YouSaid · the spoken record

Rick Smith

lines on the record: 102
first: 2019-11-27
most recent: 2019-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Have to be real careful. That's not where we're about. We're going to give you something else because when you go through that door and you have a gun in your hand, that means you've got to make a life or death decision. Boom, less than a second. And that is going to impact the rest of your life. And you can't take it back. Oops, that was a 13-year-old kid with a cell phone, not a guy with a gun And I'm finding it's resonating with customers where their response to me is this, okay, but I'm skeptical. You're going to have to prove that you can deliver something that's as reliable as the thing I'm slinging on my hip right now. But pretty universally, what I'm hearing is if you do it, then we'll use that instead. I think it can be a huge step forward.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So part of the reason I wrote the book was to rally my customers, my engineers around our moonshot, and that is within 10 years Goal, and we will do it is to launch a pistol that doesn't kill you, something that's more effective than a nine millimeter at doing what you want it to do, which is stop the person, and yet it doesn't leave a permanent injury or kill them. And when we do that, that's going to be a game changer. And it's tricky. Like when you talk to a police officer, the last thing they want to hear is you're going to take my gun”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think they're well intentioned, but ultimately it's really hard to, and this is where censorship and free speech comes in, it's just so hard to have a blanket rule about what you censor and what you don't. But at minimum, I think they ought to have like, what is the intention of this and that they ought to have an appeals process? We've tried to get appeals and we just get blocked. Where they say, nope, you're a weapon. Wait a minute, we're a weapon that's far less dangerous, and we're trying to displace deadly weapons. Nope, policy says no weapons, no self-defense tools. Sorry. And it's basically cut off so we can't do any advertising online platforms, which I think slows the pace of change.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we invent something like a taser that's an alternative to a gun, we need to educate the public. And when Google and Facebook and Amazon block our ads, they actually block our ability to move the market in different directions. So they're actually locking in the status quo and they intend to make gun violence better, but I think they're reducing our ability to change it.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's actually not about gun control, but it's about how do we, if we want to solve the violence problem, we need to basically invent better things than guns so people choose to go that direction and we reduce the carnage. And one of the things that's challenging is, look, a lot of the tech companies will do things that are well-intentioned. One of them affects me directly is they ban ads for sensitive topics. So Amazon puts this ban in place in response to all the gun violence. They say, we're going to ban ads with pictures of guns on it. Well, I've got a book about how to end gun violence. It's got a picture of gun on it. And they block my ad and my point is, look, that's actually counterproductive. And we're not going to stop people from buying guns. They're ubiquitous. People know what they are.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to say. To be honest, our position, most of the big cities are using our platform. And so we've kind of instituted a private ban, including San Francisco, LA, all the big cities in California, at least the biggest ones. What we're trying to do, part of this too, the way we can bring our customers along is say, look, you want us to be careful. Otherwise, you're going to get this stuff banned. And then we can't use it even for the good use cases.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah. But over time, like, look, in another 10 years, overturning laws is really, really hard. And so we may come up with a lot to use cases like the Alzheimer's one I shared, where police would use it and everybody agrees, but now you'd have this law that blocks you. So California's moved towards a moratorium, which I think is a prudent approach.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, California, I think, has gotten to a better and more nuanced place. So they started with a ban. I think that's a bad idea just because”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that Barry's, the primary thing I'm taking away from him is look if the Democratically elected officials authorize it, great. But it shouldn't be just like doing what they can because it's possible.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of it depends on how is it being used. Like if you're scanning somebody for identification purposes or they don't have their ID, if you're using it to identify them once police have made a lawful stop and they're entitled to inquire somebody's ID, I think that's a different threshold than somebody who's just walking by a police officer.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then lastly, using, I want to get to the Amazon thing before we finish, putting driver's license photos in these things, using them as a data set. That's something that nobody agreed to when they took their driver's license photo. How do you look at that?”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opt in and what is the consequence of error if the consequence of error is too high, then you're going to have a higher accuracy threshold.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if people opt in and police are using it, in that case, if I get a false match, it's no big deal, but it might prevent me from, oh, wait a minute, this guy who's acting weird and kind of violent, oh, he's got a mental disorder. We could shift them in the right direction. We think you could accept lower accuracy thresholds than if you now, let's say we're scanning its wanted databases where it may escalate things, I think there's a different accuracy threshold there.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, 100% is a pretty high threshold. I think, let me give you an example where we may use it at lower accuracy. Let's say we can upload lists of people that are voluntarily added by their families, people with mental disabilities or Alzheimer's, et cetera”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I could get on a soapbox and tell how other people do it. In our case, it's just because the influence we're so focused in this area.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ultimately, look, police, again, they report to elected councils. I'm in this to build a business over the next 10, 20, 30 years.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And guess what? If we can turn those critics into advocates For our system, because they're going to say, look, if you're going to deploy AI technology X, you need to be really careful about these things. And when we launch it, we can say, guess what? We've built controls on A, B, C, and D.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, when we do things that are controversial because of this ethics board, I have a pretty good understanding of where the critiques are going to come from.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had Brett Taylor. He recently retired. We became president of Salesforce. He got too busy. We just added Caitlyn Kalinowski, head of VR at Oculus and Facebook. The former surgeon general, Rich Carmona, Mark Kroll, former CTO of a medical company. We've got Julie Cullen.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to create a prize to undo the damage Well, I don't think you're going to get into the Belgian Congo thing, but yes, but I get your point. I mean, we wouldn't. Why is Nethos not in it? You have tech people on your board now. Are they open to that?”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in our case, I'm a founder entrepreneur. This is my baby. I don't want to get to the end of my career like Mr. Nobel and have to create a prize to undo the damage. Right, right.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to have an impact. Ethical design. I always say when I'm talking to product engineers and things like that, I'm like, I make a joke all the time. I'm like, imagine it's an episode of Black Mirror and then don't make it or change it. So it's not an episode of Black Mirror. You know what I mean? Think of the worst thing that could happen with this technology and think hard and think how easier hard it is for that to get to that outcome. And I think the idea of consequences is lost on so many people in technology or thinking of the ethical implications of things and the sort of move fast and break things thing, even though Facebook has removed that from there, for example, is still the ethos throughout technology. and then worry about it later.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I can go deep on that, and he's challenging my thinking. And Barry is what I would consider a true liberal, meaning. Opened a new ideas, challenging based on the merit of the conversation. So if you stay tuned in the next month or two, we'll be making announcements where we're, so face recognition is pretty straightforward. We're not going to do it. It's not ready. But I think we're actually finding ways that we can use ethical design as a competitive advantage. And I think our board's really excited about this too to say, wow, this is.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about twice a year It's a little dynamic as to how often we need them. But this is turning into a major competitive advantage for us because I have come to so much more deeply understand the position of the critics because now I'm no longer talking to cops about the critics. I'm talking to the critics. And when Barry says, oh, here's my problem with the Fourth Amendment in search.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like emotion, and it's hard to solve problems across that divide. So, with our ethics board, we focused on really it's predominantly civil libertarians, although we do have a few police representatives as well. You'd have to have. Yeah, you got to have that interchange.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, I was candidly, I was trying to recruit her to come on our board unsuccessfully, which she's very busy. But in that process, as we were talking about it, she said, hey, you got to look what they did with the human genome project. They created an oversight board because, sure, there were lots of ways the human genome project could go wrong. So investing in oversight. And based on that idea, we created this ethics board. And I can't tell you it's really been. Fun and productive because look, policing is a divisive issue. Most of the discourse ends up quite polarized. You've got Black Lives Latter and Blue Lives Matter and you've got a lot of”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, or if a cop's in your house, do you want to a police officer releasing a video of everything inside your house? What about your privacy rights? What about the people that are most? So it's nuance. It's complicated. All right. So we're facing a backlash over face recognition. And at the time, we said it wasn't even on our roadmap to be doing face recognition. Sure, we'd thought about it, but punchline was I was talking to a couple different people, including Regina Dugan, who used to run DARPA.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We already talked about that, the idea that it takes a minute to release things. You have to, I was like, why don't they release them immediately? It's like, well, you do have, you know, the prosecutors have to build a case. And so you can't immediately release any video. Even though the public pressure is on to do so”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bystanders or victims. Children, you know, children, et cetera. Which, by the way, we go down a whole rat hole. When you talk about police releasing every video, it sounds great, but then there's so much nuance. Well, they arrived to a sex crime scene involving a child. No one released that video. Certainly, you want to redact all the ideas. You talked about that.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I can tell it's not. Now I would say maybe it started as a bit of a PR reaction. So here's what happened. So we have all these body cameras and all this video and we realize, wow, there's a lot of value we could help create from this video. So we went out and we acquired two small companies with AI teams to help us figure this out. And as soon as we did, bang, like the first week we had all this negative media about how we were going to do facial recognition and we were going to turn the US into China. Candidly, we were like, wait a minute. Who said anything about face recognition? We actually were, when we bought these companies, the first problem we wanted them to work on was redacting faces out of videos because our customers have to do that by hand, frame by frame, super expensive, solving expensive problems for our customers.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People more thoughtful. Sure, absolutely. So talk to this board because Barry Friedman is someone who was, I wouldn't say it's anti cop, but he's certainly wary of and like wary of the police powers. I would say that's probably accurate and is watching that, wants policing to be better, essentially. And he operates in NYU in New York. There's been lots of controversies around the police department there over many years. Talk about this AI board. Why'd you decide to do this? The fact that you're using the word nuance is fantastic as far as I'm, because I never hear it from tech people. So it's a pleasure. But the AI board that you want to do, a lot of people think, okay, Facebook just announced a Supreme Court of Facebook that's going to watch things. Everyone thinks it's a PR thing. Talk about why you did this.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's great, he brings a very different perspective than I do. He's a police oversight guy. But he really educated me on the Fourth Amendment and how to think about this more differently because obviously being around Compt all the time, I tend to hear about how everything's just painful. We can't do their job.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think putting solid data controls in place, good audit functionality. And for example, things like two key systems where an administrator needs to approve something, or in certain cases, a court. You should get a court order to do certain types of searches. What's interesting is today, a reason a lot of that doesn't happen is it's just the bureaucracy of government getting a warrant means you've got to go, an officer's got to go spend hours at a court with a piece of paper. So that's an area.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's going to be a lot of discussion about data privacy, data security, in particular, I think, for police, you want really robust logs around who's searching this, when are they searching it, what are their justifications, you're going to want good oversight so that it's not personal vendetta as you hear stories of like a police officer running vehicle searches on his ex-wife's boyfriend.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would even go. I don't think we could. But I would say the challenge then is, okay, there's a ton of data The answer is not going to fit on a bumper sticker. Like, yes, cameras, no cameras. It's much more nuanced. How do we handle the data? How do we make sure? Like in my neighborhood, if we're using video to capture violent criminals or even people are stealing things, great if we're using it to discriminate when somebody is of a different ethnicity shows up in the neighborhood. That's terrible. There's a common.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it's complicated. I don't think we can go back to the 1950s. There's cameras everywhere. You and I have them on our phones right now. Businesses are putting them up. People are putting them on their doorbells. I don't think we can go back. So I think the simple answer is.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if we look at the Ark of History, one of my favorite authors right now is Stephen Pinker, you know, in his book, Better Angels of Our Nature documents sort of the decline in violence in human society. And a lot of that is because, look, we delegated to the government the use of force on our behalf for the most part. I mean, in the old days used to carry a sword and you'd fight with anybody who looked at you the wrong way. So the right level of surveillance, I think,”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Rick Smith, the CEO of Axon and the author of The End of Killing. Axon makes body cameras tasers for police officers and others. I never thought of criminals using. I can see anybody using a taser, but not a body camera. But of course, a facial recognition was in there. It would be very useful for criminals to use those or to identify different people. But let's stick to police officers. So you said somewhere between zero surveillance zero and 100%. Like there's somewhere in there. Where do you imagine it's going? Because it seems like facial recognition is going to be rolled out everywhere, obviously, in China. It's sort of the dystopian worst case scenario, but it's not unknown here. There's cameras everywhere in this country.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we basically started serializing our ammunition. When you shoot a taser, it sprays the area with confetti printed with your serial number. That's so we can know who shot it and hold them accountable. And I think we have learned that doing the right thing, this is going to sound trite, but doing the right thing pays long-term dividends. And in our business, we can't afford to get it wrong. And I respect Amazon. I love the company. I'm a customer. Most of what they do is pretty innocuous stuff. And so this is, I think, a little bit of a newer area for them. And in most tech, it's like, hey, caveat emperor in the public safety space. I tend to take a view just from our own experience that it pays to be careful and take your time a bit.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're more sensitive to it because every product we do is steeped in these problems. When we launched the first Hazer weapon, for example, there was concerns about, well, what if criminals start using these? So rather than say that's not my problem, we looked at that and said, well, that is our problem because it'd be catastrophic for us and society. And look, I don't want to be waking up in the middle of the night reading about it.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You do realize this is unusual and mature on your people I interview are like, yeah, we're just going to roll it out. I mean, Andy and I had this back and forth about, you know, we're not responsible for the platform, even if there are mistakes. I wouldn't put out a product that had not in that area, you know, not being worried about that issue of misidentifying people”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then it could probably do a better job than a police officer in helping them understand the situation. So it could But we also just need to then understand what is the right level of surveillance within society. I don't believe it's zero, but I don't believe it's pervasive. We don't have great answers to that yet. And so we would rather take our time and get it right.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think this is one where, how do you interpret the Fourth Amendment when this technology was unimaginable? Yeah, absolutely. And so in our case, I'm not saying that never. I could envision if face recognition gets to 100% accuracy”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there's a whole bunch in the metal. And I think Brad Smith from Microsoft just wrote his book, Tools and Weapons, about the need for some regulatory guidelines.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be abused Our company in particular, Taser Weapons, cameras, data There's privacy issues. And look, we want to be proud of the work we're doing, and we think that getting it right pays big dividends. Police ultimately are accountable to the public and to elected officials. So in the case of face recognition, The accuracy issues, there's the bias issues, and then there are legitimate privacy and search concerns. Like under what circumstances should police be searching people's faces against the database? And I think most people would agree if you're in an airport and they're searching against the terrorist wanted list, everybody agrees. If they're at a protest and they're scanning and logging everybody's face and retaining that data and the government database, everybody agrees that's a bad use.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I think it is a complicated and powerful technology that has risks of abuse and risks of inaccuracy. And our approach has been look, if we look at it right now, the accuracy levels that we could deliver are not high enough, and the racial disparities, that is an explosive problem. Get it wrong and police escalate and use force on somebody, God forbid, somebody gets hurt or killed, that is catastrophic. So, that risk alone has made us say, we're going to hold off the risk of a bad outcome is not worth it today. Then there are also, so we formed an AI ethics board policy. But basically, everything we do.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People watch ring videos, but it's always people stealing your packages, which is interesting. We'll talk about that in a minute. So I want to get into in the next section talking about facial recognition. I just want to stand clear, you don't want facial recognition technology. I just interviewed Andy Jassy from Amazon, which makes recognition, which is a facial recognition program. There's lots of them around. You do not want them in these cameras.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, there's 800,000 police officers and with 350,000 of them more in cameras, you are going to have somewhere, maybe that officer is having a bad day and they lose it or just bad judgment. I tend to look at it as sort of a glass half full that given the huge number, there's a relatively small number of videos that go out of control, but those tend to get all the attention, right? We don't see the $300,000 videos a day where officers are doing the right thing. You see the few where it goes off the rails.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why the speed of sort of really disturbing videos, the ones at the car stops where it's clear the officer escalated it. There's been lots of those, it seems like. Or they said it happened this way and then the video shows completely the opposite.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. Yeah. I mean, the observer effect in general has been pretty well documented. Human beings who are being observed or who even believe they're being observed behave better.”
2019-11-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rick Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT