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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast

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Speaker 1: thought provoking shows from Coast to Coast. Now here's a

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Speaker 1: highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeart Radio and

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Speaker 1: welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with You.

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Speaker 1: Byron Reese with Us the Fourth Age. With twenty five

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Speaker 1: years as a very successful tech entrepreneur with multiple I

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Speaker 1: p o s, Byron is uniquely suited to comment on

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Speaker 1: the effect of technology and the workplace and on society

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Speaker 1: as well. He writes books that explore the wonders of

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Speaker 1: the world of tomorrow and delights audiences all over the

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Speaker 1: planet with his vivid presentations on the future of work

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Speaker 1: in life, and here he is on coast to coast

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Speaker 1: looking for love. Your cover on this book, by the way, Byron, Well,

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Speaker 1: thank you very much and thank you for having me.

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Speaker 1: So a lot of people are concerned that the world

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Speaker 1: of robots is going to take over the planet, take

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Speaker 1: take our jobs and do everything else. Is that something

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Speaker 1: for us to be concerned about? I don't think so. Um.

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Speaker 1: You know, I think people's worries fall into two big buckets,

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Speaker 1: and one of them is what you mentioned, which is, um,

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Speaker 1: robots taking people's jobs. But um, I have a test

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Speaker 1: on my website you take to try to figure out

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Speaker 1: if your job is at risk, and it records all

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Speaker 1: the answers and and very very few jobs actually could

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Speaker 1: a robot take over? I mean you try to just

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Speaker 1: imagine one being a plumber, or a kindergarten teacher, or

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Speaker 1: a hostage negotiator or any of the thousands of other

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Speaker 1: things people do and and that. So, no, I don't

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Speaker 1: think that's a real concern at all. I think we

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Speaker 1: build these tools to increase our own productivity, and we

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Speaker 1: are all kind of better off because of them. Let's

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Speaker 1: talk a little bit by run about artificial intelligence. Exactly

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Speaker 1: what is it and how are they able to make

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Speaker 1: these things so smart? Well, that's a great question. What

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Speaker 1: is it is more complex than you would think because

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Speaker 1: nobody agrees on what intelligence means. But what what the

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Speaker 1: what people mean by the term or two very different

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Speaker 1: things that may have nothing in common, so they either

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Speaker 1: mean what you see in the movies, So commander data

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Speaker 1: off Star Trek or C three po or uh. That

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Speaker 1: would be a machine that can do everything a person

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Speaker 1: can do. It's creative, it can teach itself new things,

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Speaker 1: and we don't we don't know how to build that.

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Speaker 1: Nobody knows how to build that. And that's called a

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Speaker 1: general intelligence or it is a computer program that can

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Speaker 1: do one thing very well. It can identify spam in

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Speaker 1: your email. It can route you through traffic, and that

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Speaker 1: we know how to do pretty well. And the way

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Speaker 1: we do it is really quite simple. You take a

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Speaker 1: bunch of data about the past, you get the computer

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Speaker 1: to study it and make projections about the future. And

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Speaker 1: that doesn't sound all that interesting, but that's in essence

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Speaker 1: of what we do. We're just a lot better at

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Speaker 1: it than we used to be because computers are faster,

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Speaker 1: we can collect data much easier, and the rest. So

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Speaker 1: we're now able to just do a lot of things

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Speaker 1: that really look smart by just using these simple, simple techniques,

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Speaker 1: which are called machine learning. Are our governments so far

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Speaker 1: advanced with artificial intelligence that they're doing things that would

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Speaker 1: just kurl us if we found out what they were. Well,

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Speaker 1: there's certainly that potent shore. You see, we we used

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Speaker 1: to all have some amount of privacy just based on

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Speaker 1: the fact that there are so many of us. Can't

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Speaker 1: follow every person, You can't listen to every phone conversation. Unfortunately,

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Speaker 1: with artificial intelligence, the kinds of tools we're developing to

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Speaker 1: do very good things like identify cancer or something like that,

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Speaker 1: can be used to to to to follow people voice

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Speaker 1: to text, So now every phone conversation can be recorded

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Speaker 1: and it can be turned into text. Uh, computers are

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Speaker 1: as good as humans at reading lips, so every camera,

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Speaker 1: even if it doesn't have audio, can read lips as

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Speaker 1: well as a human um. And you know, you have

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Speaker 1: a device that tracks where you are. And again, all

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Speaker 1: of these things in and of themselves aren't bad technologies,

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Speaker 1: but they certainly can be used in aggregate to profile everyone.

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Speaker 1: And you even have places in the world. Um, you know,

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Speaker 1: China has implemented a the kind of a social score. Right,

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Speaker 1: run a red light, you lose a point. If you

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Speaker 1: go to an anti government rally, you lose four points.

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Speaker 1: If you write a pro government blog, you get two points.

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Speaker 1: And if you if you go low enough, you don't

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Speaker 1: fly on airplanes anymore, and you don't um and and

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Speaker 1: you don't your kids don't get into good schools, and

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Speaker 1: you don't get it, and you may not even exist.

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Speaker 1: Who knows, right, I hope it doesn't come to that,

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Speaker 1: but but it just shows that these technologies really are

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Speaker 1: had that capability of of of being misused. Of course,

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Speaker 1: hopefully in a country where you have a lot of

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Speaker 1: transparency and you have governments that you know, you have

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Speaker 1: a republic, but that's governed by laws. You know, the

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Speaker 1: price of liberty is a tonal vigilance. And it's so

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Speaker 1: the price of privacy is the same. That we just

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Speaker 1: have to make sure that that laws are in place

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Speaker 1: and enforced that don't allow that to happen, because it's

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Speaker 1: certainly something that is technically quite possible. Viron is every

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Speaker 1: telephone telephone conversation, smartphone conversation being recorded or listen to,

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Speaker 1: even though them were probably mundane and don't mean anything.

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Speaker 1: But but are they being listened to? I don't know.

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Speaker 1: I don't know, but I just can say the technology

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Speaker 1: is at a point where it could decipher you know what,

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Speaker 1: what what that many people are saying, and then it

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Speaker 1: can Uh, it doesn't have to understand it in the

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Speaker 1: way a human understands something. It just has to look

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Speaker 1: for patterns and combinations of words along with um actions

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Speaker 1: and and and just kind of build a build abstract

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Speaker 1: profiles on people. I mean, all I'm saying is is

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Speaker 1: it is it is a potential way to abuse this technology,

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Speaker 1: which can be can do so many good things. You know.

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Speaker 1: I've got mixed feelings about this too, because on one hand, uh,

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Speaker 1: let's say that there are a group of terrorists talking

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Speaker 1: about bombing something and the computer, you know, is is

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Speaker 1: set up to pick up code words like bomb, terror, whatever,

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Speaker 1: and so it finds this. On one hand, it's an

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Speaker 1: invasion of privacy, everybody's privacy. On the other hand, they

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Speaker 1: may have been able to stop something from happening if

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Speaker 1: they follow through with it, and they go and you

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Speaker 1: catch the perpetrators. I'm wrestling with myself, Brian By in

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Speaker 1: terms of if it's okay or not, well, it is

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Speaker 1: a it is a new enough problem that we kind

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Speaker 1: of don't have as aciety of consensus on how to

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Speaker 1: deal with it. We don't we don't have kind of norms.

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Speaker 1: You can't find, you know, a federalist paper that addressed

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Speaker 1: that topic. Uh. And so that's going to have to

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Speaker 1: be a conversation that we have over the course of

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Speaker 1: the next several years about about what what we want.

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