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button purchase. anthony townsend is an expert on information technology and a senior scientist at the center for transportation policies and management where he supervises research on the impact of information and communication technology on mobility, and land use and transportation plan and teaches a course at nyu. he is a member of the fellows that has been duly founded. the inaugural club at the institute of new york city fellowship research focuses on the emergence of the current influx of funding, talent, data and ideas as well as the impact of research on the local government and citizens. writing can be found in scientific american and the stamford review among other publication.

he's the author of 2013 smartest of the big data and the quest for the new utopia. the latest book "ghost road is the subject of tonight's talk. please join me in welcoming anthony townsend. >> good evening everybody. thank you for joining me tonight. it's been a tumultuous time in the country and i appreciate your attention given all the other distractions. feel free to monitor twitter, cnn and whatever else you have running in the other window because there's a lot that needs to be paid attention to and i understand the distraction. one of the things that has been

charring launching this book in the pandemic has been the need to re-examine the conclusions in evidence because the book was written over the course of the last three years. 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 last couple of months, namely around the increase in delivery to homes is something that i think came on very quickly. but in the last week we've basically seen the future kind of fannish. i think we are in a weird period for forecasting where it's coming at us fast. it's going to be a feared

conversation to talk about technology sort of as an abstract thing, but i think what we can do is keep drawing it back to the big picture and what's going on right now because there are some connection. i will do my best to do that as we go through a. let me just hope over to the keynote presentation. there is going to be a lot of video so long as you see the main images i think what the gist of what i'm talking about. it's really just to create some flavor for the presentation as opposed to being the main focal point so if you don't see every frame of the video, don't fret. i will explain what's going on.

the place to start is to understand what is it that silicon valley and to a lesser extent detroit and the other auto manufacturing centers around the world have been telling us is coming our way to in the form of driverless mobility. for the most part it is been driverless cars and it's been going on ten years now since google unveiled their project to googles self driving car. it will be ten years ago this october when they unveiled it. what's fascinating is this is an old idea. you are looking at a film from

1956. it was gm's vision of the future and what you are seeing is a fictional representation of a system that basically would have a camera following a painted line along the road. there are other versions that followed, the guard flyer laid down in the concrete. there were cost estimates at the time of what it would cost to fix the interstate highway system with this kind of capability. same kind of thing people are talking about with driverless technology today and the market demand wasn't fair. there. if people wanted to drive a. of us stilwas still a new thingn and the people feel like they were in control of.

what's funny is the vision cc of automated mobility, this is a tesla product video. in many ways they are not that different. the products are are actually taken from the video i just showed you. they basically par barcode a brd name gm developed 50 years previously. so much of this is part of the fulfillment of a dream the auto industry has had for close to 60 or 70 years now but they didn't really have the technology to deliver. and in fact it's lik looking muh older trade him back. if you look almost every mystical tradition on the planet you go back and there is some hero or king or god that is

moving around in the sky, sometimes on the ground that morgan the generous in wales is a character that could teleport a, a lot of thunderbirds and my favorite is the view that the dungeons of the dragons she makes an appearance and runs around the steps of eurasia in a magical hut to this. around by two chicken legs. so this idea of self-propelled vehicles is a very old technological longing and we are just now making it possible to

this we are finally fulfilling the dream at the same time that they are achieving the full organization of the planet. it's a statistic sort of trend. by the end of the 21st century will be about 100% urban. it's just a phenomenal phase and creating tremendous challenges for nobody and making solutions have served for a while like single passenger automobiles obsolete. the driverless or so of driving vehicles one of the things i

deal with early on in the book are these words we use and what they mean and what they are trying to achieve. basically [inaudible] or a visually impaired person or i think for a lot of stressed out parents trying to get kids to all these different activities it's like here is a car two shuttles were kids around since you don't have to do it. they were testing the waters here to see if this is the next great product they could deliver to the masses.

it ought to be compelling by now because the technical work to create these things has been going on close to 50 years. this is the mercedes self driving band from the 80s. it had a bunch of computers in the back that would fit in one corner on the side of your iphone now. this was the first self driving vehicle to really drive itself on the road across the country almost under computer control using computer vision to interpret imagery of the road and traffic and safely navigate around it. we've really picked up the pace since then is the last two to three years we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars spent on automated driving.

it's changing what we think of as a huge driven industry like aerospace. if anybody didn't catch the space x. launched yesterday, it's pretty exciting. a bit of a distraction from the bad news. the this has been both commercially exciting, technologically and kind of slow to come to fruition but we see is as the promise and the hype has grown, the letdowns and failures have also sort of chronically spectacular.

we've seen that he goes to like this one blew through the red light in downtown san francisco. accidents involving children in vehicles and this is something that is endemic to the testing of the technology. if it is going to fail on automated systems failed and we rely so heavily on automobiles there will be many failures so the reckoning that is associated has given people pause to about this if they've been as great as we were promised. i don't write that much about the safety issues because i'm pretty much with the old school of thought if it seems it won't

be in the industry but it's a problem the industry has to solve a. i am more interested in the other problems around the fact it isn't really cars we need to fix. we need to fix urban mobility more broadly and affect the way we travel has changed so much. we go different places and travel at different times of the day. we travel in groups and have desires in terms of how much we pay a and the impact of our travel among multiple dimensions. our own personal health and environmental health, traffic and so on so mobility has become more complicated than simply purchasing a consumer product.

it's more about the whole range of mobility services. what does this all add up to lex there is a supply and demand at work. it's clear that the business case for automation is growing. it's going to be a slow burn for the next few years. yoit will have to be adjusted depending on how the next great depression works out for this is kind of a technical. it's kind of like the virus actually. people come into contact with others who have or have used this technology and try to to to demonstrate the benefits. and others see that and decided they want to acquire it for themselves.

there's also network effects. fothe more of these that are out there it becomes more and more useful and accelerates. i think we will definitely be seeing peace out on the streets on a regular basis some places faster than others. it's important that it's not just the automobiles that the encounter. if you're waiting for david hasselhoff to go up an you are going to be pretty disappointed.

the industry simplistic narrative about automated driving means we are going to protect the car and the future of automated mobility is basically what we saw in the minority report. it's moving in synchronization in perfect safety. it's going to be different. we need this to help us understand what the future can be likened to that i like and tt out to do with the book.

her style is to sort of juxtaposing a natural beauty and infrastructure. it's almost like the dawn of life scene at the time on earth juxtaposed with this grid of data representing a.

it is a simple way of understanding this metaphor. i'm not even 100% sure what it is. it's kind of a challenge to. in the future where we go out into the spaces where we move about that we are the minority and machines are in control and often alienating and

individually working for us but collectively not and trying to raise thtry toraise the possibit things may get out of control and we have to be vigilant against that. it is a mysterious place. i'm going to run through this quick. this is to me what i think elon musk and some of the folks at gm

when they fantasize about the future of the automated driving this is what they envision it is a city that has been rationalized around high-speed transportation and has lots of expense to manufacture products. i don't think that this is terribly plausible given the direction things are going. going through the past. run by the consortium of the utilities this is the future of automated driving but it's like a future that never was.

there's no traffic or even any commercial vehicles on the road of private passenger vehicles. there is no cities where buildings of any kind. where are these people going if they are not even in the city. so, this is just a totally unrealistic way of thinking about our own future yet this image shows up and this man and "time" magazine your parents may have seen this and it's what they may still think a driverless car is. it shows up in every entrepreneur's presentation and sometimes they will be making a joke about it but ofte often its guess we always thought this was the future isn't it great that it's finally here and i just find that sort of ridiculous.

the kind of automated vehicles that were in existence are multiplying a it's happened in the evolution of life where we are finding the forms to emerge that can capitalize. they are naming it in driverless shuffles and it's a good story worth reading and has a lot to do with the different style of innovation in europe.

they started to explore the question of what does it mean if we put this into basically small buildings and starting to move them around. the boundaries between vehicles and buildings may blur the. this is a concept in china.

we may end up in a future where a lot of the shops close and main streets by but the retail just moved to the corner and maybe there's some other configuration not justified in going straight to the home. this is actually a bit of a joke, an april fools prank that they pulled, sort of a visualization of. i think that it's funny that they sort of got the case that this was driving my column -- self driving bike wrong. that people would let it drive itself. i don't think that's what you would use it for. what you use a self driving bike for us to drive itself to the

next customer if it were a shared bike or to the trojan point or in this world to drive itself [inaudible] for the next user [inaudible] the automated capability. as research explores all the ways automation will be useful in mobility, we are going to start to understand all the different ways that it's going to create value and new kinds of products and experiences. singapore you have a couple of startups that are playing around with scooters that basically come to you when you call. there is a long way to go before this doesn't look like a kind of clunky gadgets but it shows entrepreneurs are starting to explore and it's going to move very quickly because these things can be prototyped in so quickly.

and this is the category of driving vehicles i called urban ushers because they think that they are going to take the place of all the street furniture, the signage, potentially some of the people and personnel who watched over and provide services and attract and respond to things that have been on city streets and potentially do so in ways that are more effective and comprehensive and maybe less brutal. i don't know if we can program a security robots cannot discriminate against people or not use excessive force. but you know, it's certainly an appealing possibility right now although it may create many more problems. this is kind of a ridiculous scenario that we see right here.

that it does start to help you understand, and again even between motor vehicles and buildings on the one side, it's also between more vehicles and robotics on the other side. it's all going to sort of blurred together and what we talk about as a robot and car and building may start to be difficult to distinguish from each other as they will be able to move and act on their own. and then getting to the robotics piece, the ability to the gate robots that use animal and human style emotions and what is going to start to challenge our assumptions about what a vehicle is and what a self driving vehicle is and how that fits into the cities and what they might do with it and some of these things just have tremendous capabilities. this one doesn't even have any type of optical or

electromagnetic sensors. to navigate solely through what it take picks up through this l. so really just a tremendous amount of innovation. there isn't a day that goes by that i don't learn about a new vehicle. the other two big stories are just five minutes each and then we will open up. materialization, this is a big part of the book. it's the middle two chapters most will look into what's happening right now and when i was reading the book i spent some time in singapore building the central business district in newtown and the basic assumption is 2035, 65% of all retail purchases would be delivered by automated vehicles.

if you take the automated part out, we sort of fast forward pretty close to that now in a matter of a couple of months. every way that you look in the online retailing and shipping business, that's what you are saying. five to ten years ahead of where we expected to be. amazon has been at the forefront of this both good and bad. but if we call this materialization. it's a massive wave of gods sweeping into city streets and really the ability for automation to drive the cost of shutting down in another ten or two in the years to come and

unleashing just got much more movement of goods around the city streets and the reason that's important is it's not something that has gotten a lot of attention in the talk of a driverless technology. driverless technology. we focused almost exclusively on the passenger transportation and none of this even recently has shown that it's moving around, and i think much more attention needs to be paid to that and the cities don't really think about it very much. so, one of the things that has happened since the stay-at-home workers is how flat-footed the city have been trying to understand the bottlenecks from moving more deliveries in and

out and what do they need to do in order to respond to it. it's not something we have a lot of capacity. a lot of the figures e-commerce has basically been growing each year which means every five years of doubles. so it's just sort of on a steady growth. we've had a big bump but now it is at a higher level. this is essentially a neighborhood scale distribution center that has been ad hoc setup on top of a bike sharing station in manhattan which i think is hilarious and shows the tremendous conflicts that are starting to emerge around the distribution of all of these goods coming essentially from a

handful of online retailers like amazon. the volumes are growing, the shipping times for speeding up. automation really is the key to solving that. and in many ways it's so important because there are not a lot of people that really need or are necessarily eager to have fully self driving cars right now. there are a lot of businesses that are eager to have it. shipping costs are killing everybody else trying to catch up with amazon. this is an economic driver that is worse than anything we've seen in the passenger industry. it's mostly though looking for how can we make cars more attractive for people will keep buying them. and even before coronavirus, i

presented in the book that this is going to be the thing that drives the mission in the short term. again, this is another example of all of the propriety already on the roadmap around the freight delivery. this is basically what they caly called a mule so a lot of the book is just naming things that don't really have names yet. what are we going to call these things. this comes to the street corner or the neighborhood were building and its parks outside and has over the deliveries for the day and it takes all of the returns and eliminates dozens of dirty trucks running around the neighborhood scaring people who are trying to cross the streets, causing pollution and noise and hopes created or service experience as well. these things are starting to roll out essentially single

delivery. i call them conveyors because they are kind of like buckets on a conveyor belt and they are designed for short less than a mile instant deliveries from restaurants and other local retailers to people's homes and offices. in the united kingdom an was the last demonstrations the last couple of years that caught a lot of attention because the expanded significantly during the shutdowns. this is something that is potentially going to come debate could become more commonplace but it remains to be worked out. i think it's important to

understand looking at passenger travel, i've been talking for too long so i will say one more thing about this last trend and that is automation has the potential to drive a lot of investment and innovation in the transportation which is an area that has not had a lot of that in the last 50 years or even 100 years. but it's also to connect the systems that move people around cities and very powerful global financial interests and some incredibly murky and risky ways. a barge technology investment fund based in japan primarily statstaked by the saudi software

involved services essentially like fossil fuel money. it's been the single greatest investor and has built what i think of as a latter-day monopoly as they were called at the turn of the 20th century. it controls 95% of the ride hill business globally. now, these biopsies were a big deal in the u.s. cities and seattle actually had one of the worst ones. and of these arose when horse-drawn streetcars gave praise to the new tech innovation streetcars and a lot of cities that had situations where a street car companies which is the biggest consumer of electricity, the electric generating company and the lighting utility come to second-largest were all basically the same company or

controlled by the same interest. and in different cities that have been to many different cities of seattle, philadelphia, elsewhere, the different cities responded differently. philadelphia just kind of fell in line and let them run the city into the ground. it's one of the reasons philadelphia doesn't have a very large subway network and never really belt out the way new york did because they wouldn't let them do it. that. 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 power utility per visit today. so the important thing here is that it is really going to create as it has in the online world into social media, tremendous consolidation of control and power into something

that they have to look out for as we move forward. 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 hop over to the question window and let's see what we have. >> okay. so, it's a question from david. all mass transit and highways of public works transportation infrastructure will be rethought or redesigned post-pandemic. in the paradigm of the single

occupancy vehicles [inaudible] it is very unclear right now whether it is going to be a winner or loser for the early mobility after the panda mac. first of all because we don't know if there is a outdoor pandemic and we don't know how long that'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. i think it is clear people are going to be looking for short term alternatives that are safe. one of the reasons i am so bullish about these automated flight and scooters, you know,

self driving wheelchairs are a thing. like one of the biggest manufacturers is working on self driving wheelchairs. you know, would it be difficult even when ther their parts get d running to go to in airport in the next couple of years and see that will be the first place they are tested. the reason i am so bullish on this thing is because not just because i think it will be safe, easy and cheap to build automation into them and support a lot of new kinds of business models, but it will make it easy -- you know, if you thought there were like a thousand of those waiting once they figure out how to build automation into something that is small and cheap. it will give people for personal private mobility of an automobile without the impact of

an automobile. and this is something that we first saw in china. i went to shanghai in 2008 with a group of executives from a big auto manufacturer and we spent some time touring the factories and they all told us the same story which was that when it hit, chinese cities haven't expanded their subway network yet to the dormitory neighborhoods outside of the factories where all of the workers lived so all of those workers depended on buses to get into the factories and when it hit you didn't want to be on the buses anymore. and all of the brake manufacturers in shanghai and beijing, but shanghai is the first one, looked around and said hey, maybe people voted back on bikes and this battery

technology has gotten to the point that they can put a battery in a tiny motor on a bike or not that much money then vanity factory worker can afford to pay. they can go 15 to 20 kilometers in an hour and charge, you know and then get back home. that is how it was born. he was born because like chinese manufacturing workers, they needed a way to get to work that didn't involve getting on the bus during a major epidemic. so i think we are going to see those kind of things come out of the woodwork and that's sort of where my attention is focused right now as opposed to his mass transit going to survive or what can we do to fix it or should we be trying to deal with the devil and find a way to manage people

searching back to private automobiles. and in particular, for cities, i think that that's where the answer lies. right now we are in the midst of the restart of the subway system and i'm very anxious about the lack of manufacturing capacity both locally and in the united states. although supply chains depending on your point of view in china so i'm trying to get you to think about what we really need to do and how fast can we beef up these bike manufacturers in the u.s. and particularly in the new york city area because by the time september rolls around, the cities are nearly 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 bikes to move great distances over the city because they don't want to be on the subway system and the alternatives that they will have if it isn't good for the environment or for people's ability to earn her for congestion management. so i think in the short term, we need to be looking for flexible and deployable alternatives. okay. so what's next. what are the safety concerns and 1080 p. -- can they be mitigated

if everyone is responded to required to have one so, these are all great questions. this is a particularly interesting one because there'ss so much divergence of the opinion on this. what has happened in the tech industry as i think the companies are trying t to build driverless vehicles for use in urban areas they've started to realize how complex the environments are and particularly if they want to reduce risk like how many times they will have to stop the vehicle. they are looking for more separation, separated roadways or laying or having driverless vehicles operate in settings

where they are not around other human driven vehicles. this is what they proposed and in many ways this goes directly against what they say is the best practice that you should make us everything up, cars, buses, bikers, cyclists but always the most vulnerable users at the top of the pier and it and everything is designed around their needs, for pedestrians, cyclists and then everything else. and let them bleed into that as they are ready. that has been my stance a sort of go with what's not be afraid of our mobility principles that have been built up over decades.

there's nthere is no reason to s technology forward to change the city to make that happen particularly as i was saying under his hand like a huge compelling public interest to do so. one exception i'm going to make on that bill is about moving freight. and i think that's the way to handle that is not necessarily with space, but with time. automation opens up all of the idle hours that the streets just wait and they and particularly when you think about the automated electric vehicles that are quite quiet or can be programmed to move quite slowly could be very quiet and safe supplement the scenarios i played out in the book is future

cities were a defining characteristic might be that we hours of the morning or full of this kind of slow-motion ballet of vehicles essentially restocking and taking the waste out during all of the cleaning and deliveries so they don't have to burden the streets during the day with those activities. what makes it practical is when you think about automating they are receiving as well so you don't have to have a night watchman to receive the delivery. one can just put it right into the refrigerator or the waste is there and they can put it right into the trash truck and it can drive off.

these kind of things are totally solvable technology problems and they are easier to solve than teaching to drive through a busy urban neighborhood and i think we are slowly going to figure that out and cities are already starting to realize they want to encourage this kind of things because it would allow them to achieve all the goals they have for creating lively streets during the day but also providing all the services they want to provide. the one other thing i want to say about that is probably one of my favorite parts of the book in terms of coming up with a new perspective and opening my eyes we talk about the binary switch

that's going to be flipped so we are going to take it to the dealer and trade it in a. that starts to get a little bit more complicated when we talk about the different levels of automation. in reality there are a lot of reasons we've skipped most of those, but the fact is there's so many different things that drivers do, especially commercial drivers and it's a small number of them that are being automated. even when we do automate the vehicle as it moves down the road, we may not automate all of the functions or we may simply

shifted some of them to another location or aggregate them so a lot of the interesting stuff that is happening in the commercial street automation and trucking companies are you may have one operator who has bike six trucks and they are watching all six of them from the pilots wherever that is and the trucks are calling home and they get confused or need permission so can i overtake this car on a dark curve with some sketchy people they would say of course not. others are stuffed in a bridge in the middle of nowhere. the system may actually learn from that and not ask permission

the next time because it knows that it's not safe. some are looking at operating modes where the machine does most of the controls that solve some of the gross motor controls like it will get the robot to the worksite within the human being will come over and do the calling and and manipulation of the hands or the pinchers. the point i'm trying to make is that it isn't going to be on and off. it's going to be a gray zone of all of these different kinds of behaviors. another way i talked about the book is there will be those who

want to focus on the throttle and have the computer do everything else. there will be people like me where i'm just going to be focused on ho health related ths to be fuel efficient as possible. the computer can do all the other driving. or people with kid who just want to have full control. so disaggregating the driving function. it's going to be something with tremendous appeal. it's going to look a lot more like the propriety of apps you have on your phone rather than just it's a smart phone, no it's like a swiss army knife with these 87,000 different things it can do for you.

i think that's the way we are going to 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 an incredibly frightening question. thinking first what can we talk about today that will connect this to what is going on in the world and as i was thinking about that, a disturbing scene from i believe it was minneapolis. if they havthey have been somewn texas or dallas of the large fuel delivery trucks barreling along the interstate highway into an area of the protest march and thankfully everyone got out of the way and

restrained themselves for taking out their frustrations and it got me thinking that is a great example of where automation is going to change how this might play out in the future. 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 research is when the attacks were happening in europe and people were very rarely making the connection not only that more connectivity and automation in commercial trucks would allow for the coast witches and other kinds of things that would allow

this to be prevented or stopped but people were thinking about the flipside which is what if we took an attack strategy like the denial of service attack where this might be oversimplifying it got you unleash a network of computers to overwhelm a target by sending lots of messages to it. what if that strategy were unleashed using a fleet of automated trucks and you send 100 tractor-trailers steaming full blast into a major building or something.

that is an incredibly frightening possibility. and i found it very unlikely -- let me strike that because i found it pretty likely that a company could give to the point where something like that would be possible without, you know, the important people in government who ought to understand that risk actually having a handle on it. ..

>> and that is a major on - - major cybersecurity with on - - ref. so it is those kinds of things that in a situation we are in imagine 2030 and all this happens most of the trucking network was automated incredibly vulnerable position they were stretched to the max already because of the pandemic and civil unrest and one of the geopolitical adversaries decides on our

automated tracking network that was incredibly frightening. and those are the kinds of things to get attention and many this is a good product liability companies do their best. that would put general motors out of business so i worry more about those first changes.

>> i'm not sure how much time we have last one - - left. i will keep going. how do you see self-governing cars? >> there are some things that are regulated at the state level consumer safety like seatbelts is federally regulated crash test regulations states have

jurisdiction over licensing and cities and municipalities have regulation over traffic laws i spent a lot of time working with cities 2007 through 2019 and that was what planted the seed for the book. because of the reasons that i said was automated mobility it will be a whole range of products or services cities will be important because it will be a business of niches

and cities have the most diverse markets if you identify a segment of those hipsters that want autonomous skateboards and you go to a city and work with the city government and figure out how to get it. >> that is sort of what has happened they didn't start out in a cooperated mode in cities but they eventually got there. and then to understand what these are for mobility

companies as opposed to just showing up and breaking the law and rather than just reacting by companies are the rules and the conditions by which they can come into cities with new offerings that's the big turnaround in the next couple years to feel a little more comfortable to make the process a little easier like a version of all the sidewalks and people getting angry about it and then to go back to the beginning and figure how to make it work. >> that's the interesting thing that it's not just going to be one product set than by

18700-pound horsepower and vehicles that are right sized for this situation and the use and that's great this is about breaking down the box of the automobile into the pieces that fits into cities it's the technology that puts them in control and then to make the most of it. >> what are the promises of the driverless car? >> what will happen in every

form but the effect on the public sphere? >> that's a great question i have a whole chapter called the urban machines. saw the book about cities but also about technology and mobility. then the parking discussions is fascinating. there has been designed the last couple years. what do we do with this excess

parking and what we do need for automated vehicles. and then satellite parking lots. so that creates a tremendous amount of excitement and all the land that is devoted to parking. and in southern california.

and there are some detailed studies. what that is doing all the things you have been trying to do with density and housing and mixed-use reducing out of dependency with the automated driverless the way we are promised. there are ideas and anyone that tells you they know what the history is laid out like.

very thoughtful guidance out there. which is like the club city transportation in the us and canada. and with city streets. that they should be scared automobiles should be at the bottom of the pecking order. but half of the

recommendations to have those transportation planners and then to shape the city of the future. and very specific visions. i encourage you to take a look at it. essentially like to say look at the future by regulations. but then they say we enforce that is to make these requirements of the services that operate on the street we

will have our software talk to their software and it's pretty visionary and gives them a lot more leverage to do things like delivery when they are people around. and there is a sensor when there are pedestrians on the street in charge them congestion fees to get in and interfere with pedestrian life. and the result of that companies deliberately make.

wednesday have that ability and up into the marketplace to incentivize different users of the network to change their behavior. that is super exciting with those possibilities. >> i really trying to understand and to think about how we get around with driverless vehicles we ought to look at how our stuff gets around by a driverless

vehicles how much will that change? >> there is a real good work and shipping something and it has been a steady rocketing decline that cost 90 percent less to ship something then it did 100 years ago. in roughly the same whether shipping that across the country or across town. >> what if it drops by another 90 percent? it is easy and it's cheap what

does that look like? the 20th experience it took something from the headquarters in shanghai to wuhan or another big city on the other side of china. now it's 24 hour thing and then now ali baba 5 million

they could be any in under 24 hours or 5 billion hits in the book is such a staggering number can't even remember it. and what it means and what we are experiencing like amazon shoveling more crap off the web and that started with

walmart 20 or 30 years ago. and that they can team up with someone who has a big network of potential customers who are willing to do decorating so we could circuit build supply chains locally using the cheap distribution whether there are economic modes that start to develop based on that. so that is to develop scenarios and to understand how we avoid what is happening right now blocking us into the future of the last mile at

that is completely dominated by a handful of components to think about more and the role of automation with that could be to make that possible to drive that cost down. at the end of the day if we allow the technology for automated delivery to be dominated and strolled on - - control exclusively then it will be really bad. we need to find ways for

postal systems and business improvement districts and municipal operators like seattle 100 years ago was able to somehow establish or start or take control its own automated delivery network for anyone that wanted to use it at a fair rate. with its own business partners had didn't do all the anticompetitive things and it became like a utility to allow small businesses to connect to their customers.

and then lining up for that battle. amazon and walmart are duking it out and there is a competitiveness where is that third model? >> what how does that work with driverless cars and the patriot act?

>> this is something i read about quite a bit in the beginning of the book. i don't thank you have to know a lot about automated vehicles to know the exterior are riddled with sensors and cameras, radar, laser scanners, scanners, that are constantly collecting data around them. it's hard to get a clear sense how much of that is analyzed by take a picture of you walking down the street of the self driving car do i save it? so that's a big risk and i

think that something people are thinking about there's been a lot of issues but the truth is is far more surveillance going on inside the vehicle so why does google more in china why are they funding the vehicles? this is the mobile phone. i like to tell people what does it feel like to drive a tesla? it's like driving an ipad. once inside you are being constantly scanning i read

about this in the book and then deal with driver attention during this transition from human driven to partial. >> an argument i make it's not going anywhere. and instead to profile you but again why are they interested in this? research and for ads that have ever been created in the history of mankind with endless commutes the

sensitivity to distance will probably be reduced it's an incredibly future opportunity so that is at the net of this to see the future of media and computing and it is no coincidence to have a group already working what that experience will be like and try to understand it and figure out ways to get in on it. there is a lot of value for consumers they are but when you start thinking about we're

in a future world everything is automated. wealthy people have their own private self driving vehicles or they turn the internal surveillance off. it's like a cloak going to this well protected bubble and then those that cannot afford that and then have to share vehicles like huber and it is probably supported by advertising revenue. once you step into a vehicle like that you are just being scanned constantly.

you are really performing for your ride in a lot of ways. and it is just tremendous is not far from reality or the business model for the web i don't think it's crazy. i think that's all the questions if anybody has anything else if not we can call it a night. >> thank you so much. thank you for your talk tonight.

thank you for watching tonight as well you're interested in more townhall events follow this channel by clicking the follow button please support us tonight hit the by the book button at the bottom. and you can also donate to townhall thanks again and see you next time.