 Hello, thank you for coming to the Berkman Center. I'm David Weinberger, but we're here to hear a discussion, a talk, and a discussion with Robin Chase, who you are all familiar with. The sort of easiest, well, let me do the housekeeping, then I'll introduce Robin. First piece of housekeeping is that this is being webcast. So you should say whatever it is that you want, but you should know the entire world can hear it. And because it's archived throughout all its history, they will be able to hear what you said. Second of all, there is a convenient hashtag. You can make up your own, of course, but we tend to use pound Berkman. There's also a Berkman Twitter handle, which is Berkman Center. More to the point, rmchase at Twitter, if you want to be tweeting about this. This is part of a Berkman series on privacy. There's more about that at this address, which is cyber.law.harvard.edu, which is a general purpose Berkman address, slash series, slash privacy, all lowercase towards the end there. Is there a Berkman person in here who wants to tell me what I've forgotten to say? So Robin is going to talk for some reasonable period. We will want her to talk more. We will have that opportunity because then there will be a completely open Q&A. Yes, I mentioned we're being recorded. Yeah, no, no, we dwelled on that at tedious length. But thank you. This is an important note. And then we will end at 1.15. We are out. We have a hard stop. So let me very quickly introduce Robin, although she and her work is familiar to most, if not all of you. So you certainly, I mean, sort of the one line thing, if you're doing the CNN and she's on the one line thing you'll put underneath, probably is co-founder of Zipcar, which is really important development and is not only a thriving business, but pointed in some really interesting directions that Robin has followed up on as has much of the economy. Robin has consistently been well ahead of her time. So I think the first time I met Robin was about 10 years ago, and it was in a closed conference with telecommunications geniuses and innovators. I was taking notes. And I watched as Robin suggested, more than suggested, that we should be thinking about networked cars because cars are going to be networked. And there was enormous pushback from these wonderful, progressive, serious technologists saying, well, now Robin, networking of cars, that's really now. That's not going to happen, nor it'll take so far. And of course, we are now on the verge of or in the era of the networked car. In fact, Robin has a new company, Venium VENIAM, which is about the mesh networking of cars, which is exactly what you were talking about a decade ago. Robin, I know throughout those 10 years has also been working with or consulted by Department of Transportation and, in fact, many people in government. She's Robin Chase, so I'll stop saying anything more. And Robin is going to talk in part about her new book, Peer's Ink, which I highly recommend. Robin? Does it work? Yes. I'm not tethered. Thank you so much. And I actually asked Birkman, could I give this talk? Because I really wanted to pick your brains about things that are bothering me. And so I really look forward to the Q&A part. So be thinking about your questions, and I'm hoping to pose some challenging issues. Think about this talk when we look over here. I have this little web, because I feel like I'm going to be talking about several disparate things. And then at the end, we're going to like and elicit them all up together with this question around privacy and security. So there's different things going on in this talk. And I'm going to consolidate and condense so that we can get to the things that I want to hear from you. So number one, there's a totally new organizational paradigm that now exists thanks to the internet. And I'm calling this paradigm Peers, Inc. And if we think about this organizational paradigm is changing how we build companies and how we get to work and ultimately how we shape economies. And it is happening right now in real time. And it can go in many different directions. And key underlying this are these three components that I have here. It's platforms for participation that are leveraging excess capacity and inviting the participation of diverse peers. And as I say, I think this is totally reshaping capitalism and how we are working. And I'll just explain this more clearly. If we think about all of these companies that we've talked about for the last 15 years, all of these companies are this shape. All of these companies have been leveraging excess capacity on platforms for participation. And if we aren't participants, they are nothing. And Skype, I think, is like an incredible example. So imagine a telecommunications company built on the back of Robin's excess capacity on her laptop and my video camera and my internet connection, all stuff I've already paid for that already existed and they've made a telecommunications company out of that. And it's similar for each of these listed. And then down the side, just to make you realize that this is happening in every sector of the economy, the free and open source movement is this. The massive online open coursework is this. All the crowd everything, crowdsourcing, co-housing, co-work, I mean, all of those things are this shape. The impending 3D printing is going to take this shape. The beauty of the blockchain is this shape. So it's really happening in every sector of the economy. And the question is why? Like what's going on? Why are companies making themselves as platforms and what does it mean to leverage these assets? If I think about excess capacity, it's saying that this is an asset that is not wholly in my control, maybe not in my control at all. And so whenever we're talking about working with excess capacity, we are effectively talking about sharing because it's not just in one person's control. And of course, the example I want to use is bed sharing. And lots of you will know where I'm going, but still this fantastic. I imagine that some of you guys have done bed sharing in your lives. I do a lot of bed sharing because I travel a lot. And when I go to different countries around the world, my dream is to stay at a friend's house. And I've got two microphones going. My dream is to stay at a friend's house. And I'm lucky, lucky in their multi-purpose room that has some excess capacity and is also working as their home office. If I'm extra lucky, yeah, who? I get a double bed. Really like that as their excess capacity. And if I'm unlucky, ick, they told the teenager to go sleep on the couch. And I was supposed to sleep there gross. And that is why I invented bed sharing. And so that's why we invented hotels. And if I think about Zipcar, when I found Zipcar in 2000, I literally told my staff, do not call this car sharing. A, no one knows what car sharing is. You're still going to have to spend five sentences describing what type of services. And B, people don't like the concept of sharing. And so if I think about hotels, and I would say to them, imagine if we called hotels bed sharing, which is exactly what it is. So I think of Zipcar, wow, how amazingly innovative. But Zipcar is to cars as hotels are to beds. You want to get a return on assets over the seven-day week. And you want to pick up the utilization and efficiency of those assets. So I wanted to look and see. I did some research. What is the largest bed sharing in the world? You guys do know where I'm going. But here's the Intercontinental Hotels Group. After 65 years, 650,000 rooms in 100 countries. And we know that that was a huge amount of work. Because the second largest is Hilton, 93 years, 610,000 rooms. So it was really effortful to make this succeed. And yes, Airbnb in its fourth year had 650,000 rooms for rent. And this is where I've got to practice my can-you-believe-it dance. The world has transformed. That we can do this in four years. That is mind-boggling. And I'd say legacy companies in every sector need to start being terrified. And I think they are terrified. And couch surfing in its ninth year had 2 and 1 half million places that you could stay. So the question is, underline, what's going on? Why is this happening? What's actually going on? If I think about why did we ever invent companies? Why do we invent governments? What is it that they do that we can't do? And I think of this as industrial strengths. And so we invented these big institutions to do things that we, as individuals, can't do. And those things would be large investments. It's going to cost millions of dollars. Don't ask Robin Chase to do it. I don't have millions of dollars. If it's going to require lots of kinds of intelligence, I'm really smart, as David said, in two things. It's going to take 10 things. I don't have it. We have to have an institution or an organization to do it. If we think about standards and standardized contracts, I, Robin Chase's individual, am way too puny to force anything on you guys, as you have to do it this way. I just don't have the power. You have to have a big entity to say, this is the standard way. These are the contracts. And typically, these attributes are bound up in a kind of brand promise and a trusted party. And often, they are global. On the flip side, individuals actually have things that they do way better than big companies. And those things would be localization and customization and specialization. Companies can do these things, but if you think of the last 100 years of industrialization, it has been ripping that out, because you want to do everything in these big standardized ways so we can get the economies of scale at work and push prices down. Turns out, when you put these two things together, they are, in fact, very complementary to each other. And of course, Jan made the slide. But they really are complementary skill sets. And because the internet exists, dealing with lots of small parts is now no longer a drama. And that's why we have this new organizational structure that I'm calling Peer's Inc. But when I say the Inc side, I want you to realize I'm not just talking about companies. Institutions and governments are also banks in this world view. So it's the big and the small that are now able to collaborate, and each side can do what they do best. So the Inc delivers a platform for participation, and the Peer's deliver diversity of offering. And to simplify this, I think of it as a yin yang, where it's very symbiotic and very complementary, and each side has to recognize that it's got to leave enough value on the table for the other side, or they won't participate. And it's all kind of swimming in this C of excess capacity. So I'm going to go through these three things. Excess capacity I adore, because A, it's resource efficient, and I'm an environmentalist. And B, it's cost efficient. And as an entrepreneur, oh my god, I want to use excess capacity, because I'm getting it at this totally transformed economic cost. And so how am I defining excess capacity? It's something that already exists. It's been paid for, but there's some more value there. And I want you to think about excess capacity in a very broad way. You won't hear me using the term sharing economy, because people think about sharing economy as these physical assets and peer to peer. And what's happening is a much larger thing. So think about not just physical assets, but virtual assets and temporal assets. So all kinds of things. So A, we identify this excess capacity. And then B, how do we harness it? What are the platforms? So one, you take that asset and you slice it. And if you think about zip card, that's what we did. We took this big asset that was a car. You had to buy either a whole car or a whole day. And we said, you know what, we're going to make it. So you just pay for what you use. And by leveraging this excess capacity that was in the system, we had this huge economic leg up, because everyone is buying more car than they need. And now we said, you know what? You can just buy exactly what you want. So we sliced it. And I have your Upwork is another example around staffing. Instead of buying a whole employee, you can buy someone for an hour or for a project or for a week. Number two, you can aggregate. And that's what Airbnb did. It took a million empty spaces, excess capacity spaces. And it joined them on the platform and provided one umbrella of insurance policy that applies to them all and the ways to communicate and the ways to pay in ability to compare and contrast are now on this platform. So this aggregation completely provides a whole new set of values that the individual pieces don't have. Both of these are ways that are making the asset used and the way it's always been used more efficiently used. The most compelling to me is to open up these assets and to say, hey, here's an asset. What new ideas, what new values can you extract out of this? And I have here, as examples, data.gov and GPS. Let's just see what I have as my next slide. So if we just think of the whole open data movement, here were data sets that were governments and transit authorities had paid for. They were really happy with the value that they got out of it. The platform for participation would be OpenAPIs. And they said, here's this free resource of all this data, what do you got? And so McKinsey did this study in 2013 that said, you know what, 40 countries have opened up a million data sets and we think there's $3 trillion worth of value there. So talk about abundance. Like this is something out of nothing, leveraging this excess capacity to say, whole new brand, new value there. So if we talk about the Inc side, the Inc builds a platform for participation. And what's fabulous about platforms is their platform-ness. They organize lots of small parts. They make complex things very simple and very importantly, they give the power of the large to the small. They also deliver all the scale economies that we love of those big entities. And because they're platforms, they have the ability to have incredibly high growth. That's what platforms, that's the platform-ness of platforms. And here is a company called BlaBlaCar that I love. It's a French company. And it does real ride sharing, meaning if I want to go from Paris to Berlin in my own car and I have three empty excess capacity seats, I can now sell those seats to people who want to go with me from Paris to Berlin. This growth curve is really typical of what platforms look like, platform growth curves. This started in 2006, so I truncated that. But it takes a long time to get your platform right. It is really, really hard. Most fail. But once you get a platform right and singing, and it works beautifully, you can have the simultaneous co-investment of assets and interest. So BlaBlaCar now is moving 4 million people every month, which is the same as 10,000 trains or 10,747s, but they didn't lay a track, they didn't buy a rail car, they didn't buy a plane, all on excess capacity. So if we talk about the peers, the peers bring diversity. And here I want to say I am 57 years old and when I went to business school at MIT in the 80s, it was diversity, bla, bla, bla, politically correct, and I say the word diversity, whatever. And I want to say that this whole business model sings and its entire best values come out of leveraging and enjoying the power of diversity. It is diversity that makes this business model whip and kick the butt of the old way of doing things. It's diversity that's giving a lot of the innovation and creativity and the localization. And it's diversity that delivers resilience and redundancy, things that we really, really need. So my example here would be smartphones and apps. So the smartphone is in fact a platform for participation. If you think about the level of effort and skill and money it takes to build the smartphone and its operating system relative to the apps. It is way more hard and requires much more skill. But we have now, let me go to my next slide. Since smartphones were invented, we have seen more than 2 million apps developed. And sure, lots of those are the same. But if we think about this seven year period now, I think we have seen more innovation in those seven years than any other time in human history. And why are we seeing that innovation? Because it's individuals based on their own specific life experiences and their own sectors in which they're knowledgeable able to build these new cool ways of using this asset that we think of as our smartphone. Another interesting piece of excess capacity this leveraging is I bought my smartphone for killer apps. So it was worth $600 for me to have Gmail and for me to be able to take photographs and have navigation systems. But all of those other apps don't have to carry the cost of $600. They can be worth zero, which a lot of them are. They can be worth a lot more. But the creators of those apps were leveraging this fact that I had already spent my $600 for my phone, and they are just free riders on top of that. So again, if you think of an entrepreneur perspective, I am all about leveraging excess capacity stuff that's already been paid for that already exists. So why I am totally infatuated with this peers ink collaboration, this new organizational structure that's happening, is because it comes with it these incredible attributes and characteristics that are so remarkable, I think of them as miracles. And before I share those miracles with you, I want to make you deeply depressed so that you can have the ah, when you get to the miracle part. So the most depressing thing I know is climate change, and I'll be going to Paris next week. So this is a report by the World Bank, a very conservative financial institution. And so these are numbers that you might think you know. But this report is, if every country in the world does everything they promise to do, we'll see a four degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures by 2,100. And in fact, this morning I was just reading that we're actually going to see six degrees Celsius, which is 11 degrees Fahrenheit increase under business as usual. So the question is, we're sitting in this room. We aren't climate scientists. And what does it feel like to move forward four degrees or seven degrees Fahrenheit? What does it feel like? What does the seven degrees Fahrenheit global average warming actually feel like? We are actually right here now in a very good place to understand this. The last time we were minus seven degrees Fahrenheit. Right in this spot, where we're standing right here was the last ice age 20,000 years ago under several kilometers of ice. So if you want to know what it feels like to warm a planet by seven degrees Fahrenheit, that's where you are right the second under several kilometers of ice to today, which took 20,000 years. But we're going forward that same amount of warming in 85. So if you haven't been terrorized before, you should be terrorized. This is, I look at it, I think we are all walking around in this kind of crazy days that we hear the words climate change and we hear catastrophic. When they say catastrophic, they mean the vast bulk of humans will not be alive by 2100. And so I am here, and everything I'm doing is around this urgency of addressing this issue. When we talk about, yeah, yeah, yeah, do it for your grandchildren and your children, screw that. Do you intend to be around by the 2060s? If countries don't do what they say they're going to do, we will see these temperatures by 2060s, which mean by 2040s is going to be hell. And if you intend to live for 15 years, which I do, it's going to be really awful. So we have to really get on this at a pace that is just I travel all around the world, and I have to say I'm totally daunted by the scale of the planet, the 7 billion people, the economic system that we have to turn around and get to zero emissions as fast as possible. So my friend Benny from Stanford has this really great sentence, you can't solve exponential problems with linear solutions. And we have profoundly been addressing this climate change problem with these little pathetic linear solutions. And back to the miracles. I say try pierce, ink. So if we talk about these miracles, and this is what really gives me optimism around this gigantically horrid issue, is miracle number one. We can defy the laws of physics because we are leveraging excess capacity. So what do I mean by that? Imagine in 2000, instead of saying, you know what? I'm going to invent Zipcar. I said, OK, you know what? I'm going to build the largest hotel chain in the world. I'm going to build 650,000 rooms in four years. Everyone in this room, every banker and venture capitalist, my pragmatic husband would all say, Robin, physically impossible. You can't go find the land, have an architect, finance it, build it, put furniture in it, hire the staff, have people come, never have any catastrophes, and do it perfectly in four years, physically impossible. So here is what business as usual asset building would look like for hotels over six years. Here's Airbnb's growth curve. So why is that possible? Because they've leveraged existing excess capacity. So when I look at this climate change crisis, I'm in the realm of transportation. And I feel like high-speed rails, brand new cities, some blue-green algae fuel, whatever. That's going to take 25 years to produce any CO2 reductions. We have to get on it with the stuff we have right here and right now with the assets and the people we have today. So that's how we can get these defy the laws of physics. So miracle number two. Because we are building a platform for participation, we can tap exponential learning. And if you think about what is learning, learning is all about the number of iterations that you can do things. So we've always thought, yeah, I, Robin Chase, can get a certain number of iterations in my lifetime. And companies were able to get more iterations in. These platforms can get hundreds of thousands and millions of iterations in. And if they're paying attention, they can do a lot of learning. So my example here is learning a foreign language. The unit of measurement for foreign language learning is what can you learn in a semester at a university, which is 130 hours. The old top of the line before was the Rosetta Stone. And Rosetta Stone is incredibly expensive. You'd only use it if your boss was paying for it. And you'd say, yo, 54 hours like that is way better than 130 hours. Rosetta Stone, you're fantastic. My new favorite company, Duolingo, free online language learning. So I was talking to Duolingo's CEO. He does a lot of A-B testing. So if I ask the question this way, I give it to half the people or I ask it this way and I give it to half the people, which way do they learn better? He can ask to an A-B test. And in 24 hours, 150,000 people would have taken that test. And he can know categorically which is the better way to learn. So Duolingo now has it down to 34 hours in which they will robustly teach you the same amount of information as you would learn in a semester of college. And it is really robust data. Why do I know it's robust data? Because here's Duolingo's growth curve. They are just now three years old. 90 million people are using Duolingo. And from an excess capacity standpoint, A, we used to throw away all that learning what was going on in people's minds. We used to throw that away and that was excess capacity that they're taking advantage of. B, if you think about languages, they come in language pairs. So I am English speaker and I want to learn French. English and I want to learn Spanish. A year and a half ago, Duolingo opened up its processes. It said, hey world, you can make any language pairs on here that you want. Check into Russian. Balinese into, I don't know, Croatian. Of the 90 million people, 45 million people are learning language pairs that Duolingo did not create. And it's only been a year and a half since they opened it. And then amazing excess capacity number three, how do they make money? People who are getting really good at French and Spanish are translating sentences from CNN and BuzzFeed. And CNN and BuzzFeed is paying Duolingo three cents a word instead of the going rate of nine cents a word for translations that are more accurate than human translators because he's got the volumes, right? So he's leveraging excess capacity in three ways. Miracle number three, because we're working with a diversity of peers, the right person will appear. And I don't mean Superman. Superman, he can fly. Honestly, whatever. Everyone in this room is way more powerful than he is immediately because you have your smartphone. And so you can say, what's the weather like where I have to go? What's the best path? Who are the experts? Tell me about the history of that. I don't even want to talk about all those things. Those things, true. I want to give you another example. Here, Obama in December 2014 said, you know what? I think we'll normalize relationships with Cuba. Six months later, 2000 Airbnb listings in Cuba. Why? Because the diversity of people in their diverse locations, with their diverse assets, were able to do this very fast. So what we need is platforms that are going to address climate at this incredible scale and speed and be locally adaptable. And I have to say, this is my only hope. You know, I fight Princess Leah. This is my only hope that we're going to make these platforms because they can grow exponentially. They can adapt and learn exponentially. And as I say, they can adapt to every little nook and cranny. And specifically, when I think about this, I'm thinking about the rise of smart homes. So what I know is my son, he goes to bed the latest. And I have asked him for 25 years, please turn off the light before you go to bed. And he never does. But a platform would say, hey, there's been no movement in the house for the last hour. Why don't I turn off that light? We need the platform to do that. If we think about smart cities, we talk about that endlessly. Smart cities, the only way we're going to get this efficiency is through a lot of the internet of things and all these transactions. They're going to be captured and analyzed on a platform that's going to decide what is the best way to move. Distributed energy. I'm waiting for that to happen. And if we think about autonomous vehicles, I was just talking to Yochai, the car manufacturers will lead you to believe that autonomous vehicles are going to happen in the next 20 years. They're going to unfold in these little phases. And by 20 years from now, we'll have fully autonomous self-driving cars. In fact, it's probably going to happen in the next 5 to 12 years with things happening actually in 2016 immediately. And autonomous vehicles have the ability to transform our world in a dramatically better fashion, because we'll only need 10% of the cars that we have today if we have shared rides and shared cars that are electric. So if you think about cities, we will have no on-street parking. We'll have these new rights of way to do beautiful things. You'll be able to do public transportation at the cost. You'll be able to do transportation at the speed of cars, but with public transportation prices. So we'll have completely transformed access to opportunity and jobs. But all of these things, if you look at all these things, which is why I'm standing here before you guys, all of these things deliver the internet of things. And the internet of things is every single movement and keystroke and breath Robin takes is now tracked. So Peer's Inc is a collaboration. And none of these miracles can happen without the two sides at work. So we can have exponential growth define laws of physics because the platform has organized and unleashed this excess capacity. And the peers have co-invested with their assets, with their data, with their knowledge, with their experience. We can tap exponential learning because we have all of us doing our crazy ways that we do things and the hundreds of thousands of different ways we're doing it. And the platform is doing the analysis, saying, wow, here's best practices. Do more of it. Here's worst practice to stop. And the right person will appear because the platform has attracted all of this participation. And the platform is saying, hey, here's the needle out of the haystack. Take it. We're not doing that. None of these things can happen without both sides playing and doing their role. So because this is so compelling from a capitalist private sector model that these companies learn faster and grow faster and adapt faster, everything that can become a platform, I am convinced will become a platform. I am completely convinced. And if I think about industrial capitalism, which I define as the old way that we used to extract the highest value, companies would have a very thick boundary around them. And that boundary would say, that boundary was patents and trademarks and copyrights and certifications and what was inside the company. And employees and assets was very clearly delineated from what was outside the company. And that was the way you extracted the most value. Today, the internet exists. And companies are being built in this peers and collaboration way in which what's inside and outside, employer not employee, who owns those assets, is this personal, is this commercial? Very, very murky now. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It's all this kind of fuzzy. But I feel that we are definitely moving to this new collaborative economy. And I'm going to give you four reasons why I feel convinced. These are true. And you can tell me if you think they are true. But because these are true, this is definitively happening. The internet exists. So one, if we think of assets, shared networked assets always deliver more value than close proprietary ones. And we learned two ways. One, the assets used more efficiently. Or two, brand new unthought of value is being extracted. Here's if we think of humans, we knew this all along. More networked minds are smarter than fewer close ones. So no matter how smart you guys are in this room, and no matter how smart you might be in a corporation, there are more smart people out there. We've always known that. And now that we can find those individuals because they're networked, more networked minds are more creative, more specialized, more customized, more innovative than fewer minds. Done. If we think about the motivations for doing this, like what are the opportunities from an institutional or government scale, the benefits and opportunities of shared open assets are always larger than the problems associated with shared open assets. So if we think about Zipcar, when I started it, people who didn't invest would say, Robin, you know, people would have car accidents, and they're going to get a scratch, and they're not going to tell you, true, a very small percentage of people are jerks, they don't tell us, we identify them, we penalize them, and if they're bad enough, we push them out. But we have today a million people using 13,000 cars around the world. If you think about Wikipedia, when they launched, everyone would say, wah, wah, wah, there's going to be lots of lies in there, and people are going to be like, right graffiti on pages, true. Identified, people figure out how to deal with it, but we have 4.8 million entries in the world's English encyclopedia. How remarkable. And then from a very self-interested standpoint, I only care about me. When I contribute to these things, I always get more than I give. I make three hours of reservations on Zipcar in a year, and I, Robin Chase, have a fleet of 13,000 vehicles at my disposal parked around the world. You know, I edit one article on Wikipedia, and I have those 4.8 million entries that I get to enjoy. So I always get more than I give. And if I think about the world that we're living in today, the pace of climate change and what it's doing to our environment and ecosystems is unbelievably fast. The pace of technology change and automation really, really fast. The, is capitalism on its last legs? We're feeling like, whoa, is capitalism working or not? Like at any second, we're expecting something terrible to happen. If we think about the future of work and employment, we're in this terrifying moment. So Pierce Inc. is the structure for these dynamic times because it's the only structure I know of that can experiment, iterate, evolve, and adapt at the pace required and with the resources required. So I did write this book, but I'm on a rampage because I really care. This is unfolding right now. As I say, it is, this is my only optimism, and it can have positive ways that this can unfold and it can have negative ways that this can unfold. And so I wanna talk today about what is my, what I keep asking myself. Okay, Robin, what are you willing to give up in order to address climate change? What are you willing to give up in terms of privacy and security when I know that if I can have autonomous vehicles, I am going to have them all electric, I'm going to transform the drivability of cities, the livability of cities, we're gonna prevent the 34,000 traffic deaths in the U.S. and then 1.2 million worldwide, and the many millions more that get maimed. We're going to have these opportunities, I'm going to have much more efficient use of houses of energy and houses and cities and movement and assets. Those are things I want and things that we have to have. So what are you willing to give up and how can we structure privacy and data so that we can give as little of it up as we can to accomplish these other goals, which is the survivability of humans, let alone all those species that are going extinct every second that we're breathing? So that is my question for you. Yep, so the new world relies heavily on being heavily connected, networked and reliant on analysis, streams of data. So what is the least privacy loss that delivers us a habitable planet? And so that is my question to you and we can have other questions, but this is what I'm interested in and why I wanted to get you here today. Thank you. And I have my man. I am the Mike Holder. So if you have a question, as is John, we'll run a mic to you because this is being broadcast worldwide. Hi, I'm Willow Brew, I'm with the Berkman Center and also with Center for Civic Media. I really like this model, working in disaster and humanitarian response. We refer to a mixed mode system where it's both FEMA and Occupy Sandy and how do they work together. The issue for me is not privacy loss necessarily, it's who we're losing our privacy to. Security matters because we have repressive regimes and honestly, I'm comfortable with, I'm not- Are you gonna say this out loud? You're comfortable with the NSA? I'm uncomfortable with the NSA. But so my, I love the idea in here of how we are shifting to a post-scarcity model that's rad and that you define it so clearly. So my questions are about platform accountability because nowhere in this is there a shift away from dealing with those repressive regimes and it looks like we're just pushing our power into even more abstract places that we cannot see or address. Does that make sense? Yes, it does, absolutely. And I was having a discussion on this topic immediately before this and so those are indeed the things. So the question, last weekend there was a conference on platform cooperativism and I was a participant in one of the sessions and one of the things that I said to this room of hopeful idealistic people the reality is these platforms cost a fortune and it's not just let's crowdsource a million dollars which would be pretty amazing if you could crowdsource a million dollars. It's really crowdsourcing tens of millions and effectively hundreds of millions so they don't come cheap. So that's my pragmatic side and then piling on that, what I also know is he who finances the platforms creates the rules of engagement. So that is the other terrifying aspect of this. And so to repeat, he who finances the platform creates the rules of engagement ultimately. And so I am extremely interested in, so I put those two things together and I think ah! Like I want these platforms created by a distributed autonomous us and I want them to be created and owned by us. But if I come to my pragmatic self and I look at the pace of climate change and I look at the income inequality and the need to prevent revolutions, I don't have the luxury of the blockchain finally getting its act together and co-ops taking their slow path of one at a time and let's, so it's with anxiety. So, you know, Yohai and I were just talking about, so what are the chances, the free and open source movement has been fantastic and I talked about that in my book and yeah, I'm all over it. But, and even the blockchain, are we saying we're gonna put our fate in the hopes that some fantastic people rise up out of the population and become Satoshi or become Linus or become these guys and create these amazing platforms because we need, I feel like that's the option. So your options are, yeah, let's hope some spectacular, magnanimous Tim Berners-Lee steps up and says, okay, I'll do this or I have this idea and it becomes fantastic or do we make these deals with the devil? Because we have no time. Is it possible that, so Tim Berners-Lee is obviously a pretty good example of a successor and he, but he didn't create a platform so much as a protocol. He's probably getting easier. Oh man, that's because you're from the government. I've mixed that all up, mixed it all up. Okay, that's my one. Hi Robin, this is a- I'm talking to the layman. Fantastic talk. I'm Saul Tannenbaum, a neighbor and Cambridge activist. But to follow up on Willow's question and your response, a couple of weeks ago I went to a talk by the Global Connected Customer Experience Director at General Motors. Yes, former telecom guy and yeah, autonomous vehicles are coming in a slow pace, et cetera, but this was- Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. But he was really talking about the car as a platform and they're working to, I would put it this way, provocatively disrupt zip car by providing shareable cars to apartment buildings in New York and they're doing exactly what the internet does. They're taking out the middle person and going direct to consumer and they're looking at car platforms that are gonna be ubiquitously connected, talking to everything and cars to cars. And their privacy model as well, when you get to the dealership, you'll sign a user agreement just like you click on for iTunes. So these are the platforms that are being envisioned by the people who have the money to draw in the rules of engagement. How do we disrupt that? So I think it's through the Berkman that I feel like I have, I'm gonna give the answer that Berkman would have taught me to say. I have been preaching whenever I talk to those, to my co-founders at Vennium and when I talk to people at GM and Ford, he who creates the data owns the data, please keep remembering that, he who creates the data owns the data. When we go to autonomous vehicles, there's this middle space, which is there's some data that you really profoundly want to have shared data because around safety and learning issues. So there's, yeah, I feel like there's this new category of data that I think is in the deep public interest to make it, can we make it so that I can identify individuals, if I'd like to think. But so the Berkman answer would be, when are we gonna get the terms of use that says here's these six logos, six icons that I understand precisely what it says and I can parse, but I can say okay, okay to one and three, but not to two and four. There was also someone at Platform Cooperativeism that was talking about that on the beginning of the second day. I feel like we've been talking about that for a long time and so again to the price of volunteer citizen action, the challenge I think has been, there hasn't been a person who's a champion of that idea who's been able to put their 24, seven, 12 months a year for three years behind that idea because it needs to happen, but it keeps coming back to how do people live and get fed during that time. Sam Murphy, a local citizen heard, I think I'm just questioning the basis. I mean I recently signed up with Airbnb because I needed an inexpensive place close to JFK and hurrying through the signup process, it was effective, but they knew things about me that I had completely forgotten. I'm sure that was their outsourcing it to some other surface, but isn't the question of privacy almost a fantasy is the wrong word, but does it even exist? And is that, does the question even make sense? I mean there's a capital planet certainly, but it's a lot. Yeah, so I think we all have talked about does privacy no longer exist? And I think of other colleagues that I've met. So who owns the data, how long is it being kept and who's it being shared with? Those are things that we can address. So which kind of data should not be kept around for five years and which kind of data should be disappearing within a day or a month? And right now we aren't, those choices aren't being made overt enough. So when I founded Zipcar, GPS existed and I specifically didn't put it in the first, all the cars when I was CEO because I didn't want to have to get called in front of court and told please tell us where the person was. So I thought I don't need to know that data so I don't want to collect it. But there's things that we could be addressing. So coming back to what's the least privacy loss, what's the data you got and how long are you keeping it? Who are you sharing it with? Let's be explicit. So I think those are things that we can solve. I wanted to give you this, John, can you? No. So it's out. No, there is it. At the beginning it, I don't think it's worth it. No, I'll be allowed. No, it's for the web. That's thing one, two, three. At the beginning of the internet, a whole bunch of us figured that it was a completely anonymous media and there was no way that trust could facilitate transactions. And lo and behold, last week I went to Boulder and ate a clock at night in the dark. I showed up at the house of an Airbnb. A single mom clearly had just been nursing her baby and she welcomed me and sent me down to the department in the basement. Never could have imagined that would happen. Why does trust work over the web, which is a mostly anonymous media? I still can't figure it out. eBay was the first one to figure out because they were the first guys to have peer production that you need to have ratings and commentaries. And so whenever you have peer production of anything, it will come with ratings and commentaries because my experience is 80 plus percent of us are very bad performers relative to professional level quality. And so we need to have those ratings and commentaries. And just thinking about YouTube, how early they introduced ratings and commentaries. So it's a way of extending via the internet, having other people as my proxies for trust. But you will see it in every one of these platforms because you have to really get the bad production out and signal it and get it off the plate. Oh, hi. Thank you, yeah. My name's Diane Williams. I'm an entrepreneur and computer scientist. I have a question, a response and a question. You mentioned your son has a problem not turning on the lights. There's a company, iRobot, who's planning to work on that. One of the problems I have about smart homes and certainly personal robotics within homes is that when this data is collected, right now the rumors are, how many millions of rumors around, but he said they're not uploaded to iRobot. So they have no idea what they learned to lay out at one's home. But increasingly now, with the smart homes, on one hand you have things like Nest where you would have, like you said, about climate change and the use of resources. On the other hand, it's literally in your house. You're being monitored literally 24 seven. As you said, where's this data? That's my question to you. Precisely, precisely. And yeah, and what are we gonna do about it? So what are the things that we can ask for and make sure that we ask with a consistent focus loud enough and provide the solutions? Say, okay, you get my data, but you can only keep it for 20 hours, throw it out or whatever, whatever those things are. But we aren't asking, we haven't defined what those things are and we have to because this world is imminent and in fact we want it to happen. Because the alternative is, one alternative is way worse. So what we need to come up with these rules, as my quick, what is the least privacy loss that delivers a habitable planet? Exactly. So my name is Jessica Schilling. I actually work at Identity Access Management for the Central Anti-Organization here at Harvard. Thinking about ideas of excess capacity and going back to the thing about the Airbnb question and because I was actually asked that question three days ago as a refresher, having been asked that maybe two years ago when I signed up for Airbnb, you look at these questions and it's immediately obvious that, hey, these are standard sort of first tier experience credit check answers. What sort of car did you drive? What county did you live in? So once you recognize that, it makes a little bit more sense but then my next question was, hey, is this a soft credit poll? Is this something I need to be concerned about? And this sort of brings me back to ideas which seem to be kind of in their very early stages right now about quantification of what is again, excess capacity. This is spare data that I have lying around to prove who I am. It seems much less scary if I can part those pieces out one by one and say, I'm gonna give you these for Airbnb identification purposes. I'm not gonna give you this for this other use. And I'm wondering if you and your personal experience have seen anything that might indicate that we may be able to standardize some sort of identity parting out bits of data? I know there's a lot of people who are working on it and so we all know people who are working on it and then so it comes back, I feel like I don't wanna be so pessimistic but it comes back to the amount of money and time and focus and marketing it takes to make those great ideas that we all know people who are working on push them into the market and maybe another angle on that is we need to make all of us as individuals realize that this is an important issue because I think the vast majority of people don't realize it's an important issue. So maybe if consumers asked for it or complained about it, so I know whenever I get asked to sign in something I choose G plus because that has got like no information and so that's my rock bottom. If you want my social network, G plus, whatever. But yeah, so that is for me a concern because we've been talking about this for the last five years, 10 years and we aren't making any progress, any headway in a significant way. Thanks for me. My name is Charlie, I'm a Bermont fellow and I have two thoughts very related with your answer and the previous question and what happens is I used to work for Google and then I had my own startup and I worked helping brands to get better advertising campaigns and I see this from the marketing perspective and I now I'm looking this under prospective I see that marketing and that analysis and market intelligence has been one of the most pressing influences in this last area for understanding the privacy and making a hunting of private data for consumers. I feel me guilty for that, for being part of that. But right now I have a thought and I think that people like me and older than me didn't have the time and the preparation for to think about privacy and what means privacy and what means privacy in the digital era but younger generations do not need to follow this same path. So I'm questioning in the last days what are we doing and I'm asking this in the institutional and governments and even business levels, what are we doing for preparing younger generations about thinking for a better privacy practices and I don't know if there is a hope or there is a new way where we can do something. I just, what you're saying is since we're standing here it could be that Harvard, that you guys can push Harvard to do appropriate role modeling, that you can push back on Harvard, and I think the education piece needs to happen younger and younger and I think there's some of that that's happening but just thinking about here and now it could be that students at Harvard could be rallied to force Harvard to come up with what is, we want an icon system of what you're taking from us and we want to have these overt statements about how long you're keeping our data and so I think you actually do have purchase as students against Harvard to create the privacy data collection platform that you want and that since it's Harvard it has this little magnifier piece so maybe as I'm standing here that could be a mechanism because I think the students that attend could be made aware of the risks to them right now so I feel like suddenly just as I'm standing here I feel like you actually have an opportunity here to get it motivated and informed and then motivate the student body and then put pressure into a place that has a larger position in the world than it should to create better privacy policies that could then ripple through so the Facebook effect out of Harvard but I agree with you, the educational piece has to happen. David has a question. I'll wait for a microphone because I want to make sure that the entire web hears this. The privacy question as you say and the identity question has been around forever. Are we making headway? Are we making headway? No, why aren't we making headway? So let's imagine that what would you tell a student about, I guess this is too far a question, that would be great. What would you tell a student in order to get her or him motivated to take some form of action? What are the dangers? Because people seem to, I mean what would you tell them? And the second thing is would you consider as part of this or maybe as all of it not putting the burden on customers, users to figure out the buttons and press the buttons inside in each case but rather to try to protect us by putting in laws about the use of privacy is what I mean it's all out there anyway. How about we have some pilots that are and I would say Harvard would be a pilot that would say here's best practices, here's how it plays out. You, state of Massachusetts, you, country of the United States should now adopt some of those mechanisms or so those rules that we've now played this out and here's what the rules should look like because I think we're constantly making rules and laws that we spur up with because we haven't been able to test how they play out in the real world. So maybe that would be a combining answer and yeah ideally I'd wanna have Harvard do the right thing but Harvard, and I even know people who are doing this in Harvard don't we? But to her question I still like the idea of making students and individuals aware and in control. So I as a child being told to cross the street the burden is on me teaching that child cross the street carefully because all these things but I'm also making rules around cars running red lights and crosswalks. So I think you have to have both things happening to get this done in a real way, in a good way. Are we done? More questions? Yeah. Self-driving car question. We all agree that having HOV lanes is useful or that letting cops or fire trucks go by. I'm curious how you think we're gonna embed public policy concerns about the environment or the exceed the into software about self-driving cars? Well one of the interesting things about self-driving cars is that they will always have to be following the established rules. So I was just thinking about there would be no speeding on streets because there would be no speeding. Thank you. And you'll be parking only in places where parking was allowed or standing only where standing was allowed. So all the existing rules will have to be embedded. A red herring that the automotive industry constantly brings up and now I'm gonna tell you this, you're gonna see it every time you see autonomous vehicles discussed they'll say what happens? What's the algorithm gonna say? What's the software gonna say when it has to choose between killing the four year old on the sidewalk versus the oncoming collision with the whatever. And now that that's never gonna work you can never have autonomous cars because if they can't make that they're gonna have to embed that decision and I think why are you bringing up the stupid case? Like it's gonna be one in a million trips, one in two million trips that this case happens and what happens today? Someone's making a choice between the two right now and those people are, so I thought you were going there and I think I don't even wanna talk about that because it's such a crazy fine-tuned useless side thing. Distraction. So maybe we're done? No, yes, so. David, that wasn't my question. No, what was your question? The question was how are we gonna embed the practice where we move over for public safety or environmental concerns about the bus's bike? Oh, that's very easy. I wanna push you to more worrisome problems. More worrisome problems is what I learned from Zipcar is people think of the cost of driving as the cost of fuel and so when they say, wow, Zipcar is $10 an hour, like it's really, you know, I thought it was like 10 cents a mile to drive. Like people are really thinking about just as the cost of fuel and that's why they think car sharing is so expensive because they don't think all those sunk costs. When you have autonomous vehicles, your own body and your own time is now no longer a cost. So I live in Cambridge and I live a mile from Harbor Square. It's extra cold, I don't feel like riding my bike. Okay, I'm gonna have my car come drop me here and parking here is hard or expensive. Drive home, please drive home. And then I tell it to come back at one because that's why I thought I was gonna talk and it's one of five, just keep driving around. The cost of fuel is like whatever, so it's gonna cost me like 20 cents to drive around the block for 10 minutes. So that is a much more challenging thing. If we have connected vehicles, your thing about the ambulance is that connected vehicles will say this is an emergency vehicle, step aside. Like you won't have to have a siren because it'll be connecting. I'm an emergency vehicle, step aside. But people using, today we have 80% of cars are single occupancy vehicles. I think if we don't put a very high price on moving a car empty, we will see 50% of the cars and there will be zero occupancy vehicles. So there's a lot of serious policy things that we have to play through to make this future play out a better way rather than a worse way. Because we have a lot of potential for autonomous vehicles to play out in a worse way. Yes. That didn't sound like taking the train. Like, I have to. I'm sorry. That didn't sound like taking the train. Like you want a way to get to work and not have to worry about parking the car and then a way to get home when you're ready to go home and... Sorry, Saul. So just think about them. But so precisely I think autonomous vehicles are gonna be able to deliver private public transportation at public transportation prices. So I think it's gonna be, it has the potential to be a phenomenal thing that you're gonna go door to door. So we'll see how it plays out. And so the question is who's going to own those cars? Who's going to own the operating system? Who's gonna own the software? Who's gonna maintain? I see a very complex ecosystem and it will get decided city by city. But for me, much more important than who owns it, frankly, is are we gonna make all those vehicles electric? Are we gonna charge 10 times if you have an empty vehicle? Are we going to make private companies are not gonna be able to have the alcohol car and the pharmacy car and the shoe store car roaming around in circles because cheaper than having a storefront. So the piece about who owns it, if it's well-maintained, I don't care. But there's lots of pieces in that ecosystem and how it plays out. And I think that who owns, if I think of my Peers Inc. model, I think is this something that belongs on the Inc. side or the Peers side? So is it something that should be locally owned and they're gonna do a better job or is it something that should be a larger entity? The software, do you really want your local governments to do the self-driving software one by one? Me, no, I want to have a global brand that is sharing data on safety and improving and learning really fast. Do I think it should be maintained by that global brand? No, let's have some local guys do the maintenance because they know what's going on. So I think how it's gonna play out is gonna be different. Yes. This has to be the last question and that's gonna be short. Now I wanna ask five questions, but let me be very practical. I mean, you talk about a car coming right here to Harvard and that's a future we all want. But there's actually a zoning petition in Cambridge to add to the parking on Mass Ev because what the neighbors here feel they need is more parking for their single occupancy cars, which is what they're all gonna be driving more of as they get older. I mean, how do you combat that at a, sort of the practical level of, I want mine? As it ever was Saul, so I don't do any local politics because it's so, no, I don't do local politics because I am working at my highest and best use now is at an international stage. But when I went and decided I was gonna go talk about Pearl Street parking and whether you should have a bike lane. People are uninformed, I gave the facts, I gave the real facts that each well used zip car replaces 15 cars, very hard data, each person who's paying for zip car drives 80% fewer vehicle miles because they're paying full costs each and every trip, transforms where they wanna take car trips and the people in that room and the people who don't care pay no attention to logic and numbers and they don't care. So, yeah, it's with deep discouragement that I don't know how to manipulate politics well. Thank you guys, thanks, bye. Thank you. Thank you.