 My name is Sasha Meinrath. I direct New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, which is sort of the tech and telecom arm of the foundation's work. However, you are not here to listen to me so much as this gentleman to my left, Neil Stevenson, who is probably most well-known as an author, who not only helped shape an entire literary genre, but to this very day continues to extend the boundaries of science fiction and how we view that genre. And so he's spent over what quarter of a century now writing books. And there's, depending on how you want to define book about a dozen or so of them dating back to 1984 with the Big U, Zodiacs, No Crash, Interface, The Diamond Age, Cobb Web, Cryptonomicon, one of my favorites, The Baroque Cycle, and Anathem, which I'm about 750 pages into right now. I'm enjoying greatly all the way to present day, the Mongolia, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And I wanted to sort of set a tone in Neil Stevenson's own words. You wrote, a novel represents years of hard work distilled into a few hundred pages with all, or at least most, of the bad ideas cut out and thrown away. And the good ideas polished and refined as much as possible. Interacting with an author in person is nothing like reading his novels. Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down and, in some cases, grievously disappointed. These are humble words. And I'm hoping that today, humble words and a knockout introduction. Yes. So for those of you that are hoping that we're going to be talking about smileys or the reclusive Neil Stevenson, or understanding the mysteries of Enoch Root, you will no doubt be disappointed. But for the rest of us, I'm hoping that the next hour will sort of confound your expectations of your perceptions of our conversation here today. Now, as a fellow technologist, which is what we're going to focus on today, you've helped create a private space launch company that's Blue Origins. You've inaugurated a lab dedicated to creating new inventions. That's the Intellectual Venture Labs. And you've co-founded a startup company in the realm of what you call Electronic Trans-Media Publishing at Subidae Corporation. So let me begin by simply asking you, are you a super geek with a writing problem? Well, the geekiness and the writing problem, for me, have always been kind of complementary in that I learned pretty early in my career that if I tried to kind of apply a Protestant work ethic to the job and work an eight-hour day every day, I would end up writing some relatively decent material first thing in the morning and then spend the rest of the day sort of burying it in crap. And then I would have to go back later and try to separate the good stuff out from the bad stuff. And that never works. I mean, doing heavy editing on prose is a little bit like doing surgery on a living body. You can kind of stitch everything back together, but it never works the same. And there's always scar tissue left in the results. So what I found out was that it was better to do some writing for an hour or two in the morning until I started to lose momentum and then stop and do something else for the rest of the day. And so I've had a number of geeky pursuits that I've tended to pursue during the afternoons, specifically as a way to get my mind off of whatever project I'm working on and let the kind of mysterious, ineffable background processes do whatever it is that they do. And I was looking for a way to sort of summarize the last day's themes that emerged from the conversations that were happening. And I came across what I'll call a brief autobiographical sketch that you'd written. This is from 2004, but I read it online, so I know it must be true. And this is a bit after Snow Crash came out. You talked about a memorable moment in your book tour that touched on many of the ideas discussed at this week's Future Tense event. So bear with me for just a moment. Quote, I was doing a reading signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. William Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For at that time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown from a vat of scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed his LNG tanker into Gibson's stealth pleasure barge in the straits of Juan de Foucault. During the regeneration process, telescoping carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course, the carbonite stilettos pierced through it as if it were corkboard, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip out my wakizashi from between my shoulder blades and swing it his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Slowly I gained the upper hand for on defense, his praying mantis style was no match for my flying cloud technique, but I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle. So this begs the question. How much of your fiction is drawn from real life? And vice versa. But more importantly, your ability to weave real technology into the narratives that you write make for a particularly compelling narrative amongst technologists and geeks, but you've also populated these plots that you've been writing with elements of martial arts, swordplay in particular. Can you talk a little bit about this process of interweaving sort of personal interests of yours within this profoundly public medium? Well, any narrative works better and it is more compelling and involving to the reader if it contains some concrete details that kind of convince the reader at a subliminal level that the world being depicted is coherent, that it makes sense, that it follows a set of rules. And it's when a writer kind of carelessly or inadvertently builds in little inconsistencies to the description that the reader begins to get a kind of nervous sense that somehow the writer's not playing fair or there's something wrong and that's when the suspension of disbelief breaks down and the whole project just fails. So one way to kind of ensure or at least create the illusion of internal consistency in a narrative is to supply a lot of nitty-gritty specific details and different writers do that in different ways. So it doesn't have to be technology or martial arts or things like that. It could be emotional details of a relationship between two people. If it feels right, if the character is behaving in a manner that seems internally consistent, then the book works and the reader has a good time with it. In my case, since I sort of have access to a great big junk heap in my mind of bits of knowledge about geeky stuff, the sort of easy natural reflex for me is to resort to that. And so it's easy for me to describe a scene in terms of some piece of technology that's lying around or some physical action that's going on in a way that sort of cons the reader into believing that it's really true. So I'm about, as I mentioned, 750 pages into an anthem. I really feel like the plot's beginning to take off now. But it takes a while to get the turbines spun up. That's right. It is a fantastic read, particularly if like me, your background is not in technology, but you're a closeted sort of philosopher and a closeted sort of interest in different perspectives on what reality is and how it's gleaned. And I'm curious because you've sort of created this space of sort of the ultimate ivory tower, this cloistered, mathic space versus sort of the more secular world. And so this has been sort of turning around in my mind late at night while my daughter's keeping me up at 3 a.m. And I'm wondering like what do you see as sort of the role of universities in this reality, in terms of knowledge generation, technological innovation. It seems that in recent decades, their role has really been shifting a lot. They've taken on a much more corporate sort of facade. Are these academies and universities, are they a boon to civil society, tolerated necessary evil or something else entirely? My mind's drifting because somebody's cooking bacon back there. That's probably not gonna come through on the web feed, but it smells like bacon. So the world that's described in anathem for those who haven't seen the book or anathem, I don't care how it's pronounced, is a world in which essentially all of the literate, rational people have been rounded up and herded into a system of monasteries where they live according to a strict vow of poverty and have zero interaction with what's called the secular world. Using secular not to mean non-religious because it tends to be a fairly religious place, but in the sense of a concern with kind of day to day goings on. So in the middle of this kind of endless landscape of Walmarts and casinos, there are these walled enclosures with sort of gothic towers and cloisters in them where all of the kind of book reading people hang out together and philosophize. So the creation of that world was a reaction to a couple of different stimuli that penetrated my awareness around 2000, I guess you could say. One was the clock of the long now being undertaken by the Long Now Foundation. Can you just grab this clock a little bit because it is a fascinating project. Yeah, so this is an idea that I started hearing about in the mid-90s from Danny Hillis and Xander Rose and Stuart Brand. The idea is to construct a clock that can run for 10,000 years. Have it be sort of to this society what say pyramids or cathedrals might have been to other societies. And when I first heard about it, my question for those guys was, is this meant to be a technological tour de force that can run that long without any maintenance or human intervention? Or are you going to assume that there is a society of people that's going to keep it running? Because I could see doing it either way and both approaches would be interesting in different ways. But for me, trying to imagine what that surrounding community might look like was a pretty interesting project. So around the year 2000, they were trying to spruce up their website and so they asked me and several other people to contribute just informal kind of back of napkin sketches of what we imagined the clock might look like. Not as serious engineering proposals, but just to give some idea of how this idea had affected different people's thinking. And so the sketch that I drew depicted a clock tower surrounded by concentric walls and the walls had gates in them that were controlled by the internal workings of the clock in the same way that the little door on a cuckoo clock is controlled by its internal clockwork. And the idea was that in the outer wall, the gate would open once a year for a few days and during that time people could freely go in and out. But if you chose to be on the inside of the gate when the door closed, it meant that you were making a commitment to spend one year inside those walls and not have contact with the outside world during that time. And inside of that was... Kind of like grad school. Yeah, well, that's kind of like undergrad school and then grad school is the next layer in which is a 10 year door and then there's a 100 year door on the inside which is for 10 year professors. So that was kind of the scheme that I drew and it was motivated by the fact that around the end of the century, a lot of newspapers as they always do were publishing their sort of end of year news roundup and the end of decade news roundup and some of them were going so far as to publish end of century and end of millennium news roundups. The Bubonic Plague, the Protestant Reformation, et cetera. And looking at those, it just occurred to me that every day I sit down and spend some time reading the paper and 24 hours later, there's another paper with other stuff in it. And why am I spending all of this time every day reading these things when I could just wait until the end of the year and read the important stuff? And so that's kind of how I got going on that train of thought. So Anathem is a book that I wrote about four or five years later after that idea had been kind of rolling around in my subconscious for that long and mixed in with it is a certain element of kind of reacting to the way that science and kind of rational thought in general got treated during those years in public discourse. Now in Egypt this week, government shut down most of the main communications networks that people use in their everyday lives. And at the same time, many people were finding ways to sort of skirt around these firewalls and to speak with each other, one another inside Egypt but also with the outside world. And I think one of the themes that runs through a lot of science fiction is this notion of we've created this relationship where people in struggle build technologies for liberation. And I think when I look at a lot of the political evolutions or revolutions that are happening around the globe, is there a role for leading writers such as yourself for inspiring sort of the next generations of young people who are struggling for justice and thinking about how technology might be a part of that, et cetera? Well, I'd hate to volunteer, but the... I don't know if it's writers necessarily. There's usually someone around whom those things kind of nucleate, and in this case it appears to be Muhammad El-Baraday. So if you show up in the wrong place at the wrong time with a bullhorn in front of your face and someone snaps a picture, then guess what? You're now the glorious leader of the revolution whether you like it or not. So I guess stay away from bullhorns and cameras is kind of the answer there. I don't know nowadays though if it's really writers who are generally going to have that role. It's, you know, I think we've certainly been eclipsed in the popular imagination by more charismatic humans. And that may be a good thing, I don't know. So you wouldn't put the writers in charge? In charge? You've talked about the platonic ideal and all that. Is there a place for these? That would be an interesting scenario. I think you may have just given me an idea for a new dystopian science fiction. Very good. So let's talk a little bit about decline. Okay. About a half decade ago you had an article in Reason Magazine where you say that our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology and it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. And my question for you really centers around what happens when the future is yesterday? And by that I mean we tend to assume that technological innovation is inevitable, that what happens as time goes by that we make forward progress, that we're always making one step forward. But what happens rather when you have sort of a devolution of society and we don't need to go all post-apocalyptic on everyone but what happens if there are sort of warning signs that we haven't been paying attention to where instead of heading towards this utopian techno-determinist ideal 35 years down the road, it's always 35 years down the road, we're actually on the verge of entering sort of a prolonged period of slow, subtle decline. Well, for the first two thirds of the 20th century we got accustomed to seeing completely new, large, obvious technologies appearing in our lives. So at the beginning of the century airplanes didn't exist, by the end of the century flying around in huge jet airplanes and going to the airport were just completely normal behaviors. And, you know, cars, interstate highways, nuclear reactors, all of these things just happened kind of during that century and I think we became accustomed to completely new things entering our urban landscape in that way and that's why if you look at the depictions of the future shown during the 1950s you tend to see flying cars and jet packs and stuff like that because to them that's what the future was. They were extrapolating this tendency for crazy new technologies to suddenly appear in our lives and trying to imagine what those might be. Instead what we got was digital, you know, the whole cyber thing and so we've kind of taken a detour from that vision of the future that we had in the 50s and our landscape has changed very little in the sense of new forms of transportation or new kinds of buildings appearing but the landscape of our day-to-day lives has changed pretty radically with things like portable telephones and iPads and the internet and so on. So we've been in a period of progress and change that's a lot less obvious, a lot less kind of poke you in the eye than what we had in the first part of the 20th century and so I think it's easy to underestimate how much things have changed as the result of that, you know, these cyber, everything has happened in the cyber sphere. So the first thing I'd say is that I'm not sure if progress has slowed down as radically as maybe it seems like it has, but it certainly has slowed down in the area of building stuff. So myself, you know, I was enamored of all things cyber for a long time there but I'm kind of tired of cyber crap now and I know how important it is and how it's changed everything and I appreciate that, but I'm kind of tired of it and I'm more interested in sort of construction of interesting physical objects in the analog world and there's been a conspicuous kind of fall-off in the rate at which we build new stuff like that and I think it's because all of the smart young people coming out of school have tended to go into digital technology and so we don't have the kind of reservoir of machinists and engineers and designers that we had, you know, say during the heyday of the space program or whatever. And I'm kind of hoping that'll change. I'd love to see a new wave of physical inventing and physical technology building over the coming decades and I see signs of that. I see people who are getting very engaged with physically building things with, you know, there's hacker labs popping up in cities all over the place that are devoted not just to hacking on computers but to doing 3D printing and building robots and making stuff. And so you can definitely see the little green shoots poking out of the ground everywhere but I worry that we've switched into a kind of era of austerity and of being afraid to build radically new stuff that may limit how much we can really do. You know, it's interesting. So you have the horse and buggy age and they're dreaming of railroads and railroad age dreaming of cars and the car age dreaming of planes and they were dreaming of diamond age sort of fold up horses. Like it's a giant loop but it's using these nanotechnology it's using these new systems. When you're thinking about this notion of physical invention are you talking about nanotechnology sort of physical invention is more sort of a bolts and steampunk-esque kind of thing? It could be that. It could be big machines. It could be something that I'm not smart enough to think of but what I'm seeing, I see really odd things like the BP oil spill that just went on and on and on and made me think of the fact that when I was a sort of ecologically minded college student a million years ago I was being told by apparently well-intentioned people that wind power and solar power were a little too expensive now but pretty soon they would become competitive with petroleum and we could redo our energy system and now I'm kind of shocked to wake up a bunch of decades later and find out that that's not happening. We're still pumping strange fluids out of the ground as a way of getting energy and so that causes me to wonder sort of what it is that what's going on with the way our society's organized that we can't just take care of this. Let's look into that a little bit more and earlier this week you described to me sort of that we were in danger of becoming what you call the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century and it seems like we could poo-poo on regulation but you actually take a moment to say it's not that regulation is the singular culprit in this you say that equally to blame is engineering, management practices insurance, congress even accounting practices and in your words you said that we should worry less about possible negative effects of innovation or about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th century technologies that no sane or responsible person would propose today but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces. So I'm curious, what are these mysterious forces that you see at play here? That's why they're mysterious. So if you look at energy the reason we have petroleum a petroleum industry you can look this up on the internet so that must be true it all started with the practice of going out in wooden ships and throwing spears at sperm whales and boiling their heads to make lamp fuel and then when that got too troublesome and expensive somebody figured out that you could subject coal to a process that would produce liquid fuel called kerosene and then we moved on from that to pumping oil directly out of the ground and we've got this whole system now that is erected around that practice and it's highly optimized and it's kind of locked in by a whole set of regulatory factors and subsidies and just by a kind of I would say cautious mentality that says it's better to burnish what you've got and to sort of innovate within that and make it slightly more efficient than it is to change over to something different and from a you know if you were to just an alien coming to the planet Earth and sort of figuring out the energy budget and figuring out how the energy system on it looked like you would notice right away that there's just a ridiculous amount of energy hitting the surface in the form of light from the sun and that it shows up in the wind it shows up in waves the entire core of the Earth is a big nuclear reactor that makes heat all the time you can get heat out of it in some places more easily than others but it would never occur to any sane person that the way to supply energy to the society was to go around and drill holes in the Earth and suck out decayed plant material from millions of years ago and burn it and so and yet that's kind of where we're stuck and we don't seem to be able to get out of that situation so it's tempting to blame it all on regulation and say it's the bad government but I think it's more than that it's kind of a collective set of practices and habits that is very difficult to break out of seemingly You talked a bit about this path dependencies and the lock-ins in your recent Slate article that came out two days ago talking about satellites the size of H-bombs and I'm wondering if you could describe a little bit about how that process unfolds in space exploration as it was I was using space launch technology as one concrete example of these phenomena of lock-in and path dependency that I was just talking about in the case of energy and so I don't want to kind of rehash the whole thing here but the idea is that there's a bunch of different ways that you could launch things into space and people have imagined any number of alternative launch technologies using lasers or tall buildings or big guns or what have you that are at least as plausible as what we do now the reason we use rockets is because of some really peculiar historical accidents around that happened around the time of the Second World War and once we had settled on that we optimized that technology to a very high degree and to a point where we can't make it significantly better no matter how much more money we put into it and yet all whenever we have a sort of national conversation about what the next space program is going to look like it's always about building another rocket just as we seem to be stuck on petroleum as our energy system so I just think it's kind of interesting if you look at all of the huge innovations that we did create in the early 20th century at great risk but with great success that we've lost our ability to make changes whose necessity seems to be to be quite obvious I remember watching some shows talking about medieval weaponry and catapults and what stuck in my brain was the trebuchet and the narrator was talking about how you can just keep building bigger and bigger and bigger trebuchets there's no limit to the size of trebuchets I'm like space trebuchet absolutely so in terms of I tried to figure that out once sharing your obsession with both trebuchets and space it's pretty hard you gotta supply the energy over 10 or 15 minutes or else everyone dies so if you give it to them in a really short period of time bad things happen so trying to build a sling that can spend 10 or 15 minutes whipping around in that big arc is difficult you've actually thought about this most excellent yesterday's panel you started talking a little bit about the propaganda around technology so you said the public democratic consensus around science is largely manufactured and that the last 10 or 15 years the internet is all a really useful tool for good it's also driven sort of cynicism and misinformation some might argue like your autobiographical sketch but the perceptions of technology today are really more being drawn amongst the masses by sort of PR people and you said whoever is best at manipulating public opinion so what do you think this means for the future of the public's relationship with technologies that are in essence a black box we don't really understand how they work the kind of interesting data point for me on that is watching the whole birther thing and how that plays out in the public sphere because I'm pretty sure that if you were to have private and candid conversations with leading conservatives that essentially none of them expressed the least bit of doubt that President Obama was born in Hawaii but and some of them to their credit have come out and tried to sort of put the whole birther thing to rest but there's clearly at least one faction that's thinking okay we don't actually believe he was born in Kenya but it suits our purposes for there to be some people out there in the public who do believe that and so we're going to we're going to at a minimum we're going to not discourage them from thinking that and beyond that maybe we're even going to try to foster doubts about his about where he was born and so that is a level of cynicism about public discourse that feels kind of new to me and maybe I've just been terribly naive before and now I'm seeing the way things really are or maybe it really is kind of a new benchmark in how devious people are willing to be but it's very easy if you want to pursue those kinds of strategies it's very easy to do that on the internet because people just don't have ideas in their heads yet for what they see on the internet and so if that's how it's going to be then I would say that whenever any kind of new technology is proposed whether it's a wind turbine or a nuclear reactor or solar photovoltaic cells in the desert someone's ox is going to get gored by that new technology and that someone can always put up a website or put some information out that's going to scare people to death and cause them to oppose the implementation of that change So that's sort of the misinformation side of things there's also sort of the general ignorance side it's been said like when technology becomes the difference between technology and magic disappears and it seems to me I don't know in this audience probably a lot of people know how their iPhone works or what have you but in the general populace more and more we're having technologies that do things that even to two generations ago would seem almost magical I remember watching Star Trek and you'd have little things where they wouldn't have to push a button and run their fingers over the board and it would do stuff and that seemed like that was science fiction of 15 years ago Yeah and well a lot of the stuff is complicated enough that even the people who are building it don't have a kind of synoptic view of how it all works there's specialists in different subsystems who know how to make one bit of it work and no one's kind of got the big view of it Yeah that doesn't make things any easier but even in kind of simpler things like say putting up a wind farm that's a pretty straight forward technology most people can understand how that works but it's easy to create doubt in people's minds about are the turbine blades going to kill birds is there a sound that comes out of the turbine that's going to mess with people's health somehow at a distance and and what I was getting at in the bit you quoted earlier is that if somebody proposed now to create the petroleum industry from nothing then that would come off as just unhinged insanity you know once people became aware of all of the environmental side effects and hazards associated with that but for whatever reason the existing stuff doesn't get scrutiny in the same way as new things and this is what I was getting at in the comments to you earlier about how we use the word technology seems like the word technology in our public discourse is reserved for things that just got invented very recently and anything that's old that we're kind of used to seeing around us that's not technology that's just the way things are almost like it's a part of the natural world and so it's I think we need to start looking at everything we've got as technology and so evaluating it all fairly according to the same terms and instead of worrying about a possible side effect of a new energy system try to weigh that the benefits of getting rid of an oil well so if you have misinformation on the one hand you've got ignorance on the other and then you have this which you've stated that you try to avoid the easy, the glib, and the oversimplified in my books what attracts you to complexity well that's an awfully self-congratulatory thing for me to have said when did I write that in 2005? I'm so much wiser now your books do require of the reader to really immerse themselves into worlds and thought processes you seem to take a certain glee in providing looking at the calca you can think of them as appendices to anathem where you're literally walking you through fundamentals of geometry in some of these things like the complex and I'm curious what attracts you to that complexity you've talked a little bit about the oversimplification is almost what leads to these problems down the road and yet there's a tension between the easy message the propagandistic message it goes back to what I said earlier which is that I mean largely it's a it's a fictional technique that's intended to instill in the reader's mind the illusion that this world has to be real because there's so much complicated junk in it so how could it possibly be just a fake so a lot of it's that the I'm not sure if it even requires much more I was reading Robert Heinlein some of his earlier works about half a year or so ago and one of the things two things really stuck with me one is he has a book where he talks about how basically the moon becomes a gigantic knowledge repository and how you can ask any question and it's so mechanized in such an advanced manner even a matter of hours to any question that you might have and that was like yes the mechanistic future and the others he has a whole story centered around a brain transplant and at the end of the story the end of the story one of the protagonists in there talks about how next what he's really going to try to do is a heart long transplant and I'm thinking like have there been surprises for you in the quarter of a century now in terms of technologies that either you had expected in these sort of near future narratives would be with us now or the flip side of that you know ones that are here now that you wouldn't have expected over that time frame well the I mean the a true but not very interesting answer is the internet and everything connected with that and you can kind of see science fiction for the last 25 years or so as being in a kind of tailspin as it tries to absorb this gigantic thing that happened that it wasn't ready for and didn't really predict so in the 70s we've got the view of computers as seen in Star Trek or 2001 and then this the reality of how computers develop kind of blindsided us and I think cyberpunk and that whole wing of science fiction is just us trying to wrap our heads around it so so there's that and I guess I've already said that you know I was led to believe that by the time I was 40 or certainly 50 I'd be hanging around in space stations going for strolls on the surface of Mars etc and so that just totally obviously you know failed to materialize there's no jet packs you know none of the cool stuff that I was led to look forward to seems to be around so it's like iPhone yes jet pack no all the teenagers out there are like damn it so I'm going to turn this over for questions from all of you in a moment and what I'm going to ask you to do as we get situated for that is that you keep your questions through or commentary to 30 seconds or less it's going to be tough and I'll ask one final question of you what's the status of Mongolia and can you explain a little bit about how you decided to make the leap from writing on paper with a fountain pen to sort of multimedia, mobile new wave extravaganza narrative so you're referring to a serialized novel called the Mongolia that I'm co-writing with six other writers and it's an experiment in serialized content on the internet it's a subscription based thing you pay your money and you get you get a new chapter every week and it's going to look like one of those great big kind of 19th century serialized adventure books except that the distribution medium is iPhones and iPads and the web and hopefully other devices we can kind of bring those online it's not meant to be some kind of radical break with existing ways of writing or existing means of publishing things as a way of trying to come to grips with the changes that are obviously coming in the publishing industry in a way we'll kind of do the minimum amount of violence to the sanity and the bank accounts of writers and publishing minded folks alike the Mongolia is the first thing that we're publishing this way but we hope there will be others and we're building, we're working on building the infrastructure we need to make that happen so we have time for a few questions folks we'll start right here in front we on now Sean Hayes Arizona State University and I'll stay within the 30 seconds first do you find it at all amusing having written the big U that the nation's largest public university is partly responsible for your being here and second you mentioned yesterday I've designed a course that I've taught for a number of years at the backbone of which is snow crash and they read several chapters a week and it's hard, it's part of how I try and get them to understand what life in a different socio-technical context would feel like and you mentioned a story yesterday that you said might be apocryphal and I was wondering if you could expand on the apocrypha because it sort of stunned me when you said that there were actually people who were tossing down snow crash and saying this is our business plan you could point to specifically what aspect of it did they consider to be their business plan when that story was going around it was when virtual reality was quite the buzz word and so it was I think a kind of all purpose way of saying we want to do something multiplayer online with VR components but I think like all such stories it's all depends on what kind of point the teller of the story is trying to make gentlemen right here and after that we'll come over to you sir morning I think it's on Ben Schneiderman University of Maryland thanks for your fun visions I wonder what you think about what I see as the technology that's equivalent to the size and complexity of the internet which is electronic health records the volume of data the impact on people's lives and actually it's more universality and reaches out to a larger fraction of the population yet it's sadly broken in very serious ways and harmful and deadly to the tune of killing 98,000 people a year possibly because of medical errors how does that figure in your future how do electronic health records become either a successful or a dire outcome I haven't I've been kind of watching the advent of this issue I guess you could say for a little bit I have close relatives in the health care business so I get to hear kind of a ground level narrative of what's going on with that and obviously I deal with that whenever I go to the doctor but I have to admit I haven't personally put enough thought into it to really have anything interesting to say I guess I mean yeah well I mean it sounds like fodder for another sprawling dystopian novel if somebody wanted to take it on but yeah the amount of information and it's importance to people's lives is pretty staggering and sort of generally under acknowledged I guess you know here we need a trebuchet for hurling the microphone I think it's just highly directional the microphone is highly directional but it's working it is working I'm talking directly into it I'm just wondering what you think of the idea that Sherry Turkle now has in a recent book that she just put out alone together in which she basically says that internet technology and robotic technology is giving an illusion of connectedness that's really untrue and in fact harmful because what it does is track from real human interaction instead we're drawn into this appearance of connectedness through social media and so forth but it's really kind of a madness as she puts it and the future she sees is kind of going further and further in that direction in that direction yeah yeah I've been hearing Sherry's thoughts on that for actually quite a while we run some panels together at least 10 years ago when she was starting to work on that stuff and for me as long as it's about sort of robots I find it a little less immediate and so I always tended to kind of push it to the bottom of my list of things to worry about since not that many people are currently interacting with robots but I think when she's talking about the internet in general which we do interact with all the time then it actually does become more of an issue and Geron Lanier in particular in his book You Are Not a Gadget has some great things to say about the how on Facebook you can check the box that says you're single or the box that says you're in a relationship but there's no gradations in real life it's always complicated you know or it's usually complicated you had like the 16 levels of relationship status within their tradition so yeah I don't have I guess I don't have anything really pungent to say about it you know it's certainly I hope it's one of those things that will get better as people express their dissatisfaction and other innovators come along with better stuff so I've been told we're at times I'm going to take one last question here in the front this is what you get when you sit in the front by the way excuse me I'm Mitzi Wertheim with the Naval Postgraduate School I haven't read any of your stuff but in listening to you one of the things that strikes me that's missing is the emotion of human beings and part of the problem are you saying I have a flat affect ? you can pick it up any way you want I am struck by the problems you're describing which has to be people not wanting to change and so there's this basic human resistance to a lot of this stuff and the United States has had some disadvantages in technically being ahead of the game with television we were 524 pixels the Europeans got it up no 512 the Europeans got it up to 1024 but we get locked in early on it's kind of the way we're locked in with our roads and we no longer have free space in which to create all of this stuff but I'm interested in your human being component of this I mean the most important human emotional component during the 20th century was just abject terror which turns out to be a great motivator when you want to build a rocket or great big huge bombs I mean even the interstate highway system was sort of put in the defense highway system so it's part of the whole kind of cold war mindset so it's really easy to motivate people that way and it seems to be a lot harder to motivate them with things like hope or just a vague desire to make the world a better place right now we don't have any particular thing to focus our abject terror on and so it's just kind of free floating and we're sort of scared of everything and nothing's getting done scared of everything, nothing's getting done words of wisdom from Neil Stevenson