and features perspectives into the lives of our nation's chief executives and leadership styles. visit our website, c-span .org / the presidents to learn more about each president and historian features. order your copy today wherever books and e-books are sold. >> next, on the tv. programs from our archives the focus on technology. you can watch them in their entirety by visiting our website booktv .org and use the search function at the top of the page. first, from march 20 march 2819 nyu stern school of business professor amy webb argues that artificial intelligence is giving too much power to big corporations. >> my job is to model risk for living. i have primarily focused on technology and over and over i kept coming back to the same nine companies. these same companies that control the lion's share of patents that have an extraordinary amount of money that are able to attract the

best talent because they are the best food. you know, that have the relationships with universities and it doesn't mean there aren't other companies like salesforce or uber that are doing amazing things but it is these nine companies that everything else flows. the entire ai ecosystem, in some way or the other, touches these nine. in addition to all the things that i just mentioned they are building the framework and the custom silicone tips and they have the code bases. all roads lead to these nine companies in the challenge that i have is that if it is the case that artificial intelligence is not just being built to create a better microwave although that is cool that instead to optimize our lives using data as currency what does it mean when we relegate that to just a handful

of companies and a handful of people working at these companies who probably don't look like us and don't have the same worldviews as us and what are the longer-term downstream invocations of that look like? three of the companies are in china. they are backed by ali baba [inaudible] in public he traded companies but i lived in china and in japan and anyone who watches china knows that publicly traded companies are still under the thumb of beijing. there is no escape. you can be an incredibly -- if you are an incredibly successful ceo it is because you are in lockstep in some ways with the chinese government. that matters because china currently has a brilliant, brilliant person at the helm. president xi is very, very smart and a very effective leader and a very good long-term planner. china has a culture of long-term planning.

you can go back throughout history and look at their big strategic initiatives and their five-year plans and see how a lot of them really never amounted to anything but i think these are different this time for they are different because we have a person in power and a leadership team around him who really understand technology and so you probably heard of the belt and wrote initiative -- okay, this seems like an infrastructure initiative and you are building bridges and roads and in exchange for diplomacy and all around the world and deep into latin america and africa. what most people don't realize is that this isn't just about pulling physical bridges. or physical roads. there's a digital component as well. fifty-eight countries are part of the digital side of the bri and they are getting 5g, chinese 5g. they're getting small cell technology and they are also getting something called china's social credit score system.

so, there are parts in southern china right now where you might be at an intersection and if you j walk which is illegal there smart cameras placed around the intersection will recognize who you are. you can have your face covered or you can be obscured but these systems are very, very smart and they can't recognize you by gait and posture and by how you are walking and so if you cause an infraction your face gets thrown up on a digital billboard at that intersection along with your name and where you work and that information is transmitted to your employers and to your family members and if you have done it more than once you might be told to report to a local police precinct and you are devoted so your total score as a chinese citizen is taken down a few notches but there are opportunities to earn points if you have done something good. somebody can report meritorious

work and then you may get a few points up this is a program that is intended to be national that hasn't yet rolled out nationally. you may be saying to yourselves well, that's china. i don't live there so this is very interesting but you know, who cares? let me tell you why this matters to you. first of all, this system already has prevented 17.5 million people from buying airplane tickets. more than 17 million people last year cannot fly, 5.5 million people cannot buy a train ticket and 300,000 people who did really great jobs at work there scores were too low and were as a result disqualified from ascending to management positions. these aren't just ethnic minorities who are being discriminated against. this is a shot at huge social control again, you may say to

yourself listen, you had me at talking microwaves and i don't know why all of this necessarily matters to me the reason it matters is that bri. if it is the case that china is aligning itself with all of these countries around the world many of which are economically vulnerable or they are vulnerable for any other number of reasons because of climate change or because they got political unrest and they are inching towards authoritarian leaders, the social credit score system is a real good option for those places. it helps keep the populace and control in china is already exporting this to various different places. why this matters is because while we are fixating on future wars and building big ships and bombs and thinking about missiles in the sky what we have forgotten to look at is what happens if china wages an economic war which effectively blocks us out of places or forces us to come to terms that we don't like or understand

connect this potentially prevents us from doing business in us from traveling and it potentially reshapes the world in a sort of new world order were china is not just a pacing threat but a military and economic pacing threat but china has become a form -- formidable global threat to all of us. that is china. in the united states there's an antagonistic relationship and there's a transactional relationship on good days but an antagonistic relationship more than not between the valley and dc. what winds up happening is, there's a lot of actors standing and there aren't enough relationships and the valley does what it is or wants until somebody gets upset and then they apologize and then they do the same thing again. over and over and over again. this is until one day when you have somebody like elizabeth warren who starts demanding they are broken up. you can't break up these

companies. they are many reasons why some of them have to do with strategy and the nuts and bolt of technology but this is not like bell. jew member when the bell company got broken up into baby bells connect this is not that. this is not telephones but these companies have multiple divisions and are intertwined in a very completed and if the united states will continue to defund science and if it will continue to defund our education system and technology then who will build out the future of ai among other parts of science and tech and everything else? you can't just break these apart. it doesn't work that way. in the process of, you know, arguing back and forth, in the process these companies are competing against each other rather than collaborating with the sets us up for, you know, inch by inch, little by little, your daily permissions being

taken away. i no longer have the ability to back my car into my garage with the radio up on full volume. that is because nobody who has been a part of a small group was part of a small ai tribe decided that they were going to optimize my best healthiest life and that was probably unsafe, like you are probably unsafe, even though we've never been in a car accident so i no longer have control over the volume in my car. it seems insignificant but there's a compounding effect over time. we are all apart now of this process that is unfolding in slow motion. you've heard the analogy of the frog in the pot in the the water slowly, over time, boiling and you don't realize until the frog is dead. i don't want to be the frog dead in the pot. i know that sounds like hyperbole but there some way things happening that we turn a blind eye to that it at some point there is no way to turn this back and there is no

switch, no singular switch for ai and no single person that is in charge and at the moment we have no national leadership on this issue but president trump issued a and signed an executive order but that executive order on artificial intelligence is not self executing. we do not have budgets and we do not have a singular department in charge. we do not have institutional knowledge spread throughout our federal government. we have a lot of smart people but they are not in the right places and in the valley we have incredibly smart people who, i do think, want to do good by and for society but who are instead constantly dealing with market demands. let me be clear on this. i don't think that the big nine companies and certainly not the g mafia which is our part of the big nine, i don't think they're evil. i don't think they intend to do harm but i think we've gotten ourselves into a situation where the system is broken.

>> we've opened up our archives to look at recent author programs about technology. next, reporter anna weiner recalls her experiences working for tech startups the next ceo of the company i worked for in san francisco was 24 when i joined the company and i was 25. obviously worldly experienced. [laughter] he had been mike, nadir and i think is incredibly hard thing to do to run a company full of adults, many who have dependents or debts or whatever and i think i do not envy anyone in that position. obviously you self select for that position if you are lucky but i have a lot of sympathy for someone who was growing up at the same time that they are learning how to be a ceo. i think that the reason i don't name companies and i don't name the executives and if you're number one of them is that i feel that the behavior i saw

institutionally, as well as individually, was more a result of a structural position that any individual failure. i realize that's also exculpatory narrative or scope of tory framework but -- [audio difficulties] >> it's very google. ... it has more to do with the incentives of the business model than the industry and another

reading. i feel like i am with my own book, like i'm an american girl doll. [laughter] they read my book and mentioned how early numbers, my injury asked us to who are the five smartest people you know? write their names down. we all did the frigates it was like, why don't they work here? [laughter] i was like why would they work here? this doesn't make sense. there's so many other interesting things to do in the world, why would my friends from graduate school, they probably make their way to tech but why

would these people who are smart and talented and interested in other things, why should they work in this company? i'm here because i don't know what my purpose is in life. but is this idea that the five people you think should work here because of economic value. >> do think this could work? [laughter] >> yes, i totally do. he should have a one line answer for these. so she was like the same thing happened at my company. as my first time i had heard this. they tested me to say this was

my day job for me, they must have all credit on the blog post because i was also pulled into her room and asked who the five smartest people were i knew. i feel like this happens in this culture has to do with the intellectual culture which i recall anti- inflectional, has to do with more people need business advice, there a ton of accountability to the investors and responsibility to their employers so they read a blog post that's like here's how you can scale hiring get people that will set the tone for the rest of the company. ask them who the smartest people they know are and push them to recruit them and say we will pay

five to $8000. i tried so hard to recruit people who were and were not the smartest people i know for anyway. [laughter] i think the industry has values, you could speak as well, maybe you have seen this in your investigation of uber. it's available at this bookstore. i think the company cultures are shaped by the business model and incentives and there either incentives of the c-uppercase-letter harvest speed and scale and whatever, coupled with this libertarian spirit of industry that's been incubating for 25 years, sometimes longer,

50 years and you get this weird cultural product, values, over consideration and complex, i don't know what i'm talking about, i am so sorry. i'm just going forth. >> i don't remember actually. i'm wondering if there's parts of your experience that you take with you that might be appreciated. journalists are typically from a modern, tech is doing good for the world and in questioning

fact, it's come of this dangerous thing. i'm wondering if there are parts of the culture that you appreciated in took away from your time intact. >> there is. the heart of the book is this, i think there's a lot that i appreciated about working intact, along with my 30s i would go back and appreciate the same things to be honest, i happened to be the right age with the right yearning to be an ideal employee in a certain way but, yes in my 20s.

but in my 20s, not knowing anyone from a different city, trying to find meaning, being told here's your meaning, what i admired and appreciated west the camaraderie commitment to a common project, collective project if you will. i liked that people had autono autonomy, at least for a little while, i think that's also part of the problem. people who have autonomy don't necessarily have the authority to have autonomy or shouldn't there seems to be potential in the middle people with the most short of just replicate power structures that exist external externally, i think that there's

one more thing i actually did enjoy and appreciate about the culture, i think it's very finest not somebody who's constantly battling between deep pain from earnestness. [laughter] i don't know if you can relate they might be wrong but i genuinely believe people seem to think they are doing good for the world. i do think they believe it but i trust them from they say. i think what's missing is more the problem is systemic necessarily rooted in the individual. i do wonder, i don't know if you're legally allowed to answer this but you feel like someone,

i've heard people say uber can exist if it didn't have this crazy culture. my question is, should it exist? the culture shouldn't exist and if you don't have a, maybe that is fine. [laughter] you see an explanation for his behavior? one that's related to incentive? that could potentially be forgiving of someone like that? >> i think yes, you're getting at the right thing. whether how this works, you're invested in your company, if the next level whatever that is, revenue or something and for

most companies, it can be kind of desperate and you do things that maybe might not be and i think it is how a lot of this works but i also think there's justification. the people who are in these spaces, the incumbents protected in ways that are not what is necessarily fair and you can believe, not think this is wrong. >> my own argument, i do think people are in this same position and they are not a holes. >> you have to be a jerk do well in this industry, right? depending on who the ceo is. >> you are watching book tv on

c-span2 with other programs on technology. in september of 2019, microsoft senior researcher eric wright reported on the workforce that drives large technology companies like amazon, google and uber. >> you are probably familiar a category we will call online and off-line platform services over in lyft, door, they use the same mechanism. putting out a request for somebody to pick up this food, delivered to this address and the platform is participating exchange by recording when it's picked up and delivered, executing a payment, scheduling, getting an address, that portion of the work is automated but the delivery, the value of somebody being there to deliver the food from the part often are considering. more increasingly, we are aware because them.

if i said contact moderation is a form, i don't think anyone would know what i was talking about. you will know contact moderation is a job people do but provides another service for just any artificial intelligence there are people who perform very important one. we are focused on this world of business start up business to business services below the surface. anything you will ever see as a consumer and that's what i'm going to talk about today. it's the world of editor, testing, data lately which might be familiar to some of you, many of these different tasks to drive artificial intelligence in the nation, it's what helps datasets about being in mit, mostly people don't know what i'm saying increasingly we see a

number of jobs is quite hard to mail that a.i. thing, people person into this service request so anytime you go on tour website and have this pop up from you know it's a mixture of script and a person assisting you. thinking about that for the work you have a person drink something on the spot that can't be quite completed by automation you see reference that come to mind, places to thread together, this is not new. there's continuity here how we treat people were in a moment because automation will come around and it might look like piecework textiles, we could have manufacturing markup shirt but credit add a button about the bow?

no. usually in a matter of decades, is the important thing. yes, automation eventually made it possible in some cases and in others, but also the reality paradox of automation, the boat itself being too sophisticated for textile machinery to consume automation. that meant a person was kept around. it's also in the world of contract labor so the example of women most famous in the films who could, at the time, we brought in, we know that is a reference to the people, not the machine and when the demand slowed as experts, eventually disappeared. they could be let go.

was it less valuable? looking at employment and seen these women as valuable because we had already moved forward an idea of what it was two-volume work. often it was bodies embodied in this profession, white men who had specific roles to play. anyone not playing this role seemed expendable. to continue this lineage by the 1960s and advancement of staffing and temp services literally, the value of

devaluing of women's labor as a resource because mostly young women were college educated, they made great office girls. they were also expendable so keeping that thread moving by the time we get to the 1980s to thousands and off shoring of knowledge work, it becomes much harder to make the case that people are doing something that could easily be replaced precisely because their drink work also being done by workers in the u.s. there's much more obvious that this was a question of labor arbitrage you can find cheap labor just as educated as anyo anyone. perhaps to my colleagues from the settlement of the case against michael that involves microsoft, met never resolving the question of what you do in the case of employment that is less necessary for a period of time, it's product driven, it might be something with a specific kind of expertise or language expertise, but you know

you're not going to need them for more than 12 months or weeks or 12 days. what we have to value that worker and at the time, we can have a category for that. it's important to note that post- 2000, silicon valley, especially in 2001, they effectively got their bubble burst at that moment we result without case law we are going to need to know what to do with people who are necessarily, not necessarily present we are going to hold them for a career, we came up with in the settlement with federal practices contract labor for management systems that often don't leave them with the production beyond that 12 month contract to say unemployed and benefits come with my empty unemployment.

if you think about this history clicked on, any historical trajectory is an argument that in this case, we see the setting in place the beginning of the industrial era of large later protections mostly assumed the viable work, and the work that can't be automated without much projection out that might become the target of automation so policies built for assembly lines and professions that were imaginatively beyond the touch of automation and temp staffing which has driven much of our economic activity globally the growth of a service industry and attempt staffing industry that serves people requests for needs 100 serves the need to build to see this shift toward information economy that involves people doing information service work, that

involves people doing coding and other valuable skills take place, of training think about what it took to code up a website in the 2000 from him coding html, how many the rink know what i'm talking about? that's completely done with software now. at that time, we paid quite a bit of money to build people's websites. i was my first book with a 1099. i do think about what can be automated, but in the work of the creative work from a complex communication that seems beyond automation. that's open question. what is it that we will have constantly on the horizon that requires the human touch for some amount of time that we can't see growing into a career? may give you how we studied this because setting this work is not

the most obvious thing as a doing. we chose three businesses as case studies where we identify of workers but also these companies to show us the inside of their black box, how did they organize this work, what does the workflow look like? they have this world of mechanism that can both build out artificial intelligence but also keep humans in. >> other programs about technology continues with alexis. deputy chief technology officer for new york city, she spoke at kramer books in washington d.c. about the power dynamic between big tech companies and government around the world. >> i think the best way to describe is to talk about how i came upon the idea to write this book in the first place. in 2015, there were a number of

terrorist attacks and november 2015, artist terrorist attack which killed over 130 people and it was after the pack that a lot of these organized on social media company was involved in working with defense agencies to try to figure how do we stop terrorism honor we keep them from organizing attacks like this on our platform? was kind of a rough start in the beginning. one of the people in the attacks was captured about six months later despite the fact he been posting on facebook the entire time. wasn't on operation between government and tech companies at the time. a few days later, facebook, google, youtube, amazon and a few others came together for

global internet want to talk about how to fight terrorism. this was something that was organized by the tech industry and forth the tech industry but wasn't a lot of cooperation with government. a few more months, we soft a series of hurricanes, hurricane maria hit puerto rico and by cap the power grid. wiped out cell phone coverage they did not show up. who showed up? tech to rebuild their grades. google showed up to provide internet telecommute coverage. i thought okay, what's going on with the tech industry? , they are getting involved in areas that are way up that used

to be personal response ability of government. this is promising terrorism, defense citizen services and i thought had to be a better place to talk about them and just tech. they seem to have a role to play in geopolitics. the problem was the term non- state actor kind of had already evolved so i started studying where this turn happens. >> mark zuckerberg. >> is definitely some who think of tech as the bad guys. i looked into some things, as recently as 2010, social science defined it as examples like the un and nato so even then, there were not considered terrorists interest sometime around 2012, 13, you start seeing this term being used and eventually isis. so it was taken as bad guys. tech companies were nationstates

either so i thought maybe the needs to be a better way to talk about them are introduced this concept companies, internet -based companies working outside of the court technology mission in areas that used to be defen defense, infrastructure and services and i wrote the article in 2015, people who read it said i think this is a little bit of a stretch and i put on the shelf for two years and after hurricane maria, i thought i feel like there's something to this and that's when i put the article out there and it turned into this book. >> what's the difference between states and other victor companies that might have concerns like donating money or volunteer eight or whatever, cisco or cooper or any of those that also do stuff? >> the book i don't put in this

category, which i do put tesla in this category which might seem surprising to some place in the reason is that i'm looking at how tech companies are outside of additional services and into domains that used to be the territory of government. nancy glover getting involved yet were at the moment, microsoft is very deeply involved in diplomacy, you don't think of cisco having a stake international treaties. this is sort of the two others have vastly big companies from coca-cola that operates globally and mcdonald's but they're not opening a terrorism apartment. it doesn't seem all that strange that they would. i think this is one of the reasons i thought it is working.

>> the list of companies that qualify, google, amazon, facebook and microsoft and you anticipated my question, tesla. like tesla? >> one of the things i look at the book is not just how tech companies expand into governmental domains but how they expand into physical infrastructure and services. this is something tesla elon musk and many companies are doing in some ways, more than anyone else. they are pursuing partnership with government to provide electricity, he's moving into his space with stalin, because a lot of endeavors were there no longer just looking at the time products and services cars that are changing the way think about public infrastructure. with boeing, they're producing

high-speed rail in chicago. >> branding mechanism elon musk objects to. >> exactly. question is, if we can have private sector companies who are in charge of our public infrastructure, what happens when they decide they don't necessarily want to make it available for all? this is one of the reasons i talked about tesla's work in puerto rico they stepped into the time when puerto rico needed somebody to step in and the federal government did not but they're not under obligation to stay. have responsibly the government has to provide equally and fairly access to service. >> portal like one? right that states that. >> one of the things i think testing wishes these companies is that number of people that work there, make a difference

driven by this technology should be used for good so we see google, they worked with the department of defense small contract looking at how to apply a killer recognition and this is a small contract without fault of people who were working on when people found out inside that this is happening, the number of people resigned in protest, there is a company wide circulating say we do not believe google should be in the defense business and i backed up. they let it expire. significant portions of organizations that want to see tech being used to build totally unlike a government constituent

parts. >> this is something i think is one of the interesting features of these particular companies, of course they are interested in the bottom line and making sure they can be successful businesses but you do hear about internal employee protest when the company does think they don't think aligns with beliefs of the court believes tech should be used for good and i think it's one of the challenges with this dynamic, we may have them in the sidelines and you may not think it's right but we don't have any role as citizens to directly influence process which i think is another think that makes this unique. >> will come back to that in a minute. based on your experience and a lot of what you talk about, i want to ask you about the government's relationship, let

me ask you if you can start by recounting this episode in the book where i had not read about before, the social media companies the justice departme department, on how that went. >> there has been a tech industry up to what's reference in the book to reach out to law enforcement and federal agencies and partner with them and work with them about figuring out how we meet the challenges that come together and slow to respond. they were held in which the key players, google and facebook and others invited members from the department of homeland security and offered a lot of their own strategies, the emerging misinformation campaign and in

response, they were met with violence. the next time they convened, they didn't invite anyone from the table. i think 2020, crc the shift a little especially from the front sector turning to reach out to the companies aggressively to get them to work with them but i think, facebook is now at stanford put it well, he said a local police department may be heartbreaking and strong that we wouldn't ask a local police department to defend against invading army but that is sort of what's happening in the looking at tech companies to stand up there unit defense mechanisms not getting the support they need. >> after that episode and before this cycle is an interesting parable in the book about the risks of government standoffish miss, if they can't get their

act together to participate, the tech companies are going to do whatever they want to do, which i thought was a viable point. it presents a bit of a problem because d.c. and congress even with the executive branch does not and cannot keep up with tech. we have lawmakers who made their careers and medicine and law, they show zero technology during this doctor berg hearing posture, facebook was the same thing as twitter and they asked how facebook makes money and it's clear it's not on the platform at all. and mentally, i'm wondering if you have thoughts about how the government can be smarter about its relationship, the people in charge of overseeing agencies have no idea what to ask for.

>> i think there's a couple of different ways we can think about it, we need to make sure we are putting people in congress who do understand the importance of technology, not just local but power player in both domestically and geopolitically. i think we are starting to see an influx of younger and more diverse people running for elective office so i have hope clear went to see people representing us starting to reflect more globally. i also think the people who are currently in office it is not a surprise technology companies are impacting our daily lives, this is not news in 2020. we have elections this campaign from porn actors a few years ago and we have not seen action and i think there's no real excuse for it other than a lack of

appetite, i don't think it's a lack of understanding. even if congress themselves don't have all the details of technology, they certainly have access to resources they can learn help in front themselves better about what to do. >> it's hard to be passionate. talk about the work of these states for staffing and counterterrorism bigotry and predators groups, wondering what you think about the balance that exists between the work tech companies do here and abroad and what you think about the balance in the first amendment. we have structures about how we have speech here compared to the

eu and do things more easily. >> something i was talking about for some money earlier but the fact that they have really robust laws in france and we don't have anything like the first amendment and i was looking at him and thinking, wouldn't it be great if we were able to find a middle ground? i think there's some sort of movement at the extreme ends there's no mistaking hate speech other than what it really is, i think it is egregious examples of hateful content, if you can't regulate them, it's going to put pressure on our tech companies

to be more aggressive about labeling them if not taking some time. we seen this little bit for facebook and youtube and google is labeling the content that is problematic, facebook is doing this with information about the coronavirus that seems problematic, potentially suspect and it's 1202 get us making sure consumers are more informed without just stripping away the internet completely. >> you have any thoughts about whether that is working or can work? >> i think it's still in the early days, i think it is our start, it is better than nothing, remember a few years ago asking the ceo of google at the time, was about search, whether or not this should be something took a heavier hand and identifying problematic content and he's at center

anything that we can do you rank that kind of content doesn't, first so it's tipping the scales a little bit behind the scene in this comes up to the question of the fact that we don't necessarily have busybody needs action so i think one of the things that makes the companies interesting is the relative absence, we are not in a position to say it shows who your team ranking or bragging or not, we just keep it and hope they are doing a good job. >> a reminder all programs you are seeing now are available to watch in their entirety booktv.org, just type the author's name or book title the

search box at the top of the page. other programs on technology from joanne mcneil speaking at harvard book start in massachusetts, she argued internet use has shifted from being individualistic, spontaneous and voluntary data advertising driven. >> you can easily be but people can't necessarily see you watching them and i think it's one of the things that has to do with the elements that make interactions online somewhat unusual from the physical world interactions and sometimes we take for granted how much our communications is in our daily lives, a court different of interactions, i want to make clear in that title. >> you say you're working in your preferred way of interacting with the internet and since you wrote a book about it, i could ask you, is that

specific places online that you choose that you consider yourself primarily, where are you working? >> i would say probably, i've never had a reddit profile but i spent a lot of time on it, especially the corner it's very sweet and unexpected. there are some that are very toxic and our problems there are also some created that it's all about exchanging resources with somewhat of a layer of anonymity because it's a place worth a lot about that. i don't participate myself, i have worked on thought a lot of communities i find useful information wise and the book i

go through how the reports, before i was supposed, i would certainly spend possibly months making sure i did. >> i'm noting the title, we have folks working at the edge of the room so if you want to, you are welcome to we won't make you participate in this particular way fell. i think what you said about but it is interesting, one of the weird things about reddit, i am a reddit worker, i read a fair amount of legal advice as a lawyer which is probably a form of having a view of the people,

a fair amount of mic apple? which i think is funny because it has sort of gotten, i think a lot of people's way of interacting with this form of the internet is twitter, where someone will post ridiculous, and my fate a whole post and then respond on twitter. it's departed from the actual context in which the post was read. >> an example of how a conversation that is usually quite bizarre and heated in its own ways on reddit but if you take another platform like twitter where there's already this underlying irony attached and you always have to be above the content and i think that is what makes twitter distinctive, you can't sincere about things and what i think it's funny

about that is in the book, talk about when i respond on twitter, i was felt like i was too much of a jerk or social networks. these people sharing and why am i not a nice person who can just share these peaceful moments in my life? right away make my weird jokes? nowadays i feel like i am overwhelmed by that edge, and everything has to be, it's an element of distancing yourself from the platform if you can laugh at everything, you're not so inclined, you have a layer of personal disputes from what you are doing for. >> in some ways, working can be a way to distance yourself because as a vested as the people were choosing to file for

as someone who's a worker online, it isn't a lack of investment. i'm not actually as invested in the people who post. and some days, i am more invested in the people who post but i still get that sense of distance. you from the book in terms of working but also in terms of this idea of becoming a user and one of the things talk about a fair amount is facebook, which i thought was interesting because features like the off-line profiles where for those who are unfamiliar, it's the ultimate renaming because an off-line profile is somebody who decided they didn't want a facebook profile and facebook instructs the profile for them from all the things they do even though they are not on facebook so how do you think about how it is

tracking on the web and how has it changed the experience of being online generally are working more specifically? >> that's another element, it's not something possible on the internet which is designed to track activity have analytics, they are not just part of the function of the social network, especially something like facebook where it's attached to having data on its users so that's another element, you can walk away without a trace and perhaps if we don't have our surveillance camera in the future. [laughter]

>> leaving without a trace, yes. so to switch topics, one part of the book i read with a lot of interest a broader chapter entitled crash, someone at times identified with that label and actively had many of the things you described, is appreciating the humility in which you approached it, you say you're going to resist the urge to leave a theory around white women in the tech community seems more likely than professional feminist commentators to address intersectional concerns. i'm not going to ask you to leave the narrative but note that this seems like the little overly kind to me. i look at the period of them organizing what you highlighted, it's a real lack of attention and analysis that ended up

bleeding over into what i call white women, diversity box checking that we still see. the way in which there's a particular, it's a different version of feminism and new york professional commentators that your contracting but at the same time, it's a version of white feminism. certainly there were, think there's a lot to be said that's positive about that. i think your process and thinking about that chapter is a real moment where i think you are reflecting on how not to come off as nostalgic in a way that is a historical about positive part of the internet and more generally your views on tech feminists.

>> that was an intense moment and an eye-opening one at that time, i was based in new york and i remember as element became unavoidable on platforms like twitter and facebook, i found the professional ominous any other time was not addressing some of the sexual element that went into this harassment. some of the resources i found that were pertinent for things like the feminism who had resources that were much on media presentation of gender

equality and the period of time we can see activism, too, lives matter and especially women smart in 2016, how they are feeling like wow, we've come so far that a lot of basic understanding of inclusion equates to five are accepted much more broadly and i think i am always to name certain factors as to why that might be that i do think is and how much

these major platforms are from the nature of having something like twitter or you have attorney to create and use that to discuss personal interest of oppression having that community element in a platform for multiple communities it pushed forward some more progressive ideas but i say that as a patient because for the most part, i feel those platforms designed are dangerous. this is one of those trade-offs but it's a trade-off because you have a twitter account and all these people, you probably

people from backgrounds very different than yours. seeing their experiences and as part of the conversation in the part of twitter having # chemotherapy that he turning points it is something that i account or credit i want to credit twitter because twitter certainly did nothing for the

user activism. >> you're watching tv on c-span2 and we are taking. april 2019, sociologists examines the divide between digital latest generation that preceded them. >> now we have kids growing up there is mobile devices smart phones internet enabled, and all that so we are getting devices infancy. a band called the tube, there punky band out of san francisco but have an album covered called the remote control and they think about the evil impacts of television, people thought television was going to work his brains and they had to be at the kids face in a little creek but i'm going to show you a picture

here, now that we are in 2018 and, this is a real product amazon where the kid has an ipad right at their face from day one and there's others like this, product chairs that have but ipad right there, so we are feeding digital technologies to children before they acquire language skills. neuropsychologist no that there's something called brain plasticity children brains are liable to what you put into th them, the influence of the things they are exposed to those pathways and to bring up children what the outcome? was going to happen when we have babies, infants that are requiring digital scales for acquiring language? be the outcome? we don't know yet but yes you

see on youtube all this input, most parents now say they have on at the same time report that they have both going at the same time so there's always in relation noise or sound coming in. what does that do to attention as neural pathways have been shaped by that we don't know yet and that's going to be to be determined on the horizon. that's where we are now in terms of digital technology. we can say this is rewiring brains, these children to think different and that's where we are at. i told you people are coming untethered, one of the reasons is because they have so many choices you have heard

christopher say i have worked as a researcher army helped develop products match people better when i first started. what's happening now is eharmony was sort of a webpage service and now we have phones and apps tender in all these things for people are just swiping, it becomes a game but what has happened, it presented to young people this idea that you have an unlimited of choices in front of you in terms of romantic relationships so when you think with this unlimited of choices you would find just the right choice for you? what happens is, and we see this in psychology that there is a paradox of choice and the idea is that it's kind of funny but the more choices you have, it

makes it more difficult to choose. they did a study where, have you ever been in a store or market where they give out samples of food, cheese or something? they have a table set up and they give you something, they set it up with samples of jam in the first one they had 24 varieties of jam and they said his all these jams, try anyone you want and they gave a coupon to buy a jar of jam after that. the second day, they came back and instead of 24 varieties, they only gave six choices and the same coupon to buy the jar of jam. common sense you would think the more choices, you're going to find just the jam you want, apricot or strawberry, whatever you that is not the case. when people work likely to buy

any jam at all and they had more prices as opposed to when they have less. we are in a situation where there is a paradox of choice called choice overload, the more choices we have, it makes it harder to choose anything, the people are swiping and maybe you'll find somebody a little more harder, richer or somebody i don't fight with so we keep swiping but they don't choose anyone last week, half of americans are not in a romantic relationship and 65% high school kids have never had a romantic relationship now. if you go back to world war ii, a lot of people carried their high school sweethearts. one high school sweetheart now, they don't have that.

changing the dynamics of everything one of the reasons, another think they are doing is with all the swiping, easy come, easy go. you get a taste so easily that people disappear, it's called ghosting they don't ever contact the person again. some of you may have gusted somebody but that's what they are doing. the same idea swiping and choice overload and ghosting is not happening in the workplace because there's this idea on my answers and in the amount of jobs available and people are ghosting employers thinking they can just get another one and another one. this idea of the endless choices is chasing peoples world to commit something.

maybe there's something better out there. we had a job romantic relationship, there changing the dynamics of commitment because of this in this seat of choices available changing the qualities of adulthood, exchanging means. geologists who studied the five markers. depleting school, leaving home, becoming financially independent full-time job, marrying and having a child. if we go back to 1960 by age 30, 77% of women at 65% of men say they have achieved all five by early 30. if you fast forward to now, it's less than half of 30-year-old women and a third of the fan. in a sense, we are living in a period of extended adolescence and that's part of the qualities of an tethering on these

traditional measures of adulthood. some people say we unhook from these devices and things but it is becoming harder and harder because in one sense, they are addictive i didn't used to like that word but they are now, once we got mobile phones available, they have qualities that are similar to machines and we talk about gambling addiction. have you ever played a slot machine? maybe you and maybe you don't, i'll try it again planes fall in the lights and sirens are going because you one. that's exactly instagram works in facebook squarely on interesting from sometimes the

content is boring and nevertheless, it keeps drawing you back and forth more. these same behavior rivals that are the most ways to get people to come back. it's getting harder to put the phone down.

a quarter of students are on some kind of psychotropic medication for some kind of mental disorder so the key here is coming untethered, coming on board in some ways. that we don't have these stabilizing social structures that are stabilizing people's mental and physical health . so we need to sort of reinvent that and how can we do that? as we all away from these social structures like churches for example, how can we create new structures to provide some state ability

for young people because obviously we have a little bit of a problem on our hands >> that wraps up our look at books on technology with laurie pratt to discuss the next level of artificial intelligence that involves decision-making. >> i'm lucky i wentthrough the computer revolution and when i was a kid computers were big old things that nobody could use and my mom didn't know the difference between software and hardware, i had to explain that to her . we've gone through a massive democratization of computing technology. we're in the same trouble today with ai and data and that new technology stuck. ai is done to us but we don't havecontrol over it . data is overwhelming at a distance. at best we get a date of the visualization but i've hadthe honor of interviewinghundreds of people as a technology analyst for a few years and

asking them what are you frustrated about ? if technology could solve one problem for you what would it be ? over and over again i heard a similar answer . and it looks sort of like this. this is why i'm pretty sure i know what i'm doing. just background for me, i've been building machine learning applied systems a real long time, over 30 years so i was funded by the human genome project in graduate school. i don't hundred million dollar budgets for the government. i've built thousands of machine learning models, mostly supervisedlearning. who would haveknown it would still be with us so many years later . my machine learning friends know what i'm talking about . so i believe this background has given me an insight that is key. there's something in it all these years and that's something that's missing is we've been coming up from the technology instead of putting humans atthe center of the equation . i'm honored, my backside is

honored to be in this chair and molina who worked closely with doug. i liked she called it intelligence because you can sort of think of ai upside down to bia. it's pretty human, putting humans at the center of the equation again and when i interviewed all these people i found what i call for a while a decision archetype. what is the decision? it's an action, it's athought process that leads to an action but action in a complex world . we are through some stuff and i don't know what's buying that scarf is going to do to the world. it's going to have some impact but honestly i don't feel very motivated because i can't see that impact . it's not present for me. it doesn't grab my primate brain in a way that makes me think i need to buy that hybrid car . i can't see it . and the data stack today and

the ai stack today isn't giving that to me. this is my god, his name is bowie. i'm training training him to be a service dog and i've had him pretty much his whole life. he's about 11 months old and i had this awful thing happened to me. i have a trainer teaching me to train the service dog and she taught me about adc and behavior consequence and my head exploded. that's exactly what i heard from the humans i've been interviewing. the executives i've been talking to. they're always talking about the antecedent or the context. my dog sits, the consequence, he gets a cookie. this is a reversal archetype. this isn't one way to think about how we might use ai data and i'll tell you a littlebit how that fits in a moment. what i think , i'm pretty certain, this is the way to thinkabout it because it has

the lowest friction to how humans think . the lowest friction to how humans naturally think . p building people within complex environments, they don't have much brainpower to learn optimization or inference methodology or any of those fancy things. we have to meet them where they are at and the fact that we're not has created a cultural barrier between people at the head of governments , at the head of businesses and even me. as i tried to make decisions and use evidence and data and ai to help make sure that those decisions have a ripple effect that is good . so farmers i'm working with on a proposal, they have to decide what crop to plant. down the road they don't know if that crop will make them productive or what's going to happen if they have fewer migrant workers and the situation has changed. businesses might decide what

product to launch role what price to change and as they thought that through you hear much of what my dog years. they have an antecedent which is a situation, there's a behavior, we've got tolaunch this product at this price down the road, for my dog it's immediate but for us and what makes it special iswe can think through long chains of consequences . but that's limited and we need computer help . so again a decision is an imaginative process in our heads as we think through the actions in some context that willlead to some result. if you remember nothing else remember this template . and what's cool about decision intelligence which is what the book is about is the cause we start with humans, i can teach you somethingtoday you can take home and use immediately but that's my promise if you stick with the talk . okay. how do we make decisions today? i'm sorry to say and i only

recently learned this, i had the sense this was happening. especially in a complex world but going back through millennia of human evolution we don't think through the consequences of our decisions very deeply. where much more likely not to think through things rationally and instead to use social signaling. we look for someone who looks successful in our society, whose dominant or prestigious and we copy the decision they've been making . turns out that's very effective. it has been hugely successful for the human race and it's what separates us from many other species. we are great copiers and cultural revolution theory says we develop patterns any individual can't understand but that the society like the unconscious genetic evolution will use cultural evolution to come up with these behaviors. this is what we are programmed for. we are programmed to look at some prestigious or dominant person and do what they do as

opposed to thinking through the consequences and that was great for a few millennia but the situation has changed. first of all if there's a bad actor here or here and they tell us what to do and their smart they can subvert our behaviors. they can influence, influence us to make decisions that benefit them, not us if they're smart about the situation. second, the context is rapidlychanging. we need to be developing new ways of coping with this big ocean is different than our pond because it keeps changing. water is flowing back and forth and the old ways of thinking through problems at a societal and crowd level are no longer working . these are complex system dynamics. there's feedback effects and we see winners take all . where large companies or large artists get 90 percent of the benefit and there's massiveinequality. action at a distance we talked about .

anybody who's worked with data, we tend to focus on the things we can measure easily. money , price. we come to overlook reputation, happiness, morale and yet i've never built a decision model that didn't have at least one feedback loop that involved something intangible. a soft factor. we must start talking to the sociologists , the cultural evolutionists and all those disciplines to understand the soft factors. the decision intelligence creates a roadmap for how to do that . the other thing i can say is the future is no longer like the past so we have seen the past and future the same and we don't know the situation has changed and somehow someone that was morning that was what used to be black and i believe that ai which i'm

going to tell you about, decision intelligence and solve this problem. i grew up in a period technology optimism. we were all showing our code and the internet was going to democratize reality. we were going to collaborate. we had a dream. and i don't think we realized that dream. i think decision intelligence will help us go there. i think we've created a number of data machines, learning collaboration, the internet, social media and then there's work one more link that we need to make a big difference. to have a nonlinear impact that the eye which we will start to talk about practically right now. how do we do di left and mark we start with people. we don't say where's the data. we don't say we can't do this ai like thing without data. data is great but there's a

huge amount of human knowledge that is in no data set whatsoever. we're good at knowing about how our actions lead outcomes and your homework for tonight is to go home, ask a friend who didn't come to this talk howthey think about a complex decision . they will talk about action, those actions will lead to intermediate effects and that will lead outcomes and then they will talk about the context so what i do is i sit down with a diverse group of experts and diversity is great, old, young, gender, race and i say what are the outcomes weretrying to achieve . and there's so many companies that have fantastically big projects who have never sat down and brainstormed through theoutcomes . okay? i go and i consult at senior levels with many organizations and i say what are we trying to achieve . the list of outcomes is different for each person. let me tell you, you don't

need technology to get better . you just need to have a brainstorming process where you think through what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve as a team . is a higher revenue ? net revenue after two years ? is it some kind of military advantage. you want a military advantage doesn't create a backlash that will hit us 10 years later in terms of the psychological reputation. what are the outcomes you are trying to achieve ? make sure you ask that question. and, brainstorm for the actions . many. take the time to have an open brainstorming session where they allow that i funny ideas for the actions we can take that achieve those outcomes. do that, use all the blood to the creative side of your brain because when the blood from the creative side and analytical side of your brain which is over here . you don't have room for the creative side so separate those two. spend some time being creative to spend some time being analytical.

these triangles are where ai fits in . most decision models i believe as we democratize ai, this is the pattern. this is how we will do it. we talk about a decision i'm facing today. i saw greta on tv. she was so compelling. she said we've got a climate crisis and the way we solve this, it's really simple. stopworrying about analyses . at the very least pay for some trees. there are organizations over the world will take your money and buy trees and those trees will grow so there will be more biomass and that will sequester some carbons and if enough people do this perhaps on its own, i don'tknow if she said trees alone will do it but she said it would make a big difference .i haven't sent the money to its reorganization yet. i can't visualize how the money i might send leads to a

tree chain ofevents to some outcome . if i'm going to use ai to benefit me, i want a visceral , interactive, fun experience and so this is what i think is the future of ai. it's fun to look like a videogame and i hope we can do some of this in the basement because he can do this. we can walk through the spaces and what do we do in these spaces? expand with actions we might take and we're letting the computer us understand the chain of events that sets in motion to lead to the consequences. valued on a personal level, also highly valuable at an organizational level . >>. >> tonight on book tv,

beginning at 8 pm eastern, highlights from our monthly index series. followed by former consumer financial protection bureau director richard cordray who details the creation of the bureau. then journalist michelle malkin offers her thoughts on the usimmigration policy . what book tv tonight and over the weekend on c-span2. >> saturday 3:20 5 pm eastern selling author jamespatterson talked about his efforts to assist bookstores impacted by the coronavirus .plus his latest book the house of kennedy and on sunday, at 4 pm eastern vision for liberty and american greatness founder and president nick adams on his book from and churchill. defenders of western civilization. at 4:30 eastern "time magazine" national political correspondent molly ball talks about her latest book

policy which looks at the career of speaker of the house of representativesnancy pelosi . and at 9 pm, on afterwards , facebook cofounder chris hughes talk about his book fair shot about his plan to reduce poverty and strengthen the middle class. and on monday at 8:30 p.m. eastern best-selling thriller writer david baldock he talked about his writing career and books on in-depth . what book tv this memorial day weekend on c-span2. >> is my pleasure to welcome youall to this special event . with an all-star cast of some really amazing brainpower and one of my favorite people and authors in the world jamie netzel. so on behalf of the atlantic council, singularity university tour books and our host, it's my honor