Latest / General Magic & The Soul of Tech / Ep. 8 | From General Magic Idealism to the White House | Megan Smith

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Ep. 8 | From General Magic Idealism to the White House | Megan Smith · General Magic & The Soul of Tech

0:02
SPEAKER_0: This is Mike Stern.
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SPEAKER_0: And I'm Tom "Hersh" Hershenson.
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SPEAKER_0: Welcome to General Magic & The Soul of Tech.
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SPEAKER_1: We believed we were building something that would change the world, and in some ways we did.
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SPEAKER_1: In others, we didn't understand what we were setting in motion.
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SPEAKER_1: The story of General Magic isn't over.
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SPEAKER_1: We're still living inside what it started.
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Our special guest today is the extraordinary Megan Smith,
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who went from being a young engineer at General Magic
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to being Chief Technology Officer of the United States,
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and who is currently involved in a major set of initiatives
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to help humanize innovation and bring its benefits to society rather than to just
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a select few.
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I have to say that I think one of the things that distinguishes Megan,
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other than her wicked intelligence and her sensitivity to human needs and
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the human side of technology,
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is an unfailing optimism,
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never someone to ask can,
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but instead how,
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and an unparalleled ability to think outside
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the way things are conventionally framed,
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to zoom back and see a bigger picture than many and perhaps most people perceive.
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Megan,
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tell us a little bit about what you're working on now and how it might have related
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to your younger work.
1:33
SPEAKER_3: Sure.
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SPEAKER_3: Totally.
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I was just recently at a bunch of different graduations and I was lucky in 2015
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to be the commencement speaker for MIT.
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SPEAKER_3: And so what I'm doing now kind of relates to some advice I gave.
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SPEAKER_3: So I guess I'm trying to take my advice.
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I told them that you should go where there's tons of us and advance the field,
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you know, tons of tech sites, just like powering in and it's so fun.
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There's so many amazing discoveries,
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solutions, you know, engineering, solving problems, working together, much to do.
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But also,
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I guess what I learned a lot,
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maybe I knew it a little bit from our early days at Magic and maybe from growing up
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in Buffalo and other things.
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But really,
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going in the White House,
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as CTO, we thought we were a bit technology for anything, right?
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SPEAKER_3: Shouldn't we help any subject?
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And I found that we were expected in many rooms,
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but if I went down the hall we were less expected as tech people.
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People felt like,
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you know,
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IT or something,
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you're like, my computer's working, you know, why are you guys here?
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SPEAKER_3: And it wasn't an insulting thing, or they didn't know what they were doing.
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SPEAKER_3: They were amazing people.
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SPEAKER_3: They knew much more what they were doing.
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But on these problems that are a bit I'd call them harder than self-driving cars
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that require all this interconnection of socio tech,
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culture, other things, tech wasn't always at the table in government.
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SPEAKER_3: So that's what I was calling in this commencement speech.
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SPEAKER_3: Go also go where you're rare.
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So go where there's lots of you,
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go where you're rare and ping pong between those and have those experiences.
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And when you get to the places where you're rare,
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you know,
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listen a lot because you don't have that expertise
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and people really know what they're doing.
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SPEAKER_3: And that's where I'm focused now.
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SPEAKER_3: I feel like there's so many people in the commercial tech sector.
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SPEAKER_3: I love that.
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SPEAKER_3: I worked at it forever.
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But I'm trying to stay a little more in the areas of what you might call socio tech
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or civil society tech innovation.
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SPEAKER_3: And work with people.
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SPEAKER_3: So I'm on a bunch of boards.
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One of them Think of Us,
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which is foster care tech innovation,
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Planet Read,
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which is an amazing colleague from years ago who realized that you could learn from,
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you know,
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if you sang karaoke,
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you'd be seeing the ball going along or the words moving — same language subtitles
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on television help people learn to read,
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especially in developing world countries where people might not have access.
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SPEAKER_3: That's becoming law in India right now, which is to include same language.
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SPEAKER_3: Earth Conservation Corps, which is here in DC, it's local.
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The kids cleaned out the river and our sort of bird corp,
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river corp,
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story corp,
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data corp,
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young people sort of fixing their town as part of their own education,
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especially young people having a second chance.
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SPEAKER_3: So like call it a really broad range.
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SPEAKER_3: And then I'm on the board of MIT.
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SPEAKER_3: I'm on the board of LA28 for the Olympics.
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SPEAKER_3: So a broad range of work.
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SPEAKER_3: And I have a small company called Shift 7, which means if you type Shift + 7, it means "and."
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And it's really bringing these methods of scouting and scaling for innovators,
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building communities of practice,
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cross-pollinating disconnected networks that ought to know each other,
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could know each other and work better together,
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doing pilots and sprints,
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though these kinds of methods that we learned from tech,
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but we could apply them anywhere.
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SPEAKER_3: And certainly my time at General Magic informs a lot of this.
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Yeah, I mean I see it as a kind of a three layer cake,
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you know,
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the in terms of how you humanize innovation and how you bring innovation to bear
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on real problems, you know, as opposed
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SPEAKER_3: Mm-hmm.
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SPEAKER_0: to ones that don't matter.
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There's government and policy,
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there's legislation at the state and federal levels,
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but then there's citizen action as well.
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SPEAKER_0: Do you weave those three together in the things you're paying attention to right now?
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SPEAKER_0: Where are the levers for change?
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So the things you're talking about like policy,
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citizen action, law,
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law itself,
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also tech innovation and prototyping and scaling things and infrastructure.
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SPEAKER_3: So let's call that like a symphony with all these different pieces.
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SPEAKER_3: When we're in the tech commercial world, usually the engineers are in charge, which makes sense.
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SPEAKER_3: And then you've got policy, comms, other colleagues in the company.
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SPEAKER_3: But they're at least in the room.
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SPEAKER_3: And when you go to government, it flips.
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SPEAKER_3: So of course, policy and comms and that group is in charge.
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SPEAKER_3: And then the others are there.
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We include folks like a surgeon general,
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if it's medical,
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or if we have a vertical like NASA,
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I mean amazing,
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you know,
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or DOD or other kinds of very technical agencies,
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of course, those people are in the room.
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But as a general way of moving in government or in a nonprofit,
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you don't naturally have a CTO or data science lead or others in your nonprofit or
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in your government as a standard role,
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just like you would have a legal leader or a manager or a policy expert.
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And so what we learned with President Obama,
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certainly he has so many skills, and one of them is a community organizer.
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And so he was noticing that sets of American capabilities,
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sets of Americans,
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as a class or a group weren't at the table with him in some meetings and
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so just kind of pull up a chair, right?
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SPEAKER_3: And so expanding American capability.
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SPEAKER_3: He's not the first president to do that.
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The first president to do that is really President Washington when he created
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the Corps of Eng,
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which is the Army Corps of Engineers as they built Bunker Fort,
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or President Lincoln creates the National Academy of Sciences
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to make sure there's advising for the independent advising for the government.
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Or FDR, because of World War II,
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bringing in Vannevar Bush,
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who was the first formal science advisor,
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National Defense Research Council that became OSRD,
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it became Office of Science and Technology Policy, where I worked.
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SPEAKER_3: So this idea of technical capability is not a new idea with President Obama.
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SPEAKER_3: It's just in this moment, it was sort of digital tech innovation methods and tools at any table.
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SPEAKER_3: And that was something that we were doing a lot of.
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What has been the biggest challenge that you're encountering
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in bringing tech together with those other areas of focus or concern?
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SPEAKER_3: I think there's a couple different challenges or opportunities you can see.
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One is that maybe it's a great discrimination to convince you that the power tools
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of the day are not for your topic.
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So why wouldn't you use,
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you know,
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it's sort of like having a symphony and saying,
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let's not have the percussion or have them in another room,
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we'll contract that and we'll have one person.
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SPEAKER_3: Like it's not obvious at all until you see it.
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SPEAKER_3: And you're like, why are we doing that?
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SPEAKER_3: What is culturally making us do that?
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It's interesting because with the Artemis,
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you know, that just we just saw them going to the moon.
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SPEAKER_3: I don't know if you know this, but I'll show you an image really quickly.
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SPEAKER_3: See that image?
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This is Ralph Abernathy and others at the you can see the rockets here,
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see, and they're protesting the Apollo 11 launch and it's worth looking that up.
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SPEAKER_3: Why would Americans protest the Apollo 11 launch?
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SPEAKER_3: Well the community was saying like we're proud!
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SPEAKER_3: Americans!
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SPEAKER_3: Like this is amazing that we can do this!
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SPEAKER_3: Let's do this.
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SPEAKER_3: But since we can do this, couldn't we work on poverty and hunger and all these other issues?
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SPEAKER_3: Why don't we kind of moonshot that?
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SPEAKER_3: And it's a fair point.
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And so how do we observe that the challenges every day can use the power tools and
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the top talent of our time.
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SPEAKER_3: And we can run at these hard problems.
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Like I said,
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a self driving car is a hard problem,
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but maybe it's not as hard as solving foster care challenges,
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which are really all of the young people that we as the state are trying to help
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and raise because their parents are struggling.
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SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's interesting to me to think about what's animating your work, right?
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SPEAKER_2: Because it's not about maximizing the return for venture capitalists.
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SPEAKER_2: It's about maximizing the return for us as a society.
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SPEAKER_2: And you mentioned earlier that your work is informed by your work at General Magic.
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I was wondering whether it informed it in terms of a sense of higher duty
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or civic purpose or in what ways you draw on the General Magic experience and
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the lessons learned there in your current efforts?
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SPEAKER_3: You know, I think to me it's an apprentice - journey - mastery experience, right?
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So we were lucky young people to get the chance to work with people like Joanna
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and Bill, Marc, Andy, Susan,
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Jane, all these, you know, Mike, you, all these teammates who were very experienced.
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Certainly people who know the General Magic story know
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that this is basically Steve Jobs' core team,
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from the Mac spinning out and deciding to go after this next new thing, right?
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SPEAKER_3: Mobile.
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SPEAKER_3: And Marc came with that vision, you know, from his background at Aspen and other places.
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SPEAKER_3: And for us, we were young people in the middle of that innovation experience.
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And we could see,
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you know,
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I personally,
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when I looked across a lot of things I worked on, I found I had some themes.
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SPEAKER_3: One of them is to try to make the world a better place.
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SPEAKER_3: Like most people, we all work that way, right?
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SPEAKER_3: Help people.
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SPEAKER_3: And then the second was how do we reduce our impact on the planet?
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SPEAKER_3: ...has been some of my themes.
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SPEAKER_3: And what we were working on was uh this idea of this device that could empower you.
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SPEAKER_3: It was much more of a dashboard in our vision.
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SPEAKER_3: We were empowering you to be in touch when you want to.
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Now, you know,
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obviously we're in a different time where people have created algorithms
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to convince you to stare at your phone all the time.
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SPEAKER_3: And you know, attention is somehow a commodity and we have kind of become this product.
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And the big question for all of us together is,
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you know,
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can we back out of this business model that has this surveillance thing
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that has come?
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SPEAKER_3: That was not anything to do with the original idea.
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The idea was really having access to the world's libraries,
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content, and having access to each other.
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But the challenge obviously we have now is the centralization of the wealth
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and I guess it's to be expected because that's what humans do.
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We saw it in the Gilded Age,
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we saw it in the first Industrial Age, we saw the second Industrial Age.
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SPEAKER_3: So here we are in this industrial age, and it's a digital gilded age.
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SPEAKER_3: So I look for the Jane Addams and the Ida B.
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Wells, and these people,
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the union organizers and the others who are also here together
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with our industrialists.
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SPEAKER_3: And we need both of them, all of them.
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SPEAKER_3: It's a mix, right?
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SPEAKER_3: But how do we help lift up the visibility?
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SPEAKER_3: Like I did the acquisitions of Google Earth and Maps, and we can do navigated mapping.
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SPEAKER_3: I mean, there's so much value.
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And in fact,
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one of my favorite things that happened:
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my colleague Lalitesh made a tool when we launched Google Maps and Earth.
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SPEAKER_3: A lot of the metadata, like where's the hospital and where's the school, where's the airport?
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All that data is not necessarily available to license from the equivalent
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of what we have in the US, the US Geological Survey.
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And so Lalitesh launched something called Mapmaker,
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which worked a bit like Wikipedia in crowdsourcing.
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SPEAKER_3: And it just posted satellite imagery.
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SPEAKER_3: And then like Lahore, Pakistan didn't have a lot of metadata.
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And then people were drawing their street,
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labeling it,
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putting the hospital,
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putting things,
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and pretty soon across six months,
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the diaspora and the people living there put themselves on the map.
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And when we looked at the tool's use across maybe two years,
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it was all throughout the developing world.
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SPEAKER_3: And those countries wouldn't had the resources and time to develop all that metadata.
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So this won't be great for somebody who's listening on audio,
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but this is from a paper from nearly 10 years ago: 2017.
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And it's from my colleague Lauren Smith at Future Privacy Forum took a lot of
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the work we did at the White House...
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And these two graphs are really, really interesting.
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The one on the left is listing potential harms from automated decision making,
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and they've broken it into four groups.
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Both for a cluster of things for Individual Harms,
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either illegal or just unfair, and then Collective or Societal Harms.
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So one bucket is Loss of Opportunity,
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like employment discrimination or housing discrimination or education or insurance,
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those kinds of things.
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SPEAKER_3: And then for society it's a differential, right?
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SPEAKER_3: The next bucket is about Economic Loss, credit discrimination, narrowing choices.
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SPEAKER_3: These are all things that are already happening with algorithms, right?
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SPEAKER_3: Differential of pricing.
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Social detriments,
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network bubbles,
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dignity harm, constraints of bias, filter bubbles for groups, stereotypes.
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SPEAKER_3: We're seeing this with social media all day.
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And then Loss of Liberty:
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you know,
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suspicion,
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incarceration,
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we see facial-recognition misidentification,
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people get taken to jail and have to make their way back out.
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SPEAKER_3: And this chart is very helpful.
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SPEAKER_3: World leaders ask me for copies of it because this is so structurally helpful.
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SPEAKER_3: What I find interesting is the second chart.
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SPEAKER_3: And the second chart is called Potential Mitigation Sets.
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And so already in 2017,
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we had identified these harms,
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and we were already working mitigation for all of this work.
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And again,
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nascent,
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just like AI is nascent,
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and you never know:
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Are we headed towards Star Trek and the computer that loves us
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and helps us fly around and communicate?
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SPEAKER_3: Or are we headed towards HAL, where it's a pretty bad ending for us?
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And so I'm an engineer,
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so I'm like,
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let's pay attention to these people who have done this amazing work
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and can we do more of this?
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You know,
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we found this when we were doing the work with the President on "Preparing for
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the Future of Artificial Intelligence" was the name of the work that we launched
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about a year before this.
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One of the things we did in that work set is open it up for conversation,
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looking at law and safety,
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looking at downward pressure on jobs,
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looking at AI and different kinds of use cases,
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and finding out what are we doing in America,
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what are we doing in the world,
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and then coming up with sort of strategic planning as well as an R&D plan.
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SPEAKER_3: And that's what this work was that President Obama launched in 2016 in the fall.
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This follow-on work was really looking at who was already working on mitigation
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and challenges that we're seeing that we were just talking about.
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So the headline there,
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I guess,
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kind of a longer way around is:
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we really have to accelerate people who are already doing this work and get them
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into the mix faster.
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SPEAKER_0: What have you seen that you think poses the most likelihood of success?
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SPEAKER_0: We've been looking at different models for AI regulation, the public health model, right?
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There need to be gatekeepers for frontier models,
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public health in terms of age limitations,
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the way you can't buy liquor or cigarettes unless you're 21.
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What are you seeing coming up from the bottom from people
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who are doing work — what do you see as potentially effective mitigation strategies?
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SPEAKER_3: Yeah, there's I think there's a lot of good work going on.
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Some great work by Dr.
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Joy Buolamwini from MIT,
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the Algorithmic Justice League,
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raising awareness,
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and her work,
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Gender Shades, that really helped shift... She did that with Deb Raji and others.
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SPEAKER_3: Face recognition, a lot of the databases for training were very biased.
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And so, you know,
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why is it,
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when we use a camera,
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that we have to turn on the flash for people with darker skin tone
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and it doesn't matter with lighter skin... Why?
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SPEAKER_3: This is technology that could be working with all of that.
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SPEAKER_3: So it's just a lack of having the right data set and teammates to do that work.
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So Joy was able to do that and in fact when she came out with her research,
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IBM right away, it was reaching out and saying, Okay, what do we do?
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SPEAKER_3: And they began adapting.
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And an executive at Amazon actually attacked her,
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but many Turing Winners and others came back and said, uh excuse me.
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SPEAKER_3: And so, you know, then things shifted.
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But a lot of times people don't want to be told that something's not going right
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that they're doing.
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So,
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but we need to we need to call each other out and help each other then do something
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about it.
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SPEAKER_3: The, you know, engineers like hard problems.
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SPEAKER_3: These are hard problems.
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One of the boards I recently joined was ROOST:
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Robust Open Online Safety Tools that Camille Francois and others put together out of
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the AI summit in Paris,
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which is really supporting us to have more open available tools
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for child protection.
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And so OpenAI and Discord and others have open- sourced some of their tools
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and other smaller companies now can use some of those tools.
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So thinking about how can we use more collective capability for some
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of these third rail issues that we're all trying to solve and create a commons or
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a shared space,
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which is what the ROOST team is trying to do around child protection and having,
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the academy,
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industry,
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civil society,
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others all contributing to that code base and the learnings and getting people
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to be able to do something about these very hard problems.
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SPEAKER_0: Yeah, there were two things.
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We were talking to Rich Miller earlier,
17:15
about the way deterministic safety was built into Telescript.
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SPEAKER_0: It was pre-LLM-based AI.
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SPEAKER_0: But the design philosophy was safety first.
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SPEAKER_0: And
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SPEAKER_3: Mm-hmm.
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SPEAKER_0: we need to think about how to prevent bad actors and rogue agents and all that.
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SPEAKER_0: And you know, as a design philosophy, that's not where the AI world is now.
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SPEAKER_0: How does that design philosophy get inculcated?
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SPEAKER_0: That safety first and asking not just "Can we?"
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SPEAKER_0: but "Should we?"
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SPEAKER_0: as one of the fundamental questions as a design choice.
17:41
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
17:44
SPEAKER_3: I think that's the million dollar question, right?
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SPEAKER_3: That's the hard Yeah.
17:47
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
17:49
to Marc Porat,
17:50
and he was talking about how in the next couple of years,
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when silicon is available and LLMs have been reengineered,
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that we're gonna have not just the internet in our pocket,
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like you helped make happen in the 90s,
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but we're gonna have a superintelligence in our pocket that can be a coach,
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can be a teacher, can be a companion, can be a doctor.
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SPEAKER_0: How do we design those things?
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If that's gonna happen,
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and again,
18:12
I don't know if you agree with that or not,
18:13
but he usually sees the future pretty clearly.
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SPEAKER_0: I mean, if that's gonna happen.
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SPEAKER_3: I think it's already
18:16
SPEAKER_0: What do we do to make those things not destructive?
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SPEAKER_3: Yes, it
18:19
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_3: that's the big question.
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The truth is that there's already people doing most of the things you just said,
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even if it's not super intelligence.
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SPEAKER_3: People have AI companions, especially children.
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SPEAKER_3: This is a problem.
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SPEAKER_3: It's actually devastating for them and for society.
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I was in Chemical Engineering visiting committee recently,
18:39
and some of the TAs were saying that they used to have,
18:41
you know, 30, 40,
18:43
50 students come to office hours,
18:45
now they get less than five because they can have the conversation with that.
18:50
And maybe the future people will say,
18:52
that's okay, that's better, it's more efficient to learn this way.
18:54
SPEAKER_3: But I think there's something amazing about community and learning in a community.
18:59
And also you can't tell which students are struggling with which thing
19:02
because you're not able to interact with them.
19:03
SPEAKER_3: Obviously, the AI is and it can learn from that.
19:06
SPEAKER_3: But it's not having the expert person, it's having aggregated.
19:10
SPEAKER_3: I mean, artificial intelligence right now is really aggregated intelligence.
19:13
SPEAKER_3: So all of us, sort of aggregated and then coming back in a SaaS model.
19:19
SPEAKER_3: I think it's these are the hardest questions.
19:22
SPEAKER_3: And the way that I approach them personally is it's depressing and exhausting to focus on them.
19:28
SPEAKER_3: And so I go looking around for people who are doing something.
19:32
Cause I often like,
19:33
I don't what should I do,
19:34
but then I don't know who's doing this instead of looking down, I look up.
19:38
SPEAKER_3: And I call that Scout & Scale.
19:39
SPEAKER_3: Like, I wonder who's doing something.
19:41
SPEAKER_3: And you go look.
19:42
SPEAKER_3: And I think other sectors also do that same thing.
19:44
And it's certainly a huge learning that I had in the White House was for
19:48
the things we need to solve,
19:50
a lot of it is already solved or has a prototype or something.
19:54
SPEAKER_3: And just nobody knows each other.
19:56
And so in some ways,
19:57
I wish that we could use our internet technologies to better route people
20:01
who have amazing solutions, even if they're in a prototype stage, or regional stage.
20:05
You know,
20:05
one of the greatest challenges is that a lot of people feel unincluded
20:10
and they're not having the same opportunity.
20:12
SPEAKER_3: And it's not necessary for that to be this way.
20:15
And so figuring out how to community organize our innovation ways and more access
20:21
to more people by opening up what's already available in town,
20:26
which is one of the greatest things we can do.
20:28
SPEAKER_3: Like, think about the Carnegie Libraries.
20:29
SPEAKER_3: Apparently, people didn't ever go to any of the libraries.
20:32
There's more libraries than McDonald's in America,
20:34
but people didn't go to the libraries until there were librarians.
20:38
SPEAKER_3: And then they're like, I could go here now, someone can help me.
20:40
SPEAKER_3: So how do we help each other across the country to get to the kind of America we want.
20:46
And actually Vannevar Bush,
20:48
who was FDR's Science Advisor,
20:50
who wrote "Science,
20:51
The Endless Frontier," he said we can only achieve this goal of having jobs and
20:56
a better standard of living and better society with the full creative
21:01
and productive energies of the American people.
21:04
Full meaning everybody,
21:05
creative and productive meaning the creativity and the actions of all of us.
21:09
So if we want to have the society we want to have,
21:12
we have to actually get everyone in and figure out how to do that.
21:17
SPEAKER_3: That should be the focus.
21:18
SPEAKER_3: Inevitable.
21:19
SPEAKER_3: You know, it's all fixed this way.
21:21
SPEAKER_3: And it's just not.
21:22
SPEAKER_3: And so we just have to work really hard to scrub ourselves in.
21:28
SPEAKER_3: Like Shirley Chisholm says, if they didn't give you a chair, pull up a folding chair.
21:32
SPEAKER_3: So just show up and get in there.
21:34
SPEAKER_3: In fact, that's a good Andy learning.
21:36
SPEAKER_3: Andy said that at.
21:38
SPEAKER_3: We thought, the UN, they'll be like, okay, now what do we do?
21:41
SPEAKER_3: And we're like, how about if they just notice who's there?
21:43
So we actually found an amazing colleague who I work with now,
21:46
Susan Alznner,
21:46
who has the UN government liaison service that works with civil society.
21:50
And she helped us kind of "social storm" the world for the UN:
21:54
who's already fixing these things?
21:56
SPEAKER_3: And we got on the first year 800 submissions from 131 countries in like three or four weeks.
22:02
And it was amazing in an open,
22:04
simple form,
22:04
and a whole bunch of people who wanted to review that and volunteer and select.
22:08
So we had 14 people,
22:10
one hour after ratification,
22:11
take the stage at the UN and four minute, here's what I'm already doing to solve.
22:16
And it was amazing from people flying drones to plant a billion trees a year to work
22:21
on deforestation.
22:23
There was a team from Uganda who was working on teaching law in prison
22:27
because many people in less advanced countries don't have access to representation.
22:31
And in fact somebody had gotten themselves off death row just using the law properly
22:36
and having access.
22:37
There was a guy from the Amazon,
22:39
Ben Ajuarez, who is an indigenous leader and also an advanced manufacturing expert.
22:45
And he was building floating fabrication labs so that people who were living in
22:49
the Amazon, young people, could have all the tools.
22:52
SPEAKER_3: Instead of the cut down the tree job, you could be in on the Moderna vaccine.
22:56
SPEAKER_3: So very creative.
22:58
SPEAKER_3: I mean, ColdHubs was...
22:59
SPEAKER_3: Okay, get this... Airbnb meets cold storage at the market, right?
23:05
SPEAKER_3: So instead of people, it was tomatoes in the cold storage.
23:08
SPEAKER_3: And it was a genius thing.
23:09
And suddenly your tomatoes,
23:10
instead of melting in the sun in three days,
23:12
you had them and you like 3x your money.
23:15
SPEAKER_3: So just over and over and over again.
23:17
SPEAKER_3: Water solutions.
23:19
SPEAKER_3: Some people were using puppetry to work on trauma for refugee children at a whole other level.
23:26
SPEAKER_3: Another group, instead of giving a light, they gave you a light kit.
23:29
SPEAKER_3: And then the kids learned STEM by putting together a light for their family.
23:33
You know,
23:33
so very clever,
23:34
some were super simple like that, and some very, very advanced high tech.
23:38
There was a group from Malaysia that was taking all the waste instead of trucking
23:44
the trash,
23:44
they were green architects and they were taking all the food waste
23:48
from this huge building,
23:49
any huge building,
23:50
and just crushing it and microbes and heat and whatever and having soil as
23:55
a product out of your basement at your huge building.
23:58
SPEAKER_3: Like just cool stuff across the board.
23:59
That's happening in Cleveland actually — one
24:01
of my old law partners is running this food bank in Cleveland where
24:05
the food waste goes directly to garden pots.
24:07
SPEAKER_0: They
24:08
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, isn't that amazing?
24:09
SPEAKER_0: process it and it goes directly to garden pots.
24:11
And someday that'll be like people like Marc's line in the movie is like this...
24:15
What does he say?
24:16
SPEAKER_3: This will be not interesting.
24:18
SPEAKER_3: Not it's like it'll be so obvious that we just...
24:20
SPEAKER_2: Unexceptional.
24:22
SPEAKER_3: Unexceptional.
24:22
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
24:22
SPEAKER_3: I
24:23
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
24:24
SPEAKER_3: think that's I mean, that's our goal.
24:25
What's so lovely when we did the UN Solution Summit is that
24:28
because it was UN handles, we got input from every corner of the world.
24:33
And you know,
24:33
just extraordinary innovation,
24:36
men and women,
24:36
young people, old people, some engineers, not engineers, social innovation.
24:40
SPEAKER_3: It was so cool.
24:42
SPEAKER_3: I think it was Andy who first said to me, he's a card carrying optimist.
24:45
SPEAKER_3: And I said, Can I take that?
24:46
SPEAKER_3: Because I'm a card carrying optimist.
24:48
So what we take from General Magic is that optimism,
24:52
like let's work together to come up with a way to solve whatever it is in front
24:58
of us.
24:58
SPEAKER_3: Inevitable.
25:00
SPEAKER_3: You know, it's all fixed this way.
25:01
SPEAKER_3: And it's just not.
25:03
SPEAKER_3: And so we just have to work really hard to scrub ourselves in.
25:08
SPEAKER_3: Like Shirley Chisholm says, if they didn't give you a chair, pull up a folding chair.
25:13
SPEAKER_3: So just show up and get in there.
25:15
SPEAKER_3: In fact, that's a good Andy learning.
25:17
Andy said that at Apple it was starting to grow and get bigger and
25:20
then pretty soon there were meetings and he wasn't invited.
25:22
SPEAKER_3: So he'd just go anyway.
25:24
SPEAKER_3: Makers, and widen the aperture for what are the worthy problems for some of our greatest tools.
25:29
In terms of where you can be most effective,
25:31
you've been at the absolute commanding heights of government,
25:34
but also in the market economy at Google.
25:37
SPEAKER_0: Where do you think now you can be most effective?
25:39
SPEAKER_0: Would you go back into government if we can get regime change?
25:42
SPEAKER_0: Where are the levers that you wanna work with?
25:45
Yeah, there's currently a CTO, Ethan,
25:47
who's terrific and he's doing good work together with Michael Kratsios and
25:50
the science advisors.
25:51
SPEAKER_3: I'm excited to work on any of that.
25:53
SPEAKER_3: You know, whatever, whatever doors open, let's go.
25:57
What I'm currently doing is really two things:
25:59
I guess it's a General Magic thing,
26:01
just like when we were younger or had less network access or knowledge or how
26:05
to do things, we had amazing mentors.
26:07
We were all working together on these products on Magic Cap devices and cloud
26:12
and other things, but learning how to make something.
26:14
SPEAKER_3: Wendell Sanders, one of the greatest mentors ever, right?
26:17
SPEAKER_3: And it was so amazing to see Wendell.
26:19
SPEAKER_3: For people listening, we had a reunion and Wendell is in his 90s, he worked at Fairchild.
26:24
SPEAKER_3: He was my boss at General Magic, his son Brian and Walt.
26:28
SPEAKER_3: We were all the first hardware team.
26:29
SPEAKER_3: Other people came in, Lauree and Amy and Tuan and others, Tony Fadell.
26:34
SPEAKER_3: And you know, there he is.
26:35
He's like he says he has his microscope set up,
26:38
he walks,
26:38
you know, he's still doing his engineering, but boy, did he teach us a lot.
26:42
He worked with Woz,
26:43
of course,
26:43
on the early Apples and was,
26:46
you know, amazing person for how do you cause something to be built?
26:50
SPEAKER_3: How you invent something and put it in the world.
26:53
So that same mentorship or co-creation teamwork,
26:57
I like to do that with a lot of talented innovators.
26:59
SPEAKER_3: Also, I don't have the ideas they have.
27:02
SPEAKER_3: And I see them, I'm like, that's a great idea.
27:04
SPEAKER_3: That's an amazing project.
27:05
And so the surface area of supporting a lot of different people,
27:09
whether it's through networks, Journey to Lead is one of them.
27:12
SPEAKER_3: It's women innovators at MIT.
27:14
SPEAKER_3: We have a thing called Solve.
27:15
SPEAKER_3: And we have the Indigenous Communities Fellowship.
27:18
Of course,
27:18
any of the venture programs that you see at all the universities
27:21
and community colleges, just how do you help more people?
27:24
SPEAKER_3: E for All, my friend Desh helped create, he started in Lowell, Massachusetts.
27:28
All kinds of innovators in Lowell going through a cohort experience
27:32
of helping build their business plan,
27:34
build and you know,
27:35
from the Quincinera cake making company to this company that was called 99 Degrees,
27:40
which was an amazing venture company.
27:42
SPEAKER_3: So like this whole range.
27:44
SPEAKER_0: Okay.
27:44
I just read Theo Baker's book about Stanford and it was really depressing,
27:48
you know, in terms of the way the culture has become so corrupt.
27:51
The kids are recruited,
27:52
to drop out and start a company by VCs who want them to be the next Anthropic
27:57
or Open AI or whatever.
27:59
And the whole educational mission of the university has kind of soured because
28:02
the university is complicit in all that if his account is to be believed.
28:06
SPEAKER_0: And I think he's pretty credible.
28:07
SPEAKER_0: So, where are the right institutional levers?
28:09
I keep coming back to that 'cause,
28:11
we see so much of what you're trying to do being stymied by the broliarchy and
28:14
the fascist regime of the current government,
28:17
it's really hard to know where the levers are.
28:19
SPEAKER_3: And to make sure that the funding is there.
28:21
You can trace back in our country all the way probably to Benjamin Franklin
28:25
and earlier,
28:26
this idea of apprentice - journey - mastery,
28:28
whether it's through you know,
28:30
work type apprenticeships or academic apprenticeships or startups, all those things.
28:35
And it's so important not to choke the federal funding for research,
28:40
which we really learned to scale at World War II because FDR working
28:44
with Vannevar Bush they structured us to be able to invent technologies like radar,
28:50
like jet engines, and computers, other things that helped us win the war.
28:53
Then FDR said to Vannevar Bush,
28:55
who was Science Advisor, If we can do this during war, can we do this at peacetime?
29:00
SPEAKER_3: And how do we get all Americans returning here to have jobs?
29:04
SPEAKER_3: How do we improve quality of life?
29:05
SPEAKER_3: How do we help with society?
29:08
SPEAKER_3: Technology's work and innovation and commercial stuff then pays for all kind...
29:12
SPEAKER_3: I think it's Enrico Moretti's work says for every one high tech ish job, you get plus five.
29:18
You know,
29:18
one of the things that we've kind of circled around and alluded to in
29:21
the conversation is I don't want to say the business model,
29:24
but maybe the financial model is a better way to put it.
29:27
And for decades in Silicon Valley,
29:30
return on investment from for venture capitalists has been
29:33
the engine that's driven innovation and the results in terms of advances speak
29:39
for themselves.
29:40
SPEAKER_2: We could look at pharmaceutical industry or other fields and see the same sort of model.
29:46
SPEAKER_2: But the things you're doing are not predicated on a set of investors maximizing the return.
29:54
SPEAKER_2: How would you describe the model?
29:56
Because what you're doing does require funding,
29:59
and what alternatives do you see for the dominant paradigm of profit maximization
30:06
and maximum return for the people who put the money?
30:11
SPEAKER_3: It's interesting.
30:12
You made me think of two different things:
30:14
The venture capital model is critical to the success of the US.
30:19
And if we think a little bit about what's called the American Research Enterprise,
30:22
which is our fueling our universities as a third place, our labs...
30:27
There's an interesting saying from before World War Two:
30:30
until we start fueling university — Science is poverty.
30:34
SPEAKER_3: This idea that science is poverty.
30:35
SPEAKER_3: And what that means is you would need, if you were Galileo, you needed the Medicis to fund you.
30:40
SPEAKER_3: You either had to be independently wealthy or you had to go get a patron.
30:44
SPEAKER_3: You might be able to get a loan or you might be able to convince a company to give you money.
30:47
But really,
30:48
we didn't start scaling this engine room for innovation that has two dimensions
30:52
of it.
30:53
SPEAKER_3: One is money for the research, but also the workforce is the graduate students learning.
30:58
SPEAKER_3: You know, like apprentice - journey - mastery.
31:00
And so you end up with this ability for a lot of people who might never have
31:04
a chance to come into the this economic workforce.
31:09
And it's not just Tech,
31:11
it's all the different subjects that are at a university and the kinds
31:14
of hands-on experiences that people have making things.
31:18
SPEAKER_3: So that's very important.
31:20
It would be great if more of our government and civil society
31:25
and nonprofits would also adopt some of the practices of innovation.
31:29
SPEAKER_3: They are very innovative.
31:31
SPEAKER_3: And yet they're leaving a lot on the table.
31:33
SPEAKER_3: You know, even as a simple example, I have this little stuff right here.
31:36
SPEAKER_3: There's a Raspberry Pi, which is the board from your phone.
31:40
SPEAKER_3: This is a little air quality sensor.
31:42
SPEAKER_3: This is an awesome purple air sensor.
31:46
SPEAKER_3: And here's like let's call it Internet of Things, like little board.
31:50
Why don't kids in sixth grade or third grade get these ingredients and get to play
31:56
with making something with them in the same way that we might do cooking?
32:01
SPEAKER_3: You know, here's some ingredients and let's bake a cake.
32:03
SPEAKER_3: Here's some ingredients and let's test our air quality.
32:06
SPEAKER_3: So we're working on a project with some high school kids in Louisiana who are doing that.
32:10
And what's happening for them is they're learning with these items how
32:14
to put them together and it's demystifying.
32:17
SPEAKER_3: These are becoming less scary.
32:19
SPEAKER_3: Like what is that?
32:20
SPEAKER_3: And it's more, wow, I need one of those.
32:22
SPEAKER_3: Do you have this chip?
32:23
SPEAKER_3: So how do we make more fluency and creative confidence for anyone?
32:28
SPEAKER_3: And the reason to do this is because there's air quality issues all around our world.
32:33
SPEAKER_3: And why don't we have young people work on their hometown for their homework?
32:36
Whatever the challenge is in your town,
32:38
let's make that a homework assignment or a school assignment
32:41
for our high school kids?
32:42
SPEAKER_3: So how do we sort of widen the aperture of using technologies for this?
32:47
SPEAKER_3: Why does that relate to your question?
32:50
Because,
32:51
if more of our civil society organizations and nonprofits
32:54
and others are also contributing to the greater good with all of the power tools,
33:00
the arts,
33:00
technology,
33:01
science, literature, culture, we can advance solutions to problems faster.
33:08
SPEAKER_3: The second part of this is, historically, it hasn't been only shareholder value.
33:13
To have employees,
33:14
you have to have employee value, or people don't really want to work there, right?
33:17
SPEAKER_3: You have to be thinking about the community that you're in, community value.
33:21
You also have responsibility to the company itself,
33:24
which is reinvesting in your R&D so you can continue to be a company.
33:28
SPEAKER_3: So you can really broaden that perspective of shareholder value.
33:32
SPEAKER_3: Like, who are all the stakeholders here.
33:35
And as we get better at measuring that,
33:37
because really the environment,
33:38
our earth is a stakeholder because we all need it in order to sustain ourselves
33:43
for life.
33:44
SPEAKER_3: You know, take every four breaths, three are from the ocean.
33:47
SPEAKER_3: And we have to think of it as an inclusive system or it doesn't really work.
33:52
SPEAKER_3: These are daunting problems, but people appear who are like, my God, that's a great idea.
33:57
SPEAKER_3: That's gonna work.
33:58
SPEAKER_3: And it's a fight, right?
33:59
SPEAKER_3: It's a push.
34:00
SPEAKER_3: But people show up just like in the Gilded Age, Jane Addams, Ida B.
34:04
SPEAKER_3: Wells, the union organizers, all these different people came forward.
34:07
SPEAKER_3: There's a woman named Ellen Swallow Richards who was the first woman to graduate from MIT.
34:11
She just started measuring the river and figuring out,
34:14
like, let's stop poisoning ourselves by drinking bad water.
34:18
Let's have sewage treatment and water treatment,
34:20
what becomes all of USDA, and how do we fix our society that way?
34:23
SPEAKER_3: So people show up.
34:26
Some of my friends,
34:27
especially in these questions of AI,
34:29
people start to feel that things are inevitable.
34:31
SPEAKER_3: You know, it's all fixed this way.
34:33
SPEAKER_3: And it's just not.
34:34
SPEAKER_3: And so we just have to work really hard to scrub ourselves in.
34:39
SPEAKER_3: Like Shirley Chisholm says, if they didn't give you a chair, pull up a folding chair.
34:43
SPEAKER_3: So just show up and get in there.
34:45
SPEAKER_3: In fact, that's a good Andy learning.
34:47
Andy said that at Apple it was starting to grow and get bigger and
34:50
then pretty soon there were meetings and he wasn't invited.
34:52
SPEAKER_3: So he'd just go anyway.
34:53
SPEAKER_3: So again, I'm hopeful, but boy, is it a rough time.
34:55
We were speaking before the interview tape started rolling about the idea that
35:01
at General Magic we were blind to certain things.
35:03
One of the ideas that you spoke about was how a business model arose
35:09
that was unintended and one we didn't anticipate.
35:12
I'm curious to get your view on how we missed that at General Magic,
35:17
why the dystopian possibilities were not on our radar.
35:24
SPEAKER_3: Hmm.
35:24
SPEAKER_3: I think I think we had a sense of that, but I guess certainly all the movies were there.
35:29
SPEAKER_3: And science fiction is so amazing, right?
35:31
SPEAKER_3: Because it helps us see things.
35:33
SPEAKER_3: I think we were hopeful.
35:35
SPEAKER_3: I think the idea was to be able to be wherever you were, connected, content.
35:40
SPEAKER_3: And really, the early internet was so amazing.
35:44
SPEAKER_3: I ran into Steve Case recently, who was the main leader for AOL.
35:49
All those chat rooms and message boards,
35:51
like humanity, just like, hey, let's talk to each other!
35:54
And whether it was the Use Net list servs and it was sort of asynchronous,
35:58
or whether it was live chat rooms.
36:00
SPEAKER_3: Really, humanity was enjoying finding common interest.
36:05
SPEAKER_3: In fact, my ex-partner Kara was writing her book, AOL, and she was interviewing Steve.
36:09
SPEAKER_3: And he's like, I have to end the interview, 'cause I gotta go see the quilters.
36:13
SPEAKER_3: And he's like, You can come.
36:15
And so she walked into a room where amazingly all these people who were quilters,
36:20
had made a quilt and were stitching it all together,
36:23
having come to bring it to Steve because they were so happy to have met each other
36:27
and they wouldn't have met each other without AOL.
36:30
SPEAKER_3: And I think about the difference between how joyful those interactions were.
36:34
And certainly there were some horrific,
36:36
probably predator child issues, other kinds of things going on there.
36:40
Certainly I was running a internet company called PlanetOut,
36:43
which was the gay community online during some of those times later.
36:46
SPEAKER_3: And we would have peep bashers come in and you have to get them out of chat rooms.
36:50
But so the downside was there,
36:51
but the vast majority of what was going on, people were delighted.
36:54
SPEAKER_3: To be connected with each other.
36:57
SPEAKER_3: To be connected to information they needed.
36:59
SPEAKER_3: To have access in a way that we never had before.
37:03
SPEAKER_3: And it was a really an amazing time.
37:05
SPEAKER_3: The advertising model was there.
37:08
SPEAKER_3: Micro subscription ideas were there.
37:09
SPEAKER_3: There was a range of different business models that emerged.
37:11
And then this one to really camp on all of us showed up largely when Facebook came,
37:17
is my recollection of when we pivot into this,
37:20
you know, please stare at the screen all the time.
37:22
SPEAKER_3: We need to back out of that.
37:24
SPEAKER_3: We are very clear that it's not going well for our teenagers and for all of us.
37:30
SPEAKER_3: And so we're gonna have to figure that out.
37:31
SPEAKER_3: It's one
37:32
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
37:32
SPEAKER_3: of the one of the hardest problems in the world right now.
37:35
And we do want, Mike,
37:36
to your point about students, we want them to be in school wherever they want to be.
37:40
We want to make sure there's entrepreneurial experiences at school
37:43
that you can leave and come back.
37:44
SPEAKER_3: We also wanna make the university a place where people who are not in the university can come.
37:49
We have a program called Solve at MIT where we just put out some challenges
37:53
and we try to help anybody working on these areas.
37:55
In fact,
37:56
in the early days in Boston,
37:58
there was a neighbor who was a teacher and he came to a physics lecture and he asked
38:04
if he could pursue some of his ideas.
38:06
SPEAKER_3: He's a teacher of the deaf.
38:07
And so Alexander Graham Bell ended up inventing the phone in our labs
38:10
because we were like, sure, yeah, come on in.
38:13
And so the more we can use,
38:15
think of our universities,
38:16
our libraries,
38:18
our community colleges,
38:20
our classrooms as a third place where community can come together.
38:24
SPEAKER_3: And we drive creative confidence as much as we can with our youth and everyone.
38:30
SPEAKER_3: And these are not new ideas.
38:32
These are things that exist all over the country,
38:35
but just nobody knows each other, even in the same town.
38:37
SPEAKER_0: That's what Shift7 works on, right?
38:39
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I have a small company.
38:40
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, Shift 7 just means "and".
38:41
SPEAKER_3: It's really a vehicle.
38:42
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, that's what I work on and with colleagues.
38:45
SPEAKER_3: It's a lot of methods.
38:46
SPEAKER_3: How do you scout and scale for innovators like VCs do of any type?
38:50
Well, but you there's Scouting Stanford and then there's perverting the whole notion
38:54
of what an education is all about.
38:56
Again, the Theo Baker book is kind of jaw-dropping in terms of the way
39:00
the kids themselves are now hell bent on getting rich.
39:04
SPEAKER_0: It's it's not changing the world for the better.
39:06
And that ethos that counter ethos is being enabled by the university itself,
39:11
because it wants a share in the wealth that they may create.
39:14
SPEAKER_3: Right.
39:14
SPEAKER_3: There was a huge problem with that before the internet bubble burst, the same thing happened.
39:19
The internet bubble was huge and people were all leaving university and running out
39:23
and getting out of a taxi and giving a 20 or 30 dollar tip like crazy situation.
39:28
SPEAKER_3: And then the bubble burst.
39:30
SPEAKER_3: We still continued the digital technologies, but the overfrothiness sort of went away.
39:34
I don't know if that will happen in this time,
39:37
but I do think it's important for the universities to keep their center.
39:40
The center is really empowering to these young people to become who they can be,
39:45
to get the ingredients and get the push that they need to work hard.
39:48
There was a third grade teacher that my kids had,
39:51
and she had on the wall,
39:52
she had the most amazing,
39:53
she had all this great stuff,
39:54
a master teacher, Laura, and it said, "In effort, there's joy."
39:58
SPEAKER_3: In effort there's joy.
39:59
SPEAKER_3: And I think General Magic was certainly a place where there was in effort, there was joy.
40:05
SPEAKER_3: What an amazing opportunity.
40:07
And that's a hope we can have for everybody,
40:09
everybody in the world that they get the chance to work on things that they care
40:12
about that would matter in the world and work together with others.
40:16
SPEAKER_3: At MIT the motto is "Mens et manus" — mind in hand — so hands-on teaching.
40:21
But I always feel like it's "Mens et Manus et Cor" — mind and hand and heart —
40:27
because the heart is really about both curiosity...
40:31
We have a thing out right now that "Science is curiosity on a mission" is
40:35
the current MIT campaign we have.
40:36
SPEAKER_3: But this idea of curiosity, like how does this work?
40:39
SPEAKER_3: It's that's a very human thing, right?
40:41
And then ingenuity or engineering doing something with that solving something
40:45
with those principles across disciplines.
40:49
SPEAKER_3: And then teamwork, you know, community.
40:52
SPEAKER_3: Technology's greatest form is about those things.
40:54
SPEAKER_3: It's about love.
40:54
And so the question is,
40:55
can we make that part louder and turn down the volume
41:00
on this stuff that's really quite destructive?
41:03
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
41:04
One of the things that Andy says is,
41:06
that kindness is the most fundamental thing that we need to preserve,
41:10
protect, and defend.
41:12
SPEAKER_0: But in the current environment, how do you make kindness a design criterion?
41:17
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's very important.
41:18
SPEAKER_3: Kindness by design.
41:19
SPEAKER_3: I Kindness is equal to knowledge, probably more important.
41:22
SPEAKER_3: And shouldn't the technologies have a kindness?
41:24
SPEAKER_3: In Pope Leo's work he's like, let's not weaponize these technologies.
41:28
SPEAKER_3: They already are weaponized, that's already happening.
41:31
SPEAKER_3: It'd be worth looking at the book, "Weapons of Math Destruction."
41:35
SPEAKER_3: It's from maybe 2018, Dr. Cathy O'Neil.
41:38
SPEAKER_3: She has a wonderful TED talk.
41:39
So just watching that,
41:40
you can get a sense of where algorithms were already hurting people in those times.
41:45
SPEAKER_3: So we have great value from them and we have harms already existing.
41:49
SPEAKER_3: And so we've got to figure out how are we going to mitigate that.
41:54
SPEAKER_0: Well, if you were back in government, what kinds of regulation would you support?
41:59
I would be working with people who have great skill in these areas
42:03
to bring forward their voice as loud.
42:06
So for example,
42:07
if you were going to have a hearing,
42:09
you would have maybe one of the industrial leaders,
42:12
you might have somebody from one of the civil society orgs,
42:15
and you would add the third person,
42:16
the socio tech person who's just as technical and have a more specific conversation
42:22
about what about this method and this method and this method?
42:26
Why don't we use these and sort of debate how we can do that and open
42:29
the design problem for kind- inclusive technologies.
42:34
SPEAKER_3: That's what I would be working for.
42:36
SPEAKER_3: One of the greatest things governments can do is convene.
42:39
And so you can convene major experts to have conversations across disciplines and
42:45
across possibilities to try to come up with, you know, like a negotiation.
42:50
There was a really wonderful piece that Alexander Macgillivray,
42:52
who was principal deputy CTO with me,
42:54
and then again in the Biden administration,
42:56
the blueprint for the AI Bill of Rights,
42:59
which has a lot of framework,
43:01
and several administrations,
43:03
both Republican and Democrats,
43:04
looking at these kinds of issues and paying attention.
43:08
SPEAKER_3: So there's possibilities.
43:09
SPEAKER_0: What do you make of the grassroots revolt against data centers?
43:12
And how do you see that as being either helpful or not in terms of raising awareness
43:18
and convening the public as having a stake in this?
43:22
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, engagement and of all kinds is always wonderful, right?
43:25
SPEAKER_3: And so it's urgent for us to figure out what is the energy supply that's happening here?
43:31
SPEAKER_3: What is the industry asking a community, what burdens is it asking the community to take on?
43:36
SPEAKER_3: Can those be transparent?
43:38
SPEAKER_3: And can we make sure that the balance of cost is there?
43:42
Also in terms of what energy we might be choosing to use for that data center,
43:47
what is the pollution load?
43:48
One of the things that I look at almost every day,
43:51
just to share something fun with everybody,
43:53
This is the Texas, it's ERCOT, the Texas grid.
43:58
SPEAKER_3: And you can see right now, see the orange, that's solar.
44:00
SPEAKER_3: So Texas
44:01
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
44:02
SPEAKER_3: is currently 32% solar and 7% wind.
44:06
SPEAKER_3: And natural gas, we met with a guy named T. Boone Pickens.
44:09
SPEAKER_3: I don't know if you remember him.
44:10
SPEAKER_3: He said, "Natural gas is the bridge fuel."
44:12
SPEAKER_0: He's still around?
44:13
SPEAKER_0: Pickens?
44:14
He's not around,
44:15
but he said "natural gas is the bridge fuel," and you can see it's the bridge fuel!
44:18
SPEAKER_3: So
44:19
SPEAKER_0: Mm.
44:19
it's exciting to look and see,
44:21
this is about a third solar and wind there and natural gas dominating.
44:25
SPEAKER_3: But some days this is it can go as high as 80%.
44:28
SPEAKER_3: Having been a kid in Buffalo with the river on fire, and we had mandatory science fairs.
44:33
SPEAKER_3: I did all solar and wind.
44:35
SPEAKER_3: So for me to see this happening, I love it.
44:37
SPEAKER_3: But we have to pay attention to what energy sources we're using.
44:40
SPEAKER_3: And you know, and Nikola Tesla he said we will always want more energy.
44:45
SPEAKER_3: It's important for communities to engage for the balance of resources for all people.
44:50
Well, do you think it's a fundamental market failure and misallocation of capital —
44:54
the trillion dollar capex that the AI companies are doing?
44:58
SPEAKER_0: Is is it a mistake?
44:59
SPEAKER_0: And should it be redeployed somewhere else and for different things?
45:03
SPEAKER_3: I don't know the answer to that.
45:04
SPEAKER_3: We can't know because people who are developing technologies need capital.
45:08
SPEAKER_3: That's true.
45:09
So the question is:
45:10
can we expand,
45:11
again widen the aperture of the design criteria,
45:16
through work with them,
45:17
through which employees they have,
45:18
through broadening the stakeholders, through regulation, rules, through current law?
45:24
SPEAKER_3: I was in a conference and somebody said, who's working on AI?
45:27
SPEAKER_3: Raise your hand.
45:28
And then lots of people raise their hand and they said,
45:30
look to your left and right, one of you will be in jail.
45:32
SPEAKER_3: So, you know, it's like, okay, you
45:33
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
45:35
SPEAKER_3: know, it was an amazing conference.
45:37
SPEAKER_3: I was like, okay.
45:38
So we already do have people who probably unintentionally are breaking laws
45:43
or breaking their terms of service.
45:45
SPEAKER_3: So how do we deal with that?
45:47
SPEAKER_3: But you know, so many people are hopeful.
45:49
SPEAKER_3: There's incredible stuff.
45:50
The thing that is true is that the healthcare stuff that's happening
45:54
on AI is probably some of the most exciting.
45:57
SPEAKER_3: There's also bias and discrimination happening there, and we have to be careful.
46:01
SPEAKER_3: But I want our colleagues to stop using only that as the positive example.
46:05
SPEAKER_3: And I want them to have, you know, I want them to channel their inner Ida B.
46:08
SPEAKER_3: Wells, who was the greatest justice data scientist in the United States ever.
46:12
SPEAKER_3: She won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago for her work 100 years ago.
46:14
SPEAKER_2: Well, I think maybe that's the right time to raise the question.
46:16
You know better than anyone how women have been written out of the history
46:21
of innovation and written out of the history of technology, especially.
46:26
SPEAKER_2: What do you think drives that?
46:28
SPEAKER_2: Is it just an innate sexism?
46:30
SPEAKER_2: Are there other factors at work?
46:32
SPEAKER_2: What is the cause of a malignancy that
46:36
SPEAKER_3: I don't I don't know what's driving it.
46:39
SPEAKER_3: I don't know what's driving it, but it's a huge problem.
46:41
SPEAKER_3: During World War II, we invented computers and these are photos.
46:44
SPEAKER_3: This is Bletchley Park up here.
46:46
SPEAKER_3: That's the Colossus.
46:47
SPEAKER_3: It comes from you know, the movie Imitation Game.
46:51
SPEAKER_3: Joan Clarke was there.
46:51
You see over here on the right,
46:53
Harvard Mark I, there's Grace Hopper and other members of her team.
46:56
SPEAKER_3: This is the ENIAC on the bottom left.
46:58
SPEAKER_3: That's the first computer at University of Pennsylvania, Eckert and Mauchly, Jean Jennings.
47:04
SPEAKER_3: Six women were the first digital programmers in the United States over there.
47:08
SPEAKER_3: And then this is the MIT Whirlwind.
47:10
SPEAKER_3: These are the first four computers, really, as they came in.
47:14
SPEAKER_3: Really, the Bletchley one becomes the Manchester Baby.
47:17
SPEAKER_3: And then the bottom right is the Duchess of Cambridge at the time, now the Princess of Wales.
47:22
SPEAKER_3: Her grandmother and great aunt were codebreakers at Bletchley Park, working on early computing.
47:26
SPEAKER_3: And these are some of the women, the codebreakers that she's meeting.
47:31
But, you don't see these people when you think of computing,
47:35
and yet these are the founders of computing as much as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
47:39
So the kind of theft of or imbalance of the past,
47:44
the hidden figures, really affects the future deeply.
47:46
SPEAKER_3: That's why I work a lot on it.
47:48
SPEAKER_3: Worked with the president on image of STEM, you know, Katherine Johnson.
47:52
The Artemis team basically just traversed the path that she did for Apollo,
47:56
originally when she calculated those trajectories and also John Glenn and others.
48:01
SPEAKER_3: The first person to ever write an algorithm is this woman, Ada Lovelace.
48:06
SPEAKER_3: She's Lord Byron's poet math daughter.
48:08
She was working with Charles Babbage,
48:10
who created the first mechanical computer,
48:12
and he encouraged her to write this paper.
48:15
It's a sketch of the analytical engine,
48:16
and she translated the paper that was written by Menabrea.
48:22
SPEAKER_3: It was in Italian.
48:23
SPEAKER_3: And then he encouraged her.
48:25
SPEAKER_3: Babbage was like, please add your notes.
48:27
SPEAKER_3: And she added, I think most of the papers Ada's notes.
48:31
And she signed it "A-A-L," just like J.K.
48:33
Rowling, because she couldn't get published if she said she was a woman.
48:36
SPEAKER_3: So Ada, we did the Google Doodle for her.
48:39
She said at one point,
48:41
I think we can figure out the math of the cerebrum if we think about it right.
48:47
SPEAKER_3: The way we figured out astronomy and sidereal, which is star math.
48:51
SPEAKER_3: And then she said, I wish to bequeath to the generations a calculus of the nervous system.
48:56
SPEAKER_3: And then she writes the world's first algorithm in this paper, which is a Bernoulli's equation.
49:01
SPEAKER_3: And she really speaks of general programmability at the time of Darwin.
49:06
SPEAKER_3: You know, it's such a robbery to not know about her AND Turing.
49:12
SPEAKER_3: All these amazing people who are the heroes, I call it infinite roots for an infinite future.
49:18
SPEAKER_3: We had a US CTO coin and we had Grace Hopper.
49:21
SPEAKER_3: We had POTUS 1, President Washington because he started the Corps of Eng.
49:25
And we had George Washington Carver,
49:27
he saved us from malnutrition, figured out how to rotate crops.
49:31
And people think of him as the peanut guy,
49:32
but he's really the guy who how about we nitrogen fix the soil,
49:35
people, and trained 10,000 farmers and saved us from real starvation.
49:41
SPEAKER_3: Amazing; people considered him like a Da Vinci.
49:44
So if we know about these people,
49:47
then it really changes the confidence we have to include ourselves.
49:50
SPEAKER_3: And it's a real opportunity for our colleagues in Silicon Valley to lift that up.
49:54
And I really thank NVIDIA for naming their chips,
49:57
you know, after some of these extraordinary women and trying to lift that history.
50:00
SPEAKER_3: It's really important.
50:03
SPEAKER_0: If you were gonna sum up your trajectory from being what, you were 22 when you started at Magic?
50:08
I had done my master's,
50:09
so maybe I was 23 or four,
50:11
but yeah, I did masters and then I went to Japan and worked for Apple for a bit.
50:14
SPEAKER_0: So from there to now, what's the through line for you?
50:20
SPEAKER_3: I think it's just been an extraordinary opportunity to work with so many amazing people.
50:24
Everybody I've had a chance to work with,
50:26
both mentors but young people who I've had a chance to mentor myself,
50:31
teams, things that we've built.
50:33
There's this extraordinary opportunity to build capabilities and confidence in
50:38
the world and try to solve problems that are very real and significant for others.
50:44
SPEAKER_3: I'm hopeful that we can reduce our impact on the planet.
50:47
SPEAKER_3: These are some of the themes for me.
50:48
And whatever I could do to kind of give back to the next generation and help them on
50:53
that path,
50:54
I think we probably could draw from,
50:58
you know,
50:58
thinking about Marc and Joanna and Bill and Andy and Lucia and everybody,
51:04
we could look at all of them and they would tell us who helped them.
51:07
SPEAKER_3: And those people would tell us who helped them.
51:09
SPEAKER_3: And we would go back in time and see this arc of human capability that gets transferred.
51:16
And my hope is that more people in the world get that creative confidence and access
51:22
to each other.
51:23
And one simple thing now that a colleague of mine,
51:27
amazing mentor,
51:28
Diane von Furstenberg,
51:29
who's an incredible designer,
51:31
said that one thing she tries to do is just every day connect two different people
51:36
who should know each other to make sure they know each other.
51:40
SPEAKER_3: And if everybody did that, you know, we could move faster on all these problems.
51:44
SPEAKER_0: That's something we should all commit to, yeah.
51:45
SPEAKER_0: Absolutely.
51:46
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's not that hard.
51:48
SPEAKER_0: Well, thank you for spending time with us.
51:50
SPEAKER_0: It's always a pleasure to listen to you.
51:52
SPEAKER_0: You're so inspiring.
51:55
SPEAKER_0: Things can be different.
51:55
SPEAKER_0: They can be better.
51:56
SPEAKER_0: They will be, you know.
51:57
SPEAKER_0: Thanks a lot.
51:58
SPEAKER_0: Michael Stern (OUTRO) Thank you for listening to General Magic and the Soul of Tech podcast.
52:03
Tune into our Substack for more interviews and articles
52:06
at spellboundproductions.substack.com.