How will new tech shape your life? A roboticist and a political strategist answer | Bradley Tusk and Ali Kashani

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Our original series, TED Intersections, is back for a third season. The show features unscripted conversations between speakers and experts taking on subjects at the intersection of their expertise. Should we be polite to robots? In this second Intersections conversation of the season, venture capitalist Bradley Tusk sits down with AI specialist Ali Kashani to explore the relationship between innovation and regulation. From voting on your phone to having a robot deliver your lunch, they discuss how technology could make your life easier and the challenges that come with disrupting the status quo.

1:00People in power don't like making it easier for others to gain power. And by definition, if we're going to triple or quadruple the size of the electorate, people who know how to win in this current environment are not going to like that.

1:29And what's the reaction? Like, I've seen your robots, and I always think they're kind of cute, right? Is that the normal reaction or are there people who are abusive to them? Obviously, it creates an impression on human beings. We've designed them to be friendly and fun because for every customer we serve, there's 100 bystanders that have to see the robot first as it's getting right. The most surprising is people just get used to them so fast that that actually surprised me the most. when I go down to Los Angeles, for example, every now and then, and see this magical box moving around and people are just on their phones and just indifferent, which to me is a really good sign.

2:09It just says how quickly we can get it. Yeah, you adapt. I remember, so I was in LA over Christmas and I loved the Waymos because I live in New York and we don't have them. And the first half a dozen times I got out, I thanked the Waymo and then I'm like, wait, I'm just saying thank you to myself. And by like the seventh time, I just got out of the car, right? So you definitely do adapt. I think it's nice to be polite to robots. Yeah, I wonder, well, you can tell me if they appreciate it or not. I think so. You think so? I like to think that, yeah. And what about the flip side of it? So do you have people saying, hey, human beings need jobs, and you're putting them out of work?

2:40I think that's, like, human nature. Yeah. Funny enough, most negative reactions I see are online, not in person. People who have seen their robots actually feel fairly positively about them. Yeah. Kids love robots. It's really fun to see their interactions. They sometimes get their parents to pull over, and they go, you know, want to see the robot and play with it, get it in space. but there are always going to be, I think, this kind of initial fear and concerns. And some of them are absolutely valid, by the way. I don't question it. But good news is that in person, when you see the robot, 99.9 % of the time, the reaction is really, really positive.

3:17And what do you need to get a city to let you do this? Is it legal until they tell you to stop, or do you proactively need to create a regulation or a law? Yeah, actually, I think this is an area maybe the work you do can help us. But by default in the U.S., the robots are allowed to operate in cities unless they have put any restrictions, which is actually quite rare. We found a lot of positive momentum with them, too, because, again, whether you care about sustainability or your local businesses or safety, this really checks a lot of those boxes. But unfortunately, every now and then there is someone, some politician somewhere who wants to, you know, rally around an idea.

3:56And they have done this, which is kind of brings me to the question I asked for you. One of the biggest challenges that I found in our work is actually the political system. Sure. Whether it's maybe incompetence or instability or corruption and terrorism or for all these reasons, we find ourselves challenged in ways that we shouldn't probably be. Like this shouldn't be the job of the innovators to be fighting these systems. And I'm kind of wondering, you know, I would love to actually first hear, you know, your version of your story. I listened to your talk. It's fantastic. I love what you're working on.

4:34I grew up in Iran, so I've seen the other side of a broken kind of democracy. So the work you do, how important it is, and how do you think it can actually help with situations like this where misalignment exists? Yeah. So I'm going to work backwards. So in terms of the specific what you're talking about, regulation by definition is always going to lag innovation because until you, the innovator, think of the idea and then build it and go through all the pain of doing that, they don't know that it exists or what issues need to be regulated around it. So to a certain extent, it's kind of the natural order of things.

5:10But then you get into a problem of regulatory capture where the same people who are supposed to be industries regulated by government end up using government to stop innovation and stop new entrants into the marketplace. And who that really hurts are consumers, right? And so ultimately, it really comes down to a question of, one, what are the reasonable regulations? So, for example, when I ran the campaigns to legalize Uber, it was all regulatory capture in the sense that the rules governing how a hired car worked, there it existed, right? We didn't need different rules, right? What the taxi industry tried to do is say, oh, well, if you're using an iPhone to calculate distance or if you're being called for someone for a ride this way, that's not okay.

6:03But those were all just attempts to use regulation to drive us out of the market. Once we overcame that, the actual regulatory structure was pretty simple. Fast forward probably eight years later to Bird and to scooters, another sort of very local transportation mobility issue. But there wasn't a clear set of rules of what you would do with electric scooters. Should they be on the street, on the sidewalk, in bike lanes? Where can they be docked? What should charging be like? Should you need a helmet? Should there be insurance? And those, to a certain extent, in my view, were reasonable questions.

6:38So I think part of it is there's always a disconnect, to be honest, between the innovator who's saying, I'm doing something really important and great for society. Get out of my way. And the regulator who's saying, well, it's my job to look after the public good and the safety and everything else. And most of the time, no one's actually corrupt. Sometimes they are. But most of the time, it's that everyone has their perspective. and like everything in life, they have a hard time understanding the other's perspective. And so there's this cognitive dissonance between the two. A lot of my job is really to try to like basically help them understand like, look guys, you don't really disagree on that much.

7:16So let's agree on what we can. Maybe we'll have to fight a little bit of this out. And that's how it works. And so there are definitely solutions to most of it. But the first question you really asked is kind of basically why am I here at TED? And it's, I was lucky to be able to give a talk today on mobile voting. And so we have been building our own mobile voting technology over the last four years that we're just about done with. By the time this airs, we probably will have already finished it and made it public. And it's going to be free and open source. Anyone wants to use it. And my hope is that we can then legalize it.

7:49And everyone watching this can vote in elections on their phones. We can get turnout up. And that combats all the polarization of the system and moves things to the middle. So I guess this is where the two concepts kind of connect, which is if you can empower that 80 % rather than the 10 % super polarized, either they're ideologues or the most angry, that actually is going to create more alignment between politicians who obviously care about the voter, you know, whoever votes, and innovators. Right. Who are trying to create value, but a lot of times are battling. Well, ironically, so innovators have to find product market fit.

8:31Sure. Right? So as a venture capitalist, that's really a big part of what I'm looking for, which is, okay, one, do I think this is a good idea? Two, do I think Ali or whoever the founder is is capable of executing? And then three, is the public going to want it? Right? And if those three things are true, the company usually succeeds. Right? Right. Ironically, founders have to find much broader product market fit than politicians because only 10 percent of us vote in primaries, but 100 percent of us buy stuff. Right. And so as a result, if voting turnout went up, almost by definition, it would start to align towards the market.

9:11And then once those two things are aligned, it's a lot easier to get to rational choices around how to regulate it. Yeah, that really excites me. It's very cool. So I have an interesting question for you. Yeah, please. When you started, what did you think were the challenges? And then what did they actually turn out to be? Yeah, that's a great question. So when I started, the biggest challenge then is still what it is today, which is people in power don't like making it easier for others to gain power. And by definition, if we're going to triple or quadruple the size of the electorate, people who know how to win in this current environment are not going to like that.

9:46And the only way we're going to overcome that is with a giant grassroots movement where hopefully millions of people will tell their city council members and their elected officials, I want this thing, and we're able to push it through anyway. So that's the one that I think kind of remains a challenge. But ultimately, this is really a behavioral economics experiment in many ways, right? There's sort of two things I'm betting on. One, if you put things on people's phones, they're going to do it. I think everything you and I have learned in our career says the answer to that is yes. The second, if you change the inputs, if you change the political incentives, you will change the policy outputs because politicians just want to get reelected and will behave rationally in order to do so.

10:27Everything that I've done in my career has also told me yes. And so we're really seeing if those two things are the case. I will say building the technology was really hard and really expensive. Um, I've spent about$20 million of my own money on this so far. It's totally philanthropic. And, you know, but for us, the view was it's got to be right. And even if that means it costs me more money, even if that means it takes longer, because I thought we'd be done with this a couple of years ago, to be honest. Um, but it's got to be perfect because everyone who doesn't want it, they can't say publicly that they don't want more people to vote.

11:08They know that. So they have to come up with another excuse, right? So the excuse is going to be, it's not safe, it can't work, technically impossible. And if I gave them a product that it didn't work, I'd be dead in the water. And so we have just been working, just iterating forever and testing and everything else to get to a point where we've built a system that we think is incredibly secure and incredibly easy to use. And we'll stand up to the critics. And we'll have our share of critics for sure. And you mentioned open source. Yes. I'm assuming that's a really important part. It is. And one of the reasons that I felt that this needed to be done philanthropically is in order for, I think, the public to have confidence in the validity of an election done on your phone.

11:48And to be clear, it's just meant to be one additional way to vote. It's not replacing voting by mail or person or anything else. But it has to be auditable. It has to be verifiable, which means it has to be open source. and my fear was an election company, and they do exist, isn't going to invest eight figures of their own money and then just give away the IP to everybody else, right? And I understand that. I'm in business too. I get that. But as from a philanthropic standpoint, I was lucky enough that I could afford to do that. And I think the fact that it's open source does generate, I may have even seen this conference where you have just lots of technically sophisticated people and the reaction to what I'm doing because it's open source is so much friendlier than I think if it had been just like another guy with another product that he's trying to sell.

12:34So paint me a vision of the future. Think ahead. Assume the regulatory stuff is whatever you want it to be, just for sake of this argument. And if everything goes perfectly, what do our lives look like? And like, in what ways are they better? I am so incredibly optimistic and excited for a number of reasons. Actually, I'll start with one, just being at a place like this, talking to folks like yourself, you explained why this project is open source, which may not have been possible through a normal for-profit effort. But people like yourself exist. And in fact, most CEOs that I know are really thoughtful stewards in this moment.

13:19So that's one thing that makes me excited. Of course, the other one is the technology itself. And what I like to say is this AI, this large language model, it's not a discovery. It's not an invention. It is a discovery. We've figured out how to put data together in a way that suddenly this magic happens, and it's doing things we didn't even expect. And if you think about it, discoveries always have much bigger impacts beyond what we even thought initially. So we've turned silicon into intelligence, which means everything around us is going to have that intelligence. So starting with one of the, actually, my favorite TED Talks of all time was Salman Khan talking about tutors in every kid's pocket.

13:57The tutor that the richest person cannot buy is now almost free that any child anywhere in the world can actually buy. Right. I don't know if you teach, but I do. And my students are smart. It's Columbia Business School. And yet despite that, everyone has a different learning style, right? And someone learns from reading and someone from writing and someone from listening and someone from doing. and as a teacher, even with really bright kids, you still kind of have to teach to the lowest common denominator, right? And if you could instead use AI to sort of teach things to everyone's individualized learning style, I just think the efficacy of education would be exponentially greater.

14:35Yeah. So that's education. In medicine, we listened to a talk today about these rare diseases and existing medication that can actually cure them. But there's like millions of combinations. How are you going to check every single one of them? But guess what? AI is going to make that so much easier. Again, there's scaling intelligence. And you can cure. I think they said one out of 10 of us, our children, are going to experience one of these diseases for which there is no medication. And the process of coming up with one would be so expensive. So again, it's going to save lives. They don't get saved.

15:07So education, health care, what else? And I guess coming into the physical world, I have this thesis that we are about to unbundle the car. Okay. So take it apart into, we basically made this monster of a machine. That's, by the way, getting bigger and more dangerous. Unfortunately, we've started reversing the trend around safety. And if you could have, again, a shopping cart-sized robot, do the last mile deliveries, have a drone that does the longer distance kind of deliveries, have autonomous vehicles for the appropriate applications for them, even scooters. One of the challenges with scooters has been you have to bring them to people at the right time.

15:49If you do, there would be more adoption. But the scooters can move by themselves right now. What if they could by making them autonomous? So I think removing those cars off the road is one of the biggest, most interesting things because our city is going to change. Imagine how our cities changed when cars were first introduced. Right. Like that's the kind of scale of change that I expect to see in cities again for the better. By the way, I'll even just say as someone who lives in Manhattan in the congestion pricing zone since January 2nd, whenever it kicked in, there's a difference. Right. And that's a relatively minor change.

16:24Right. That's just a minor tax policy designed to disincentivize certain amounts of consumer driver behavior at certain times. Right. Like that's pretty low level. and yet I experience it and I benefit from it and I see it. So now one thing I've always wondered about is how you kind of the declination between drones and robots when it comes to delivery, right? And the way I think about it in my head, but I don't know if this is right at all, would be suburban and rural areas, drones make a lot of sense, high-density urban areas, drones would be really hard and that's where robots come in. Is that a fair way to think about it?

17:03Yeah, absolutely. Actually, they may even work together. Okay. So we're doing this program pilot actually with Wing, which is the subsidiary of Alphabet. And the idea is drones work great when they're going longer distances into less populated areas. But a lot of goods originate in highly populated areas like restaurants. Yeah. But drones need some real estate to get to the restaurant. Yes. How do you solve that? How does the drone actually get the food when most restaurants don't have the real estate? Also, you know, the drone can have noise. There are other challenges. Well, we actually have a robot pick up the food and hand it over just like a couple blocks away, maybe in an empty parking lot.

17:43To the drone. Automatically to the drone. Oh, wow. And the drone would actually go completely. Yeah, I'd love to convince you that. That's super cool. Yeah. It's very cool. The only thing cooler than robots is robots and drones. Right, together. Yeah. And I'm actually curious, what do you think your system would have, what kind of impact in other countries? We've talked about the U.S. Yeah. So good news is we want, this is, anyone's welcome to use this. I'm actually in Estonia and England next month about it. I'm in Israel the following month about it. So I would be thrilled to see any country adopt this.

18:20Like overall, unless there's compulsory voting like Australia, voter turnout is never as good as it should be. So always if you take our underlying agreement that more turnout leads to more democracy, better outcomes, more alignment with the market and everything else, you would see that everywhere. You know that what's really interesting is the most common question I get about robots is about vandalism. Yeah. To the point that I get the question more often than it happens. I could see that. And so what's the real answer? The real answer is it doesn't happen as often as people ask me the question.

18:53Robots can complete deliveries at a better reliability rate than actually human careers right now. And that small percentage of failure includes vandalism and everything else that could go wrong. So I've always noticed this phenomenon that we have such a low opinion of ourselves for some reason. And I don't know where that comes from. Maybe it's Hollywood. Every apocalyptic movie, people are behaving the worst possible way. I remember when I first moved to Canada and there was some issue with the water. So everybody had to go get water from the store rather than from the pipes. And people were so kind.

19:27But when you see that in a movie. Right. They're all killing each other. Exactly. I'm like, I don't know where this gap comes from, but we definitely have a lower opinion of ourselves. I would argue social media is the culprit of a lot of this, right? Because we have this mechanism that seems to bring out the absolute worst in people. and then the regulations are, this is a case where there's not nearly, in my view, enough regulation around innovation because, as I understand it, human beings have an inherent negativity bias because it's literally what makes us leave the house when we smell gas.

20:01It's what went back in the old days where if we saw a lion, you walked in the other direction, right? Like, you have to have it to survive, but then it manifests itself in lots of different ways, and one of the ways it manifests itself is if you have two headlines to click on, and there's endless A-B testing showing this, you're going to most likely click on the negative headline. And you know who knows that? Mark Zuckerberg. You know who knows that? Elon Musk. You know who knows that? ByteDance. So all of the people that own these platforms, if all of the money they make is basically just based on clicks, which is 99 % of their business models, then they are perversely incentivized to push the most toxic content towards people.

20:40And so we are seeing the worst stuff. And so if you think about it in many ways, social media is almost the unhappiness machine because it does two things. One, it shows you how your real life is inadequate compared to everyone else's fake life. So you feel bad about yourself. Two, everything bad happening everywhere in the world is thrown at you at once. So your life seems inadequate and the world seems terrible. And so, of course, you develop these sort of negative sentiments and views about humanity and everything else. And so I would argue this is a case where you could have regulation. This may be getting too granular, but do you know what Section 230 is?

21:19Yes. Right. So for the viewers and listeners, in 1996, Congress passed a law called the Communications Decency Act. And they had a provision in there called Section 230 that said that Internet platforms are not liable for the content posted by its users. And in 1996, that made a lot of sense, right? Because the internet was just barely happening and it needed to get off the ground. But what they couldn't have envisioned back then was social media and all these other things. And they never updated the law. And as a result, the same responsibilities that a normal media company has to meet where, you know, if they were to defame you in some way, you could sue them, right?

21:59Or even that among individuals, We have, you know, legal obligations. They don't have any at all. So you're saying to these companies, you can make as much more money by showing people toxic stuff. And they can't sue you. You can't get in trouble for it. Like, what do you expect them to do? Right. And by the way, to just bring this back to mobile voting right now, it's not that politicians don't understand that they need to repeal Section 230. In fact, in the 2020 election, ironically, Trump and Biden both had it in their platforms. The problem is in a world of 10 percent turnout in congressional races, the meta lobbyists walk around the halls of the Capitol and say, hey, you know, Section 230, I heard you might be for repealing it.

22:42Be real ashamed if someone ran against you next time I had a five million dollar check from us. And everyone's like, well, I don't want to lose my election, so I won't do it. And as a result, it prevents change. And that, you know, it's not just sort of this negative sentiment, but we see a massive rise in self-harm, massive rise in cyberbullying, massive rise in teenage suicide, like all these really terrible outcomes. And so it all gets back to, like, we need a government that is working in the interests of people. And what people want is to be heard. What people want is to be able to get things done and find reasonable compromises.

23:20and they want to be able to take advantage of technologies and ideas that will make their lives easier and better and more fun. And fundamentally, that's what we should be working towards, in my view. Empowering the 80%. Like, we keep coming back to that. Yes. Like, getting them to actually be the reason why politicians do things, not the extreme ends. So I guess what makes you optimistic? We've talked about a lot of problems. Yeah. But, like, what are you looking for? Well, I think a few things. I think one is I do believe in the underlying nature of people. Two, I believe in the underlying nature of technology to make people's lives better.

23:54And so while I do believe, for example, that we do need regulation to deal with certain negative manifestations of AI, surveillance, for example, the drug development, the, you know, one thing we didn't talk about yet would be energy, right? Like the way to me that you solve the climate crisis is AI figuring out carbon capturement, right? Education. So there are so many ways that technology can make our lives better. I think the inherent nature of people. And then, you know, I go to a conference like TED and it's hard not to be inspired by it because all of the speakers, and by the way, not just the speakers, just anyone, even randomly, I've like sat down next to someone and we've struck up a conversation.

24:34You have all these really smart people. And I think the same thing applies to people watching this and who are just engaged in the TED content, who want to make the world better, are working on specific tangible ideas to make the world better, dedicating their money, their lives, their resources, their reputations to making it better. And I think those people ultimately win. Agreed. We have an incredible system of experimentation in place for those people that are trying absolutely everything under the sun to find all these interesting ways. Our idea of robots was not very popular when we first started, but now you're getting to see the results, and it's getting more popular.

25:10where I'm sure, you know, you probably felt that way at the beginning of, oh, voting on your phone, and then everybody's complaining about these voting machines. But the fact that all these people are out there trying different things, and, you know, eventually some of these ideas actually work and can have such material impact. All right, Ali, thank you. Thank you so much.

25:33That was a conversation between Bradley Tusk and Ali Kashani for our original series, TED Intersections. Visit TED.com to watch this conversation and others from the series. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezzo.

26:13I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.