in this slide. Excellent. So hi, everybody. My name is Rob Sherwood. Let's get settled in here. I'm going to be talking today about how to scale out neutron networks. How many people actually have an OpenStack network deployed? Anyone? And of you, how many of you are actually having problems with neutron? So what I'm going to talk about today is a whole bunch of stuff that hopefully will help you with some of those problems with neutron. So I am the CTO at Big Switch Networks. We built networking software. But networking software is only one piece of this crazy OpenStack puzzle. So what I'm going to talk about today is a large scale-out test bed that we did with our partners, Mirantis, on the OpenStack side, as well as Dell, both for the compute and these physical hardware, running the Big Switch software. And so we scaled that out to 300 nodes running neutron. And we made it work. And so today I'm going to talk about what that scale-out test bed looked like, what are some of the things we ran into, and some of the fixes that we have.  And there honestly aren't enough of you that I should be worried about. You should interrupt me and ask me questions. I guess is where I'm going. So just shortly about Big Switch, what we have seen is that there are these really large companies in the world, so the Microsofts and Googles and Facebooks of the world, who have just stopped using traditional networking vendors. They have started creating their own boxes, their own networking stacks. They've started doing things completely different from how things have always been done. So what Big Switch Networks does as a company is we try to figure out, what are these guys doing? And there's some things that they're doing that's actually not all that useful for the rest of the world, but there's actually a good chunk of what they're doing that is useful. And we're trying to figure out how to productize it and to bring it to folks who can't afford to hire 10,000 programmers to run their network. So all of our products are based off of this one Big Switch architecture notion. So the idea is if you actually have kind of traditional chassis-based switch, something like a Nexus 7K or a Cat6500, if you look under the covers, there's actually three components there.  And notably, those line cards plug into the backplane using something that's called a claustropology. So what Big Switch Networks does is we actually pull that supervisor card out of the box and we'll call that a controller. And we're gonna pull those fabric line cards out and we're gonna call those spine switches and we're gonna pull the line cards out and call those leaf switches. And so what we have done here is actually recreated all of the elements of this traditional Big Switch using commodity, low-cost, data-centered pizza, one-U pizza box switches.  And so with this controller, this redundant pair of controllers, you can have a single point of control that manages this big collection of switches, potentially upwards of 40 switches, all like it's one big switch. And this one big switch notion is the core to how are we build our products and it's actually so fundamental that's how we named our company Big Switch Networks. Does this make sense so far? Someone say yes so I can move on. Thank you. So, but I'm not gonna move on, I've tricked you. So the thing that we've called this to help you remember this vision. So I claim this is the same thing that happened in the mainframe days when people sold these large vertically integrated mainframes and eventually moved to the data centers that we have today where you have desegregated hardware, you have individual servers that you actually manage like it's one big large mainframe. And it's exactly this same analogy that goes on in the networking world right now. So we've actually started jokingly calling these big older style chassis boxes. We started calling those netframes just to drive home that point a little bit more. So this is the last slide about Big Switch and I'll get back to open stack. But so we have two products. They're both basically taking large traditional boxes either a network packet broker or a data center switch and re-implementing those with one new pizza box data center switches with different smart hardware on top, this smart software on top. This software uses SDN control technology but that's honestly more of an implementation detail. The benefit that you get as a user is that you can actually manage your entire network from a single pane of glass. With our data center switch equivalent our big cloud fabric, our main use case not surprising because we're here is actually open stack. So we provide open stack plugins to manage our network. We have a neutron plugin, we have some of our developers here on staff today. We also have VMware integration and we also integrate with other forms of control software that you might use including Hadoop, Hyper-V and some other points. But for purposes of today I'm gonna focus on the open stack bits. So what happens with big cloud fabric is we'll deploy a collection of switches, leaf and spine along with and this is the new thing that we were actually announcing today in Japan along with our virtual switch as well. So the idea is that you will have both the physical switches and the virtual switches under the same control from the same redundant pair of controllers. What this means from an open stack context is we can actually improve some of the efficiencies and I'll be talking about this of things like the L3 agent. We can actually implement things like distributed virtual routing both across physical switches as well as virtual ones. That means that you can get the equivalent of distributed routing for your virtual workloads as well as your physical workloads and the combination of the two. We have our own neutron plugin. It's adapted into the, it's available through the open stack distribution and we have integration with folks like Red Hat, Morantis and Canonicals soon to come. The one thing I really want you to take away from this picture is it's the best of my knowledge. We're the only company that provides this integrated support of the physical and the virtual nodes particularly for open stack. So that's all a whole bunch of stuff about the company that doesn't particularly apply to the fun part of the talk. So the fun part of the talk is talking about how we in partnership with Dell and Morantis actually built a huge test bed. So we threw roughly about a million dollars with the hardware at this problem to figure out what are really the scaling limits for neutron. So we threw 300 compute nodes donated by Dell Networks along with a whole bunch of switches, as you can see here. Net, just south of five terabytes of data, 140 terabytes of disk. This is actually a pretty sizable cluster. This was based off of Dell R22 devices. We actually used Fuel as the installer. We ran with five open stack control nodes and two redundant big cloud fabric control cluster nodes. Any questions so far? If nobody asks any questions, I'm gonna get through this talk really fast. So this actually used a full neutron plugin. So because we have control of both the physical so the question was with the ML2 plugin. So because we have control of the physical nodes and the virtual nodes, we actually don't need the ML2 split. This is correct, right? We've got our developers in the audience here so. Yeah, I assume what Reginace was clarifying is we actually have a mode where we actually, using our V-switch is optional. And so if you actually wanna use just the physical fabric, we do have an ML2 plugin for that. But specific to this deployment, this is the full neutron plugin. This is a shot from our controller dashboard. So we used 16 leaf switches. So I'm sorry, 18 leaf switches. So this was nine racks with redundant leafs in each rack and four spine switches. We created, in our parlance, a tenant is an open stack project. So 250 some projects and over almost 900 endpoints. So this is kind of the money slide. This is the problems that we ran into and how we got them fixed. So one of the first problems, and I think most people know this, your L3 agent can be scheduled somewhat arbitrarily through the fabric. And so if you have two nodes that are in different networks that are trying to talk to each other, they may have to go someplace completely different to route through an L3 agent before they can talk to each other, even if they're actually even co-located on the same device. So if you have VMA in one network and VMB in another network and they're connected by a logical router and traditional open stack networking, that L3 agent actually could be somewhere else and you might have a hairpinning that happens. The thing that's particularly bad about hairpinning, maybe you can over provision and maybe you can have lots and lots of these L3 agents. But it also causes these weird correlated air conditions. So if a rack that's not involved with the compute nodes goes down, maybe it takes your L3 agent with you and then you have these weird issues that happen there. Another thing that people tend to do with Neutron is say, all right, well, if I have a bottleneck in my L3 agents, let me actually just make lots of L3 agents. And so kind of the extreme of that is to have an L3 agent per compute node. And so as you approach an L3 agent per compute node, you actually have a whole bunch of scaling challenges that happen. So the first thing that happens is all the L3 agents have a KEPA live protocol that runs. And that KEPA live protocol doesn't scale once you get up to the order of 300 nodes. And as a result, L3 agents starts furiously timing out and when they time out the open stack scheduler thinks they've died so it tries to reschedule them. And the rescheduling process is itself actually fairly heavy. And so what ends up happening is not only do you have these L3 agents kind of disappearing for no good reason and coming back, it actually causes excessive load on your system as they turn and get moved around. So the question was, does our Switch Lite VX actually run in user space or kernel space and is it a replacement for OBS? And the answer is actually yes and no. So we actually replaced the user space part leaving the OBS kernel space. So what we found is talking to a large swath of customers. Many people are worried about putting weird stuff in their kernel and I certainly understand that and that makes sense. So they really want a kernel module that's been blessed by the kernel.org folks. So we decided to keep using the OBS kernel agent but we've actually replaced it with our own user space agent.  Does that make sense? I apologize sir, I can't hear you. Can you repeat the question? So in Reginage, feel free to jump in here as well. So what's interesting with our solution because we have the physical and the virtual, the OpenStack DVR is not DVR for physical, it's only for the virtual. And so this way we can actually integrate with the physical bare metal workloads because we can implement the DVR equivalent functionality in the physical switches as well. Anything you want to add to that or? Okay, turns out I got it right. This is the downside of being CTO, like you're supposed to know this stuff but these are the guys who write all the code. So these are the two problems we ran into as you start to scale out to 300 nodes and as folks have guessed, it turns out our virtual switch does actually solve these problems. So first we implement the distributed virtual routing and the NAT per compute node. So that guarantees that between any two points you'll never do hairpinning, you'll always follow the shortest path. And also it means that if you have some sort of resiliency issue, maybe a rack goes away, only the nodes in that rack are affected. There's not necessarily a cross correlation problem. The other thing it turns out is we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do scale up monitoring of lots of switches and lots of nodes. So we actually using our OpenFlow controller and the SDN primitives that we've learned, we actually avoid all of the keep alive storm type issues and there's no need to start rescheduling all of these alpha regions all over the place. Does that make sense? That's kind of a mouthful but I actually don't even have a lot of time. So yes, so not pictured here but we do implement service chaining. We don't implement it with tagging or tunneling. We actually do something that looks a lot like smart routing. So you can think of it as between two points, by policy you can implement a service chain by saying as the device crosses the logical router we will actually change the MAC addresses and the output direction to go to the service. But we actually don't change the packet header. And the magic is after something has been processed by the service it comes back, it's the same logical router and by the interface it comes in can say okay now that's actually been processed by the service now go on to the destination. Does that make sense? And much like the DVR functionality what's cool about our solution and I think unique about our solution is we do that not just for the virtual workloads but also the physical. And so at least it's been my experience that there are a bunch of pure virtual workloads but most workloads are somewhat virtual and some physical. You get things where people wanna talk to a storage node or like a hardware firewall or something like that and whether that changes over time or not I think we're all hoping it does but Ironic is a real project, Magnum with the bare metal containers those are real projects and it'll be interesting to see how this evolves over time but my claim is that most customers have some combination of physical and virtual workloads and so this is a valuable thing. The point I wanna make here is actually a really interesting one. Doing scale in the steady state where you're just trying to make sure that things stay up that's actually kind of the easy problem. What we've done here is a test that we call the Chaos Monkey test a little bit similar to what Netflix has done where we took the Hadoop Terrasort benchmark and ran it on a stable network and it came out with some number it ran in seven minutes 20ish seconds and then we ran that benchmark again and did horrible things to the network. So we killed the active controller every 30 seconds we killed the random switch every eight seconds and we killed the random link every four seconds being careful not to cause a disconnection and so A, if this ever happened to your network it would be horrible but what happens in this network because we have multipathing everywhere because we pre-program all the backup routes there was effectively almost no discernible change to the performance numbers it still ran in seven minutes 20ish seconds give or take. So the lesson to take from this is even if there's horrible things going on in your network as long as you have this style of SDN control you can actually recover so quickly that your application barely notices. So and we did this at scale as well so I mean again this is a it's easy to put up a 300 node test network that runs in a steady state but as it starts recovering from this scale of link failures this scale of switch failures that's really where the rubber hits the road. Questions on this? If anything I've said to you is interesting so far today we actually have both of our products both the big cloud fabric that I talked about today and the big monitoring fabric that I only briefly mentioned that they're available online with a free trial. So if you just log into labs.bigswitch.com you can find out more about these products. But in conclusion I feel like we did something that I don't know that many other people have done we really scaled out NOVA to 300 nodes. And actually I should say 300 nodes wasn't the limit of the software that was actually the limit of the hardware that we could throw at it presumably it scales out even larger than that. And one of the things that we did is scaling the steady state is relatively easy but with this chaos monkey testing that we did I think that we showed that it's actually scales out in a real production bulletproof kind of way. There's a bunch of details that I haven't had a chance to get into here in the talk feel free to grab me or some of my colleagues there's a couple of us around afterwards or we've got the white papers online. And with that I thank you very much and I'm happy to take any further questions that you guys have. Thank you. Sorry a lot of background noise. Do you know the answer Rajneesh? I don't. So the DVR as far as I know is actually a relatively new thing. So this was with Juno. So for those who are missing this the other point is the existing Kilo DVR implementation I think doesn't do high availability failover of the floating IP state. So if you lose a DVR instance you actually lose the state for the NAT transactions. Is that correct? Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you everyone.


So the last couple of days you've published a few articles, you've made a few tweets, you've ruffled a few feathers. Have I? Yeah, you have. I've noticed. One line in particular stood out for me, you said that much of the UK media looks like a cult. Can you unwrap that a little bit? What do you mean? Okay, so what I said in the tweet, if I've got it here, just so I get it right, is afflicted by a suffocated group, I think. Intolerant of critics, hounds and turtle dissenters, full of people who made it because of connections and all personal background rather than merit. And what the British media then did with a full-blown pylon was disprove comprehensively that they are not intolerant of critics and they do not hound internal dissenters. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is about it. I kind of have lost patience a little bit, to be honest with you. I mean, media bias the structural problems with the media, which is one of the most socially exclusive industries in Britain. I've written about it, you know, my first book was pretty much about that. You know, it was about how the media demonised working-class communities in the arch-part.  And then I wrote another book called The Establishment which has a whole chapter called Mediocracy which is again about the structural problems with the British media. And the reason I'm just, I think fed up is partly is that it's not just which will come on to you, which is just, you know, what a closed chop for the privilege that the media is for lots of reasons which I'm sure we'll chat about. You know, in the kind of pre-2015 era, I was in a very isolated position without getting a little violin out as, you know, one of the only left wingers with a public platform. And, you know, and I was genuinely treated by my so-called peers as, you know, basically a crank who was completely divorced from political reality. And after the 2015 election in particular, that was, you know, I remember Dan Hodges, quite like Dan, in a weird way, but he was like the one thing that the next Labour leader can learn from is never listen to Owen Jones, or do the opposite of whatever Owen Jones says and everything. And obviously we've changed that in the sense, you know, we do have some, you know, left wingers and so on, but with very marginal platforms. And there was a complete difference between political reality in Britain where the left, as me and you understand it, is at its strongest position in the history of this country, and immediately, which actually now is increasingly just doubling, you know, going back to basically this idea of the left is this cult, I mean, you know, and also this, you know, completely marginal or relevant kind of thing. But for me, it is that, you know, it's the suffocating group thing. It's the absolute intolerance of any criticism or critique. And it is the fact it is a closed shop for the privilege. And I suppose what I'd just say to those people is, blimey, you can deal it out, can't you, but you certainly can't take it.  It is just a cult. And that's it. You know, these are just delusional... Got the Genanganesh tweet, right? That was emblematic of that. Genanganesh, the format, you know, sorry, he's still at the Financial Times.  Now, that was quite, you know, a vulgar way of putting what, a lot of journalists, you know, the media elite certainly feeling, felt in privately, but still feel. And that expresses itself in their analysis. So, there's that. But also, I mean, many of the people who piled in will have, you know, their careers have included demonising immigrants, Muslims, refugees, benefit claimants, with genuine life, you know, consequences for people, hate crimes on the streets, whether it be towards, you know, disabled people, a coalition of charities a few years ago said, abuse towards disabled people had surged because of this narrative of scroungers pushed by the media elite, or immigrants, you know, the surgeon hate crimes we saw particularly after the Brexit result. So, all I would say is, you know, my view in terms of, yes, this is a very socially and politically exclusive institution which defends its borders, its boundaries, it's, you know, in a very zealous fashion, to say the least. And it does strike me as somebody who's worked in the media for seven years that it is a racket, I'm afraid. It's not, you know, the media, unless you're a social Darwinian who believes that people, you know, that the most privileged people in society are the best and the brightest, then, you know, quite clearly the media is completely unrepresentative of British society, both in terms of being socially exclusive but also politically exclusive. And, you know, the cult-like way people have responded to that.  But it's got a point, isn't it? I mean, look at the figures. Jesus Christ. You know, we need to, you know, we need to, I think, an intelligent response given... A few people have said that right, but a tiny minority. A tiny minority, yeah. I mean, privately, many have, but they're scared of speaking out, which again, did you see my point? Actually, privately some journalists have gone. One did, Lewis Goodall, he's a sky political correspondent, and he said there is group think, and he's himself, he said he's been susceptible to it. And that sort of honesty is important. I mean, it's extremely important, in terms of being self-critical. But the vast majority don't want to do that. There's been a very defensive reaction. I mean, if we just look at the social-exclusive side of things, I mean, study after study by the Sutton Trust, by the Social Mobility Commission, set up by the government, led by Alan Milburn, a former New Labour minister, you know, it went into detail about the media, all of those studies, and it shows that all about 50, well over half of the top 100 journalists are privately educated, only 7% go to a private school.  And that journalists are, the journalism is second only to medicine in terms of people coming in from, you know, with middle-class parental backgrounds. And again, you know, let me apply my own critique to myself.  My mum was a university lecturer at Salford University. And the background I have was more privileged than every single person that I was friends with growing up, without exception. So, you know, even the people who went to comprehensive schools who are now on my feed, oh, honestly, I know every single person who went to a comprehensive school in the media now, I've got their entire live stories on my Twitter feed. You know, again, overwhelmingly are still from these very narrow social backgrounds. Now, you know, that is one reason you have groupthink. If you have people who are drawn overwhelmingly from a relatively very small sliver of British society, you know, we all have prejudices and preconceptions and views of the world which are shaped by our background experiences. If you get lots of people from similar backgrounds in the same institution, all of those things will reinforce themselves. How you see the world, your priorities.  If you didn't, you know, you didn't grow up in a family which was languishing on a social housing waiting list.  Just in terms of the reaction, though, because I think it's worth, I don't know, we'll talk, I'm sure, about why it's socially exclusive. But the reason so many of them have got so angry is partly the age-old phenomenon of anyone with privilege having that privilege critiqued, taking it exceptionally personally, because everybody wants to feel that all of their achievements are theirs alone. And the idea of suggesting, well, actually, you've had odds stacked in your favour from day one, and again, I'll apply that to myself. If I'd grown up on, you know, a council estate around the corner, if I'd been on the, you know, Angela Rayner, who is an exception, she grew up literally the road next to mine in Stockport. She is an exception in politics, she's somebody from, you know, left school at 16, working-class single-mom and so on. But, you know, statistically, the idea I'd be sitting in this chair talking to you as a guardian columnist and an author or whatever, as somebody who'd grown up around the corner for myself and a council estate is for the birds. Just every statistic shows that. But many people take that personally. I am the best, I am brightest. That's why I've made it here. It's not true. All of us have to accept that in these privileged positions. Well, what's changed? Because you said right at the outset that you were fed up, you'd had enough.   Or has something significantly changed after 2015 and then, of course, after the last general election? I think the fact that, I think that the stubbornness, you know, the lack of willingness to adapt or understand a political situation, which, you know, the gap between media culture and how the media looks at the world and analyzes the world and the political context of this country has surely never been wider. Ever. I mean, surely not. Surely not. In certainly, you know, I mean, I don't know. Certainly in the last generation, let's... I mean, it feels that way, but maybe we're younger, maybe we're missing out on something, but it feels precisely like you said. In the last generation, certainly, let's just avoid that. You know, avoid anyone nitpicking over that. It's like from the 1890s. Yeah, exactly. Well, exactly. There we go. In the last generation, let's be as precise as possible. And I think what we've seen in the last few weeks is certainly an attempt to not just turn the clock back on the general election result, but also to actually go further than that and delegitimize the left as a political force, as unacceptable, as morally disgraceful. And this idea was returned again, because many journalists responded to me, senior journalists, by going, oh, you call this a call? Oh, look at the left. Well, again, that's kind of the point there, because they still have this, you know, even after the left-led Labour Party won 40% of the electorate, won the third-highest share of the vote. I know Labour didn't win. Third-highest share of the vote in, you know, polarisation meant Labour didn't win, but third-highest share of the vote since the early 1970s. And you still have a situation where the left now is just treated as an irrational, delusional, dangerous, potentially cult of people. And that lack of willingness to understand it is infuriating, and it has to be changed.  Why do they say that? Because, like you say, this is your entire professional career has been based on talking about these things. So why are they saying that you're having a breakdown? I think... What's your explanation for that? What's my explanation now? I think it's an age-old... The age-old way of approaching people on the left who are unapologetic and strident about their political opinions is that they are unhinged cranks. And we've always... It's applied to any senior left-wing figure or any left-wing figure, sorry, with any significant platform. And it is a way of policing the acceptable boundaries of political debate that, you know, that there is an ex... You know, that there is the grown-up, sensible, sane view of the world, which is very grown-up and look, you know, people in the professions and, you know, people within the commentary and all the rest of it, they're all colleagues and we all have to be collegiate and all the rest of it, and partly have the same worldview, the same suffocating group, I think. And anybody who deviates from that is seen as, you know, completely delusional or basically unhinged mentally. And, you know, I think using mental health stigma at full stop is obviously gross, but it is just an attempt, again, to police those boundaries. It's a commentary that wants to reassert old certainties in politics which do not exist in this country anymore. But hasn't it gone past all that? Momentum have got 40,000 members, like you say, Labour have just got 40% of the vote. Surely it's too late for all this. Because it seems almost like, more than denial, it seems almost like despair because the response to has just been, like you say, so monumentally bizarre for me. Yeah, again, it's an attempt, I think, to return to a comfort zone of analysis, of political analysis, which is, you know, in the old comfort zone, you know, one of the central pillars of your understanding, you know, in the media, in political journalism, of the world around you, is a mythical idea of the so-called centre ground which if Labour departs in any serious fashion, will lead to electoral annihilation. And anybody who thinks otherwise is completely and utterly delusional and at war with political facts. And the way that media commentators are used to, you know, policing that analysis is to treat anybody who deviates as children, you know, is infantile, we're the grown-ups, we're serious, get with the real world, you know? If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to make some serious compromises. Even as there are, you know, centrist politics across the entire western world is in a state of abject collapse where, you know, all the social democratic parties led by those subscribing to the so-called third way, you know, are facing extinction in many countries. But nonetheless, they're still like, you know, this is our grown-up way. And it's like they've got this way-back mission. They're trying to find a way back to how things were when things made sense. And what we have seen that over the last few weeks in particular, you know, labor, pawns of foreign powers, and all the rest, the way, to be honest, quite authoritarian societies deal with political opponents. Do you think that's the direction we're moving in now? Absolutely. The total delegitimisation of the left, pawns of foreign powers, allied to terrorist organisations would be totalitarians. Neo-fascists, as, you know, one cabinet minister described, Sajidavi described momentum, it's sinister, it's dangerous, that the left is not wrong, it's morally disgraceful, and, you know, and not a legitimate part of British politics. So let's say that the left overcomes that, surmounts all these issues because it was relatively unimportant in the last general election. Secures the majority somehow at the next general election, let's say 20 or 30, even a minority government with the SNP. How does that play out? Because clearly this is not going away. This tendency now within the media delegitimised to just really immerse itself in slander and defamation 24-7. How do you envisage that playing out under a Labour government? Well, firstly, I genuinely do worry, by the way, that some of the discourse and some of the rhetoric even before Labour going to government is radicalising people. We've already had an attempted, well, we had a terrorist attack in London where a man plowed his van into a mosque and it was revealed that he'd gone to London with the intention of killing Jeremy Corbyn on the basis he was a terrorist sympathiser and also said he can't on the basis he was a terrorist sympathiser. He said that would be, I don't know, a bonus or something.  And if you constantly tell the public that the opposition are basically traitors who are, you know, in league with hostile foreign powers, you know, I went door knocking yesterday and I did have somebody, a character who was ranting about Labour being in league with Putin and Russia and how Jeremy Corbyn should be shot. That's what he said. Can you think that's direct outgrowth of the media that you're criticising? Of course it is. Of course it is. The media in this country, you know, and it's why it's so important to critique the media because the media regard themselves as the guardians, you know, the, you know, those who guard the boundaries of acceptable political debate who choose the priorities of the nation, they're losing that power. Partly why they're so kind of the hysteria, by the way, because they feel very insecure. They're challenged by new media outlets like yourself. They're challenged by, you know, by other people with platforms. They are facing increasing critique. Social media means they can be constantly scrutinised in a way they don't like. Not just, you know, they will conflate criticism, passionate criticism with abuse, in debate, but that's what they do. And that, as part of it, is kind of, you know, an institution which is in decline objectively.  The enemy within has taken over the citadel of power, and they will throw everything, everything out that government to destabilise it and to bring it down. So you think there would almost be a sort of suspension of the media as one we would associate with democracy, who are labour to come into power? Of course.  And I worry sometimes that we're numb to some of the language and discourse which is used. You know, look, just myself, I'm one of the only people in the British commentary at, in terms of a hired columnist who is not overtly hostile, you know, let alone sympathetic to the politics of a Labour Party which won 40% of the vote.  But we're already seeing that. I mean, the question is, of course, how much influence will that have because we saw very clearly the limits of what that does at the last election. The caution I would put there, though, of course, is during the general election campaign, broadcasting impartiality rules have to come into play so the leader of the opposition gets unfiltered, direct, kind of, reached to the audience and also you get viral social media and that's harder when Labour's in government. Do you think that the BBC could be a counterweight, however, to private interest in print media, potentially? Well, look, we've just had a study revealed by the BBC which, until the 1990s, they prevented leftists from getting jobs at the BBC by cooperating with the security services. Many of those people are still there. In fact, Chris Dillow, who's a brilliant, a very interesting, I think, blogger and writer, he wrote about this, about how the fact that many of those people who came in under that regime are there and are now in senior positions and have appointed people who are in junior positions. So even though, of course, that filtering system with the security services, as far as we know, has, well, probably it has gone because Paul Mason managed to creep through at one point, but nonetheless, you know, overwhelmingly it's stuff full of people who did come under that regime, who were often in senior positions and they've appointed people in other positions, so you can see how it replicates itself. But the BBC, what it does is, so we have a press in this country which is overwhelmingly editorially supportive of the Conservative Party. In an aggressive partisan way, we have one of the most aggressive press print leaders in the entire Western world. And the BBC, every day, it frames its discussions around the front pages of those newspapers. So that's how you end up with a situation where the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Times, the Press and all the rest, you know, to a large degree dictate, broadcasting priorities every single day. Which they're amplified by, I suppose, you could say. Of course, and you end up with a positive feedback loop as well. And obviously, they inevitably ask the benefit of a Conservative Party, which overwhelmingly has the press on its side, which then means Labour's constantly put in a defensive posture. And, you know, even when you get, you know, attacks or criticisms on the Conservative Party, they're very different from... as a consequence to the Labour Party. You know, I'm not saying the press never criticizes the Conservative Party, that's not true. They're often it's from the right. But, you know, it's nowhere near the intensity, inevitably, in the same way if we lived in a country where nearly every single newspaper backed the Conservative Party, I'm sure you would still have critiques of the Labour Party, but they would not be, you know, they would not be anywhere near the intensity and the framing of the broadcast media would be weighted overwhelmingly towards us. But I think, I mean, you know, it's difficult because, I mean, the reasons we have these problems in terms of the press generally is it's obviously the fact the press is overwhelmingly run by oligarchs who are part of a status quo that's in their material interest to defend.  That makes journalists even more insecure, doesn't it? The journalists are constantly terrified of their career if they rock the boat in any way that out and they have no future. So that ties into the editorial position. Equally, if you have, you know, work in a newspaper, which the odds are you will, which has a Conservative bent, even if you're not a Conservative, if you want to rise, you're going to have to bend yourself to the editorial worldview of that newspaper. Equally, of course, you have the collapse of local newspapers which allowed working class aspiring journalists off in a reading. You've got the proliferation of unpaid internships, which do two things. Firstly, they discriminate in favour of the privileged. Those who can live off the bank of Mum and Dad. They live in London, one of the most expensive cities on Earth, and what, and work for free. For months, often, with no promise of a job at the end of it, you know, it's impossible for those people. The other thing it does is often those interns are relatives or friends of people who work at those newspapers. So, you know, and I've had examples, someone got in touch with me, he applied for an internship at The Times in 2003 and the letter back said, I'm afraid we only, the only people who do internships are relatives of people who work here. And he said they probably won't put that in print anymore, but that still happens, and he knows that anecdotally, this journalist. So, you have that problem. You have the rise of expensive postgraduate journalism qualifications, which, again, are exorbitantly expensive for most people. It's a filter, really, isn't it, to get... It's a massive filter. You've got as many filters as possible as stop working class people getting into a profession. Exactly, and it makes it socially exclusive. It's just, exactly, it's a complete... For the vast majority of people, that's impossible. The statistics are so clear that it's so... And actually, much of the evidence suggests it's become more socially exclusive since the 1980s, which isn't the case with some other institutions, incidentally. So, you've got that problem, and also, for the reasons I've described, it's politically exclusive. There's a very strong and suffocating worldview, which, if you deviate from, you are going to suffer career-wise, or there's a big chance you will. Different standards will be applied to you. So, even if you deviate slightly, you can probably still rise to a degree, but your expectations will be a lot higher. The standards you have for me will be much higher.  You're pathologised, but you... So, it is, I'm afraid... And it's not, I'm saying, I'm not saying those who rise to the top have to be conservatives. Actually, I bet most journalists maybe don't vote for the conservatives. It's a centrist worldview. It's an orthodoxy, which is economically liberal, or neoliberal or whatever, or certainly thinks that you can't deviate from a so-called centre ground of what you do with the economy, like increasing taxes on the rich or public ownership, and social liberalism. That has a limit, because much of the press is vociferously anti-immigration, but a lot of people writing those pieces don't believe what they're writing. Stig Abel, great example, right? Former editor at The Sun. But also, I suppose, Richard Peppier, who works at The Daily Star, and he was a whistleblower, he resigned a few years ago, because he was... He was writing... He was forced, well, he was told to write a copy which was lies about Muslims and demonised Muslims, one of the most demonised communities in this country, which faces hate crimes as a consequence of that media bile directed against them. He didn't believe a single word he was writing, as he said, and he was very courageous and he resigned. But in any case, you know, that's in the BBC, the centre of gravity is economic and social liberalism, which is why you get people on the right often. I mean, part of the reason the right say, because there's this logical fallacy, both the left and the right say the BBC is biased, therefore it's doing its job right. That doesn't work, because obviously, the right are far more organised, well, sorry, they're far more dominant in the press, I mean, infinitely more dominant than the left is.  You know, they call judges who wanted parliamentary scrutiny of Article 50 as enemies of the people.   The social liberalism, you know, a lot of the people in the BBC, you know, on immigration probably are pro-immigration, in fact, overwhelming, I'm sure they are. So, that's one of the reasons you get that attack. But from the left position, you know, the centre of gravity of the BBC is free market economics with a social conscience, probably, to a degree, is probably Blairism to, you know, to summon up. So, I think that's the problem. The left, as we understand it, the radical left is at its most powerful in the modern history of this country. It's never, ever being the leadership of any of the Labour Party, the mate of one of the two parties. And, you know, it is still treated by the media as though it is as irrelevant and as delusional as when it was completely marginalised, you know. And I know that because I remember, you know, I got a column at the Indian 2012, it feels worse now, you know, that group thing. It's more suffocating and that's partly a fear of the left assuming power. And it's also partly an attempt to return to those old, completely discredited certainties.  I mean, they don't like being told this because it's not just seen as an attack on their own, you know, I made it even though I'm the best at everything. But every journalist, you know, has a self-image of being this independent, you know, very individualistic just wants the truth and all the rest of it. To suggest that there's group think it play is something they find very offensive as a consequence because it seems to remove the agency that they pride so much. And they don't understand a lot of them world view what group think is. And the reason I know they don't know what group think is is because my Twitter feed is full of people saying nobody tells me what to think. That's the point though, isn't it? Well, you want to think. You wouldn't end up as Noam Chomsky once put it to Andrew Ma. You know, he suggested that you wouldn't rise to the top of that if you needed to be told what to say or to be checked because it's impossible in the British media, structurally speaking to get there and have a world view which is fundamentally a rejection of the current status quo and its assumptions and neutrality in the media is all too often accepting the current status quo. That's not neutrality. I don't believe in neutrality objectivity but nonetheless, there was that suffocating group think for the reasons I've said and I think hearing Louis Goodall that Sky News presenter talk about actually there is group think and he succumbed to it himself that's a sign actually of him being a very good journalist in terms of if you were to scrutinize your own privilege and your own group think, then at least that gives you a chance to check those problems. But he's in a minority, so the inference is there aren't many good journalists in Britain then. No, I mean look, there are some excellent journalists and I want to be clear about that. Just think of my colleague Amelia Gentleman who has exposed this horrendous scandal over Windrush. You do get those dogged determined journalists who look for those sorts of injustices and expose them. I'm not denying that. I suppose that's the sort of journalism we can't really afford very often. No, and that's another problem because actually the funding models have collapsed so the budgets for investigative journalism which means often months of hard labour with no guarantee of results at the end of it, that's been slashed back and funny enough the Sunday times and the pre-murduck days used to be the absolute vanguard of investigative journalism and we've seen a massive decline of that, that's another problem. Particularly when you get the rise of well-funded PR agencies and so on which represent major companies and so on which often they're copy, as Nick Davis in Flat Earth News talked about they just write this PR and overworked, overstretched journalists it just gets re-urgitated in the media. So there are some excellent journalists despite it all. There are this army of insecure freelancers and sub editors and copy editors and all the rest in the media who are excellent and the vast majority of people are well motivated and I suppose this is the problem with the hysteria that what I said has generated because all these people can think of is a personal attack on themselves rather than understanding what a structural critique means which is it's looking at the structure of an institution and the consequences of that structure. But all they can see is we're under constant siege we're under constant attack we're not going to listen to any critic we're not going to look at the statistics of how unbelievably socially and representative we are we're not going to look at the fact that we are still we are utterly divorced from the political reality of modern Britain. We are going to instead close ranks we're going to double down against our critics and our opponents, we're going to hound them we're going to ridicule them we're going to demonise them we're going to call them mentally ill anything but say hang on a minute maybe just maybe there is a point here that alas you know it's going to take and that's why I lost patience because you know what in the last few years nothing has changed nothing it's got worse if anything


For us at Unicree, one of the things that we spend a great deal of time doing is teaching member states who don't know what other member states do know. We spend a lot of time sharing information and that goes both ways. It isn't like the the Western world teaches the others or it's a two-way street. On this particular issue, I think it's more split than that. I think we have to teach those who know and those who don't know and help them. And that's this organization, this event is really about sharing knowledge between two different sets of people. In 2015, we had our first event at the at UNGA at the United Nations General Assembly in New York where we brought together some of the greatest minds on artificial intelligence and we brought together member states. We filled a standing room only and had the folks talk about what does this mean to member states. And that was the beginning. What we're doing is setting up a center in The Hague and at that center we will spend our time creating a, shall we call it a platform or a communication technique that will allow us to share the knowledge of those who have it and those who don't. I think artificial intelligence is the way of the future and I think that it is going to bring the SDGs in line in a way that we cannot. So our earlier speakers today I think really express that much better than I. And through our center we will spend a lot of time putting people together with private industry, academics, policymakers, government officials and our job I see as being the interpreters of that language because the academics traditionally don't speak well with policymakers and policymakers don't hear well from practitioners and as we go around each group seems to speak their own language and our job is to interpret that. And then of course there's AI for good and for every good that there is there's somebody out there who would like to take that information and use it in a negative way. And we want to see this continue to go without any restriction but we also want on the other side for governments to be ready and I don't think we're ready. We the world I don't think we're ready because governments traditionally move a little bit slower, more methodical through more rules and regulations and criminals don't. They tend to move very quickly and it's very difficult for those two things to come together and our center is our center will be focused on that. Because I think the prediction of what AI will be good for is really difficult at this point in time and it is true that law enforcement is using AI I think that corrections should be able to use it. I think predicting human behavior is incredibly inexact science and I think one of the examples that was given this morning in medical research where we can take the data from all cancer patients for a specific cancer not just the three or four that we know about in this particular locality and we can see what the outcomes of their treatment that's the same thing that can be used for rehabilitating or or habilitating folks who are in corrections or in the criminal justice system and and we need the supermind to do that because we don't have the the ability and the data currently so I think that we'll see a lot of interventions in in the criminal justice system all the way along as fast as as we come up with those interventions the criminals will come up with new ways to to do there and and they will intervene in what we try to do so I think we have to just try to stay one step ahead


My name is Silvana Tanredo. I'm a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and I'm an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. And since January I'm also president of the European Economic Association. I do research in three main areas, monetary policy, macro development and international economics. I'm very happy, honoured and grateful to the Bank of France to lose the award committee and obviously my co-authors and my family for their support. Thank you very much.