several programs from our archives with your favorite authors such as christopher hitchens, toni morrison and others. tonight it's a look at the many appearances of award-winning historian david mccullough on book tv over the past 25 years. it all starts tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on book tv. >> good evening everybody i am the townhall executive director on behalf of our organization our partner booksellers it's a pleasure to welcome you to tonight's lifestream presentation by anthony townsend. as we get underway want to acknowledge our institution stands on the ancestral territory we thank them for our continuing use of the natural resources and their ancestral homelands. and we thank all of you for tuning in and will call them interesting times they are grateful for the opportunity to invite virtual audience together to share ideas and creativity even we are not exactly coming together. i like to especially like to

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communication technology on mobility, land use and transportation planning. he also teaches a course on intelligent citizen nyu's urban planning program. townsend is a member of the inaugural class of fellas it has been duly founded which is redundant isn't it? the inaugural class of fellows at the research institute based in new york city. his fellowship research focuses on the new emergence of a new urban science with the current influx of funding, talent, data and ideas in the field of urban studies as well as impact of research -- of this research on government and the research itself. his writing can be found in scientific american stanford social innovation review along with other publications but he is the author of 2013 smart city, big data, civic taxes in the case for new utopia. and that be an physical town help his latest book is ghost road, beyond a driverless car.

please help me enjoining anthony tauzin. >> good evening everybody. thank you for joining me tonight. it has been a tumultuous 48, 96 hours in the country. i really appreciate your attention given all of the other distractions. that said be filled to monitor cnn or whatever else you have running in your other window is a lot that needs to be paid attention to and i fully understand the distraction. one of the things it is been really jarring watching 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 past three years. and thankfully, i think i've done a pretty good job as a forecaster.

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

so let me just hop over to the keynote presentation i put together. it's going to be quite a bit of videos in this. so long as you can see the main images. you look at the main gist of what i'm talking about. it's really to create some flavor to the presentation as opposed to being the main focal point he don't see part of the video don't fret. i'll explain what's going on. think the place to start with this is to really understand what is it that silicon valley into a lesser extent detroit and all the other auto manufacturing centers around

the world have been telling us is coming our way in the form of driverless mobility? for the most part this has been driverless cars. and this has been going on ten years now since google on veiled their stealth project the google self driving car will actually be ten years ago this october when they unveiled it and what's more fascinating is this is an old idea it's a film from 1956 it was gm future it's a fictional representation of a system that rca actually developed that would have basically it's a camera following a painted

line along the road there other variants of this that followed a guide wire laid down in the concrete they were cost estimates 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 driverless technology today. it wasn't pursued because the market demand was not there. people wanted to drive even though it could be a drag sometime. it was still fun in them feel like they were in control. what's funny is the vision juicy of automated mobility, this was a tesla product video. in many ways are not that different. in fact tesla's product there driverless car product, autopilot is actually taken from the video i just showed

you. they basically borrowed a brand name that gm had developed 50 years previously. there is so much of this is the fulfillment of a dream that the auto industry has had from close to 60 or 70 years now that really didn't have technology to deliver. and in fact it's a much much older dream than that. if you look, almost every mythic tradition on the planet you go back and there is some hero or king over god whose often in the sky but just as often on the ground, sometimes it's in the sea they have a self driving sailboats. king morgan the generous, in wales who is a mythic character had a chariot he

could teleport a lot of chinese emperors and myths have flying thrones see here the flying carpets. those of you who played dungeons & dragons may remember she makes an appearance in that game world 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 we are just now making it possible. finally fulfilling this dream at the same time we are achieving this is often cited the beginning of the 20th

century is about 50% urban by the end of the 21st century will be about 20% urban. this is just a phenomenal city building and it is creating tremendous challenges for mobility making solutions that have sort of worked for a while private single passenger automobiles obsolete it's a huge search for new solutions. the driverless vehicles or autonomous vehicles or self driving vehicles and i think one of the things i deal with a very early on in the book are these words we use. then what they mean and what they are trying to achieve. these demos are really, really compelling. so this is google self driving car vehicle oil played again really quick so you can see

basically they're saying this is a car that will keep grandma or a visually impaired person or they didn't put kids in these, unintended children in these. i think for a lot of stressed out parents trying get kids all the different activities there like hey there's a robo card or shovel your kids safely rounds you don't have to do it. and i think they were really testing the waters here to see if this is the next great product they could deliver to the masses. and i think again these are been going on for 50 years this is the mercedes self driving van from the 80s had

a bunch of computers in the back which would probably fit in like one order of the inside of your iphone now. this is the first self driving 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 traffic can safely navigate around it. we've really picked up the pace since then. so in the last two or three years with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on automated driving. is dwarfing what we think of as a huge area r&d driven industry like aerospace. if anybody did not catch the

dragon's launch yesterday was pretty exciting. it was a distraction from the bad news. the thing is this has been both commercially exciting, technologically exciting it's been kind of a slow burn and slow to come to fruition. what we've seen is as the promise and hype of automated driving has grown, that the letdowns and failures have also grown equally spectacular. and we have seen videos, mostly a self driving cooper command from the right of the screen and blow through the red light in downtown san francisco. their fatal accidents involving both hoover self driving vehicles and tesla's,

and this is something that i think is really endemic to the testing of that technology is that it is going to fail, all automated systems fail. because we rely so heavily on automobiles, they're going to be many failures. and so the reckoning that's associated with that has given people pause about if it's going to be great as we have been promised. >> i don't write that much about the safety issues around automated vehicles in the book because i am pretty much of the school of thought that if they weren't safe there won't be an industry. clearly an engineering problem that the industry has to solve. and potentially can self regulate. i am more interested in the other problems around the fact

it isn't really cars that we need to fix. need to fix urban mobility more broadly. and the fact that the way we travel has changed so 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. on and it all adds up to, there is a supply and demand at work. it is clear that the business case for automation is growing

going to be a bit of a slow burn for the next few years this will have to get adjusted depending how the next great depression works out. this is kind of a classic technology and start slowly and builds and builds and builds us, what the virus actually. people come into contact with others who have used it will definitely be seeing these things out on the streets on a regular basis. in some places faster than

others. and in some uses multicolor little bit about that in a second period really important not necessarily going to be automobiles that we first encounter this technology of automated driving. if you're waiting for david hasselhoff and kit to rollup, you're going to be pretty disappointed. i think we can pass this one it's kind about a sequence. so, i think the point of the book is to break out of very simplistic narrative that automated driving means we are going to perfect the car and that the future of automated

mobility basically is what we saw in minority report. it's little individual pods moving in synchronization along a traffic free highway imperfect safety. it's going to be different, going to be weirder. i think we really have some new myths of driverless technology to help us understand what the future could be like. i think that is what i set out to do with the book. so the book is really organized around -- this is actually going to give interest to you guys. the cover of ghost road, was actually a painting by mary iversen who lives in the pacific northwest area. i did not force the art the author did but i have become

quite an fan of hers. this style is to juxtapose natural beauty and images of infrastructure and logistics and globalization. she will often do these things like this works kind of like -- 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 sort of the way the computer might see the world. and i think it's a really sublime way of understanding what this thing, this metaphor goes through it actually is.

to me not even 100% what sure what it is. it's kind of a challenge, i think it is a placeholder one to put in your head of a future when we go out into these spaces will remove about, that we are the minority and machines are in control. and often alienating, often may be individually working 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. so anyway, that's enough about

that. i think you will figure out what the ghost road is if you want to get to the book. it is a mysterious place. to the big three big stories that i think we'll give it some shape i'm going to run through these real quick and then we will open up for questions. this is really an answer to, that's not perfecting the automobile, perfecting the car so i talked about minority report. this is to me what i think elon musk and some of the folks at gm and some of the german car companies, when they fantasize about a future of automated driving, this is what they envision. it's a city that is been once again we rationalized around high-speed, individual transportation and it has lots of expensive high precision manufactured products in it.

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. again, i spoke back through the past and it is remarkable how durable in misleading some of these images of the future work. this is an ad from the 1950s that was run by a consortium of the electric power utilities. this is a future of automated driving but it's like a future that never was i guess is the way i think of it. there on a road there's no traffic there's not even any commercial vehicles there's no cities or buildings of any kind is a totally unrealistic

way of thinking this is in the mid 50s so your grandparents may have opened a magazine and seeing this. this is what they may still think of driverless car is. this shows up in every venture capitalist every entrepreneur presentation sometimes are making a joke about it but often they look at it and say yes we've always thought this was the future isn't great it's finally here? i just find that so ridiculous. the reason i find it ridiculous is there are a number of -- a kind of automated vehicles that are just multiplying. so the moment we are in is a massive explosion of species that has happened at various

times with the evolution of life for we are finding this capability allows all different kinds of forms to emerge that can capitalize upon it. and a lot of the book, or a good part -- the beginning of the book is going through in naming these things, driverless shuttles, teeny-weeny french buses for some reason they cornered the market on these things and it's a good story it's worth reading. and has a lot to do with the different style of innovation in europe in the silicon valley. i do and others have architects have started to explore the question of what is 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 airport in washington d.c. you've been on what's essentially a small building traveling in mobile lounges between terminals. to get a sense of just how far we are pushing the boundaries between vehicles and buildings. this was a concept in china which i think is super relevant to what's going on now. the idea of self driving pop-up stores, the goods are closer to you. if you cannot get out, we may ep in the future were lots of shops close and our main street to di die. and you know maybe there's

another configuration not just everything going straight to the home. this is actually a bit of a joke. it's an april fools prank that google's amsterdam office told. it's a visualization of the self driving bike. i think it's a funny joke but they sort of got the case for the bike wrong. their matching people are doing other things with her riding the bike or to drive itself to the charging pointer in the covid world to the distance they want the automated driving capability. think it's as we start to

explore all the ways in automation will be useful in mobility were going to start to understand all of the different ways that it can create value and create products and experiences. the standups there that basically

in response to things change on city streets and do so in ways that are more effective, more comprehensive, maybe less brutal. i don't know if we can program the security bot to not discriminate against people or not use excessive force, but it's certainly an appealing possibility right now. although it me a create many more problems. this is ridiculous scenario, but it does start to help you understand -- again, even the boundary between motor vehicles and buildings and since 'er going to blur together and we talk but a robot, car and a building may start to be

difficult to distinguish from each other because all be able to move and act on their own. and then the ability to create robots that use animal and human style locomotion is going to really challenge our assumptions out what a vehicle and is a self-driving vehicle and is how that fits into our cities and what we might do with it and some of these things have tremendous capabilities. this one doesn't have any kind of optical or electromagnetic sensors. it navigates and senses the world solely through what it picks up through its lens, so really just a tremendous amount of innovation. there isn't a day that goes by i don't learn but new vehicles.

there's a five-minute speech and then open it up. material. this is the part of the book, the middle two chapters most relevant to what is happening right now in covid. and when i was writing the book i send time in singapore and they're building a new central business district called newtown and their baseline assumption is that 2035, 65% of all retail purchases would be delivered to the home by automated delivery vehicles. and if you take the automated part out, we have sort of fast-forwarded close to that now in a matter of a couple of months. everywhere you look in the online retail and shipping business, that's what they're saying, five to ten years ahead

of where we expected to be. they knew we were getting there. of course amazon has been the forefront of this, both good and bad. but, boy, like, i wasn't expecting this to happen. i think the reason i call this materialization is it's just mastiff 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, another factor ten or two in the years to come, and unleashing just that much more movement of goods around city streets, and the reason that's important is that it's not something that has gotten a lot of attention in the talk about driverless

technology. we focused almost exclusively on passenger transportation and none of the movies from 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 but it very much. so one of the things that has happened since the stay-at-home orders since covid is how flat-feeted cities have been caught, really trying to understand where the bottlenecks for moving more deliveries in and out, and what do they need to do in order to respond to it. it's just not something they have a lot of capacity. i a lot of these figures are out of date now but e-commerce has been growing 15% a year for the last decade, which means every five years it doubles. and so it's just sort of on a

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

self-driving -- fully self-driving cars right now. there's a lot of businesses that are eager to have it. shipping costs are killing amazon, killing everybody else that's trying to catch up with amazon. this is an economic driver that dwarfs anything in the passenger industry. mostly old school conversation, looking for how to make cars more attractive so people will keep buying them, and even before covid, this is the thesis i present in the book is that this is going to be the thing that drives automation in the short term. again, this is ido, this is another example of all the variety that's already on the road map around freight delivery, and this is basically what we call a mule. so a lot of what is in the book

is naming things that don't really have names yet. what are we going to call this? this is a mule. comes to the morning to your street corner or neighborhood or building, and parks outside, has all the deliveries for the day and takes all the returns, it eliminates dozens of dirty trucks running around your neighborhood. scaring people who are trying to cross the street. causing pollution, causing noise. and helps create a better service experience as well. these things are starting to roll out essentially single delivery. i call them conveyors because they're kind of like conveyor buckets on a conveyor belt that is the sidewalk. and they're designed for short, less than a mile deliver -- instant deliveries from restaurants and other local

retailers to people's homes and offices. milton keynes in the united kingdom which is one of the last of the -- has had a verily large demonstration of this the last couple of years and got a lot of attention because they've expanded it significantly during the covid shutdowns. i think this is something that is potentially going to become much more commonplace. lots of conflicts with people on sidewalks and things like that but remains to be worked out. so, i think it's just important to understand, i if we're looking at passenger travel, we may be missing the boat. i've been talking too long so i'm going to say one thing about the flash trend. skip to that slide. that is that automation has the potential to really drive a lot

of investment and a lot of innovation into transportation, which is an area that has not had a lot of it in the last 50 years. or even 100 years. but also going to connect the essential systems that move people around cities and very powerful global financial interests in incredibly murky and risky ways. soft bank, which is a large technology investment fund based in japan primarily staked by saudi sovereign wealth and abu dhabi sovereign wallet so this is essentially fossil fuel money, has been the single greatest investor in ride hail and has built what i think is a latter day traction monopoly as they were called can he turn of

the 20th century. that controls 95% of the ride hail business globally. now, traction monopolies were a big deal in u.s. cities and seattle had one of the worst ones, and these arose when horse drawn street cars gave way to a new tech innovation, electric street cars, and in a lot of cities you had a situation where the street car company, which was the biggest consumer of electricity, the electric generating company, and the lighting utility, which is second largest consumer of electricity, were all basically the same company, were controlled by the same interests, and in different cities this happened in many different cities, seattle, philadelphia, elsewhere. philadelphia fell in line and let the traction trust run the city into the ground. one reason philadelphia doesn't

have a very large subway network, never really built out the way new york did because the trusts wouldn't let them do it. they wanted people on the street cars. seattle actually, i believe it was in the midst of the first world war, basically took over the whole system and still owns the utility part of it today. i think the important thing here is that automation is really going to create, as it has the online world and social media, tremendous consolidation of control and power and it's something that cities have to watch out for as we move forward. john, i'm going to stop there this has been a tremendous amount of stuff. i hope some of it is interesting for us to dig into. i'm going to close my screen share and pop over to the

question window and, let's see what we have. okay. so, there's a question from david. all mass transit and highways and pock works, transportation infrastructure, will be rethought or redefined post-pandemic. thundershower youths. a retire traffic engineer. >> the opinion the single occupancy vehicle is dead. it's very unclear right now whether this is going to be a clear winner or loser for urban mobility after the pandemic. first of all because we don't

know if there is an pandemic, and we don't know how long it's going to be or what form it's going to take. so, i don't want to get too far ahead of myself and speculate there. i think it's clear that people are going to be looking for short-term alternatives that are safe. one of the reasons i'm so bullish about these automated bikes and scooters, self-driving wheelchairs are a thing. they're like hitachi, one of the biggest manufacturers of wheel chaired is working on self-driving wheelchairs. it would be difficult if and when airportes get up and running to go through an airport in the next couple of years and not see a self-driving wheelchair. that's the first place where they're tested.

the reason why i'm so bullish on those things is because not just because i think it will be safe, easy and cheap to build automation into them and will support a lot of new kinds of business models that will make easy if if you thought bird came fast and furious there are thousand more of those waiting opposite we figure our houston to build automation into something that small and cheap. it is that it will give people the personal, private mobility of an automobile without the impact of an automobile. this is something that we first saw in china with sars. i went to shanghai in 2008, with a group of executives from a big auto manufacturer and we spent time touring e-bike factories and they all told us the same

story, which was that when sars hit, chinese cities had not expanded their subway network yet to the dormitory neighborhoods outside the factory zone on the outskirts of cities where all the workers live. all the workers depended on buses to get the factories and when sars hit they didn't want to be on buses anymore and all the bike manufacturers, shanghai and beijing, but shanghai was the first bun -- looked around and said, hey, maybe people will get back on bikes, and, oh, wow, there's battery technology has get ton the point where we can put a battery in a tiny motor on a bike for not that much money that a factory worker can afford to pay in installments and go 15 to 20-kilometers in an hour, and charge while they're working, and then get back home.

that's how the global e-bike industry was born. it was born because working, like chinese factory workers needed a way to get to work that didn't involve getting on a bus during a major epidemic. so i think we'll see those kinds of things come out of the woodwork and that's where my attention is focused on right now. as opposed to, well, is mass transit going to survive or what can we do to fix mass transit or should we be trying to deal with the devil and find a way to manage people surging back to private automobiles. in particularly for cities, i think that that's where the answer lies. right now new york city, we're in the midst of a somewhat bungled restart of the subway system, and i'm very anxious

about the lack of manufacturing capacity for e-bikes, both locally and in the united states, all the reply chains for those thing -- supply chains for the things start, depending on your point of view in china. i'm trying to get people to think about what do we really need to do and how fast can we beef up e-bike manufacturing in the u.s. and particularly at the new york city area, because by the time september rolls around the city is back on its feet, we could have hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people trying to get access to tens of thousands of e-bikes to move great distances over the city is beau because they don't want to be on the subway system, and the alternatives they'll have if that isn't in place are not good, for the environment or for people's ability to earn or for

congestion management: i think in short term we need to be looking for flexible, cheap, rapidly deployable alternatives. so, what's next i'm going to skip to question by dale. what are the safety concerns and can they be -- disappear dead-can they be mitigated to everybody in a downtown area required to use one instead of having a mix between cars with drivers and driverless cars. so, these are all great questions. this is a particularly interesting one because there's so much divergence of opinion on this. what has happened in the the

tech industry, as i think companies trying to build driveless vehicles for use in urban areas have started to realize how complex the environments are and particularly if they want to reduce risks, like how many times they'll have to stop the vehicle if they're looking for more separation. separator roadways or separated lanes or having driverless vehicles operate in settings where there are only around human beings and pedestrians but out in around other human-driven vehicles. this is a sidewalk labs proposed for the project in toronto. and in many ways this goes directly against what the urban planners are saying is the best practice, which is that you should mix everything up, cars,

buses, bikers, cyclists, but always put the most vulnerable users of the street at the top of the pyramid, and everything is designed around their needs. so, pedestrians, cyclists and then everything else. and let -- wade into that as they're ready, and that has been my stance is i sort of go with let's not loose soothe of or mobile principles that have been built up over decades. let make avs fit into that. there's no reason to rush this technology forward to change the cities to make that's happen particularly when there isn't a huge compelling public interest to do so. the one exception i'll make to that is but moving freight. i think that the way to handle

that isn't necessarily with space but with time, and automation opens up all of the idle hours that streets just lay empty to do things, particularly when you think about automated electric vehicles which are quite quiet. or can be programmed to move quite slowly, could be very quiet and very safe, and so one of the scenarios i play out in the book is like future cities might really defining characteristic of them. might be that the late -- the wee hours of the morning are full of this kind of slow motion ballet of robo vehicles essentially restocking and

taking waste out, doing all the cleaning and tidying up and deliveries so they don't have to burden the streets during the day with those activities. what makes its practical when you think out automating the receiving opened that as well. and so you don't have to have other night watchman there to receive the delivery. one robot can just port with the other robot and put it right into the refrigerator or the waste there is and can be put right into the trash truck robot and can drive off. and those kind of things are totally solvable technology problems. there are million times easier to solve than teaching a tesla to drive through a busy urban neighborhood, and i think we're slowly going to figure that out and cities are going to --

already starting to realize they want to encourage these kinds of things because it will allow them to achieve all the goals that they have for creating lively streets during the day and also providing all the services they want to provide. the one other thing i want to say about that, probably one life favorite parts of the book in terms of coming up with a new perspective, opening my eyes to what the future may hold. we really talk but driverlessness lick it's a boundary incarcerate switch that's going to be flipped. we have a human driven car and take it to the dealer and trade it in and we're going to get a fully computer driven one and we'll never touch the thing again. that starts to get a little bit

more complicate when we talk about the different levels of automation that the automotive engineering societies have define. in reality there's a lot of reason is why we'll skip most of those but the fact is, there's so many different things that drivers do, and especially commercial drivers, and it's really only a very small number of them that are being automated. even when we do automate the actual operation of the vehicle 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 or we may aggregate them. so a lot of the interesting stuff that is happening in commercial fleet out make and trucking is -- automation and trucking is that companies are developing systems where you may have one operator who has like six trucks, and they're watching

all six of them from the piloting center, whenever that and is the truck are calling home when they get -- when they need permission. so, can i overtake this car on a dark curve with some sketchy paint markings and the operator will say, of course not, 0, yeah, there's a car stopped on a bridge and in the middle of nowhere and i go around it. let's good. go ahead. and the system may actually learn from that, and not ask permission the next time because it's learned enough to know it's safe. there are like -- so, some of the robottists are looking at operating modes where the machine does most of the control itself.

the degrees motor controls -- the gross motor controls like gets the row about to the work site and then the human being will come over and do the -- call in and do the fine grain manipulation of the hands or the pitchers, and so the point i'm trying to make is that self-driving and deliver -- deliverless won't be on and off. it will be a gray zone of different kind of behaviors and the other way i talked about in the book is like you'll have hot rodders who just want to focus on the throttle and have the computer do everything else. you're going to have people like me who are like prius hypermiler and i'll just be zero focus on how do i get this thing to be as fuel efficient as possible. don't care bother anything else. the computer can do all the other driving. i just want to be hypermilage,

or people with kids who may just want to have full control over the defensive driving aspect but leave the rest -- so, like, desegregating the driving function and having software do parts of it will have tremendous consumer appeal and make this thing look a lot more like the variety of apps you have on your phone rather than just like, it's a smartphone or dumb phone. no, it's a smartphone that ex-like sways army notify with 87,000 different things it can do for you. that's the way we'll look at it. next question, david malcolm. it seems there's nothing that cannot be hacked. how can we avoid this with driverless cars. that's incredibly frightening question. i don't know if any of you --

this is something i was thinking. what can we talk but today that will connect this to actually what is going on in the world. and i was thinking about that, really disturbing scene from my -- i believe it was minneapolis, may have been somewhere in texas, in houston or dallas, of a large fuel delivery truck, tractor-trailer, barreling along interstate highway, into an area of protest march, and thankfully everyone get out of the way and thankfully also restrained themselves from taking out their frustration and fear on this guy for what he had done, but got me thinking, like, that is a great example of where automation is going to change what a scene

like this might play out like in the future. i've spoken -- i didn't put any of this material in the book because i think it wasn't quite mature yet but when i started doing the research on the book is when a lot of the truck attacks were happening in europe, and people were very -- make thing connection that not only more connectivity more automation in commercial trucks would allow for kill switches and other kinds of things that would allow the attacks to be prevented or stopped in progress, but people were thinking about the flip side which was, what if you took an attack strategy like a distribute disdenial of service attack that is used online, where just like -- vastly

oversimplify it but where you unleash a network of computers to overwhelm a target by sending lots and lots 60 messages to it, lots of requests to it. ...

the company to get two or something like that would be possible. without the people, the important government understand that risk actually have a handle on it. i think it's something that would probably actually occur we went back and fixed it so that risk is real. they is something we will see. trucking is something who was the automated because there's a lot of good reasons to do it. technology is just easier. there are startups working in this space right now and a major cybersecurity risk that needs to start getting blamed for so it's

those kinds of things that -- for the present situation we are in imagine it was 2030 and all of this happened and the u.s., most of our trucking network automated so we are in this incredibly vulnerable situation, supply lines are stretched to the max already because his pandemic, because of civil unrest and one of our geopolitical adversaries decides to just press a little bit harder by throwing some stress on our automated talking network through cyber attacks, the kind of thing that is incredibly frightening and i think those are the kinds of things that will get attention and money

before the kinds of stones that you seek with two cars making them accelerate. very good product liability reasons that companies will do their best to make sure that doesn't happen. prevents everything but those kinds of things will put general motors out of business. i worry less about that, i worry a lot more about the systemic change. let's go to the next question. measurement time we have is there a way to check on how much time we have will all just keep

going. how do you think cars are working out? various restrictions are state-by-state so in the u.s., there some things regulated that are relevant at state level, some are national. although consumer safety stuff, like seatbelts is federally regulated. how cars are made that kind of stuff. that's all federal. states have jurisdiction over licensing and cities and municipalities mostly have regulation over traffic laws. i spent a lot of times working

in 2007 -- 2019 and i was -- that work was on this, various cities are going to be crucial because i said, cars going to be the big market for automated mobility, i think it's a whole range of different products and services that are built on these products so cities are going to be important because it's going to be a business, sort of like a long tail business and cities the most diverse markets, if you identify a market segment of young hipsters who want autonomous skateboards, you're going to go to a city to find

them and develop the solution and work with the city government to figure out how to get it rolled out. that's what's happened with this ride hail and scooters, we didn't start out in like a real cooperative kind of operating mode but they eventually called the way they were working with cities and good friends, whose working on trying to understand what the market entry markets are for companies to come into cities as opposed to showing up and breaking the law and how cities are reacting to this market entry by companies. very aggressive entry to create the rules and conditions for the channels by which mobility

innovators in common to cities with their new offerings impacts like going to be big in the next couple of years of feel more comfortable and make the process a little easier other than having stuff -- scooters ending up all over the sidewalks and people getting angry about it and having to go back to the beginning and figure out how to make it work and the interesting thing is it's not just going to be one product seven by 18, 2000 pounds, five parsing and it's going to be vehicles that are right sized for this situation and the youth and that's really

great. this is about breaking down the box of the automobile into the pieces that fit into cities and are aligned with what cities want as mobility. think it's the technology that fundamentally puts cities in control, helping them figure out how to make the most of it for the promises driverless cars, traffic, decrease or elimination for parking lots what will happen not only in this form but in the public sphere? this is elizabeth, that's a great question. i have a whole chapter in the book devoted to answering this. chapter eight, called urban machines. one of the things that's

different than the first book, it's not a book about cities, it's really about technology, mobility, a book about technology and mobility. the discussion is fascinating. there have been a lot of interesting design over the last couple of years, figuring out what are we going to do with this excess parking? where are we going to put the parking? knowing that they can probably drive themselves off to a satellite parking lot, they don't need to park right next to

where ever they dropped their phone off at. the people that are using so the tremendous amount of excitement in urban planning and design community because someplace like los angeles, it can bring purpose, all the land devoted to parking and automobile, you can follow the housing affordability in socal just by unleashing that land for development and there's been really detailed studies have been done so i think what that's doing is, it's being held out and saying look cities from all the things you've been

trying to do with density and housing, reduce dependency, are they still the right things to do? it might be even more right down the road if automated pans out the way we are being promised, there's a lot of other kooky ideas out there about one-way streets and reducing the widths of lanes and anyone who tells you they know what the future should be laid out like or the perfect design for the future is like lying to you. there are, however, thoughtful guidance out there without the principles how future streets are to be and when i read about in the book, the club of city

transportation officials in the u.s. and canada and published this thing called blueprint for autonomous, it's the things they've been saying about city streets before autonomous came along, they should be shared and pedestrians should be given clarity, automobiles should be at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to how we plan streets. let's 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, shaping the city is by getting the software right. it's one of the really strong, clear and actually very specific

kinds of plans i've seen the urban planning organization ov over. if you're interested, i encourage you to listen, it's essentially like saying okay, we're going to design a history of the future by designing the regulation which isn't that radical an idea. it actually makes a lot of sense but the way we are going to enforce those regulations is by making these requirements for the vehicles and services that operate on the street and we are going to have our software on their software to make sure that's how they actually do it. i think it's pretty visionary potential to give cities more leverage, they might be able to do things like no deliveries when those people around and

they said that policy and there's some sense to that can detect and their pedestrians on the street and constantly ward off delivery vehicle charge them pedestrian to get in and justify interfering with pedestrian life and the results, desired results of that companies deliver late at night. and this is what they can do, if they have the ability to write regulation and code set it into the marketplace and incentivized different users of the street that worked to change their behavior and it is super exciting, the possibilities are there.

okay, share the content behind this? i mean, the idea there is basically, trying to understand, we are focusing on the wrong thing by thinking about how the we will be changed by driverless vehicles, we ought to look at is how the way our stuff gets around will be changed by driverless vehicles. how much is it to change? there's some really good work in economics literature that looks like the price for 10 miles, i guess is how they measured by shipping something is changed

throughout the 20th century, it's a study sort of rocketing decline, it cost like 90% less to ship something a ton of book stuff across the country that it did 100 years ago. roughly the same throughout, other it's shipping across the country or across town. with automation drops by like another 90% for this like easy and cheap to send a box of something across town as it is to send a text message. what does the world look like then? what kinds of things you people start to do with that? around the time i was thinking about that, i was thinking about what's going on in china with

delivery, china basically went through the u.s. is 20th century experience with this decline in shipping costs and increase speed in shipping and like ten years so when ali baba started, it took like three weeks to ship something from their headquarters which i think is in sutro, shanghai to lujan or another big city on the other side of china and ten years later, that was like a 24 hour thing and you've got ali baba has 5 million -- like, you could get anything from any chinese city and like under 24 hours. something like a big holiday incentive, i can't remember the numbers, they are so staggering. billions packaged in 24 hours or

5 billion, it's in the book. it's a staggering number, i can't even remember. but that kind of growth and what it means for how we shop and thinking beyond all your experiencing now which is, it just means shoveling prep the web down our throats and sort of furthering this big execution of retailing that started with walmart 20 or 30 years ago and it has snowballed, what if it means that my kids were into baking can team up with oakland's got a big network of potential customers or is

willing to do decorating or we can start to build supply chains locally, using this cheap distribution, whether it's economic modes that might start to develop based on that so that's a lot of research work i'm doing now, developing scenarios that are trying to understand how we avoid what happening right now, walking as into this future of what they call the last mile of delivery between the local people in your home, it's completely dominated by a handful of global companies and trying to think about more cooperative, potentially publicly supported, potentially.

types of models from moving around communities and the role of automation in making that possible and driving that cost down. what it comes down to at the end of the day, if we allow the technology for automated delivery to be dominated and controlled exclusively by a handful of companies like amazon and google and by do, it's going to be really bad for local economic development that we need to find ways for postal systems and business improvement districts, municipal operators so it's an idea, like what if seattle like it did 100 years ago, like was able to somehow either establish or start or take control over his 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 cost, it didn't privilege it's only own business partners, doing all the competitive things amazon does with the marketplace customers and became like a utility that allowed small businesses to connect to each other and to the customers, that's kind of the really big struggle that i was writing about, we are going to be lining up that battle five or ten years from now and you know, right now seeing amazon and walmart duking it out is a little reassuring that maybe there's still some bit of competitiveness left in

the space but like where is that third model that might allow for other ones to unfold. would that we got left? future driverless trucking. i'm going to let that one go, i talked about that. i will privacy work with driverless cars? less government tampering with our internet. this is something i read about quite a bit in the beginning of the book, interior, i don't think there's a lot about you to know that the exterior things riddled with sensors, cameras,

laser scanners that are constantly collecting data about what's around them and it's hard to really get a clear sense of how much of the data is analyzed and discarded and the results of the, if i take a picture of you walking down the street, digest savings? some risk and i think it's something people are thinking about those are interesting studies but the truth is, there's far more surveillance what's going on inside the vehicle and if you think about why does google, why are these

companies funding self driving vehicles? where the first in and why are they so aggressive? is because the future for them. ten or 20 years ago -- we are going to spend more time -- i like to tease people and say, what does it feel like to drive a tesla? it's like using an ipad, is a computer you get inside of and once you're inside, it is constantly scanning you it is going to sneak in through interesting ways. i write about this in the book, a lot of the ways they deal with the issue of driver during this transition to partial to full is to monitor you with cameras to

tell whether you're paying attention or not and after they switch, the cameras aren't going anywhere. they're going to stay and instead, they are going to basically profile you for advertising and other kinds o of -- why they so interested in this? this is the biggest captive media audience for research and adds ever created in the history of mankind. people inside automated vehicles on in this commutes because your sensitivity to distance and travel time, your willingness to tolerate traffic is probably going to be reduced, drive and you can use the time productively. it's like an incredible future opportunity for them so you are primed to receive whatever it is so i think that is the not of

it, they see it as the future of media, the future of computing and the inside of the cars, where the action is, it's no coincidence, disney has a group already working on with that in car media experience is going to be like and trying to understand it and try to shape and figure out ways to get in on it. i think it is all relative, there's a lot of value for consumers but when it gets itchy, it's like well, we are in a future world where everything is automated, you're no longer allowed to drive the vehicle anymore and wealthy people have the own private self driving vehicles where they turn the internal surveillance off.

it's essentially a clip, the going and they are in a bubble moving through the world, protected bubble and then you have people who can't afford that and have to travel in shared vehicles, whatever the future equivalent of the work is. a very downmarket thing and it's probably supported by advertising revenue and once you step into a vehicle like that and you're just being scanned constantly, then your paying, your really performing for your ride in a lot of ways there's tremendous inequities in a scenario like that and it's not at all for from reality. in many ways, business model for the web. so i don't think it is crazy to speculate about that parables.

i think that's all the questio questions. does anybody have anything else? i think we can probably call it a night. >> thank you so much. thank you for your talk tonight, it's been interesting. it's easy to think of this as so modern but that is interesting to see that it is actually not. i want to thank everybody for watching tonight as well. if you're interested in town hall events, you can follow this channel by clicking the top right of your screen. if you're interested in buying a copy of his book, the by the

book button at the bottom. you can donate to the town hall via this page or whichever page you are watching. thanks again, we will see you next time. >> you're watching tv on c-span2, television for serious readers grade here are some programs to watch out for this weekend. author and robin hood ceo westmore talks about the 2015 baltimore rising to the lens of several city residents witnessing the unrest following the death of freddie gray. former national security advisor, john bolton counts his time in the trump administration. ralph reed weighs in on why evangelical christians should support president trump and

former robert takes a look at the use of u.s. power around the world since the end of world war ii. he's joining the conversation i former defense secretary james madison. find more schedule information at booktv.org or consult your program guide. >> as part of our program series in conjunction with our white america, we welcome layla. [applause] her book, he and white supremacy grew out of an online effort to get people to confront and december, the way they benefit from whiteness and become what she calls good ancestors. people who leave a legacy of liberation and for others to follow. podcast author, she earned her bachelor of laws degree from lancaster university in the united kingdom, her husband and two children