From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

Why do people fear a machine revolution?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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Why do people fear a machine revolution?

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(energetic electronic music) - [Interviewer] So, in an open letter to the NIH, you wrote, "The general consumer "is likely to benefit sooner than the Department of Defense "when it comes to data." What did you mean by that? - Well, the argument that I was starting with, is let's take the self-driving car. The original genesis of the self-driving car was work from the Department of Defense, under what's often referred to as DARPA, and that was the grand challenge to create a self-driving car. And the question there is, under the way taxes are spent, appropriation by Congress, is that said, hey, the Department of Defense is investing in this so that this is going to be able to be used by the Department of Defense. So who's going to get the self-driving car first in this case? Is it going to be the consumer, or is it going to be the person that's in the military? And in this case, it's going to actually be, interestingly enough, the consumer. That's a flip from what it's traditionally been. Most oftentimes it's been, the military has the application first, and then it trickles into the rest of industry. Why is that? It's because, one, the prevalence of data, the technology, the open source, and then all of this infrastructure that we've built up in these companies that have the ability to use that data. And one of the things that was done under the Obama administration, that President Obama signed, is an executive order that said, by default, all data that the federal government produces is open and machine-readable. And the reason for that was, look, one, it's paid for by the American public, two, is when you unlock it in that way, and other people are able to interact with that data, you don't know where innovation's going to come from, but the cool thing is that somebody out there is going to use it in some creative way to come up with something really insightful and brilliant, and as long as the right measures are in there to ensure that that data is being used responsibly, and that data is secure, and all the other necessary checks are in there, really great stuff can happen. (energetic electronic music)

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