publishing, modern insurance, coffee house, franklin and used to hang out and political ideas, chemistry and publishing, so it was incredibly generative space, one of the things that made it so generative was that it was by definition multidisciplinary space, not defined by university discipline or corporate mission, a space with people with interest would get together and have the open-ended conversations where interesting collusions could happen. we would have more coffee houses more than ever now, i'm not sure that necessarily the starbucks is that quite intellectual can top that and the coffee house wasn't in the 180th century but that's a great example of a space of innovation, i think. >> it's it's fascinating about conversations going on.

james murray the auditor of the oxford english dictionary, they were true poly math, they knew about everything. i want to know whether the people that run the great corporations that you were talking about a few minutes ago are polymatic too or single-minded. [laughter] >> you want me to answer that, i would say the style of managing of corporation has really changed and the mba-financially-oriented-family style has come in and there's been a decline in those people although you find them in silicon valley and are still celebrated there. but there's been a real change in the way companies are run and

they are much more focused on short-term results for their shareholders and, you know, do i feel that that's a sort of innovation in the economy that has negative effects, do we have another question? yes, front row, please. [inaudible] >> what can be disastrous for us and not everybody else and nobody wants to think about, for example, evolution, great

physicians developed our geological space and also great for us destroying it, we don't include, we never include problem to have race in the -- in our way to industry, for example. [inaudible] >> you still don't think about anything, you don't want to innovate in this area, what do you think about it in. >> it's a really important objection, one of the things that i talk about a lot in farsighted in as nuance and advance decision-making set of techniques is really what we see in kind of a sustainable planning decision processes that have developed where you do design where you consult all the stakeholders, you don't look at the problem through a single lens but you think about the long-term impact, environmental

impact of building park or freeway or something like that. that's a science really that has advanced over the last 50 years, we are able to make much more nuance decisions that factor in the impact on lots of different communities that are kind of shaped by the decision. in the corporate model it's been very interesting to see, again, this is not widespread yet but things like benefit corporations b corp.s were created so a corporation doesn't have fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, that was a big thing that changed, we are obliged that our shares go up in value. executives who we wanted to actually think about other impacts, right, wanted to think about the environment for instance, were they breaking the law in some level. so these new -- there's a new actually spear headed by a bunch

of people in new york, b corp., yeah, we are interested in profits and we are interested in shareholder value but we are saying at the outset that we are also interested in other things maybe like our employees' benefits or the environment or civil discourse or whatever those extra values are and that is built into the definition of a corporation and so we are seeing companies like kick starter and etsy have embraced that kind of structure and that's a big improvement. i hope more companies push in that direction. >> do we have time for one more question, what do you think? >> yeah. [laughter] >> okay, one last one. someone in the back. okay. so we have someone standing up all the way at the back.

>> creativity is human, right, so my question is do you think that innovations that we are creating now is like the next stifle creativity, what do you guys think? >> you're probably better position to talk about it. it is true that when plastics were invented and if you remember celebrated from graduate, that's where the future is plastics. when you talk about artificial intelligence, now everyone is suddenly saying, wait a minute, this is something that we are creating or developing but we are not certain it's good for us and the long-term ramifications even in relatively primitive awareness of it are seeming to be profound and so i think to answer your question at the back, that specific area of

artificial, one of the many things that people must be concerned about is whether two extensive, if artificial intelligence makes extensive inroads in our lives it may well have the fact of starving intelligence. >> i think religion and bureaucracy, people wanting power is what stifled our innovation beforehand and where we are going now is the new road to stifling or innovation and creativity, like human creativity. >> i think the path we should be pushing ourselves towards is the scene orio -- scenario in a sense diversity that diversity of interest and perspectives makes us more innovative, better decision making, something that

i talk a lot about in farsighted and that's going to include in the near future if it doesn't already machine intelligence, right, we will have different kinds of human intelligence and some problems will be best approached with a bunch of humans, different background and different interests and ai who has got a seat at the table, we are not handing power to ai, it's up to you, we will sit here and play video games all day. this is going to be a collaborative process because we recognize the computer is good at certain things that we are not and we can turn it into a duet but if we hand over the reins entirely and how the work and the decisions that are making behind the scenes, that's the scene orio i'm worried about. >> sorry, we couldn't control

religion and people who wanted power, what makes us think we will control what we are creating? [laughter] [applause] >> i think we are out of time. >> we can go on till tuesday. >> yes, thank you so much everyone for coming, just a reminder, authors will be signing books outside. [applause] >> thank you so much.

look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors on booktv on c-span20. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the national church a library. i'm the director of the library and executive director of the international society. the library is the result of a collaboration between the society and the university. our opening two years ago, we