Transparency

David Brin Debates Brad Templeton

Accelerating Change 2004
50 minutes, 23.3mb, recorded 2004-11-06
Brin and Templeton
David Brin debates Brad Templeton on "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?"

For background, see David's provocative cover story, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society! in August's Salon on transparency, the rapid growth of digital recording and communication in our society, both public and private. Brad has written popular pieces about property and privacy rights such as Ten Big Myths About Copyright and his take on privacy issues in Google's GMail.

One of David's big issues is our culture and media's knee-jerk tendency to either 1) fear the future or 2) blindly accept the status quo, when today's complex world demands instead 3) a radical new openness, honesty with our shortcomings, self-examination of our unsolved problems, and confidence that we can make measurable annual progress in fixing them. A quote for your file:

There's a world to be saved and those who spread either complacency or gloom aren't helping. What we need is confidence and a sense that our efforts can matter. That will come, if we open our eyes to how much good has already been done. Are we ready, at last, to stop ridiculing those eager, can-do boys and girls who believe in progress? -- David Brin

David proposes that we can have increasing transparency without being forced to choose between freedom and security (e.g., more of one means less of the other). Brad also wants to avoid this forced tradeoff, but doesn't see increasing transparency as the answer and is much less optimistic that we are managing these issues well. Among the questions he will ask: Can all-pervasive surveillance be avoided? What are the dangers if we don't avoid it? What are the things that always go wrong? How closely tied are privacy and freedom? Can we watch the watchers without them watching us?

David Brin, Ph.D. has a triple career as scientist, public speaker, and author. His fifteen novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. Another novel, Startide Rising, is in pre-production at Paramount Pictures. Brin's widely acclaimed 1998 non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with a wide range of threats and opportunities facing our wired society during the information age.

As a scientist, Brin was a fellow at the California Space Institute. More recently, he has been a research affiliate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and participated in interdisciplinary activities at the UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. He now lives in San Diego County with his wife, two infants, and about a hundred very demanding trees.

Brad Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. ClariNet publishes an online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers machines. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized conference on that network. He has been a software company founder, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products.

Brad is chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He also sits on the advisory boards for a few internet startups. Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone call. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think-tank.

Debate moderator Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Previously, Mr. Jurvetson was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard. His prior technical experience also includes programming, materials science research (TEM atomic imaging of GaAs), and computer design at HP's PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek. He has also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT Software. As a Consultant with Bain & Company, Mr. Jurvetson developed executive marketing, sales, engineering and business strategies for a wide range of companies in the software, networking and semiconductor industries. At Stanford University, he finished his BSEE in 2.5 years and graduated #1 in his class, as the Henry Ford Scholar. Mr. Jurvetson also holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. He received his MBA from the Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Mr. Jurvetson also serves on the Merrill Lynch and STVP Advisory Boards and is Co-Chair of the NanoBusiness Alliance. He was recently honored as "The Valley's Sharpest VC" on the cover of Business 2.0 and chosen by the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner as one of "the ten people expected to have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st Century." He was profiled in the New York Times Magazine and featured on the cover of Worth and Fortune Magazines. Steve was chosen by Forbes as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors", by the VC Journal as one of the "Ten Most Influential VCs", and by Fortune as part of their "Brain Trust of Top Ten Minds."

This presentation was recorded at Accelerating Change 2004, November 5-7, 2004. Check here for the complete Accelerating Change archives.


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