The Exchanges

Q Right. I don't think there is one either. What do you, but then, you know, it's interesting. The title of your book is Machines of Loving Grace. You're not talking about machines being helpful and saving the world. You're talking, there's, there's a, two very specific words. Um, what do you tell people who are losing jobs to machines? Is that even happening directly?

A Well, sure. Um, you know, there, there are people who are being displaced by new labor, new, new types of labor, but I mean, what do I tell them? It has been happening since the, you know, the Industrial Revolution, and so it will continue to happen. I actually don't think that there's evidence that it's happening at an accelerating rate. Right now, in the United States, more people are working than ever before in history. There are a hundred and forty million people employed. Even if there's this polarization stuff, that's a lot of people working. Now, people come back and say to me, but, you know, workforce participation is down. Ok, that's true. There are a lot of reasons of which technology is one of them. It's not the only one. Aging society is a reason. Uh, and so you get into this stuff, and you read the papers, and you come out thinking, you know, I think that the, the big impact has, the things that, uh, that are gonna really reshape society haven't happened yet.

AI assessment note: “what do I tell them? It has been happening since the, you know, the Industrial Revolution”

Q excited to have you in the A, six and Z podcast today because you have been a long time journalist and chronicler of technology and how it's evolved and also been, have been observing Silicon Valley. And until now, those two things have been completely conflated. Um, we're curious to hear your vantage point on what's changed so much for you. Like what surprised you the most in that timeframe?

A Well, you know, I actually grew up in Silicon Valley. I mean, the, the sort of the, my, my street cred is I played in the Hewlett household when I was a kid in, in kindergarten and first grade, and I was the paper boy at the houses where Steve Jobs and Larry Page lived. I like to say, there goes the neighborhood. So, you know, I grew up with a very different Silicon Valley than the one we have right now, and actually, you know, what surprises me, I guess, if you're a, It, it's, it's actually the geographic shift. I mean, Richard Florida, about a year ago, did this wonderful bit of research where he basically found the center of Silicon Valley by geo-coordinating current investments, and, you know, once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara, and now it's at the foot of Potero Hill in San Francisco. Right. And, you know, it used to be a manufacturing center, and now it's a marketing design center, and, uh, still a very unique place, um, but I have to say, um, it's generational. And I grew up with a particular generation of Silicon Valley. I sort of call it the second generation personal computing. Um, there was a valley, electronics valley before there was Silicon Valley, but the semiconductor guys were the first generation. And now it's something that I'm only barely in touch with. You know, personally, I'm in the science section of the New York Times, so …

AI assessment note: “what surprises me, I guess, if you're a, It, it's, it's actually the geographic shift.”

Q Right. I don't think there is one either. What do you, but then, you know, it's interesting. The title of your book is Machines of Loving Grace. You're not talking about machines being helpful and saving the world. You're talking, there's, there's a, two very specific words. Um, what do you tell people who are losing jobs to machines? Is that even happening directly?

A Well, sure. Um, you know, there, there are people who are being displaced by new labor, new, new types of labor, but I mean, what do I tell them? It has been happening since the, you know, the Industrial Revolution, and so it will continue to happen. I actually don't think that there's evidence that it's happening at an accelerating rate. Right now, in the United States, more people are working than ever before in history. There are a hundred and forty million people employed. Even if there's this polarization stuff, that's a lot of people working. Now, people come back and say to me, but, you know, workforce participation is down. Ok, that's true. There are a lot of reasons of which technology is one of them. It's not the only one. Aging society is a reason. Uh, and so you get into this stuff, and you read the papers, and you come out thinking, you know, I think that the, the big impact has, the things that, uh, that are gonna really reshape society haven't happened yet.

AI assessment note: “It has been happening since the, you know, the Industrial Revolution, and so it will continue”

Q Well, the no power thing is actually really incredibly interesting, because then you think of developing countries, and the fact that you don't require that much power to power entirely amazingly huge, large-scale platforms, which does beg the question that I've heard you ask as well, which is, is it possible for the next great platform to come not from Silicon Valley?

A So, so, just a bit of history, because I was spending a lot of time in Europe in sort of 2004 to 2006, And I was over there and it seemed like all the mobile innovation was happening in, in, uh, in Europe and not in the U S and I thought, wow, we're behind. This could be a big deal because I was really bought into the fact that mobile was going to be next. And all of a sudden here comes the iPhone and it resets and it comes in the next platform comes from Silicon Valley. But, you know, it seemed to me that there was this moment where the, a new platform innovation might come from outside the Valley. It's, you know, if, Tom Friedman is right, and the world is flat. It has to happen at some point. We don't have a lock on good ideas, and I, I'm amazed it lasts as long as it lasts.

AI assessment note: “It has to happen at some point. We don't have a lock on good ideas”

Q findings over the years. Um, let's talk about what happens to research. So one of the things, as we've seen the valley in technology evolve, is that we've moved in cycles from basic research to applied research, back and forth. We see this in NIH funding, NSF funding. What are your views on where we are in that balance today, sort of the pastures quadrant of investing in the future?

A Well, look at the role that DARPA's Played in sort of developing the seed corn for Silicon Valley. I mean, you don't know how many people understand how much of the technologies that have been commercialized were originally pioneered by DARPA. And you'd think that looking at the history, you could just sort of dial it forward and say, well, that kind of spending probably would be good for us. Um, but that's not the framing of the discussion right now. Um, you know, what, what worries me when I look at a great institution like Stanford, Um, is that Stanford, you know, is become, it's become an entrepreneurial hotbed on a scale that you can't imagine. You know, there used to be this notion of an ivory tower, and that's so gone. People pass through on their way to their startup, and they'll, you know, maybe come back. I talked to Hennessy when he was dean of engineering about this, was this 15 years ago? Maybe 20 years ago.

AI assessment note: “that's not the framing of the discussion right now. Um, you know, what worries me”

Q Well, the no power thing is actually really incredibly interesting, because then you think of developing countries, and the fact that you don't require that much power to power entirely amazingly huge, large-scale platforms, which does beg the question that I've heard you ask as well, which is, is it possible for the next great platform to come not from Silicon Valley?

A So, so, just a bit of history, because I was spending a lot of time in Europe in sort of 2004 to 2006, And I was over there and it seemed like all the mobile innovation was happening in, in, uh, in Europe and not in the U S and I thought, wow, we're behind. This could be a big deal because I was really bought into the fact that mobile was going to be next. And all of a sudden here comes the iPhone and it resets and it comes in the next platform comes from Silicon Valley. But, you know, it seemed to me that there was this moment where the, a new platform innovation might come from outside the Valley. It's, you know, if, Tom Friedman is right, and the world is flat. It has to happen at some point. We don't have a lock on good ideas, and I, I'm amazed it lasts as long as it lasts.

AI assessment note: “It has to happen at some point. We don't have a lock on good ideas”

Q What do you think about, then, like, Peter Thiel's view on people drop, kids dropping out of college to become entrepreneurs?

A Yeah, so, you know, um, how to respond to that? Um, Uh, at the Bits and Adams Center, um, there is a physicist, whose name I'm blanking on right at the moment, uh, who basically styles himself as the anti-Peter Thiel. I'll think of his name as soon as we get off the air. Um, and he has a series of students who've, um, studied sort of, uh, serious graduate level physics who are in incredibly important CTO-like roles all over the valley, probably 20 of them, some of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley. So, you know, you get back to my notion of wanting to be an entrepreneur before you have an idea. I think that's the cart before the horse.

AI assessment note: “I think that's the cart before the horse.”

Q just have this concept that things never plateau. Like, that Moore's Law is going to keep going, it's going to keep going, and every time we think it's not going to keep going, it just does. Something happens, some innovation comes across, some material science advance, whatever it is. What do you think is going to happen next? Like, do you think that's going to keep going in that direction?

A So I am absolutely obsessed now with the concept of scaling. For a Kind of an unusual reason, but I think you'll be able to relate to this. Um, I'm the one who stumbled across the paper in, uh, the Stanford archives that Doug Engelbart wrote in 1960, where he looked at, uh, this brand new technology of, uh, semiconductors, and he pointed out that it scales. And he made a very, uh, systematic argument about the way the relationship between the components change and the, Performance change. And so a lot of the stuff that was codified five years later in Moore's law in that electronics article, Doug got at. And he was looking, you know, the irony is he had come from the, uh, he was an electronics tech in the 19 fifties at NASA Ames in the wind tunnel. And that's where they had this aeronautical engineers use this term similitude, which was similar to scale. It meant scaling. And they took a small model and they scaled it up. And he saw that when he looked at photolithographic technologies, he realized it scaled down. That was a profound insight. For him, it gave him the confidence to realize there was going to be more computing power, and he could go and do his thing and develop his augmentation tools more than codified it. But what I've realized is, you know, scaling works both ways. And, you know, the Valley used to scale down, be obsessed with scaling down. Now the Valley is ob…

AI assessment note: “Now the Valley is obsessed with scaling up.”

Q just have this concept that things never plateau. Like, that Moore's Law is going to keep going, it's going to keep going, and every time we think it's not going to keep going, it just does. Something happens, some innovation comes across, some material science advance, whatever it is. What do you think is going to happen next? Like, do you think that's going to keep going in that direction?

A So I am absolutely obsessed now with the concept of scaling. For a Kind of an unusual reason, but I think you'll be able to relate to this. Um, I'm the one who stumbled across the paper in, uh, the Stanford archives that Doug Engelbart wrote in 1960, where he looked at, uh, this brand new technology of, uh, semiconductors, and he pointed out that it scales. And he made a very, uh, systematic argument about the way the relationship between the components change and the, Performance change. And so a lot of the stuff that was codified five years later in Moore's law in that electronics article, Doug got at. And he was looking, you know, the irony is he had come from the, uh, he was an electronics tech in the 19 fifties at NASA Ames in the wind tunnel. And that's where they had this aeronautical engineers use this term similitude, which was similar to scale. It meant scaling. And they took a small model and they scaled it up. And he saw that when he looked at photolithographic technologies, he realized it scaled down. That was a profound insight. For him, it gave him the confidence to realize there was going to be more computing power, and he could go and do his thing and develop his augmentation tools more than codified it. But what I've realized is, you know, scaling works both ways. And, you know, the Valley used to scale down, be obsessed with scaling down. Now the Valley is ob…

AI assessment note: “Now the Valley is obsessed with scaling up.”

Q findings over the years. Um, let's talk about what happens to research. So one of the things, as we've seen the valley in technology evolve, is that we've moved in cycles from basic research to applied research, back and forth. We see this in NIH funding, NSF funding. What are your views on where we are in that balance today, sort of the pastures quadrant of investing in the future?

A Well, look at the role that DARPA's Played in sort of developing the seed corn for Silicon Valley. I mean, you don't know how many people understand how much of the technologies that have been commercialized were originally pioneered by DARPA. And you'd think that looking at the history, you could just sort of dial it forward and say, well, that kind of spending probably would be good for us. Um, but that's not the framing of the discussion right now. Um, you know, what, what worries me when I look at a great institution like Stanford, Um, is that Stanford, you know, is become, it's become an entrepreneurial hotbed on a scale that you can't imagine. You know, there used to be this notion of an ivory tower, and that's so gone. People pass through on their way to their startup, and they'll, you know, maybe come back. I talked to Hennessy when he was dean of engineering about this, was this 15 years ago? Maybe 20 years ago.

AI assessment note: “that's not the framing of the discussion right now.”