Obama’s an Optimist and You Should Be, Too
(Jim Watson / Getty Images)
Dear Backchannelers,
Jessi here. Two years ago, cellist Zoe Keating’s husband got sick. He was diagnosed with an aggressive stage IV lung cancer. Keating lived near San Francisco, where she had access to good medical care, but she quickly discovered that her doctors weren’t sharing medical information. As a result, it took five months for her husband’s cancer to be diagnosed; by then, he had 20 tumors. There were days, she said, where she had to drive 100 miles with her four-year-old in the backseat to deliver disks carrying medical records because the institutions taking care of her husband wouldn’t share their data.
On Thursday, Keating told her story to President Obama before 300 science and technology leaders in a gymnasium at Carnegie Mellon University. “During our journey, we never had the sense that there was one person keeping track of all the data,” she said. Obama leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows and clasping his hands. She asked him, and us, to consider a future in which a patient, upon walking into a doctor’s office, encountered artificial intelligence that synthesized all of her medical data—allowing a doctor to surface only the most meaningful information to create a complete plan of care.
Welcome to the The White House Frontiers Conference. I had thought, when I was invited to speak at Obama’s confab, that we were gathering to discuss the breakthroughs and innovations in tech. It was, after all, billed as a tech conference. Obama guest-edited WIRED’s November issue, which explores the event’s tech themes. But yesterday, we spent the day talking about our humanity.
The promise of technology is that it will spur progress and make human lives better. But all of our inventions and patents and breakthroughs are wasted when they exist in isolation. Tech’s potential is only realized when it becomes a tool that amplifies the traits that make us human — giving us more time with each other and more ways to be healthier, to live longer, to connect more deeply, and to share our resources more equitably. For that to happen, we need to decide collectively how we will use such advances as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. How we put tech’s tools to use is arguably more important than the fact of their invention.
I came to Pittsburgh to moderate a conversation about the future of local transportation. We talked a lot about self-driving cars. They’re coming fast, and there are few places where that is more evident than this former steel town, where Uber is now running a pilot to test them. If you hang around the city long enough, you’ll catch a glimpse of a Volvo SUV gliding cautiously to a stop at a light, its minder keeping her hands off the wheel. Pittsburgh’s Mayor Bill Peduto was on our panel along with the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, Zipcar’s cofounder and former CEO Robin Chase (a Backchannel contributor!), and Tim Kentley-Klay, the cofounder and CEO of the autonomous vehicle startup Zoox. (Don’t ask what it does. He won’t tell you yet.)
Yep, that’s me. Followed by Zoox founder Tim Kentley-Klay, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, Zipcar founder Robin Chase, and Secretary Anthony Foxx.Cities are growing increasingly congested. There have to be better options for moving people from place to place. But how do we step back and think about how a city’s systems serve everyone, making it easier to get from one place to another — not just for the wealthy, but for everyone who lives in the city? We need a common vision for that future, and the resources and money to pay for it.
Resources? Check. Secretary Foxx used our conversation to announce $165 million in funding to encourage cities to pilot advanced transportation technologies. The funds will be directed to seven cities, including Pittsburgh and San Francisco, with plans to pilot technologies that can alleviate congestion, such as smart traffic signals. Foxx also announced $8 million in new grants for communities (urban and rural) to test on-demand mobility services, such as smartphones-enabled car sharing and bike shares.
But aside from resources, we need a vision of how to implement innovation in a way that strengthens our connections to one another. Without that, it’s easy to lose sight of the real bottom line.
Oh, and, a few of our recent highlights….
The Physicist Who Sees Crime Networks: __“__Everyone talks about globalization and interconnectedness. As a data scientist, Mizuno actually tries to measure it. If he could map exactly how businesses around the world interact with one another, perhaps he could predict — and even mitigate — the effect of the next natural disaster like Tōhoku.”
The Venture Capitalist Who Is Both a Man and a Woman: “I think that when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a woman. I don’t see a man. I see myself. I see a genderless being. … I’m hoping that by coming out, more people will approach me and talk to me about their experiences. I might actually meet new people, or existing people in a new way.”
The Surprising Backbone of the Internet of Things: “With streetlights and signal poles, a city stands a chance of pushing along a competitive and innovative world of Internet of Things and sensors and data transmission, as long as it acts decisively to open those street lights and signal poles on a standard technical basis — again, like an electrical outlet.”
