one of the beauties of technology is that it -- it's sort of mediates our perception of reality. however, with increasing mediation, there's complexity d there's also danger that it's difficult to see the consequences of our actions. because of this mediation. and this potentially could also undermine our ability to choose. and to have responsibility. because of this thick layer of mediation. so based on this, do we see -- and i would like to hear some discussion, is there a danger of -- with the march of technology that we really contribute to the further concentration of wealth and knowledge and power in the hands of the very few, to the point where we have no longer have any consumers to buy our roducts?

sebastian: the question is about technology most recent developments changing the balance of the distribution of wealth? yes, no? really about the effect of the most recent technology developments in silicon valley on wealth, global wealth and inequity and different things in the world? certainly the divergence of wealth in this country, and the middle class used to be a floor and the elevator and get there and stay there. and now it's an escalator that you have to keep running up but is running in the opposite direction and you have to keep running faster and faster to even attain this. and a very concerning development i think for us as a nation. the division of the people who have a chance and the people who don't have a chance. and i think it's a concerning development worldwide. that that has to be addressed

ecause under utilizing our resources by giving some people enormous power and other people no power at all. and having said this this goes hand in hand that basic services are becoming more available for everybody. not that -- just leads to a really -- leads to a really bad situation. but it's not quite as bad as it could be if for the poorest of the poor, and worse and worse and worse and worse. and a long discussion about what the implications are. i'm a big fan of the estate tax. and it has a chance to reset dynasties. jaron: i'll applaud that. sebastian: very important. and i'm coming from europe. where we're much more socialist than you guys are. and how little is done for poor people in this country. and people of low income people, of race, people of color and so on. and how badly we manage ourselves in terms of people

having a chance to get a great education. but i also hope that we can invent technologies that help that. so my own company works in the education space. and our objective is to democratize education. and take the best education to the world. and we're not the only ones. there's other companies that do the same thing. and they're using technology to leverage what used to be behind stanford's walls and make it available. and responsibility, absolutely yes. we should think globally. we should think about people. because we have 7.2 billion of us and an amazing gift that we can turn into an amazing progress in the world. and not everything is peachy obviously. but to think about what -- how could use silicon valley to redemocratize the world. jaron: so the question about whether the world becomes more obscure to us because it's so mediated by technology,

particularly technologies from other people? right now, a lot of the news you read is selected by algorithms and those algorithms are based on data that's often gamed by a bunch of people trying to manipulate it and becomes obscure why you're reading what you're reading. and you know, going back to this question of empirically whether we're willing -- if you would ask me in the 1980's would it be possible, once the internet is really -- we weren't calling it that yet but once everything was networked and people were sharing media and they were collaborating all over the world would it be possible for something like climate change denialism to get a foothold? no. it would have been possible. because everyone will have access to evidence and everything will be clear. it turns out to be possible. and it turns out not only to be possible but it can be possible in a really politically powerful way. that really has an impact. i thought that would be -- i that you that couldn't happen. -- i thought that couldn't happen. the way out of that to help people not lose touch with reality, when there's just so much technology everywhere, and there's so many incentives to

manipulate it, is to make these interfaces that are clear as possible so people can have as much access to expertise and understanding their information as possible. and i think we failed at that. i honestly do. i think that we have an information system now that's all about manipulation. because it has perverse incentives. so there's -- the way journalism has been about click bait and being centralized around the top servers and all that kind of stuff. i don't want -- you can read my books if you want to hear my argument on that. but -- and this is -- a beef i have with the artificial intelligence world. because if you say, oh, here's siri or qutana deciding what you should read or whatever algorithm it is, cibc we're social creatures we tend to defer to them. but what it does is it creates this obscurity. because if we're honest, what it is is it's some stupid algorithm that -- none of these algorithms are that great yet. i'm very proud of what our field has done. but at the same time we have to have some perspective. and recognize that it's still pretty crude. and what we should really be

doing is visualizing for people what the algorithms are doing. giving them access to understanding the mechanism as much as possible so they have an opportunity to understand their world better as doug would have expected them to. we should expect more from 0 you are people rather than we've automatically chosen these things and chosen like the latest one from facebook is what things from your past you should remember. well, that's ok. but i don't mind -- i don't mind facebook offering that service. but i want them to make visible that algorithm so people can look at the mechanism and see what the corpus is that's driving it and play with it and understand it. and, you know, open source in itself doesn't do it. we need a new kind of computer science that visualizes and makes clear what algorithms do or we can't use them intelligently. what could be more clear than that? so that's the answer to the mediation issue, i believe. more visualization or more explanation, less fantasy. you know. less manipulation. and then the second question about the power distribution, of course, is tremendously

concerning. and here, like in the personal computer era, from the 1970's into the early 1990's, before everything got networked, well, there was a really interesting thing that happened with personal computers which is like little shops. like some dry cleaner or something. they would buy a little -- they would buy -- an apple ii or a mac or an early p.c. and they would own their own data. the data quobcying on their desks. and the -- the data would be sitting on their desks. and the data would allow them to be entrepreneurs and i'm convinced that the personal computer era did a lot to raise the middle class because it gave so many people the ability to have unique information powers as small players in their market. which is what capitalism is all about. when we have entered into this cloud era, where it's -- one of our big companies that owns people's data, and co-lates it and gives some algorithms to -- people no longer own their own data and that's the mechanism by which technology has been hurting the middle class.

that's absolutely correctable. that's an engineering issue that we can actually solve. and i -- we have to. it's not -- what we're doing is not sustainable. >> one last question. think we have time for. >> my name is laurus and a friend of doug engelbart back in the day. we used to exchange visits to each other's labs. i was managing the stanford artificial intelligence lab. i admired his work. a good demo he gave was -- a very good presentation of the state of the art in interactive computing. however, i disagree about the appraisal of it. it was called the mother of all demos, i believe. by some reporters who didn't know the state of the art.

there was one new idea introduced in the talk. it didn't work. the thing that got the most attention was the point and click interface using the mouse. the mouse was a less expensive way of pointing and clicking than the prior state of the art. which was so-called light guns and light pens. but it was not a new idea. the point and click graphical user interface had been around for 15 years at that point. it was introduced at m.i.t. on the whirlwind computer. and later widely used in the sage air defense system which i helped design.

but that was not a new idea. t was -- became popular. especially after the -- they introduced the introduction of the personal computer. t now the new idea that doug showed was the one-handed keyboard. didn't work out. it was -- it was dropped. and of course the mice are now sort of fading. being replaced by touchpads. and the like. so while that was a very nice been somewhat blown up in perspective beyond what it really accomplished. so i'm sorry that's the dissenting view. jaron: yeah. well -- there's a couple of

things i want to say about that. assessing the value of contributions in computer science can often be tricky. because i would tend to agree that isolating a single contribution of doug's like -- often he's introduced for the mouse. and i don't think that's -- that's the important thing he did. what he did is he did a holistic sensibility and demonstrated an overall approach to technology in a scenario for using it that was fresh. and i think you're teasing it apart into elements. i agree with you on the points of history. i do want to say that if you were going to apply the same standard to the a.i. field, a whole lot of a.i. achievements would fall into nothing really fast because a lot of that is puffery. if you want to play that game i think your own field would suffer pretty badly. but i don't think that that is -- that's not -- that's not the important field of play. i have to say something else. back in those days, the stanford a.i. lab was such a

charming, amazing eccentric place back in the hills and this sort of weird decaying ultra modern arc building and loved it back then it was so strange. so a lot to remember about that wonderful lab as well from the period. but i -- you know, there's -- there are levels of achievement that can't be described in terms of the atoms that need to be described in terms of their molecules. and doug was a molecular innovator and i'll defend him on those terms. [applause] henry: i think we're going to go with one more question. that would be you. >> hi. my name is andre mekert. henry, i would like to go back to your last question. would like to go back to henry's last question if you had to name out about three or four things which you two would think would change the world most in the next 15 to 20 years, could you do that?

i know it's difficult. but three or four industries or key things in the next 15 or 20 years, please. jaron: the most important oin vegases of the next 30 years? is that -- >> what you guys think from today might change the world the most. jaron: i think you're not holding the microphone close enough or something so i couldn't quite -- i think you're asking what do we think are the most important innovations to seek in the next -- 25, 30? >> 15 or 20. sebastian: can i think nor 20 years? -- for 20 years? i've always been so wrong in predicting these things. it's amazing. so i can tell you things that i would love to see happening. something obvious like we're moving from a sharing society from an ownership society and the car being shared through uber and also personal belongs and moving to an on-demand service and your clothing for

the evening you push a button and it comes on a machine. your food will come out of a machine and don't have to worry about going shopping anymore. and maintaining your refrigerator or other things will go away. there's a company called calica and about longevity and on making people live longer. so maybe the time between us and our death in 20 years will be the same as it is today. because we lived 20, 30, 50 years longer and maybe 100 years longer and maybe we crack that code. i believe in medicine, a whole bunch of changes will take place. that between personal medicine and preventive medicine. that will probably render half the deaths today completely survivable. easily in my opinion and that will be very massive for society. transportation. a hyper loop which makes a lot of sense. flight. i believe we're going to change the basic mode of transportation. memorization. as