their expectations were. and they had been organizing with adults but by april they were able to mobilize enough adults any longer they turned to children. so for me the whole heinspiration of this book was the children's because as a child, watching it on television every night, and having my dad go down to birmingham, became , i wanted to march the children, i wanted to join the movement in a more nsubstantial way, not just the thought of isolated in stamford connecticut so my dad found a way to bring us into the civil rights movement that chairman fort patterson, back then it was the boxers that would go down and travel with my dad. it wasn't the baseball players. they need people to bring visibility to the movement t board was one of the great i went down picture

right there, that's the motel where doctor king was staying . >> the one up there by my finger -mark. >> right and my dad in patterson went down the next day bring money for the children who had been jailed during the marches. and they went to the site and also stated that motel so. >> where it had beenbombed . >> martin luther king, a ie friend of the family? >> what they did, as a family, is we started doing jazz concerts and our first concert was also to raise money, it was in june and then we went up, at the house, at our house, yes and my brothers and i sold hotdogs and sodas and we turned in $1000 after our first gas sponsor and we had a second one after the march in washington and we had gone to the market as a family.

that was our first time as a family actually participating in the larger movement. and it was just an amazing experience because this is what we were asking for. we would ask dad can we go with you to birmingham and he said no, i'll figure this out and he figured it out by bringing us with him to the march in washington and just after the march in washington we had our second jazz concert and doctor king came to our house himself. it was amazing. >> we are talking with oosharon robinson, the author of this book "child of the dream", and the more of 1963 talking about the civil rights movement, her childhood during that time and of course she is the daughter of jackie robinson. if you live in eastern central time zone and would like to participate, 202 748 8201.

to those of you in the mountain and pacific time zone. sharon robinson, until the end you get tired of hearing that? >> no, i don't get tired of it. >> .. it essential essentially helps

understand barriers are part of life, give my dad storynd and values i associate with his success on and off the field. they tell their story international essay contest, to barriers they've had to overcome and talk about that process, including which values they use. i go out and select national winners who give between 11,000-15,000 sec's year. kids all over the united states. i quite and visit with the winners in their classrooms, bring o them to local major or minor league parks if we can, and then the grand prize winners are honored that is the all-star game or the world series. it's been an incredible program and i've been working with kids on thert importance of finding their voice and i tell them to me, voices confidence. by writing it down and showing what they'veun over, come helpig to build confidence and helping to build inner strength, and

that's been my work. it's just been incredible. i've met some amazing children and they stay in touch. >> host: it was 56 years ago i believe, i got that right, just aboutt right now that the march on washington happened two miles from where we're sitting. what do you remember about those august 1963 days? >> guest: i remember it was hot and very, very crowded and people came from all over. there were buses all over the city. i remember as going as a family because again, this was a first-time click on a march and and we had only seen the marches in birmingham on television. so we didn't quite know what to expect. and i remember we were separated from my dad at one point, and in that process i get overheated and dehydrated and fainted. so i remember being carted off to the medical tent, and they

got me back together, and then we went, met up with my dad and we were able to hear dr. king's speech. it was an experience of, i wanted to be part of a larger movement and so this is my first experience of billy participating, and being an activist on that level. i started being an activist on a lower level in terms of my school papers and just activating and advocating for myself in school. but now i felt the energy and excitement of being in this mass of people that were all striving for equality and justice. >> host: what do you think of the movies that have a been mat your dad and your family? >> guest: i loved 42. it was accurate. i thought they understood

determination versus -- i felt the original jackie robinson story, which was made in 1950. my dad played himself in that movie, black and white of course. even as a child, and i was a child when this was made, and watching it in dave camp. i didn't recognize my dad because the way he was directed. you can direct somebody to sort of, people came away feeling he had the personality that he could handle that adversity as opposed to someone who was so determined and sees the larger mission and is pushing forward, and sort of holding back some natural instincts for some of the reactions. so i loved 42 because chad was such a strong actor and understood jackie robinson and

children as a powerful, strong man who was on a mission. >> host: sharon robinson was our guest, first call from maryland. >> caller: thank you so much. i am thrilled to build to talk to you, and here's my question. you're talking about the 63 march. i was 16 in 1959 and went on the use of march for integrated schools then, and i'm dying to know if you remember anything about that because your dad was there, and so was i, and i've been trying to find more information about it. i was going to get in touch with yourur mom, but now i have you. do you remember anything? >> guest: good. i remember that my dad did a youth march in 1959, but it also would like to hear your memories.

so you can reach me through the jackieat robinson foundation bad in new york city. and please call and leave a message that you're trying to reach me, and i'll -- we'll talk. >> host: sharon from dublin ohio go ahead. >> caller: i was just wondering, how long did it take you to write your book and where do you live now? >> guest: thank you, sharon. as an author you very much, you write books in your head for a long time before you actually start writing them down. i wanted to write a book around the children's march and started doing research for several years before i started writing this book. scholastic was my editor and the publisher convinced me to convince i can convince. tell a story within a memoir format. the actual writing process i would say did about two years of research. it took about a r year and a haf

to write, and as of the edited, and so it ends up being a quick process towardses the end but it was a number of years to think about the children's park and how it affected me in 1963. i actually lived in delray beach florida and plug back and forth between del ray and new york city. my mom lives in new york and connecticut so i am with her every month. >> host: i'm a writer who works best structure, i guess, laptop, walls plastered with timelines, quiet, neatly perched in a bed. >> guest: mimi wright knows that the hotel. she travels with me still. >> host: she's a dog? >> guest: she's a dog, a five-pound your key. >> host: you like to edit on the o beach. >> guest: i like noise.

that's why go to a diner. his particular restaurant is right across the street fromos e beach and they allow me to sit there for hours, and i just a table i like i can see the water so i sit on the upper level and can look up and see the water into my editing. i like voices around me when it edit. i don't know why that is. >> host: next call sharon robinson is larry from macon, georgia,. >> caller: i was here. as you probably know, they filmed "42" here and i enjoyed watching them film and do is just a wonderful experience. i have been down to the ballpark so many times and i lived through all the integration and so many good ballplayers have been at that stadium so many times, and i just had some wonderful experiences there and

i enjoyed seeing all the filming, not only of the ballpark but in the downtown area also. jackie robinson has always been one of my heroes, and so i just want to say thank you for that good movie and everything, and i know you said i think previously it was very accurate. and i thought it was, too. try to guess it was. >> caller: i really enjoyed watching them and everything. i remember the integration of stadium at one time johnny blue moon odom pitched here and there are so many african-americans that came to watch him pitch, that they really didn't have any choice but to integrate the stadium because the blacks had previously been made to sit over on the third base side.

>> guest: right. >> host: larry, do you remember hearing from people who were opposed to the integration of baseball and the integration of the stadium, et cetera, et cetera? >> caller: yes. yes, very much so. >> host: what were some off the comments? >> caller: well, you know, they went through, you know, they got, they started with the schools and they protested that, and then they would make comments like, you know, you know, they can be happy, you know? now they want to integrate a baseballt park. now they want to integrate into the army, and all the stuff like that can you know. it was really sad, but i like to say we're over that now but we did go through that period of

time in macon. it wasn't a good time, what it was, you know, a dark part of history. >> guest: american history. >> host: two final questions. what kind of work do you do, and how old are you? >> caller: i'm 72 and i'm a librarian, or a retired librarian. >> host: thank you. i appreciate your time. sharon robinson, we had a little chat with larry. what did you hear? >> guest: i heard that times have changed and that he experienced that change, and that there was, you know, the other part he didn't say was why people didn't want to sit next to black people in the stadium. you know, unfortunately, you know, we are experiencing similar attitudes today. one of the things my dad told

me, in the '60s, in the civil rights movement, we were fighting to change laws. he said you can't legislate hate, you know. hate will be around and it would be a constant struggle, and we certainly are seeing that today, the country is very divided site don't think he wanted to say that schools are re-segregated, in many places in america. you know, but its lessons we can learn from 1963 or the civil rights movement from f the 50s through the '60s when we passed the civil rights act in 1964, but wey still are living n a very divided world. >> host: sharon robinson you talk about robinson family, a very public face. did your parents have to walk that line quite a bit knowing in

the sense that they were cultural icons? at least your father was a cultural icon. and yet their personal feelings asso well? >> guest: you know, iin wouldn't say that they stayed online. my dad wrote columns, letters here he never stop advocating for a quality and justice. he didn't even when he did about politics picky was always a voice of there. once he retired from major league baseball, he worked -- activism was in his blood and the movement was heating up and he jumped right in their and found every way he could to continue to use his voice. >> host: what about his endorsement of richard nixon in 1960? >> guest: well, it was a mistake. and i told him, i was ten years old, you know, that was my first

discussion with him about politics. my fifth grade teacher asked us to go home and find it who our father was voting for. i knew who my father was voting for. i didn't have enough self-confidence to say it doesn't matter who my father is voting for. i was voting for kennedy. i went home and had that discussion with my dad, and i learned d about integrity and commitment, and he had made a commitment to richard nixon. he thankfully did not supporting the second time around and he learned that nixon wasn't going to listen to them very early in the campaign. but hen, stuck with him but he said he met with kennedy. kennedy did not looking in the eye and explain to me about trust and how you establish trust with somebody. and also he said kennedys voting record was not, you know, he had a chance to work on equality and justice issues as a senator, and

he had not done it. we continue to have those discussions right until the -- until goldwater, 54 when my family went out to san francisco and -- >> host: republican convention? >> guest: republican convention. the entire family went and dad was there with rockefeller. and they lost and they had to regroup and we literally drove back across country and we literally stopped off at rockefellers ranch so he and dad could sit on the porch and say the republican party is going in a different direction, and they met in regroup. and then my dad, from that point on kind of, well, he didn't have that much longer but he voted for candidates or supported people that he felt regardless

of party who he could support try what you did he pass and at what age? >> guest: he was 53. >> host: and the reason? >> guest: my dad had type i diabetes and heart disease. it runs in the males on his side. adult onset type one, and he had a massive heart attack. >> host: you had two brothers. what happened to jackie junior? >> guest: jackie died in a car accident when he was 24. >> host: and he is featured in your book what you remember about him? >> guest: imb remember that i love my older brother very much and i member he struggled. he struggled from a young boy. he struggled in school, academically. >> host: did he struggled in jackie junior? >> guest: struggled from being

jackieso junior. there was no hiding place for him so he acted out. he struggled some early age because he also didn't have the confidence you get from being successful in school. i was telling about baseball. he was actually a very good baseball player, youth baseball player, but het couldn't be himself. he was constantly being compared to cco a dropped out of that. he struggled in school. finally dropped out and went to vietnam, you know. came through addiction, inadequate and died ind a car accident. so it was a very hard, hard years for my family. so in my book in 1963 we are just sort of beginning to see how adolescents, his adolescence and how traumaticw it was, on te family as well. it's funny, because when i wrote

my first theme of the book which is my birthday, january 13, 1963, i wrote it and everybody was home. i dad was home, my brothers were home. and i would go wait a minute, and i would go back into my research. you have to do research even though it's your own story began to go back and research, and that's when i found out my dad was not home. he was in hospital, and jackie was home. he had come back from boarding school. so i had to rewrite that scene, and it showed me right then that i trauma that was happening in our family. so jackie literally ran away to california the day my dad comes home from the hospital. >> host: younger brother as well. >> guest: my younger brother, david, is, we are very close. david lives in tanzania east

africa. he is a fatherlo of ten, close with all of his children. and he's a coffee grower, businessman and, you know, do some work with baseball as well. he's doing some work international for the dodgers. he's an incredible man. we see him two two to three tia year we no longer go, my mother and he used to travel to see them, but now he comes to new york andit spends time with us. you know, he and i, he's not an independent farmer. he's part of a cooperative and it all goes back to how we were raised and the kind of work we selected, i dad told us in 63, find work that you love, stay committed to your family and we will have family mission. we have been mission driven from our childhood, and it shows in the kind of work that each of us

selected. >> host: next call for sharon robinson is ginny and potomac, maryland,. >> caller: thank you for this opportunity. sharon, my sistero used to go to school years ago in the seventh grade, and one of the friends was mary lou robinson who happen to be goddaughter to your dad. and i've often wondered whatever happened to mary lou? i sister is now gone. she died from pancreatic cancer, but but i was a tomboy and i love lane baseball, so i'm watching this broadcast and i thought this is the time to ask this question about mary lou. >> guest: i have no idea who mary lou is. so this is in connecticut? >> caller: no. we actually live on the east side of manhattan and my sister and mary lou were at robert wagner junior high school on 766 street at the time. this is going back a

long-distance ago. they would be around 74 years of age now. >> guest: i don't know because, you know, it seems like we would've had some family association, and i don't recognize the name at all. i can't help you. i don't know. >> host: let's see if pamela has a goddaughter as well. go ahead, pamela. >> caller: thank you for the opportunity. my mother is a retired -- i am from jackson, mississippi. i'm a summer of 64 baby, and i have an older cousin on my mothers side who played in the negro league in washington state. so i watched the pbs documentary the other night until about 3 a.m., and when i was going up

in mississippi, we worked with lee bennett hopkins who is a a poet from new york, and we always start a children, why are all these people from new york coming down to mississippi? we appreciate your parents. we w appreciate what you and yor siblings have sacrificed being in a w celebrity family, and i just always curious, you know, my friends in the north are coming to mississippi now that you are afraid to come to mississippi now. why did you and celebrities like your dad, why did black new yorkers connect and did your father ever feel apprehension coming down to alabama next because my friends are afraid of these states now. >> guest: thank you, pamela. all great points. my dad was a fundraiser for the civil rights movement, and he traveled the country. and then the activities, the

whole point of them t going down south was to v help bring visibility to the civil rights movement. only way we had change in the country was by getting that visibility. now, was the children's of march and activities in birmingham to get their attention, finally get the attention of president kennedy, and that was after outrage from people all overve e country who watched dogs being unleashed, or at least being threatened with children that were marching peacefully, and fire hoses were knocking the children over come tumbling into each other. some went over o cars. so they needed visibility. they tried to get celebrities to help give visibility so we can actually have change in this country. and also the celebrities helped raise money. because all of these marches,

you know, they went to jail and there had to be bail money raised. people like my dad, in new york city they would host of things to raise money for the jazz concert i talked about that we had in our house. yes, i had, i was apprehensive about my dad going down south, but they did what they had to do in order to change laws and bring equality and justice to american citizens. >> host: sharon robinson, according to your book, the birmingham church bombings with the little girls were killed really hit you hard. >> guest: yeah, it did. you know, again, i was very invested in the children who were marching, and it's interesting because i told her dr. king came to our house for the jazz concert. and in his speech he talked

about sacrifice, including death. and so it introduced the idea. i understood why t kids had to o to jail and why marchers went to jail and have that raise the visibility of the movement, but you didn't think about children dying, you know? and children died. they were going to sunday school and they died. it was a children's day at the baptist church, so that was devastating to me and my dad sat with me pick my dad was always my sounding board. he allowed me to talk about anything, and he just sat with me and said, you know, here's what i'm going h to do, you kno, and yet to make a choice in life essentially, when tough things happen. you get back upat or do you fol?

do you give in? >> host: there are several photos in your book of your family. just going to hold these up quickly to really see them until you get the book. how many of these are post photos, publicity photos? are these natural? >> guest: all of those are posed i was telling you, and went to look for photographs, i had some come back then we had come photographs were about this bigg swipe some that with this big and those are ours. those are really ours. but those actually were posers. >> host: did this happen a lot in your childhood? >> guest: yes. >> host: the dodgers or somebody would want, we need a family picture? >> guest: absolutely. the one that always got me was the one of my come before i was born and is taken in brooklyn. my parents are on the stoop sitting there looking very beautiful and posed, and my

brother jackie, who is now a toddler and already acting out over these photographs, these drinking a glass of milk and the photographer takes the shot, he takes the class oversaw covers half is based. i was like, ride on, jackie. >> host:ki pages of posed photographs. >> guest: retirement. >> host: everyday occurrence in the robinson family. >> guest: yes. not every day but it was, like i said, i told you we understood we were a public family, and photographs were part of that publicity. >> host: let's hear from our letter in charlotte, north carolina. , good afternoon, thank you so much, sharon, for this opportunity, and congratulation congratulations. >> guest: thank you, i am absolutely fascinated to be speaking with you for w a couple of reasons. one, i'm an aspiring writer but i grew up in pittsburgh,

pennsylvania, as an avid baseball fan. >> guest: yes. >> caller: -- spoke so highly of your dad. although i didn't get to see your dad play, just knowing his legacy and out came to be, so many special memories in my life. and, in fact, -- grants and you may is -- >> guest: i know him very well. absolutely. wonderful young man. >> caller: yes, absolutely. my question though is a little different. looking at your thoughts onn our society and you talked a couple questions about the divisiveness in our country, and what can we learn from your memoir? what are your thoughts about that previous time and how it applies to society today?

>> guest: thank you, great questions. i'm also very close to roberta those family. the most important thing until children is that, one, to get an education. because that will offer them options as move forward in life. at the other thing is we talked a lot about voice and find your voice. i'm hoping that children who read this are adults who read "child of the dream" will watch my own development voice at age 13. i started to lift my voice and i was part of the protest generation. i generally marched from everything from women's issues to apartheid in south africa. i'm hoping the children will be encouraged to continue to lift

their voice and that's building self-confidence, and know that someone is listening to them at that they will fight against this division that we have in the country, and their growing up in a very different time what is a lot of division, but these kids are also growing up at a time when there's a lot of diversity in their experience, more so andn we had in our childhood. so i'm hoping that diversity will help them get to meet people that are from different cultures and religions and speak different languages, you know, and they will feel more comfortable so as adult they will not be as threatened people who don't look like them.'t so really it's about, "child of the dream" is encouraging all of us to not just accept the status quo and not just accept troubling times but to fight back. that's one of parents told us. we had to fight back. it's an ongoing process.

just because things have changed and things have gone, slid back, we have to continue to believe and have hope that we can continue to move forward as a country, or move forward again. >> host: one needed is from florida. >> caller: hello. >> guest: i'm from all callow. >> host: callback. [inaudible] we are family friends going back to brooklyn, so they lived, they have a horse farm in ocala site visited many, many times. >> caller: that makes me happy. well, i'm calling because i was changing channels and i saw you there, my mother used to always tell us a story, and she told us that jackie robinson was a first

cousin. now, her name was jane bryant. do you know, did you have an uncle by the name of james brian? >> guest: you know what, i have a lot of relatives in the south, in florida. my father was from georgia, and so come from jacksonville. ocala, i don't remember any but that doesn't l matter. we have a lot of robinsons out there that arere family come and they don't know all of them. >> host: you have met a goddaughter and your commitment uncle or a a first cousin now. >> guest: all part of my family. i have a very large robinson contingency. >> host: there is another part of the book i do want to mention since you mentioned your family friends, but -- [inaudible] was a big part of your life. >> guest: diamond was given to my brother.

i have been researching and wanting a horse for a long time. itas was given to both of us and we shared him. i tell people today, david and i worked so well together around my mother today, because we had to share a horse and be totally responsible for horse when we were kids. but he was also my freedom. he was my movement, and he gave me the confidence that a lot of preteens don't have, and diamond gave me that. i rode diamond bareback. i wrote dime with the saddle when he was, you know, he was very important to us. >> host: do you still write today? >> guest: i wish i could. we finally gave up. after one writing, i was like steve, it's not worth it. it took me a week to recover. so writing gets a lot harder as

you age on your back. >> host: ralph come here 30 seconds to talk to sharon robinson. >> caller: i just wanted to share a story with you briefly. i grew up in the country right of baton rouge in louisiana. my mother lived in new orleans, so he came down -- [inaudible] to see her father, jackie robinson. i found out recently right before she passed she passed in 2013, but he was coming down there to pick my brother and i if we were raised by our grandparents. i just found out about it, right before she -- >> host: we are going to have to cut you there. sorry. >> guest: thanks for calling. >> host: any comments or

ralph? we will leave it there. >> guest: he didn't get to tell his whole story. >> host: i know, i apologize. sharon robinson is theon authorf this book, "child of the dream: a memoir of 1963" and she is been our guest here on booktv. thanks for your time. >> guest: thanks, peter. it's been wonderful. i love all the call ends, too. interesting comments and questions. >> and now on c-span2's booktv, more television for serious readers. >> p. diddy everybody. my name is jeff jarvis. i met the grad school journalism, the craig newmark ride to school school journalism. i'm honored to be with my favorite philosopher, david weinberger, alive at least.

he wrote of the great books, small pieces, too big to know. every day chaos is a wonderful book that is at once energizing and begin even a little frightening. we can get shorty but at first i want david to take you through the book and his ideas and then we'll move on from there. >> thank you, jeff. thank you for hosting this event. event. thank you for coming out. the plan is i'm going to give a presentation about the book jeff and i going to talk and then we also will talk. so -- sorry. don't fail now. excellent. i want to let you know alexa going to say positive things about the internet and about

artificial intelligence can which i understand objects of great fear in many ways properly. one of the great fears, and very real and important fear about sort of artificial intelligence bonus machine learning is what will be taught but about is mae learning learned from david. you feed him date and learn from it. if you feed in biased data, mkarns vices and think and amplify it. biased results. if you said it data about employment, it might learn that women correlate poorly with senior management positions. it will learn the biases in our culture. there's a lot of work being done to try to address it or at least recognize this is a very serious and important problem. it gets worse when the machine learning system is working in a way we can understand which is fundamental to what my book is talking about because then you may not even know about its

biases. these are really, a serious issue. it's not the topic of my book. the book references it but stop at the book is about. i does want to make sure this is on the table is equally important. what the book is about as a way which our future is changing. not the content because it always changes. this is elon musk asked this hyperlink thing. this is 1912 version of it. content of the future always changing, that's the point of the future. what the book talk to is not that. there are no predictions. the book talks about the way in which we think the future happens is changing. one of the ways we think about the future, sort of casually, is we think about the future consisting of huge number of possibilities. as the future comes closer those possibilities narrow and tell us on the one left. our job is to think about what's possible, choose the one we want

and then do everything we can to make sure that's the one, that one possibility is the one that becomes real. if you do, that's great. the way we've done this, the strategy of strategies for very long time has been would try to anticipate what's going to happen and then prepare for it. this is a paleolithic strategy, really, really old. when we first started glinting ax handles or spear points, we were anticipating their use the next day. we are never going to give up entirely on it because if you do you get hit by the next bus because you didn't anticipate and look both ways. i'm not going to be saying anticipation instead, but something is happening. the book talks both about the net and about ai. because it's the hypothesis of the book that are light on the internet, our success on internet, the things we do enjoy and we do well at on internet

have been training as to succeed and prosper and thrive in a chaotic environment, both in the strict sense of chaos which isn't all that relevant at the moment, in the sense of lots of things happen beyond our control. we are being surprised and suddenly something goes viral that doesn't make any sense, so we don't know why. internet has gotten used to that. ai is giving us a new model for understanding how that happened. going to start with the internet. going to spend more time on ai. on the internet we are succeeding with ai. we do very weird things that we take for granted on the internet. i think it's a threat the coast duties some going to point to examples of where things we do on internet that we don't recognize as weird, and what the threat is that holds them together.

the first is minimal viable product. does anybody know what mvp is in a sense? well, good, thank you. it's a very popular approach on the internet for launching products, where you figure out what the one key feature is that people want a product and you hold off on all the others. people pay for. they are paying for this one feature, if it's dropbox, you can use your files anywhere. when key feature, you launch it and watch what people do with it and then you start adding features dropbox is a full-featured product out. it makes total sense because you can see what people actually want, not what they think they want, not what they say they want. what they really want once it is in their hands. what works, , what doesn't and w you can extend it. but this goes, flies told in the face of how we design products further. if you are henry ford and his 1908 and you launch the model t, and then you don't change it for

19 years, it's the same product, tiny little changes overnight gingers, so 15 million of them and you change the world. this is a fantastic example of designing by figuring out what people need ahead of time. mvp, minimal viable product, no, so that out. instead ship with one feature, the future, and then see what people do. this approach along with other weirdness on the net holds possibilities open. rather anticipating it purposely holds open the possibility there's a bunch of other things that do this, on-demand and agile development. i'm not going to go through these but conferences in which the attendees decide on the agenda when they get there, rather than the conference organizers anticipating what users, attendees are going to want to talk about. it's basically a new thing in the world.

then there are, second example, open platforms. technically open aei's. with an open platform if you come to launch your product, it's going well. maybe it's an mvp, maybe, maybe it's not. you decide that there's lots of things you could do with your product but you don't have the staff to do them all. and more important you can't even think them all. so slack is a well-known messaging at houston business among teens and it's a great product. they opened up an open platform which means anybody on the web, any developer in particular can use what slack has developed to create new products, new features for slack, you ways to integrate slack into their current work environment, to make a a niche version of it tt satisfies some small handful of users. these are things slack will might not have even thought of, and if they did they probably wouldn't have the staff to do all.

this is very much not the way products are supposed to work. you don't hand off the power to develop your project to users who jenna with these platforms can develop these new features without even asking permission. they can just do it. but a major product far more valuable more useful and get integrated into workloads. slack has an $80 million fund to encourage people to do this sort of work. this again, very weird, very new, very weird and world, widely adopted and it's a part of many other such instances in which on the internet we do this thing of opening up, giving up some measure of control and allowing others to extend and modify. not the way we used to build products. this is very counterintuitive. both of these sorts of things, one holds open possibilities and one makes new possibilities, enables people to create new things.

all of these are examples of switching from insisting on anticipating what will happen to on anticipating compassing benefit and not trying to guess what's going to happen. it's as if we collectively as a species has spent the past 25 years doing everything we can to make the world more unpredictable. actually it's not as if it that's exactly what we've been doing for the past 25 years. everything we can to make the world less predictable. the result is in some sense this reverses the flow of the future. rather than it being a narrowing in which possible was delimited and you're left with one, we're systematically engaged in multiple ways to trying to enlarge the future, a large the possibility. this is pretty new in the world. that's a quick view of how it has changed our practice. now let's talk about how ai may be reframing it.

when i say that i, i do mean the particular type known as machine learning. i will now try to explain it as quickly as i can, as machine learning is a very deep art and science. i'm not a computer scientist. it's really complex. this is the simplest version i can do. if you are a normal computer programmer, traditional programming and traditional computer, and let's say it's to come up with software that will predict sales for your business. you will first come up with a conceptual model, figure out these of the factors that affect sales. it includes things like the number sale people and how many leads to you have and what are the incentives you think if we increase incentives that might increase sales by do have enough leads? would have to increase support staff and so forth. all of these things are interrelated. here are the factors. here are the interrelationships.

that's the conceptual model. you program it up into a working model. it sounds like a spreadsheet. that's what we don't spreadsheet which spreadsheets aren't easily to program a computer. obviously these things really work. they are great, but it is not at all how machine learning works. machine learning drops the relationships. it says give us data can give the machine can become give it labels with the data stands for, but those labels are in a sense of meaningless because it doesn't know what the relationships are. i want to note that we like it generally when the conceptual model matches are working model, but with machine learning you basically throw away the conceptual model. you just take the data, put into buckets, so to speak. and then the system goes through and it works over that data,

looks for correlations among all the different pieces. they can be millions of pieces of data. fines correlations, when peace connected maybe to thousands of others, until you have this network, this is an artist rendering, a network in which there are, the pieces are connected in their dependencies and relationships with so much detail and complexity that if you wanted to walk through it as a human being, start with data .1 and see where it connects, it would take you a long time. you might be able to do it but you would learn nothing. you just have seen where things are connected. nevertheless, the system when you feed in data output if you have trained correctly will output data that makes good predictions, predictions better than human skin which is why we use it for predicting, or categorizing and classifying more accurately faster or both.

it works it works but we cannot, at one level we simply cannot explain how it works because the networks are too complex and there's another level what we tried to figure out trying to make sense of it, we frequently also simply cannot explain how it works. but it does work. every day there something new that is being done with this technology that is unexpected and sometimes occasionally slightly miraculous. but this comes at a price. in some ways it's a very, very wrenching change. it's a change in how we think models work. we use conceptual model all the time but our conceptual models tend to work starting from broad, general relationships. it's not the way machine learning models works. so in general, when we think about how things work when

remodeling are coming up with conceptual idea of how something works is we look for the general principles. we look for the generalizations and the whiplike and two particulars. the generalizations have to be understandable because we need to know how to apply them. and then we value the principles more. we look at the principles for the truth. they dated we put in is just transient stuff. it's the principles that abide and that is the old model. when i say old i mean thousands of years old. with machine learning levels, it's really different because you pour in particular. you don't tell it generalizations. it may not come up with general principles or rules. it just may not orbit as we may not understand the even notice them. it connects complex and delicate and sense of the small change can ripple through and at it'sa really unexpected result. and in ways that are frequently beyond our understanding. that's a very different sense of

how come models, also what those models are modeling, , which is our world and our future. if it is the case as i think it is that historically we've understood ourselves in terms of our technology, so it was only after the steam engine was invented and steep and protection was built that we started to feel ourselves under pressure. that's a steam engine term, and we have to let off steam or blew a gasket. all of that, and we felt that. we feel under pressure because we have adopted the technologies we are thinking, thinking about the world. and in age of information, very quickly, in 1950s everything was information. including ourselves. we actually felt information overload. we felt we were being overloaded. we would feel like we are processing information, soy, can't process that right now. with so thoroughly taken up metaphors and the models.

if that's the case, if we understand ourselves to our technology, and if it is the case, i'm pretty sure it is that ai machine learning is going to name the next age, age of information, age of ai, then can we start thinking about what that might mean or how we understand ourselves and understand our place in a world? that's what a lot of the book is about. i want to give you three examples, two of them pretty quick, what a little, little bit longer about the sorts of things might have. we already see elements of this now. that's what i'm going to point to. first, what happens with strategy. strategy is a very new idea. military strategy is a 19th century idea. business strategy is measured in decades, not in centuries. strategy is really new idea in the world because for us to have a strategy, the concept of strategy makes sense, we have to believe the world is pretty stable, that it's run by laws

that we can learn and teach and use as our guide. the stability -- we didn't have that sense for a long time. in 19th century start to get that since even for war and in business as well. in the past ten or 15 years in the brief life of business strategy, it's already getting knocked around. this book black swan is very important bestseller, very influential. the basic idea is you sure you have your strategies in business but any moment a black swan, , d unexpected thing can happen. your supply chain could blow up. you never know what's going to happen. which could bring down your business and you should be aware that and try to prepare for as best you can.

it's a little surprise to me and you'd be told that because this seems a evident in life, but apparently we did. it's an important thing. it's been an important idea in business. another quick example, rita mcgrath has been thinking about the problems with strategy just along these lines, recommends people, businesses pay very close attention to the small changes in the vast amount of information that is around us, to look for opportunities and risks. rather than only having a long-term strategy which assumes pretty stable and fiber. no pay attention to the small things around you. some people talked about this overall, this trend is minimal viable strategy. you want the least possible strategy because you recognize the world is so unstable, so chaotic, so unknowable that the general principles may actually

be totally right but applying them in such an environment means that you cannot plan as closely and as carefully as you would like. i just want to add a note. plato was the first person to separate tactics from strategy. what he meant by tactics is pretty much what we meant by logistics. what he meant by strategy though, is go to example, the first thing that he says about it, he gives an analogy and he says strategy, that's like but musicians do when they make up new tunes. basically it's improv. that is not how we think about strategy these days, but i think we may going back to that, based upon what we're already seeing happen in the business world, if nowhere else. second thing that changes is progress, our idea of progress. whether pretty straightforward idea of progress. progress is relatively recent

idea, around 1700, wii and the west can the idea that progress makes sense. ask somebody what progress is, they will draw a a line like t. this is progress in telephones and there are big markers, big steps that mark the progress. this is fine, sure, but it is absolutely not how progress works. it's never been a progress works. this leaves out all of the mistakes, many of which were important and helpful. it leaves out all of the intersections of each of these technologies with all the other technologies that enable them all with their own points that can lead out to other points. this is fiction. stories are great, this one is not a true story but this is how we think about how the world has proceeded. you get a different picture online. this is changing online. this is a screen capture of get help, a wildly popular and

influential site for developers. software developers with a post the code to other people for collaborative purposes but also to other people can use it, can add on to it, make suggestions or do the thing called forking with the technical and turn it into something else without, this is open source. generally without asking permission. as a result each piece of code, and dark in the millions of get hubbers. each of them can become a launching point and you can mix and match with other pieces of code. this is i think the most popular in terms of number of times it's been reused or in this case called for, and somebody builds a new branch of it. this has been forked well over 27,000 27,000 times at this point. that's a lot of reuse. each of the things, each of the forex also maybe using pieces from other pieces of code, and

what gets forked may be forked. if you draw map at get hub it would look like in a straight line to it would look like this except way more complex with a lot of dead ends, a lot of leaps forward, a lot of splitting. this is what progress looks like. this is a somewhat better idea, pictured what progress looks like because this is a picture of the internet, this is a very old map of the internet, of nodes that are connected. architecture reflects the way that progress and reuse works on internet because the internet allows that sort of thing. so companies, developers and companies to the sort of thing because they see benefit in it. they use other people's work, legitimately, to make what it and available. it gets better because of the

people iterate on it, find bugs, and features. but if you want to tell the story of progress, it is not a straight line with nice little notches in it. the third thing that changes is explanation. this will take me a minute. let's say you're on a back road driving along, you get a flat and you want to know why so you take off the type and you look, and you figure it out. it's the nail. great explanation i'm not going to argue against that explanation. a great explanation. it's an explanation of a particular type, extremely common, there but for the nail i wouldn't have gotten the flat. works great. however, it's not the only seen the klingon in the picture. here's the road again. excuse me, you're on the road because you were late. you said to take a shortcut. i cannot relate would would not cut athletic if you are not swerved for the rabbit, no nail, no flat.

if metal were softer than rubber, no flat. if the pointy things didn't penetrate better, you would not have gotten a flat. if you did want, if people did want to go fast, then it would be cars, if there were not car companies to serve the need, no flat. .. so why do we pick the little nail as the explanation? and there's a really great reason for this. the nail is the one thing we can change, the scenario.

you can't get rid ofcorrect gravity. you can't go back in time and say i'm going to roll over the bunny . you can't undo any of thatbut the one thing you can changes the nail, that's why it's the explanation and it's a good explanation explanations are tools . they're not things in the world . they're not part of the world . they are tools we use because we have purposes and we need explanations sometimes as a tool. they are not always the best tool.the issues around regulating ai and there are many regulators who assume everything has to be explainable so it's often the right tool, it's not always the right tool and explanations always hide more. that's okay. but it's really important to recognize that. we will be doing really well i think if we come to think, the machine learning model that's continually putting

more and more in front of us as something that is inexplicable, as a problem, we're worried about these black boxes, inexplicable workings of some of these systems. as things go wrong as they inevitably will and it turns out we don't know why, every time we're told that in effect we are being told there are systems we rely on that do things we cannot, these things are sort of cognitive with eric quotes here because these machines don't think but there's cognitive work that they're doing every time we're told that these ideas are being reinforced that a machine that works in an inexplicable way can do things we cannot and if we come to think of next likability, inexplicably not as the exception , there's a handful of things we can't explain but as a part of life. as a part of the landscape. then we will be enabled to

not only make more progress with ai because that's important and interesting, but i think we start thinking about ourselves differently. we are at a disruption that is copernican in its scale the cause of -- in the west, we started with a compact, with an agreement, with a covenant that said humans are a special species, we're the ones that are able to understand all the world works to some degree. god created us, i'm sorry i'm generating but it's traditional, god created us in his image, not to look like god because it doesn't make sense but in our ability to understand or appreciate some of god's creation. for the greeks the same word is used for the beauty and harmony and order of the cosmos, logos, that same word is used to describe the human capacity to appreciate the logos, the order of the universe.

there is this unity, this magical unity that makes us national. that is what the covenant has been. and there's no point in being a rational animal in greek terms if the cosmos isn't rational, if it doesn't disclose anything about the universe so we had this covenant insofar as we are beginning to learn through technology that does things cognitive things that are than we do but in ways that we cannot understand, that does not rely upon generalities, that may work without plotting any generalities as they don't think the way we do, then that covenant is broken and that is i think a big deal and that's what, we are coming i think i hope to question whether our way of thinking is the way of thinking, whether we are more alien in the world and we thought, that our thinking is maybe more as the baltimore for survival then necessarily

for truth. the generalizations are a good shorthand. but we now have a system that is able to do more by focusing on the particulars and theirrelationships . this seems to me to be an important point in our history and i am, there are tons of problems both internet and ai and we can talk about and i suspect we will in a moment but this change in the covenant seems to me to be an opportunity and a possibility that we are in a new stage in our evolution, that we are at a new stage of maturity in which you recognize how small and fragile and incomplete our thinking is and i think it's a moment, i hope it's a moment of great humility as we reconsider what our position in the universe is. moments of great humility as i think there's an inverse relationship, grace not inverse, that great humility

is an indication, that enables great off and i'm opening that we managed to make our waythrough with difficulties with this new technology . both in a more humble and also more in all of where we live. thanks very much >>. >>. >>. >> is talking about house of goals which machines are systems that beat more than often. so he says here, how these algorithms work, they captured better than anyhuman can . >> better than any human can the complexity and even beauty of the universe in which everything affects everything else all at once. >> say that again.

>> i want to read a moment from early in david's book where he talked about the machine learning of algodones defeated humans in winning the game really misses the learnings algorithms work because they capture better than any human can the complexity, fluidity and even beauty of the universe in which everything affects everything else all at once. as we will see, machine learning is just one of many tools and strategies that have been increasingly bringing us face-to-face with the incomprehensible intricacy of our everyday world. but this benefit comes at a price. we need to give up our systems on always understanding our world. and how.

with that i realize that david was pulling the rug, the cognitive run out from underneath all of us. he was taking out the idea that we can explain the world. and as we go further and furtherin the book , to concrete example, what i learned was that often times a machine learning algorithm with lots and lots of data set in and lots of connections made can make predictions better than we can. and it can't explain it. so david started off early on with the simple av test which is beloved of the platforms but let's just try out, let's test this and that, which ones better. they do it all the time. you are bombarded with 80 tests throughout theday whatever you're on , google or amazon or facebook. and the abs says this works better than that. reliable, we've done 100

times. this works better than that . b is the winner. why is be the winner? we have no idea. there's no explanation from the algorithm, the algorithm can't explain, neither can we. i found a little frightening. because i think it starts to take away our sins that we can't make the world, that we can explain the world. that we're the best at explaining the world, we are the humans and that's where the computer starts to do is take away that numerous from us. is that right? >> yeah. >> av tests -- so you want to sell your barbecue, sauce online or whatever and on one you have the model on the left, hundred thousand people in the other end hundred thousand people say it was the model on the right or

with green background, red background, micro changes and you discover that on the left , to present more clicks which is quite significant, that's a lot of money and then you say tomorrow, you're selling catch up and you do the same and its no, it's not the model on the left. in fact it's the green background and we don't know why, we don't need to know why, we just run the tests and i'm sorry, i'm just repeating this and then maybe going on, why is it that we don't have generalizations for this? we don't learn from it. for one thing, it's keeping up just to run the test again. and of all, it's likely, it seems likely given the great variability of these tests that what determines the test of the barbecue sauce model on the right is some complex set of factors, may be

different for different people, maybe so sensitive, that's why it's only a two percent difference. that's why it may be in cities where it just stopped raining, then people become more likely but in cities where the sports team lost and some people who just heard loud traffic go by wave on the left, it may be some confluence of factors so delicately balanced that in a sense there's nothing to learn. that's a really interesting lesson for thinking about how the world's work causes not just av testing which we harness it and thus are able to validate it and sort of accept it, it's everything. everything you did on the way here is subject to the same sortof , micro influences of a sickly everything that has happened. everything in the world. that seems to be a pretty for me, i'll give you another example .

it's a convincing model of how life works. it is for what causes war and people have theories of war, popular topic among historians and the like. and so the world war i started when somebody shot the archduke and that's what caused it. well yes, maybe and in a sense that's maybe a sinequan on, there's an argument about that too. if nobody had shot him for it had missed they wouldn't have started but that act dramatic act only caused the war because of you have to know everybody, the economics, the politics at the time. the socioeconomic, everything about it would be required to understand why they were starts. the archduke wasn't shot before without starting a war. it may just be things happen for complex reasons that are so complex that we're just

not set up for it, think about it but we have this fiction, maybe it's fiction that wecan explain it, that we can understand . so i read another book by alice rosenberg called how history things wrong. the moral science of our addition to stories. this is not rosenberg time but he says that the theory of mind that we had ever since we were in savannah. that we, that we match the desires for action, rosenberg says this is proven by neuroscience. so he says that newton's law of the universe, law of divine purpose. why do they think that happens? we don't know. it's not.

then along comes star wars. who robs biology of purpose. because not sorry, it's that law. and now rosenberg and reimer come along and take away the last part of that . the sense of human purpose that we know what we're doing . the theory of mind doesn't work, we may be just players in a grid of the testing life and who knows why we do what we do. it takes away that sense of storytelling, that sense of explanation. that i think is somewhat frightening still and i'm no technophobe, and accused of being a no optimist to an extreme even more than david but i think there's a common crisis of cognition here, that we think we know how to figure out the world and if the machine can figure it out better, will we become even

more resentful of them. >> it's such a rich comment but just as post-it medium about this which and then applies it to reference for journalistsbecause he's a journalism professor . that it's fabulous and i say that not because you talk about me in it although that would be enough. >> so there's been lots of discussion by lots of people on breeding this idea. philosopher, evolutionary philosophers who say thinking is an evolutionary products, why would we think, evolution tells us that itshould be about survival . driving reproductively if nothing else so there's a lot of confluence is here that are bringing us i think you this point, the fact that we have technology that, and that we use all the time is i

think reaches, you have cell phone, i'm going to get all cell phone. using machine learning all the time, every time it auto completes typing or you use mapping to get somewhere or you read the email and the spam filters are allmachine learning . basically it's a little bit of exaggeration, everything is machine learning so that heasked a question . how frightened are you that mapping software that you use , routing software? >> i love it. [inaudible] it would waste another year of my life. >> and likewise. that's machine learning, why aren't we frightened of that? >> i'm not frightened of the technology.

what i'm frightened of these peoples right of the so i think in the world we have now, this is outside of the books but i think what we see going on is a panic about people who are in power who look like me who are now panicking about new voices can be heard thanks to the internet, new connections that can be made and the reaction we see that is was frightening. so what i really have a low-level arise that people will have the likes against machine learning they was going to be robots, they didn't know . they didn't know amazon was going to replace a box backof the lot . we know that. that doesn't change i don't think our view of the world but this stuff. >> you could have other source of deleterious effects . >> and it takes away our sense of ourselves and our humanity. we feel empowered.

we new agency. i just worrywhat people's reactions are going to be . >> i'm worried about the action to, i do want to reiterate that the problems of bias if nothing else and there are other problems as well including the facts that these systems can be fooled by adversaries and we become more reliant on them. we these are real problems and we should be engaged with them verythoroughly . that's different, but i don't think i disagree with that. >> how do we call down mankind. >> so why is it frightening, i'm sorry. let me put it like this. we have been in an enlightenment parentheses. jeff often talks about the gutenberg parenthesis as a

way of. >> for another time. >> as a way of putting some of the internet changes into. we've been in this parenthesis, historical parenthesis of thinking that we are the masters of the universe. and this is a well, so not original, it's sort of canaan and its right. it involved with. >> a sense that we can master everything, control the environment . we are maybe fatally reorganizing, but that's not the case . why wouldn't we, coming to the understanding that we are not in fact masters of the universe, we cannot find the magic keys that will unlock everything in furtherance of knowledge so everything becomes understandable and controllable, i understand why that writing to some

people. but they're wrong to be frightened about. >> maybe i'm just follow of myself . it doesn't bother me but it bothers everybody else . >> it really struck me and it goes to your nail in the tire is that you say that that which we can explain is explained. it's laws, we figured out, we know why. everything else is an accident. and what you're saying is there are no accidents only things we can figure out. >> i think that people, that the idea of that the world is a rule-based system that we can't figure out is as old as newton. newton knew that everything affects everything that score

is thinking. gravitation goes on forever but it's weekend so quickly. it doesn't matter. i'll tell you an anecdote about newton. which actually, you more or less raise. newton was very, newton as you know, the actual stunning genius who gave us the idea that there are simple rules that humans can understand apply equally to everything in the universe throughout the universe and this undid the greek notion that had held on forever. and it's astunning active genius . he was a very, very deeply committed christian and he was very disturbed by the fact that his loss could explain everything, because then you don't need god. it's mechanical movers, god creates it, wind it up and

you don't need god to explain anything and deeply distressing. so one of these speculations, he doesn't very much in an active specialization because, forbid back then. and he said you know, comments are in their beautiful elliptical orbits is the sign of god's grandeur, so perfect but gravity, everything in the universe exerts gravity that affectseverything else even though it's minor . add all that up and it's, the mass of the universe shouldn't maybe be pulling a planet out of its perfect orbit? somaybe , maybe a comment , god rosa: into the system vertically safe to exert gravitational pull, to target the planets back into their perfect orbit . he found a way secularly, this is not to try to get god back into full. but he i'm sorry, i forgot. was that he and newtonian's,

similarly understand that the universe is really complex, that everything affects everything. but we can safely, if you want to know when an eclipse is coming you don't have to worry about the gravitational pull of some star a gazillion miles away butwhere aware that . it didn't matter ultimately so the focus is on universal laws, that's permanent and real and eternal and the rest of it is just for theswirling matter . it is determined by the laws but you can ever possibly know it so we don't pay attention to it. we can, if the machine learning model that focuses on the particulars and succeeds without generalization leaves us, it leads us to appreciate the particulars and maybe rather than throwing outlaws which we don't want to do, that's one more science. rather than throwing out the laws maybe we can begin to in