problems rather than abolishing the building we call prisons. >> to watch the rest tonight program visit our website, booktv.org and search right wilson gilmore. ... as we get underway i want to acknowledge we are in traditional territory and particularly we thank them for the continuing use of natural resources of their ancestral homeland. we think all of you for tuning in is called interesting times we are grateful for the opportunity to invite virtual audiences together to share ideas and creativity even when we are not exactly coming together but i would especially like to thank anthony for helping us keep the conversation aloft at town hall and on sunday night no

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tonight and we hope you all consider supporting us during this time by using the donate button at the bottom of your screen or becoming a member to the website. also give by texting townhall to the number 44321. so many ways to give one final point of data are partner booksellers have been hit by the negative effects of the covid outbreak as well and can usually support as well. tonight's of enron ghost road will have more interest in this provocative issue if you're interested in supporting local bookstores and others on the issues pick up a copy of the book using the button to purchase the book. we hope you will do that tonight. alright then then, anthony townsend is an internationally expert on information technology he's a senior research scientist at nyu center for transportation policy management where he supervises research on the impact of information and communication technology on mobility, land use and transportation planning he

also teaches a course on intelligent cities in nyu's urban city planning. he is a member of the inaugural class of fellows that is been newly founded which is redundant isn't it? the inaugural class of fellows of the research institute basin eric city. his fellowship research focus on the new urban science with the current influx of funding, talent, data and ideas in urban studies as well as the impact of research -- research on ever met and research itself or is writing can be found in scientific america and stanford social review with other publications he is the author of 2013 smart city, big data, civic taxes in the case for utopia. that's the actual physical townhall. his latest book, ghost road beyond a driverless car. please join me in welcoming anthony townsend. >> good evening everybody.

thank you for joining me tonight. it has been a tumultuous 48 or 96 hours in the country. and i really appreciate your attention given all of the other distractions. that said though, feel free to monitor twitter, cnn, what ever else you have running in the other window. because there is a lot going on that needs to be paid attention to. i fully understand the distraction. you know, one of the things it is been really jarring launching this book into the pandemic has been the need to re-examine all of the conclusions and all of the evidence. because the book was written over the course of the last three years. and thankfully, i think i've done a pretty good job as a forecaster and a lot of the things that have been fast

forwarded at us, from the future in the past couple of months mainly around the increase in delivery to homes, is something that really came on very quickly. but in the last week, we have basically seen the future kind of vanish. i think we are in this really, really weird. for forecasting. where the future is coming at us fast scout wars commit their total standstill. 's going to be a really weird conversation to talk about technology, sort of as an abstract thing. i think but we can do is keep drawing it back to what is important, the big picture, and also what is going on right now. there are some connections. i will do my best to do that as we go through. so let me hop over to the

keynote presentation i put together. it's going to be quite a bit of video in this. so long as you can see the main images, i think you will get the gist of what i'm talking about. it's really just to create some flavor to the presentation as opposed to being the main focal point. so if you do not see every frame of the video, don't fret. i will explain was going on. so, i think the place to start with this is to really understand, what is it that silicon valley and to a lesser extent, detroit and all the other auto manufacturing centers around the world, have been telling us is coming our

way? that would be in the form of driverless mobility. and, for the most part it is been driverless arts. this is really been going on ten years now since google unveiled their stealth project the google self driving car. only ten years ago this october when they unveiled it. and, what's fascinating is this is an old idea. what you are looking at is a film from 1956. it was gm picture car of the future it's a system that rca actually developed that would have basically a camera following a painted line along the road. there other variants of this

that followed a guidewire lay down in the concrete. there were cost assessments done at the time of what it would cost to fit the interstate highway system with this kind of capability. same kinds of things people are talking about with driverless technology today. and it wasn't pursued because the market demand wasn't there. people wanted to drive even though it can be a drag sometimes it still a new thing it was still fun it still made people feel like they were in control. it's still the thing that sold automobiles. what's funny is what you see on automated mobility, this is a tesla product video. in many ways they are not that different and in fact tesla's products, the driverless car products, autopilot, was actually taken from the video i just showed you. they basically borrowed a brand-name that gm had

developed a few years previously. so much of this is the fulfillment of a dream the auto industry has had for close to 60 or 70 years now but did not have technology to deliver. and in fact it's actually like a much much much older than that. if you look at almost every mythic tradition on the planet, you go back and there is some hero or king over god who is racing around, often in the sky but just as often on the ground, sometimes it see there is a god with the self driving sailboat. king morgan the generous in wales who is a mythic character had a chariot he would teleport around.

i'll a lot of emperors and miss head flying thrones or the flying carpet. or the slavic myths and those of you have play dungeons and dragons her member she makes an appearance in that game world of who runs around the steps of eastern eurasia in a magical hut that's carried along by two chicken legs. so this idea of self driving self-propelled vehicles, is a very, very old technological longing and we are just now making it possible. so this is coming here finally fulfilling this dream at the same time we are achieving really a full and total urbanization of the planet. this is often cited statistic sort of trend in urban planning circles that at the beginning of the 20th century -- the middle of the 20h

century it was partially urban by the one the century it will be one 100% but it's a phenomenal phase of city building. and it's creating tremendous challenges for mobility and really making solutions that have served for a while private single passenger automobiles obsolete it's a huge search for new solutions. the driverless vehicles or autonomous vehicles, our self driving vehicles, i think one of the things i deal with very early on in the book are these words we use and what they mean and what they are trying to achieve. these demos are really, really compelling. so this is google self driving car video meta- plating in real quick to see it basically, they're basically saying this is a car that's

going to keep grandma or a visually impaired person or, they didn't put kids in these, unintended children and these by think for a lot of stressed-out parents trying get kissed all the different activities this is like here is a robo carta shuttle your kids safely around so you don't have to do it. and i think they were really testing the waters here to see if this is like the next great product they could deliver to the masses. and i think again this is -- it ought to be compelling by now because the technical work has been going on for close to 50 years. this is the mercedes self driving van from the 80s. which had a bunch of computers in the back, which would

probably fit in one corner and the inside of your iphone now. this is the first -- this is the first vehicle to really drive itself on a road across the country almost fully under computer control using computer vision to interpret imagery of the road and safely navigate around it. we have really picked up the pace since then. some the last two or three years we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars spent on automated driving, just dwarfing what we think of as a huge area r&d driven industry like aerospace, if anybody did not catch the crew dragon spacex launch yesterday, it's pretty exciting.

it's a distraction from the badness. this has been both commercially exciting, technologically exciting, kind of the full burn and slow to come to fruition. what we've seen is as the promise and hype automated driving has grown, that the let down and failures have also grown equally spectacular. and we have seen videos, see the self driving lubricant from the right of the screen and sort of blow through the red light in downtown san francisco. there are fatal accidents and involving uber self driving vehicles and others. this is something that i think is really endemic to the

testing of this technology is that it is going to fail, all automated systems fail. and because we rely so heavily on automobiles, there are going to be many failures. and so the reckoning that is associated is kind of given people pause whether this is going to be as great as we have been promised. i don't write that much about the safety issues run automated vehicles in the book because i am pretty much of the school of thought that if it is certainly an industry problem it's an engineering problem and potentially can self regulate itself. i am more interested in the other problems around the fact that it is not really cars that we need to fix. we need to fix urban mobility more broadly.

and you know, the facts the way we travel has changed on much, we go different places, we travel at different times of day, we travel in groups. we have different desires in terms of how much we pay and the impact of our travel among multiple dimensions our own personal health, environmental health, traffic and so on. and so mobility has become much more complicated than simply purchasing the consumer products. it's more about consuming a whole range of mobility services. so what is the solid up to? there is a supply and demand at work. it is clear that the case for automation is growing. it is going to be a bit of a slow burn for the next few

years. this will have to get adjusted depending on how the next great depression works out. this is kind of a classic technology diffusion is start slowly and then build and build and build parties kind of like the virus actually. people come into contact with others who have or have used technology and can explain or demonstrate the benefits of them. and others see that and decide they want to acquire it for themselves. there are also net work affects the more these that are out there, they become more and more useful and they spread the accelerant. i think by 2030, we will definitely be seeing these things out on the streets on a regular basis. some places faster than others. and in some uses more than

others will talk about that in just a second period so i think it is really important that again it's not going to necessarily be automobiles that we first encountered this technology of automated driving in. so if you're waiting for david hasselhoff and kat to roll up in your neighborhood are going to be pretty disappointed. i think, can this was out of sequence. so, i think the point of the book is really to break out of this very simplistic narrative that automated driving means we are going to perfect the car in the future of automated mobility is basically what we saw the minority report. it's little individual pods moving in synchronization

along traffic free highways imperfect safety. you know, it's going to be different. it's going to be weirder. i think we really need some new myths of driverless technology to help us understand what the future could be like. that is what i set out to do with the book. let's see here. the book is really organized around oh this is actually going to be of interest to you guys. the cover of a ghost road is actually a painting by mary iversen who lives in the pacific northwest in the seattle area. i did not source there, the publisher did but i became quite a fan of her since they selected it. and, her style is to kind of

juxtapose natural beauty and images of infrastructure and logistics and globalization purge she will often do these things like this where it's kind of like this and the reason i picked this one is it's almost like the dawn of life seen at the beginning of time on earth, juxtaposed with this grid of data representing the way the key computer might see the world. and i think it is a really simple way of understanding what this thing, this metaphor goes through it actually is. and to me, go start them not even% what it is.

it's kind of a challenge. it's kind of a provocation. i think it is a placeholder that i want to put in your head of a future where when we go out into the spaces we move about, we are the minority. and machines are in control. and often alienating, often may be individually working for us. but collectively not. and trying to raise the possibility that things may get out of control. and we have to be vigilant against that. that's enough about that. i think you'll figure out what the ghost road is if you dig into the book.

it is a mysterious place. so the three big stories that i think we'll give it some shape, i'm going to run through these real quick and then we can open up for questions. this is really an answer to, it's not perfecting the automobile, perfect in the, then what? csi talked about minority report. this is to me, but i think elon musk and some of the folks at gm and some of the german car companies, when they fantasize about the future of automated driving, this is what they envision. it is a city that has been once again re- rationalized on high-speed, individual transportation. and it has lots of expensive, high precision manufactured products that will keep them busy for decades to come. and again, i don't think this

is terribly plausible given the direction things are going. you know, again, i go back to the past and it is remarkable how misleading some these images of the future were. this is an ad from the 1950s that was run by a consortium of power utilities. this is a future of automated driving, but it's like a future that never was is the way i think of it. there's no road there's no traffic is not even any commercial vehicles on this road. it's all private passenger vehicles. there are no cities or buildings of any kind. where are these people going? they're not even in the city. so this is a totally unrealistic way of thinking

about our own future. yet this image shows up, this renin "time" magazine in the 50s. it's like your grandparents may have opened a magazine and seeing this. and this is what they may still think a driverless car is. this shows up in every venture capitalist every entrepreneur's presentation sometimes are making a joke about it but often they look at and they said yeah we always thought this is the future is in a great it's finally here? i just find that interesting. the reason i find it ridiculous is the number of -- and the kinds of automated vehicles that are already in existence are just multiplying. the moment we are in is more like this massive explosion of species has happened at various times in the evolution of life where we are finding

this capability allows all different kinds of forms to emerge that can capitalize upon it. and so a lot of the book, or a good part of the beginning of the book is going through it and these things, driverless shuttles. teeny-weeny french buses. for some reason the french is cornered the market on these things it's a good story worth reading. and it has a lot to do with the different style of innovation in europe and silicon valley. i do and other disorders or explore the question of what does it mean if we put this into things that are basically small buildings and start to move them around. this is an idea and architecture that goes back to the 60s, if you've ever been to the dulles airport in

washington d.c., you have been on what is essentially a small self driving building going through the airport. so it gives you a sense of just how far we are pushing the boundaries between of vehicles and buildings, this is a concept in china which i think is super relevant to what's going on now, the idea of self driving pop-up stores bringing the goods closer to you, if you can't to get out go down to get it. we may end up in a future where lots of shops close in our main streets die. but the retailing just moves to the corner. and maybe there is some other configuration, not just every thing going straight to the home. this is actually a bit of a

joke. this is an april fools prank the google amsterdam pulled sort of visualization of the self driving bike. i think it's a funny joke they sort of got the case for the self driving bike wrong. imagining people would do other things where they were riding the bike like people would let the bike drive itself. i don't think that's what you'd use a self driving bike for pride which would use a self driving bike for his drive itself to the next customer if it was a shared bike. or to drive itself to the charging point, or in a covid point to drive itself to the disinfecting location. for the next user. so i think as we start to explore all of the ways with automation will be useful in

mobility, we are going to start to understand all of the different ways it can create value and create new products and experiences. singapore, he got a couple startups they are there playing around with scooters that basically come to you when you call. there is a long way to go before this does not look like a clicky gadget. but it shows entrepreneurs are starting to explore that will move very, very quickly because these things can be prototyped and built quickly. and, this is a category of self driving vehicles i call urban ushers because i think they're going to take the place of all of the street furniture, the signage, potentially some of the people and personnel who watch over and provide services and

direct respond to things that happen on city streets. you know, potentially do so in ways that are more effective comprehensive, maybe less than brutal? i don't know if he could program a security bout to not discriminate against people or not use excessive force, but it certainly an appealing possibility right now. although it may create many more problems. this is kind of a ridiculous scenario that we see here. but it does start to help you understand. again as were blurring the line between motor vehicles buildings on one side were blurring robotics on one side. they will all sort of blurred together but we talk about is a robot, a car and a building may start to be difficult to distinguish from each other. they will all be able to move

and act on their own. and then getting to the robotics peace, the ability to create, robots use animal and human style emotion, is going to really challenge our assumptions about what a vehicle is and what a self driving vehicle is and how that fits into the cities and what we might do with it. some of these things just have tremendous capabilities. this one does not even have any kind of optical or electromagnetic sensors. it navigates incenses the world solely through what it picks up through its lens. so, really just a tremendous amount of innovation. there's not a day that goes by that i don't learn about a new vehicle. the other two big stories are just five minutes each in the middle open it up.

this is how big the part of the book it's the middle two chapters that's most relevant to what's happening right now with covid. and, when i was writing the book i spent some time in singapore. singapore is building a new central business district called newtown in their basic assumption is 2035, 65% about retail retail purchases will be delivered to the home by automated delivery vehicles. and if you take the automated part out, we have kind of fast forwarded pretty close to that now. in a matter of a couple of months. everywhere you look, online retail and shipping business that is what they're saying. if you wait five to ten years the head of wherever we

expected to be, they knew we were getting there, of course amazon has been at the forefront of this both good and bad. but boy we did not expect this to happen. i think the reason it's called materialization is this massive kind of wave of goods sweeping off the web and into city streets. and really, the ability for automation to drive the cost of shipping down is another factor or ten or two in the years to come, and unleashing just that much more movement of goods around city streets. and the reason that is important is it's not something to its gotten a lot of attention we talk about driverless technology, we focused almost exclusively on

passenger transportation and none the of those movie shown in the 50s or recently, show goods moving around. and i think much more attention needs to be paid to that. and cities don't really think about it very much. so one of the things that has happened since the stay-at-home order with covid, is just how flat-footed cities have been caught really trying to understand where the bottlenecks are for moving more deliveries in and out. and what do they need to do in order to respond to it? it's not just something they have a lot of capacity. a lot of these are little out of date now but e-commerce has basically been growing about 15% year for the last decade bird that means every five years it doubles. and so, it is just sort of on a steady growth.

we've had this big bump but it will now resume that growth at a higher level. and you see things like this is essentially a neighborhood scale like distribution center that has been ad hoc set up on top of a bike sharing station in manhattan which i think is hilarious. it really just shows you the tremendous conflicts that are starting to emerge around distribution of all of these goods coming from essentially a handful of online mega- retailers like amazon. the volumes are growing, shipping times are speeding up, automation is really the key to solving that. and in many ways this is why think it is so important, there are not a lot of people who really need or are necessarily eager to have self

driving cars right now. there are a lot of businesses that are eager to have it. shipping costs are killing amazon they are killing everybody else is to catch up with amazon. this is an economic driver that dwarfs anything worth seeing in the passenger industry. it's mostly just a lot of old-school conversations are like looking for how can we make cars more attractive so people will keep buying them? and, even before covid this is the thesis i presented in the book this is going to be the things that drives automation in the short term. again, this is another example of all of the variety that's already on the road map around freight delivery. this is basically what we call a mule. a lot of it in the book is naming things that don't really have nays yet.

what reagan called the sings? this as a mule. it comes in the morning to your street corner or your neighborhood or your building, and parks outside has all the deliveries for the day and it takes all of the returns. it eliminates dozens of dirty trucks running around your neighborhood. , scaring people are trying to cross streets. causing pollution causing noise, helps create a better service experience as well. these things are starting to roll out essentially single delivery and call them conveyors because they are kind of like conveyor buckets on a conveyor belt that is the sidewalk. and they are designed for short, less than a mile delivery, instant deliveries from restaurants and other local retailers to people's homes and offices.

one of the last --'s had a very large demonstration for the past couple of years, got a lot of attention because they expanded it significantly during the covid shutdowns. i think this is something that is potentially become much more commonplace with contacts on people and sidewalks and things like that. that remains to be worked out. i think it's important to understand for looking at passenger travel we may be missing the vote. i'm an talking way too long going to say one thing about this last trend that is we have the potential to drive a

lot of investment and innovation into transportation. it's an area that is not have had a lot of it in the last 50 years. or even 100 years. also going to connect to the essential systems that move people around cities. and very powerful global financial interests in some incredibly murky and risky ways. softbank, which is a large technology investment fund, based in japan, primarily by saudi sovereign wealth in abu dhabi, this is essentially fossil fuel money. it is been the single greatest investor and has built what i think of as a latter-day traction monopoly as they were called at the turn of the 20th century. it controls 95% of the

business globally. now it was a big deal in u.s. cities in seattle actually had one of the worst ones. and this is when horse-drawn streetcars gave way to a new tech innovation, electric streetcars and a lot of cities have a situation which is the biggest consumer of electricity generating company and the lighting utility which the second largest conservative electricity were all basically the same country their control by the same interest, this happened in many different cities, seattle, philadelphia and elsewhere. different cities responded differently, philadelphia sort of fell in line and let it run the city into the ground.

adelphia never built out like new york did. because the trust would not let them do it, they wanted people on street carts. seattle actually i believe it was in the midst of the first world war, basically took over the whole system. and still owns the power utility part of it today. so i think, the important thing here is automation is really going to create and it has in the online world and social media tremendous consolidation of control and power something cities are going to have to watch out for as we move forward. going to stop there this is been a tremendous amount of stuff. i hope some of it is interesting for us to dig into. what let's see what we have

okay. so, there is a question from david. on transit for your redesign posts pandemic your thoughts? that's by retired traffic engineer. single occupancy vehicles, so it is very unclear right now whether it's going to be a clear loser after the pandemic. don't know is in them.

and don't know how long that is going to be what form it's going to take. i don't want to get too far ahead of myself inspected for short-term scooters, self driving realtors are thing, there like hitachi which is one of the biggest benefactors of wheelchairs is work himself driving wheelchairs. it be difficult to an airport to see a self driving will i'm

so bullish on those things just because i think it will be spayed to them and support a lot of the kinds of business models it will make it easy. there like a thousand more of those waiting automation is something that small and cheap. it will give people the oven automobile without the impact of an automobile. this is something that we first saw in china with sars, i went to shanghai and with a group of executives from a big auto manufacturer. we spent some time touring factories they all told us the

same story, was that when ours hit, chinese cities had not expanded their subway network yet to be dormitory neighborhoods outside the factory zones on the outskirts of the property workers live. they did not want to be on buses anymore. all of the bike manufacturers, shanghai, looked around and said maybe people will get back on bikes and oh wow, battery analogy goes 15 kilometers in an hour. and charge while they are working. and then get back home. how the global ebay industry

was born it was born work needed work that did not involve getting on during a major epidemic. i think we are going to see those kinds of things come out of the woodwork. and, that is where my. who while is to survive or what can we do to fix mass transit? to deal with the devil and find a way to bills lift, your spirit right park city. in the midst of the people read part of the subway i am very anxious about the

manufacturing both locally knighted states. so i am trying to get people to think about what we really need to do clean the narc city area. because you know by the time september rolls around people if two tens of thousand pbytes move great city because they want to be on the subway system. and you know, the alternatives they will have placed firemen or people's ability to earn or for congestion management.

in the short-term, we really, rapidly deployable case i'm questioned by dale. what are the safe can they be what you use with ayers and karla's drivers of driverless cars? these are all great. particularly because there is so much divergence opinion on this. what has happened in the tech

industry, companies trying to build driverless vehicles for use in urban areas have started to realize how complex the environments are. and particularly if they want risk for more duration? whether separated roadways are separated lanes, or having driverless vehicles in settings where they are only around human beings and equestrians but not other human vehicles lab proposes in charlston. and in some ways this goes directly urban planners are saying is the best practice partners buses always put some

of the most vulnerable users of the street at the top of the pyramid. and everything is designed around their needs so pedestrian cyclists and everything else. and let them wade into that as they are ready. and that has been my stance. i sort of go with, let's not go with the mobility principles that have been built up over decades, let's make it fit into that. there's no reason to rush the technology forward to change the city to make that happen. particularly if i was on their failing public interest to do so. the one exception i'm going to make to that though is moving freight i think to handle that though is not necessarily with space, but with time.

and, you know automation opens up orders that streets just lay empty. they just lay empty to do things. particularly think about automated electric vehicles which are poor, can be programmed to believe. they could be very quiet and very future cities my really defining characteristics of them might be late we hours of the morning of the slow-motion valet actually restocking taking out, do tightening up

and deliveries so that they don't have to burden the streets during the those act what automate the receiving end of that as well. so you don't have to have a right to the refrigerator or the waste as they currently put up off. things are hopefully some probable technology problems. they are a million times then teaching tesla to drive is the urban neighborhood. and i think we are slowly going to figure that out. these are already starting to realize they went to encourage

these kinds of allow the they have a super about that is probably one of my favorite parts of the future may hold. you know we really talk about driverless and thus likely by an airy that's going to be flipped. humans have a car in a take it to the dealer traded in, we are going to get a fully computer-driven one. never gonna touch the thing again. you know that starts to get a little bit more complicated when we talk but the different levels of automation, the

automotive engineering societies have defined. in reality the reason we can skip there's so many different things that drivers do especially commercial drivers really only a small number of them being automated. and even when we do automate the actual operation as it moves down the road we may not automate all of the functions or we may simply shift some of them to another location. a lot of the interesting stuff that's happening, and commercial fleet automation and trucking is companies are having systems remain have one operator there watching all six of them from the piloting

center wherever that is. and the trucks are just calling home when they need permission. so yes, can i overtake the car on a dark curve with some sketchy paint markings and the operators they will of course not. if the car stops on a bridge and it's in the middle of nowhere, can i go around it? yes that's good go ahead. in this system actually learn from them. and not ask the next time because it's learned enough to know, there are some robot assists are looking operating mode were even the machine does most of the controls itself. the gross motor controls like

it will get the robot to the worksite, but then the human being will come over and do -- or call in and do they find grade manipulation hands or the pinchers. and so the point i'm trying to make his self driving and driverless this is not going to be zero and learned a second would be on and off it's going to be like these different kinds of behaviors. yet, the other way it talked about in the book was like you're going to have hot rodders who just want to focus on the throttle and have the computer to everything else. you are going to have people like me who her previous hyper milers where i am just going to be zero and focused on my get this thing to be as fuel-efficient as possible. i don't care about anything

else the computer can do all the other driving i just want to be hyper. or people with kids who may want to have full control over the defensive driving aspect make the applicable 87000 okay question, david nelson. >> it seems there's nothing that cannot be hacked how can we avoid this with driverless cars? that is incredibly good question. i don't know if any of you

certainly thinking what to make about today that will connect this technically was going on in the world. and as i was thinking about that a really disturbing scene for my believe minneapolis may have been some texas and houston or dam of lubbock fuel pump the liver barreling along an interstate highway area of protest march. and thankfully everyone got out of the way. and thankfully they restrain themselves from taking out their frustrations and fear on this guy for what he had done. but it got me thinking that is a great example of aware automation is going to change what seems like this might play out in the future.

i have spoken, i did not print any of this material in the book, because i think it was not quite mature yet. but when i started doing the research on the book was when a lot of the truck attack were happening in europe. and people were barely making the connection not only more activity and more automation and commercial trucks would allow for kill switches. and other kinds of things that would allow tax to be prevented or stopped in progress. >> people were thinking about the sub side which is what if you taken attack strategy like a distributed back that's used online, but where you on leash

a network of computers to overwhelm a target message lots of requests through, at the sam same. what

without the people -- the important people in government who ought to understand that risk and be transferred to having a handle on it. it's something that we probably have to actually occur before we went back and fixed it. so that risk is real. as i said before, i think something that we'll see move along, long haul trucking is something we'll see get automated very quickly because there's a lot of reasons to do it. a technology is somewhat easier. at least a half dozen startups working in that space right now. and that's like a major cyber security risk that needs to start getting planned for. so, it's those kinds of things that -- or it's like a present

situation we're in, like -- imagine it was 2030 and all this happened and the u.s. most of our trucking network was automated so we're in this incredible vulnerable position, our supply lines are stretched to the max already because of pandemic, because of civil unrest, and one of our geopolitical adversaries tries to press a little bit harder by throwing some stress on our automated trucking network through a cyber attack. that's the kind of thing that is incredibly frightening and i think those are the kind of things that will get attention and money before the kinds of stunts that we see with, like, people hacking interest cars and

making them accelerate. there's very, very good product liability reasons that companies will do their best to make sure that doesn't happen. won't prevent everything put those kinds of things will but gm out of business of toyota out of business. i worry less but that and more about the systemic changes. >> let's go to the next question. i'm not sure how much time we have left. any way to check on how much time we have left? anyway, i'll keep going. someone can make something come up on my screen, that would be great. okay. how do you see the beginning

self-driving cars working out. this is candice's question or comment. city by city allowing restrictionses are state by state. so, in the united states, there's some things regulated that are relevant at a state level, some of national. all the consumer safety stuff, you know, like seatbelts is federally regulated. how cars are made, crash test regulations, that's all federal. states have jurisdiction over licensing. and cities, municipalities have regulation over traffic laws. they -- so, i spent a lot of time working with cities through bloomberg philanthropies and

that planted the seed for this book, and the way cities i think are going -- i think cities will be crucial because the reasons i said, cars aren't going to be the big market for automated mobility. i think it's going to be a whole range of different products and different services that are built on those products, and so cities are going to be important because it's really dig to be a business of niches. sort of like a long tail business and cities have the most diverse markets. it's going to bev if you identify a market segment of, like, young hipsters who want, like, autonomous skate boards you'll work with the city government to figure out how to

get it, to get it rolled out. that is sort of what has happened with raid hail and scooters -- ride hail and scooters didn't start out in a real cooperative kind of operating mode with cities but they eventually got there to where they were working with cities, and i have a good friend, sasha, who is working on trying to understand what these market entry mechanisms are for mobility companies to come into cities, and rather than just showing up and breaking the law, and how cities, rather than just reacting to this market entry by companies, very aggressive market entry to actually create the rules or the conditions or the channels by which the mobility innovators can come into cities with their new offerings, which is that is like going to be the big turn-around

he in the next culp of years that starts to make this stuff feel more comfortable and make the process a little easier rather than having stuff -- like scooters ending up all over the sidewalks and people getting angry but it, and having to sort of go back to the beginning and figure out how to make it work. i think that will also be the something thing pout it, and the good thing is that it's not just going to be one product, like a seven-by-18, 2,000-pound 500-horsepower thing. it's going to be vehicles that are sort of right sized for this situation and the use, and that's really great. this is but breaking down the box of the automobile into the

pieces that actually fit into cities and are aloined witness of what cities want out of mobile. i think that puts cities in control and i'm excited helping them figure out how to make the most of it. let go to next question. the so-called promise of the driverless car, traffic, decrease or elimination of the need of parking lots, stresses antievents rather than the grope paradise, what will happen with physical urban form and the effect on the public sphere. this is elizabeth. so that's a great question. i have a whole chapter in the become devoted to answering this, chapter 8 called the urban machines. one thing that is different about ghost roads than smart city is, the first book, it's not a book about cities but it is an urban book.

it's really but technology, book about mobility, and it's a urban flavored book but technology and mobility, and i think the parking discussion is fascinating. there have been a lot of really interesting design experiments of the last couple of years to try to figure out, like, what are we dig to do with all this excess parking that's left over in cities and where are we going to put the parking that we still do need for automated vehicles, knowing that they can probably drive themselves off to, like, satellite parking lots and don't need to park right next to wherever it is they dropped their owner, and -- or if they're shared fleets, the people that are using them.

and so creates lick a tremendous amount of -- creates like a tremendous amount of excitement in urban planning planning and n community. look at someplace like los angeles, you can repurpose all the lan that's devoted to parking and automobile -- not even just the street. you can solve most of the housing affordability problems in southern california by unleashing that land for development, and there have been some really detailed studies that have been done of this. and so i think what that is doing is really just -- it's like a carrot that's being held out, that's saying, look, cities, all the things you have been trying to do with density and housing and mixed use, reducing auto dependency, those

are still the right things to do and might be even more right down the road if automated, driverless pans out the way we're being promised. there's a lot of other cooky ideas out there about, like, one-way streets and reducing the width of lanes. anyone that tell outside they know what the street of the future should be laid out like or, like, the perfect design for the street of the future, is really like lying to you. there are, however, thoughtful -- there's thoughtful guidance out there about the prims for future streets ought to be. and when i read about quite a bit in the book is a fault called necto, the club of city transportation officials in the

u.s. and canada, and what really, the published a thing called the grouped for our ton mouse urbanism and it's consistent with the things they've been seeing out city streets before odd ton mouse came long, pedars, share, automobiles should be at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to how we plan streets. but half of the recommendations are about software and it's kind of a crazy thing to have a bunch of transportation planners coming out and saying, look, this is really the way we'll shape the city of the fewer, the street of the future, is by getting the software right, and it's run of the first, like -- one thief first really strong -- one of the first really strong, really clear, and actually very specific kinds of visions i've seen like that, to come out of any urban planning organization

ever, and i really -- if you're interested in this, i encourage you to take a look at it. they're essentially saying, okay, we are going to design the street of the future by designing the regulations which isn't that radical of an idea. actually makes a lot of sense. but then they're saying but the ware going to enforce the regulations is by making these requirements for the vehicles and the services that operate on the streets, and we're going have our software talk to their software to make sure that's how they actually do it. and i think it's pretty visionary and has potential to give city a lot more leverage, so might be abe able to do things look no delivers when there's people around and make that the policy, and there's some sensor that can detect when

there are pedestrians on the street, and just constantly ward off the delivery vehicles, or charge them congestion fees to get in and justify interfering with pedestrian life, and this -- and the result of -- the desired result of that being that companies deliver at night. late at night. and it's just endless permutations what they dock once they have the ability to write regulations and code and push that out into the marketplace and incentivize behavior and the possibilities are exciting. okay. if you-flash an i trying vial. when atoms behave like this.

the idea is basically -- i was really trying to understand, if we're doing -- if we're focusing on the wrong thing by think but how the way we get around will be changed by driverless vehicles, and what we ought to be looking at is how the way our stuff gets around will be changed by driverless vehicles, how much will that change in and there's some really good work in economics literature that looks at the price per ton mile, i guess is how they measure it, of shipping something, has changed throughout the court of the the 20th century and it's been a steady rocketing decline. i think it costs like 90% less

to ship something, ton of bulk stuff across the country, than it did 100 years ago. in a sort of roughly the same, like, throughout -- whether shipping across the country or cross town. what if automation drops that by another 90ers and it's ease -- 90 and it's easy or cheap to send a becomes across town also it is to send a text message. what does the world start to look like and what kinds of things do people start to do with that? and around the time i was thinking of that it started looking at what was going in china with delivery, and china went how to the u.s.' 2nd 2nd center experience with this decline in shipping costs and the increased speed in shipping in, like, ten yours. so, when alibi baba started it

tack three weeks to ship something from their headquarters, which i think is in -- outside shanghai to wuhan or another big city on the other side of china, and ten years later, that was like a 24-hour thing and you have ali baba has 5 million -- they have five, jd has two million. you can deliver anything in any chinese city under 24 hours. and like on something lick singles day which is a big gift-giving holiday in china, i can even remember what the numbers are they're so staggering. a billion packages in 2 4 hours, it's a staggering number. so that copied of growth and that kind of disruptive shift,

what it means for how we shop and what our neighborhoods look like, and what intrigued me was thinking beyond what we're experiencing now, which is just -- oh, just means amazon shoveling more crap off the web down our throats, and sort of furthering this big boxic indication which started with walmart and snowballed. what it means that my kids who are really interest baking -- into baking can team up with someone who has a big network of potential customers or is willing to do the decorating or we can build supply chains

locally using this cheap distribution, whether there's other economic modes that might start to develop based on that. and so that's actually a lot of the research work that i'm doing now, is developing scenarios that are trying to understand, like, how we avoid what is happening right now, locking us into theirs future of what they call the last mile, that leg of the delivery between the local depot and your home. that's just completely dominated by a handful of global companies, and try to think but more cooperative potentially publicly supported, potentially peer types of models for moving goods cheaply around local communities and what the role of automation could be in making

that possible and driving that cost down. what it really comes down to at the end of the day, if with allow the technology for automated delivery to be dominated and controlled exclusively by a handful of companies like amazon and google, that's going to be really bad for local economic development that we need to find ways for postal systems and, like, business improvement districts and even municipal operators. so it's an idea. what if seattle, like it did 100 years ago, like, was able to somehow either establish or start or take control over it own local automated delivery network, and offer that service to anybody who wanted to use it

at a fair rate that allowed it to cover its costs. didn't privilege its own business partners. it didn't do all of the anticompetitive perspective to go that amazon does with marketplace customers and just became like a utility that allowed small businesses to connect to each other and to their customers. that is kind of what is at stake and i think it's a really big struggle that i was writing about is we would be lining up for that battle five or ten you're from now, and -- five or ten yours from now and right now seeing amazon and walmart duking it out is a little reassuring maybe there's still some bit of competitiveness left in that space. but like where is that third

model that might allow for some other future stuff to unfold. minneapolis. good. what have we got lest, future of driverless trucking, i'm going to -- i think i talked put that. i'll let that one go. how will privacy workive driverless cars, let government tamper with our internet. this is something i write but, like, quite a bit in the beginning of the book. the interior -- so, i don't think it's a lot about automated vehicles to know that the exterior of these things are really riddled with sensors, cameras, radar, lace are --

laser scanners that are constantly collecting data about what is around them, and it's hard to really get a clear sense of how much of that database analyzed and then sort of discarded and just the results of the analysis are kept. so, like, if i take a picture of you walking down the street, i'm a self-driving car, die just scan it and see if anything is relevant or chuck it or just save it? so, that's the big risk. and i think that's something that people are thinking about and there's been a lot of interesting studies. the throughout i that there's far more surveillance of what is going on inside the vehicle and if you dig down and think why does google and china, the index, russia's biggest search engine -- why are these companies funding and developing self-driving vehicle and why are

the the first in and so aggressive. and it's because it's the future of computers for them. this is the mobile phone. ten years ago, 20 years ago. we're going to spend more of our time -- i like to tease people and say that what does it feel like to drive a tesla? it feels like driving an ipad. it's a computer you get inside of and once your inside of the computer, it's just constantly scanning you, and it's going to sneak in through some sort of interesting ways. so, i write about this in the book that a lot of the ways that car companies will deal with the issue of driver attention during this transition from human driven to partial to full, is to monitor you with cameras, to tell whether you're paying attention or not. and an argument i make its like even after they switch to full

automation those cameras aren't going anywhere. they're going to stay and instead they'll be basically profiling you for advertising, and other kinds of essential -- again, why are search companies interested in this? because this is the biggest captive media audience for search and for ads that has ever been created in the history of mankind. people inside automated vehicles on endless commutes because your sensitivity to distance and travel time and willingness to tolerate traffic is going to be reduced when you don't have to drive and you can use the time productively. like, it's like an incredible future opportunity for them. so you are primed to receive whatever it is they want to pitch to you and so i think that's really the nut of it. they see it as the future of media, the future of computing,

and, like, the inside of the car is where the action is. it's no coincidence, disney has a group already working on what that in-car media experience is going to be like and trying to understand it and shape it and trying to figure out ways to get in on it. i think that's all well and good. there's a lot of value for consumers there but when it starts to get iffy when you start to think but, okay, well, we're in a future world where everything it automated and you're no longer allowed to drive a human driven vehicle anymore, and wealthy people have their own private self-driving vehicles where they turn the internal surveillance off. it's essentially a check. they good in there and they're just in a bubble moving through

the world, a protective bubble, and then you have people who can't afford that and have to travel in shared vehicles, whatever is the future of uber, which is like a very down market thing and it's probably supported by advertising revenue, and once you step into a vehicle like that, you're just being scanned constantly, and you're paying with -- you're really performing for your ride in a lot of ways and there's just tremendous inequities in a scenario like that. it's not at all far from reality. in many weighed it's just the business model for the web, over to urban mobility and i don't think it's crazy to speculate about that, as terrible as it sound. think that's all the questions.

if anybody has anything else to show to up on the chat board. we can probably call it's night. >> yeah, thank you so much, anthony, i'm candice. thank you for your talk tonight, very interesting. certainly the highlight, i think it's easy to think all of this as so modern but it's interesting to see it's actually not. i want to thank everybody for watching tonight as well. if you're interested in more town hall events you can follow this channel by clicking the follow button at the top of the screen. please support the book. if you're interesting in big a copy of the book, hit the buy the book button at the bottom of the screen and if you're -- you

can donate to town hall via that's page or whichever page you're watching on. thanks again, and we'll see you next time. >> john aboutn's new become, the room where it happened is being released on tuesday but news organizations have contained copies and reporting on contended. according the "wall street journal" the form are national security avisser to president trump writes that the president ran the white house where, quote, obstruction of justice was way ofly and the pratt was stunningly uninformed. the white house says that none of those allegations are true and that the book contains classified information which makes publishing it, quote, inexcusable. the justice department has sued to stop the book from being released but it publisher plans to make it widely available next week. look for the author in the near future on booktv and c-span.

and now on c-span2's booktv, more television for serious readers. >> good evening victory to all audience, and welcome. thank you so much for joining tonight. other kate brouns and on behalf of harvard bookster, the harvard university division of signs and the cab about science library i'm so blowed to introduce this event with mario livio, preparing his book "galileo and the science denier. just like always you can find announcements about upcoming eventness series at harvard.com slash he vend/science. you can kind up for the e-mail news alert for more updates and