Welcome to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, I'm Amy Goodman. Israel's military launched airstrikes overnight in southern Lebanon in the Gaza Strip, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that Israel's enemies would pay a price for any aggression. The strikes followed rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and from Lebanon in the largest such barrage since 2006. Two Israeli women reportedly sustained minor injuries. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said Israeli airstrikes hit a children's hospital east of Gaza, terrorizing medical workers and patients, but causing no injuries. In the occupied West Bank, gunmen opened fire on a vehicle near an illegal settlement near Jericho, killing two sisters and injuring a third person, their mother. Meanwhile, tensions were high at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Occupied East Jerusalem ahead of Friday prayers, after Israeli soldiers were filmed beating and tear-gassing Palestinian worshipers earlier this week during the Holy Month of Ramadan. Later in the broadcast, we'll speak with Mohamed al-Kurd, Palestine correspondent for The Nation magazine. More than 3,300 Afghan men and women employed by the United Nations remained idled for a second straight day Thursday after the Taliban ordered a ban on women's staff in Afghanistan. This is Amina Mohamed, the UN's deputy secretary general. It's a clear violation of our fundamental human rights of women. I have met our female staff members, and they're essential for UN's work, including in the delivery of life-saving assistance, and some national colleagues have already experienced restrictions on their movements. This comes as the UN warns a record 28.3 million people in Afghanistan are in need of assistance this year, with 6 million of them one step away from famine. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has released its long-anticipated report on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. The report found U.S. officials should have begun an evacuation sooner, but determined actions taken by former President Trump set the stage for chaos as the Taliban overrun the capital Kabul. In the United States, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted Thursday to expel two Democratic members for joining peaceful protests against gun violence inside the state capital last week. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis, both African-American, from Tennessee's two largest cities. Jones made an impassioned case against the proceedings before the Republican supermajority voted 72 to 25 to expel him. He called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy. That is why the nation is watching you today, and I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that no matter what you vote, you have the votes, but you will not be victorious because there are generations of young people who see what is going on. They were called the Tennessee Three, but the third Democratic representative, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, who is white, narrowly survived a vote on her expulsion. Thursday's extraordinary proceedings were interrupted at times by thousands of protesters who packed the House Gallery and flooded the capital grounds to support the lawmakers and their efforts to stem gun violence in the wake of the March 27th mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, which left three adults and three nine-year-old students dead. And Biden condemned the expulsions as shocking undemocratic and without precedent, after headlines will go to Nashville to speak with one of the expelled state representatives, Justin Jones. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing renewed calls for his impeachment after a pro-publica investigation revealed he failed to report frequent luxury trips paid for by the GOP billionaire Harlan Crow. For more than two decades, Thomas frequently joined Crow aboard his private yacht, jet at his private estates and at Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California. The junkets likely violate a law passed after Watergate, requiring justices and other federal officials to disclose most gifts. New York Congressmember Alexandra Cazio-Cortez tweeted in response, this is beyond party or partisanship. This degree of corruption is shocking, almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached, she said. Later in the broadcast, we'll speak with Justin Elliott, who co-authored the pro-publica investigation. The Biden administration proposed new regulations under Title IX Thursday to make it illegal for schools to impose blanket bans on transgender students playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. Schools could, however, still bar transgender students for participating in competitive high school and college sports if deemed necessary to maintain, quote, fairness in competition, unquote, after evaluating the sport, the level of competition, and the greater education level involved. Twenty states currently have blanket bans on trans student athletes, meanwhile the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of a 12-year-old transgender girl in West Virginia, allowing her to continue competing on her school's girls' track in cross-country teams while a lawsuit over a state ban proceeds. Idaho Republican Governor Brad Little assigned to Bill criminalizing the act of helping someone under the age of 18 obtain an abortion in another state without parental consent. It's the first so-called abortion trafficking law passed in the U.S. and carries penalties of two to five years in prison. Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, quote, the law will isolate young people and put them in danger, including those who are in abusive situations, she said. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill shielding abortion providers from prosecution, disciplinary action, or extradition attempts by other states. A warning to our audience the following story contains graphic footage and counts of police violence. The Justice Department is open to federal civil rights probe into the death of Delano Martin, a black 17-year-old who was fatally shot by a U.S. Park police officer in Washington, D.C., last month. The investigation was announced after Tuesday's release of police body cam video showing the March 18th shooting. The video shows officers investigating what they call the suspicious vehicle with Martin sleeping behind the wheel. An officer opens the rear driver's side door of the SUV and issues the command, police don't move. Martin accelerates with an officer in the back seat. The officer then fires multiple times before the SUV crashes into the side of a home. A medical examiner later reported Martin was shot six times and died instantly. His mother, Tara Martin, spoke to reporters on Wednesday. I want the officer name released immediately. I want him arrested.  Sudan's military rulers have once again delayed signing an agreement that would transition the nation from military to civilian rule. Thursday's postponement prompted a new round of protests in the Capitol, Cartoon and other cities. The agreement would allow for elections in the formation of a civilian government after over a year of military rule following the October 2021 coup. Security forces fired tear gas at massive crowds as protesters were heard chanting, no militia can rule a country. Protesters also marked the fourth anniversary of a 2019 sit-in that led to the overthrow of the longtime authoritarian president Omar al-Bashir. For the martyrs who have given their lives for this country, the protest will reach its end, God willing, and we will keep going until we reach a civilian democratic rule and without the return of any totalitarian system in Sudan again. Many have criticized the deal for excluding the establishment of a transitional justice system or the implementation of key military reforms. And Oklahoma's attorney general is asking for the murder conviction of death row prisoner Richard Glossop to be vacated in a decades-long case in which Glossop narrowly escaped execution three times. In 1997, 19-year-old maintenance worker Justin Snead killed the owner of a budget motel in Oklahoma. He admitted to the murder but accused Glossop, the motel's manager of orchestrating it, allowing Snead to avoid the death penalty. Glossop has always maintained his innocence. Oklahoma's attorney general cited evidence in a new report that shows Snead, who was a heavy drug user at the time of the murder, gave false testimony about his psychiatric condition and the state's failure to turn over key evidence. An appeals court must now decide whether to vacate Glossop's conviction and order a new trial. Glossop is currently scheduled to be executed May 18. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, I'm Amy Goodman. We begin today's show in Tennessee, where a Republican supermajority in the state legislature carried out its threat Thursday to expel two black Democratic lawmakers from their seats for peacefully protesting gun violence on the House floor last week, breaking with decorum as thousands rallied outside the Capitol to demand gun control days after the Covenant Elementary School shooting in Nashville that killed six, including three nine-year-olds. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis are both African-American and from Tennessee's two largest cities. They were part of the Tennessee Three, but the vote to expel their white colleague, Gloria Johnson, who joined them in solidarity, narrowly failed. In a minute, we'll speak with Jones. But first, we bring you some of the historic scenes that unfolded as Justin Jones and his colleagues defended themselves and supporters looked on from a packed gallery, but stayed quiet so they could witness the proceedings. This is Representative Jones facing questioning from his Republican colleague and laying out his defense. I was shocked to have the Speaker of the House condemn mothers and children and grandmothers and parents and concerned citizens' clergy lie on them and say that they were violent insurrectionists. And I think that he owes the people of Tennessee an apology because at no point was their silence. At no point did we encourage violence. In fact, what we were doing was calling for the end of gun violence that is terrorizing our children day after day after day and all we offer are moments of silence. It is in that spirit of speaking for my constituents, of being a representative of the people that I approached this well on last Thursday, breaking a house rule. But exercising moral obedience to my constitutional responsibility to be a voice for my people, to be a voice for the Tennesseans who you choose not to listen to because of those NRA checks that are so hefty in your campaign funds.  One of the questions that keeps coming back to my mind that I hope maybe you can answer is when you say no action, no peace, what do you mean? What does Representative Jones mean by no peace? Thank you. Representative Jones. Thank you. I would invite my colleague from Putnam County to join any protest where that is a very familiar chance that it usually goes no justice, no peace. And I believe the roots of it lie in something that Martin Luther King stated that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice. That's what I was saying, is that until we act, there will be no peace in our communities. In addition, I would like to read some context about that chance that comes from Jeremiah 614. I'll read the New Living translation. It says, they offer superficial treatments for my people's mortal wound. They give assurances of peace where there is no peace. I'll go to the new international version. They dress the wound of my people as though it was not serious. Peace, peace, peace, they say where there is no peace. That's what the chant means, is that we have no peace. And that until we act, there will be no peace for the thousands of children who came here demanding that we act. We're afraid that if they're in school, they'll be gunned down because you have passed laws to make it easier to get a gun than it is to get health care in this state. You've passed laws to make it easier to get a gun than it is to vote in this state. There will be no peace in Tennessee until we act on this proliferation of weapons of war in our community. That is the peace I was talking about. That is what I was saying. Representative Williams, thank you for your question. After his questioning by Republican Ryan Williams, Tennessee Republican lawmakers gave Representative Justin Jones five minutes before their vote. This is how he concluded. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I want to say that you have the votes to do what you're going to do today. But I want to let you know that when I came to this well, I was fighting for your children and grandchildren, too, but to those who here will cast a vote for expulsion. I was fighting for your children, too, to live free from the terror of school shootings and mass shootings. When I walked up to this well on last Thursday, I was thinking about the thousands of students who were outside demanding that we do something. In fact, many of their sign said, do something, do something, do something. That was their only ask of us is to respond to their grief, to respond to a traumatized community. But in response to that, the first action of this body is to expel members for calling for common sense gun legislation. We were calling for a ban of assault weapons and the response of this body is to assault democracy. This is a historic day for Tennessee, but it may mark a very dark day for Tennessee because it will signal to the nation that there is no democracy in this state. It will signal to the nation that if it can happen here in Tennessee, it's coming to your state next. And that is why the nation is watching us what we do here.  I pray that we uphold our oath on this floor because, colleagues, the world is watching. Pursuant to Article 2, Section 12 of the Constitution of the State of Tennessee, I hereby declare Representative Justin Jones of the 57th Representative District expelled from the House of Representatives of the 113th Assembly of the State of Tennessee. That was Speaker Cameron Sexton announcing the expulsion of Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones from the statehouse Thursday in a party line vote. Republicans also voted to expel his fellow freshman, another 27-year-old, Black Democratic Representative Justin Pearson, who also faced questions as he defended himself. This is part of Representative Pearson's exchange with Republican Representative Andrew Farmer. That's why you're standing there, because of that temper tantrum that day, for that yearning to have attention. That's what you wanted, but you're getting it now. So I just advise you, if you want to conduct business in this House, follow Bill. Be recognized, stand there and present it, and pass it. All you've got to do is pass the bill. Cheers. Now, you all heard that. How many of you would want to be spoken to that way? How many of you would want to be spoken to that way? We're not talking about politics, we're not talking about even gun violence. How many of you would want to be spoken to that way? The reason that I believe the sponsor of this legislation, of this resolution, spoke that way, is because he's comfortable doing it. Because there's a decorum that allows it. There's a decorum that allows you to belittle people. We didn't belittle nobody. What we said was that we cannot be beholden to gun lobbyists, to the NRA. We can't be beholden to organizations that don't want to see us make progress on gun violence. We can't be beholden to folks who don't want to see us help save our communities and protect them. But there's something else I think that the sponsor of this resolution has alluded to and there were a few things here that you said that I want to address. He called a peaceful protest a temper tantrum. Is what's happening outside these doors by Tennesseans who want to see change a temper tantrum?  And she showed up here demanding that we do something about gun violence. Is that a temper tantrum? Is elevating our voices for justice or change a temper tantrum? But there's something in the decorum of this body that makes it okay to say that folks who are exercising the First Amendment rights to speak up for the hundreds of thousands of people collectively that we represent. There's something in the decorum of this body that says it's okay to call that a temper tantrum, to call people we disagree with on the issues, to say that all they want is attention. But I'll tell you what, I don't personally want attention. What I want is attention on the issue of gun violence, but instead we're here with a resolution you put up talking about expelling me for advocating for ending gun violence in the state of Tennessee. I'd much rather be talking with you about legislation to protect Shelby County and to protect our communities than talking about why we don't deserve to have our representation lost because we came to the camp house saying we've got to do something. That's what I would like to be doing. And so you brought attention or tried to bring attention to me, but I want to turn the attention to the people, the people who will never be able to throw a temper tantrum for gun violence. You know, the Larry Thorns, the Catherine Coons, the Mike Heels, the Cynthia Peaks, the Evelyn DeKal, the Haley Scruggs, the William Kinnies who will never have a chance to throw what you call a temper tantrum for justice, for gun reform, for the ending of gun violence. Now, never have a chance, because we haven't taken our oath seriously, because we don't take people who we disagree with seriously. We tell them you just are throwing a temper tantrum. Ultimately, Tennessee Republicans voted to expel Democratic Representative Justin Pearson from the House as well. At one point during his final remarks, the official TV feed for the Tennessee House continued to wrongly identify him as his colleague Justin Jones, as he was giving his final statement. Pearson ended by saying the struggle had just begun. Who's, folks? We've got good news that Sunday always comes. Resurrection is a promise, and it is a prophecy, is a prophecy that came out of the cotton fields, is a prophecy that came out of the lynching tree, is a prophecy that still lives in each and every one of us in order to make the state of Tennessee the place that it ought to be. And so I've still got hope, because I know we are still here, and we will never quit. During the votes, thousands of supporters rallied in the halls of the state Capitol and outside. When a reporter asked Democratic Representative Gloria Johnson why she thought there was a difference between her outcome, she was not expelled, but her colleagues were. This was her response. I will answer your question. It might have to do with the color of our skin. Representative Gloria Johnson was a teacher at Central High School in Knoxville that faced a school shooting more than a decade ago. At the end of the night, the lawmakers, now known as the Tennessee Three, stood together again, and Johnson vowed to work to get her expelled colleagues back in the house. And I just cannot say enough about how proud I am always and forever to stand with these two brilliant young men who connect with their community, who really listen and understand the voters in their districts and across the state, who can tell everybody in the most powerful way. They spoke to our members. They won't admit it, I don't think, but they spoke to those hearts. I could see it on faces. But still, what's the difference where I made it through? And these two young men did not make it through. I think you're right. We know. We know why. We know. But here's the difference. I think we might have these two young men back very soon. Representative Gloria Johnson standing next to the Justins, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who had just been expelled by the Tennessee State Legislature. Well, we're joined right now by Justin Jones, Expelled Democratic Tennessee State Representative of Nashville. Welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us again after this marathon day.  Justin Jones. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me again, Amy. It's good to be here. So your feelings right now, how is it possible?  You were elected by the people of Nashville. So how is it that a Republican supermajority can fire you, can expel you? Got you. Sorry, I couldn't hear your other question. But, I mean, I'm feeling, you know, when it happened, it didn't feel real. I didn't, you know, if I didn't know what happened to me, I would think it was 1963 and not 2023, that a predominantly almost entirely white Republican caucus expelled the two youngest black lawmakers, not for any unethical or criminal behavior, but for our First Amendment activity and for standing and doing our job to speak up for our constituents and to speak up particularly for young people who are terrified of these weapons of war on our streets. And so I'm feeling, I'm tired, but more so, I'm tired of the injustice that rules the state capital. But I think that what they've done, though, is the complete opposite. They may have won yesterday, but they have not won the moral narrative as we go forward, that they thought by expelling us they would silence us, they would silence our movements that were a part of.  The nation can see how retaliatory and absurd and authoritarian they are. And so I think that is what gives me hope, is that they tried to kick us out, but instead they put a spotlight on themselves for their shameful policies that make it easier to get a gun than it is to get health care in this state. You know, we spoke to you a few days ago. I was going to say Representative Jones, but you are Representative Jones. The question is, will you be just immediately reinstated next week? They're talking about your behavior as you spoke out from the well of the House of Representatives in Tennessee. But I wanted to ask you about Republican State Representative Justin Lafferty. He showed this a few days ago as well, of Knoxville, who pushed you and grabbed your phone as you filmed the interaction. He attacked you. Can you talk about was he disciplined for violent behavior? I'm not at all. I mean, Representative Lafferty, the same representative who tried to justify the three-fifths compromising the Constitution a couple years ago, I mean, he can act, you know, out of decorum, out of rules, act violently, and he's welcome within his party. I mean, that's what we brought up here, is that we've had so many instances of behavior. You had Republican caucus chairman get upset at his son's basketball game and pull down the pants of the referee. That, you know, does not mirror any type of sanction.  He sat there without being expelled. You have David Hawk, you know, who was, you know, guilty of domestic violence. I mean, these things happened, and there was no accountability. But for us, for exercising our first amendment activity, for saying that, you know, we took our oath seriously to protest against and dissent from any legislation that is injurious to the people, Article 2, Section 27 of the State Constitution, we took that seriously. They expelled us, the most serious measure taken against us. And it's wrong and shameful. And what it really was about was about trying to silence the voices of the 78,000 people each of us represent. So— In the most diverse districts in the state. Can you tell us—and this is an absolutely key point. You represent the largest and most diverse cities in Tennessee. The local governing bodies, for example, of Metro Nashville, could reappoint you immediately? That's what we're hearing. The question will be, will the Republican supermajority seat us? And so, I mean, we would have to still run in a special election, and will the speakers seat us back in the body? Or will they—will this be a legal battle? Just like Julian Bond, you know, they refuse to seat him in Georgia when he was a young man who ran for the legislature during the civil rights movement. And so, we don't know what to expect. I mean, I don't think the nation—what happened yesterday was unprecedented, and it should alarm us all that if it can happen in Tennessee, it can happen anywhere. And so, I hope that people are paying attention. I hope that people realize that this is authoritarianism, that this is ousting of opposition voices from a legislative body, is authoritarianism. This is not democracy—I know I'm on democracy now, but this is definitely not what democracy looks like. And we are on a very scary path toward fascism, toward authoritarianism, toward autocracy in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. And let's remember the significance of this week. I mean, this is the week of April 4th, April 4th, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down, and we're also here talking about gun violence that began this protest you were involved with, Justin Jones. But so, there was the Tennessee Three, you, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson. You both are 27, she's 60 years old, you are both black, she is white. She made no bones about this. She said the reason she is—was not expelled, and you two were—was the color of your skin. At the end, I was watching—walking through the streets of New York, watching on my phone what was happening. And when Justin Pearson gave his final comments, the Tennessee feed from the House of Representatives called him Justin Pearson, like they couldn't tell the difference between the two of you. Yeah. Yeah, they called him—they confused his name, Justin Jones. Oh, sorry. Called him Justin—called him Justin Jones. Your name. Yeah. I mean, that is it, is that they just—they saw two young black men who, you know, speak up on the House floor, you know, speak up in committees and challenge this dominant narrative of white supremacy, of plantation capitalism, of patriarchy. And that terrified them, that we, you know, were the two youngest lawmakers. I'm 27. Pearson's 28. And that, you know, we represent the future of this state. And that is what they're trying to stop, is that they want to hold on to this old South, and we're trying to bring a renewed South that uplifts human rights and democracy, multiracial democracy and social justice. And so, these—what we saw yesterday was a public lynching, let's be real. And it was meant to set an example, but we did not bow down. And that's what I think has them, you know, really upset, is that we didn't, you know, we didn't break, we didn't bow down. They wanted us to, you know, to feel broken, but we left with our fists up in the air because we knew that this was not the end, that they may expel us, but they can expel our movements. And that's what terrifies them. Well, Justin Jones, I want to thank you for being with us. Of course, we'll continue to follow this major protest as planned for Monday, I know. Will you be out there? I definitely will. I'll be outside of that chamber with these young people, showing up every week until we take action to take these weapons of war off our street and until we honor the victims of covenant elementary school by acting. Justin Jones, Expel Democratic Tennessee State Representative, representing Nashville, author of The People's Plaza, 62 Days of Nonviolent Resistance, with a forward by Bishop William Barber. Thanks so much for being with us. Coming up, we go to the Middle East. Israel's bomb Southern Lebanon Gaza's tensions soar in the region after Israeli forces repeatedly raid the al-Aqsa Mosque, beating and tear-gassing Palestinian worshipers during Ramadan. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Israel bombs Southern Lebanon Gaza overnight, its tensions soar in the region. Days after Israeli police repeatedly attacked Palestinian worshipers inside the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. In response to the Israeli raids on the Mosque, militants in Southern Lebanon and Gaza fired dozens of rockets into Israel, the largest rocket attack from Lebanon in 17 years. Israel says most of the rockets were intercepted. Meanwhile, earlier today, two Israeli sisters were shot dead, their mother critically wounded in a shooting near an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. Israeli authorities are searching for the perpetrators. This all comes as Israel continues to impose a violent crackdown in the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli army has killed at least 94 Palestinians this year. Israel's raids on the al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan have sparked international condemnation. Palestinian worshipers said they were beaten and tear-gassed as they prayed. We were spending the night in the mosque, and after we were done with late-night prayers, the police started to evacuate worshipers from the outdoor yards. We were inside and the young men closed the doors, but police stormed in and detained the young men and women. There were other worshipers to the eastern part of the compound. In the yard to the eastern part of the compound, the police were firing tear gas and stun grenades. It was a scene that I can't describe. Then they stormed in and started beating everyone, and they detained people, and they put the young men on their faces to the ground. They also beat them while in detention. Joining us now is Mohammed Kurd. He is the Palestine representative for the nation, where he recently wrote an article titled, Israeli Protesters Say They're Defending Freedom, Palestinians Know Better. Mohammed O'Curd is from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem. Mohammed, welcome back to Democracy Now! What is happening right now in Israel and Palestine? Good morning. What is happening has been a crackdown on Palestinians from the Israeli regime on all levels. But it's important to remember and it's important to contextualize that these tensions that may arise and this kind of violence that may quote-unquote erupt does not happen in a vacuum and it does not happen in isolation of the larger settler colonial enterprise of the larger military occupation that Palestinians are forced to live under. As you said, there have been 94 Palestinians killed since the start of this year, and that within itself is an escalation of violence. But in the past two days, Israelis who have been emboldened by international impunity, by international inaction, have been using the bodies and using the site of al-Aqsa Mosque as stage to display brute force to send a message of sovereignty and security to the Israeli public, as well as send a message of intimidation to the Palestinians who use that mosque as one of their only remaining public spaces in a shrinking city. Can you explain what you understand happened in al-Aqsa? Yes, well, according to eyewitness reports and according to the video footage that has been circulated all over the internet, as well as TV channels, Israeli occupation forces stormed al-Aqsa Mosque. They used rubber bullets. They used tear gas, sun grenades. They used butts of their rifles to beat on the worshipers and arrest a mass number of them. Over 400 worshipers were detained and then they were handed orders, preventing them, denying them entry to al-Aqsa Mosque or the old city for 15 days. Later that day, an armed Israeli settler, which by the way, many of the settlers who live in East Jerusalem are armed, shot a 15-year-old boy in the old city of Jerusalem. And of course, to no one's surprise, the settler was not arrested. And explain what's happening from Gaza and Lebanon. You've got this barrage of rockets in response to al-Aqsa going into Israel. And then you have Israel rocketing Lebanon, though they were careful to say they weren't calling out Hezbollah but saying Palestinian militants. And it looks like Lebanon is not trying to escalate this. Absolutely. It seems like the internal chasm that is splitting apart Israeli society today might prevent them from entering a fully-skilled war, which is why I assume they have been very cautious in their wording. But we must understand that the Palestinian people, regardless of the geography, regardless of the legal status, be it in a refugee camp in Lebanon or in BC's in the Gaza Strip, are one people, and they feel each other's pain. But it's not just retaliation for al-Aqsa Mosque. I mean, the Israeli regime has been bombing Syria for well over a year. It has been bombing the Gaza Strip on and off for the past 15 years. And the most important piece of context here is that we must remember that the Gaza Strip is an open-air prison. The largest in the world. This is a densely populated refugee camp where people do not have an inch to stretch. People do not have the right to movement. People do not have access to clean water. It has been declared uninhabitable. That, within itself, is an aggression. You mentioned the Israeli settlers in Jerusalem and Israelis carrying guns. I wanted to ask you about Itamar Ben-Gavir, Israel's new minister of national security, ultra-nationalist convicted of racist incitement against Palestinians and supporting a terrorist group. In October, he waved a gun and shouted, this was during a confrontation in your neighborhood, Mohammed, in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, where settlers attempted to violently evict your family and others from their homes. Just going to play a brief clip. If they, Palestinians, throw stones, shoot them. Explain what he was saying and what he did. Absolutely. I've had a few interactions with Ben-Gavir and also Smuttsch. And, you know, while adjectives like far-right and ultra-nationalists certainly do describe him, these adjectives make him sound as though he is fringe, as though he is marginal, when, in fact, he represents, I would argue, a large portion of the mainstream. You must understand that these politicians use our neighborhoods, use our front yards as avenues for political campaigning. These displays of racism, these displays of brutality, these threats, this—all of them serve to embolden and bolster his election campaign, which was insanely successful. He is now the Minister of National Security. This has been a pattern with Ahmad Ben-Gavir, but it is just—he is just a man saying the quiet part out loud. Truly, the differences between him and the liberal Zionist parties are purely cosmetic. He is willing to say in public what they say behind closed doors and what their policies and what the laws that they have put forth have done for the Palestinians, for the past seven decades. They've all been policies and laws and actions of racism, ones that promote ethnic cleansing, ones that reek of racism. Let me ask you, Mohamed El-Kurt, about the massive Israeli protests, not about treatment of Palestinians, but about what Netanyahu wants to do to the Supreme Court, severely curtail the powers of the judiciary. Can you talk about whether you think they will transform into supporting Palestinians and also the mainstream media's coverage of what's happening right now with the escalating violence? I mean, I want to—watching the protests, I want to tell the Israeli public that they have a lot more in common than they realize, because the body that they are protesting to defend, the body that they are trying desperately to save, the Supreme Court, which they say is a beacon of democracy, has its fingerprints all over the Israeli government's settler-colonial enterprise and apartheid regime. I mean, this is the same Supreme Court that, in 2018, when the Israeli occupation forces created a generation of martyrs and amputees in the Gaza Strip following the Great Martyr Return, ruled that they were doing so in self-defense. This is the same Supreme Court that upheld the legality of the family reunification law, which prevents tens of thousands of Palestinian couples and families of living together and uniting together. This is the same Supreme Court that, in January, ruled in complete violation of international law to forcibly expel over 1,300 Palestinians from Masa Fariata. And one of the Supreme Court judges, which made this ruling possible, by the way, is himself a settler in the West Bank. So, this is the body that these people are trying to defend. So, I absolutely do not think they can transform into talking about or protecting the rights or defending the lives or being advocates of the Palestinian liberation movement, because they are defending a body that is settler-made and that serves settlers and that was built on top of the rubble of Palestinian lands and that was made to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and to legalize that kind of ethnic cleansing. Do you think that there is growing resentment about what the government is doing to Palestinians when it comes to these massive protests? I wonder. I mean, they have been able to show us that they can mobilize in the hundreds of thousands and they can speak up and they can do all of this civil disobedience. They can engage in the boycott, the investment in sanctions campaign against their own government. They have been showing us this, and we're just told that they're just not choosing to do it in favor of the Palestinians, which makes sense. I mean, defending the lives of Palestinians or protesting against the apartheid regime or the settler-colonial regime would mean that they have to undermine their own privileges and the own luxuries they enjoy as settlers in historic Palestine. Well, Mohammad al-Kurdwun, thank you for being with us. Palestine Correspondent for the Nation will link to your latest piece at democracynow.org. Coming up, calls are growing for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be impeached after ProPublica reveals Thomas has frequently taken free luxury trips paid for by a Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing renewed calls for his impeachment after a ProPublica investigation revealed he failed to report frequent luxury trips paid for by a billionaire Republican megadoner named Harlan Crow, who serves on the board of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The investigation revealed set for about 20 years Thomas secretly accepted luxury vacations from Crow in apparent violation of a law requiring justices and other federal officials to disclose most gifts. One vacation involved nine days of island hopping in Indonesia aboard a 162-foot super yacht. Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginny Thomas, flew to Indonesia on Crow's private jet. Thomas also frequently vacationed at Crow's 105-acre resort in the Adirondacks of New York. Hanging on the walls of the resort is a painting of Clarence Thomas sitting with four other men, including Harlan Crow, as well as Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society. Thomas never reported any of the free trips as gifts. On Thursday, New York Congress member Alexandria Casio-Cortez tweeted, quote, This is beyond party or partisanship. This degree of corruption is shocking, almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached, she said. We're joined now by Justin Elliott, who co-authored the ProPublica investigation headlined Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire. Lay out what you found, Justin. Yeah, well, what we found is that Justice Thomas has this extraordinary and apparently unprecedented relationship with this outside billionaire who is basically subsidizing his life. I mean, we're talking about trips on a private jet that charters for $10,000 to $15,000 per hour cruises around the world on the super yacht that you described. Regular vacations with this billionaire and his friends, who in some cases are people that have either ideological or potentially financial interests before the court. Well, explain what the rules are for Supreme Court justices. You know, one of the striking things here as we got into this is that it's just how few rules there are, especially compared to other people in the government. I have friends who work in the federal bureaucracy who say they can't even have somebody buy them lunch. Supreme Court justices have very few rules in terms of accepting gifts. One of the few things the law requires them to do is to simply disclose gifts, most gifts. This was a law that was passed back in the 1970s after Watergate. And Clarence Thomas, by not reporting these private jet trips and some of the other travel, you know, appears to be in just repeat violation of that law, according to the ethics lawyers we spoke to. So I wanted to read from your investigation, Thomas's frequent vacations at Topbridge have brought him into contact with corporate executives and political activists during one trip in 2017. His fellow guests included executives at Verizon, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, major Republican donors, one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank, according to the records you reviewed. The painting of Thomas at Topbridge—and so I want to show this for our TV audience—shows him in conversation, as we said earlier with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society. Explain who the other people are and what Topbridge is. Yeah, Topbridge is this incredible, essentially private resort in Upstate New York in the Adirondacks. It was actually built by Marjorie Maryweather Post, who is the same heiress who built what is now Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago about a century ago, to give you a sense of the kind of lavishness of the property. And this property is now owned by this Dallas real estate billionaire, Harlan Crow, and he regularly hosts Thomas there. And we're not talking about just sort of a lake house. It's a whole campus of buildings. There's a staff of chefs and waiters and that sort of thing. And, you know, it's very difficult to find out who is on these trips with Justice Thomas. We were able to get the names of guests on one or two occasions. And even though Harlan Crow told us in a statement that he and his friends are not trying to influence Justice Thomas, you know, the people, for example, in the painting you describe are... And what is the sculpture behind them? Yeah, it's a sculpture of a Native American man sort of with his hands outstretched. We're not really sure why it's there, what it's supposed to mean. I actually spoke to the painter who created the piece. And, you know, he said that in real life that sculpture is actually two or three times bigger and he shrunk it in the painting because for scale. But we don't really know why it's there or why they made the choice to pose in front of it. But, you know, all of the men in the painting besides Harlan Crow are conservative lawyers. People are active in one way or another in the conservative legal movement, you know. Of course, Leonard Leo key to the choosing of conservative justices, especially under Trump. Yeah, Leonard Leo has been very involved in creating the current Supreme Court supermajority and Harlan Crow has donated to Leonard Leo's groups. And this is a guy who now has a war chest of over a billion dollars. And, you know, again, when you look at that painting, it raises a lot of questions about Harlan Crow's statement that this is all about sort of friendship and just socializing. So tell us more about who Harlan Crow, the billionaire GOP super donor is. Can you tell us more about Harlan Crow? Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Justin? All right, while we're while he's fixing his IFB, I'm Justin Elliott writes in the piece that Clarence Thomas has presented himself as a quote every man with modest tastes. We're going to turn to a clip right now of Justice Thomas speaking in the documentary created equal Clarence Thomas and his own words. You know, I don't have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. I prefer going across the rural areas. I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There's something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock and I prefer that. I prefer being around them. That's Clarence Thomas. Your response to that, Justin Elliott. And if you can tell us more about the man he spends a lot of time with, even if he extols Walmart parking lots, and that is Harlan Crow. Yeah, a couple thoughts. I mean, one is irony is the documentary you just showed, which was made by friends of Justice Thomas, it was actually financed in part by hundreds of thousands of dollars from none other than Harlan Crow. And yeah, there's been a deliberate effort over the years by Clarence Thomas and his supporters to present to him as a kind of every man, a regular guy who likes driving around in his RV. And he absolutely does drive around in his RV around the country, but they've never mentioned that he also is flying around on private jets and going around on yachts, hanging out at resorts, essentially private sort of boutique luxury hotels hosted by this billionaire that has somehow never come up in all these interviews he's given about his RV. So it's starkly different than the reality. With respect to Harlan Crow, he was actually born into money. He was heir to a major Dallas real estate fortune. He was the son who took over the family business. So he has wide-ranging business interests, particularly in real estate. But I think more relevant for this story, he's also been involved for over 20 years now in conservative legal politics, giving to groups like the Federalist Society and others. As you mentioned earlier, he's a longtime board member of the American Enterprise Institute at the Think Tank, which of course is active on a lot of issues, but including conservative legal advocacy and advocating for various things related to the Supreme Court. So he's very deep in the kind of political world and specifically the world of conservative legal politics. And says that the greatest threat is Marxism. Is that right, Justin? Yeah, he didn't agree to an interview with us, but he gave an interview recently in which he said his greatest fear is Marxism. Well, we're going to leave it there as you write in ProPublica. Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass. Justin Elliott will link to your ProPublica report, Clarence Thomas and The Billionaire. A very happy birthday to Matt Ealy. I'm Amy Goodman. Tune in to democracynow.org. Thanks so much for joining us.


Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, wikibon.org, and this is theCUBE, where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we bring you the best guests that we can find, we like to call them tech athletes. I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. Doug Leone is here, he's a partner at Sequoia Capital, very well known VC, on the board of ServiceNow. Doug, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here. It's great to have you here. You know, a lot of times, venture capitalists, they'll get in, they'll help seed the companies, help grow the companies, go to an IPO, successful IPO, and kind of go on to the next one. So you're here, and you're seeing the growth of this company, the meteoric rise, and you're seeing this user conference. You must be delighted to see the degree, the enthusiasm of the user base. It's very exciting. It's very exciting to be here and see close to 4,000 people being here, and hearing some of the feedback from the customers. It's horrific. So how is it that they've been able to keep you interested in this journey, and you're still here, you're helping grow the company? Well I think the short answer is that the job is not done yet. We are in the early innings. If one thinks about IT service management, we're well in our way. But one thing we learn from the conference is that customers are finding many use cases for the software. And the software is spreading in IT, in HR, in many other areas. So I actually think we're in the early innings. And so I think there's a great deal of opportunities for the company, and I would like to very much try to help in garnering as much market share in that opportunity as we can. Yeah, you've been around the technology industry for a while. Why is it, do you feel that IT is now ready to change? Well, I think IT is ready to change for the simple reason that the world has changed. If you think of IT maybe four or five years ago, essentially what the role of IT was, a defensive role to protect the enterprise, and the employees and the technology were enclosed in four walls, and a little bit on the attack side, where no was the first answer and yes was the other answer. And they work mainly in infrastructure. I think that is the plumbing. Well, suddenly the role of the CIO has completely changed. The defensive part of the house has become much more challenging. The technology's out of the building and the employees are out of the building. So that requires a lot more skill set and it's way more exciting. And the plumbing side of the house has completely changed where the CIO is no longer the plumber, he's a business partner. So his role has been elevated within a corporation. And I think it's the most exciting time to be a CIO in the history of CIOs. So I think that the future is very bright for this market segment. Lastly, for the very first time, the IT function touches every employee in the company. And so there's a lot to be done for every employee. We talk a lot on theCUBE about the whole hyperscale trend and my colleague John Furious says, if you want to know what's going to happen in the enterprise five years from now, go look at what's happening at Google and Facebook and Amazon. And you remember after the dot-com crash and Nick Carr wrote his famous book, does IT matter, everybody just pull back, like you said, got defensive. But the hyperscale crowd showed us that technology actually can be used to create competitive advantage. Nonetheless, a lot of traditional IT has continued to be defensive. Do you think that platforms like ServiceNow can actually change that mindset and bring IT back to being a competitive advantage and also importantly, catalyze increased spending within IT? Well, I actually would take it one step further. I think that companies like ServiceNow offer a product that are extremely necessary for IT to change. I don't think it can be done without a service now. For the very first time, we have employees that can create applications on the fly. They can create application, many applications that talk to one another in the single type of a data model. Therefore, the ERP for IT. And instead of the end users having to wait weeks, months for any changes, that can be done very quickly, very overnight by a user. So I think having learned a little bit from Amazon and from Google in the expectations of the end user within a corporation, a company like ServiceNow now offers a solution where companies can make those kinds of changes and build those kinds of systems very, very quickly. So Dago, I wonder if you could talk from, step back from kind of a VC perspective where we saw a few years back tremendous investment and valuation creation in Facebooks and Google of course and a lot of consumer facing buzz, Zanga and this and that. And now it seems to kind of have shifted back to the enterprise side. But I think what's interesting is how the consumerization and those applications both in infrastructure as well as user experience seem to really now be influencing where the enterprise side of the house is going. Can you speak to that? Sure, please keep in mind that the business of investing in these small companies is a business of latency. If you invest in one year, products don't hit the market for two years later and consumer adoption is three or four years later. And unfortunately the venture industry tends to run with momentum investing. So 50,000 venture guys do consumer, 50,000 venture guys do infrastructure and IT. I think the good investors have seen some of these trends just begin to evolve four or five years ago and you have to be quite consistent and be true to your vision. If you start coming in to companies in infrastructure right now, one could argue that you're investing at a local maximum maybe four or five years ago. But unfortunately the investment industry is a momentum driven industry for most investors. And you know, the thing that happens with momentum, you're always a little late and paying the highest price and then the moment that you get there that you see a peak. So I think the trick is to have careful market maps, have a clear vision, and then have Dumbo-like ears available to listen to guys like Fred Luddy. So when you run across them and they have a crystal clear vision in the future you're ready to jump on for the simple reason you've thought I had and maybe it was one of your veins of your market maps. What was it when you first talked to Fred that really struck you? What was the piece of his vision that resonated? I think two or three things. One, he was crystal clear in what he wanted to do. And the great founders are crystal clear because they are great thinkers and they spend all the time thinking. And therefore when you spend a lot of time thinking then what you can do is articulate in very few words. Second, Fred knew exactly as the founder of the company what his strengths were and what his strengths were not or his weaknesses were. And he asked some of his trusted friends, investors and colleague to help him find people to show up the other side. And third, he just told it like it is, no surprises. As a matter of fact, for every board meeting we went to for the first year and a half the only surprises we got was surprise on the upside. And I will tell you that never happened. Tug, you have said that the next big thing in enterprise IT really doesn't exist.  Most VCs, like you said, are out chasing a trend. They're trying to focus on momentum. So talk about that a little bit. If there is no next big thing in IT how do you decide what to invest in? You said you have these market maps. Talk a little bit about that philosophy. So I think what I really said is that there's no way we know what the next big thing is. As a matter of fact, if I could articulate what the next big thing is I'll tell you it is not the next big thing. As I said earlier in the presentation the day before we met Fred Luddy if you had asked me that question I would not have told you IT service management is the next big thing. It took Fred to come in and explain to us why that was going to be a market opportunity and we jumped on it. So if we make 10 investments, four or five fits some kind of market map. It's an extension of the world we know mobile is going to penetrate. I can tell you the real exciting investments are the ones where no one's paying attention and someone like Fred Luddy can see the future. So yes there's going to be next big thing is going to be wearable computing is going to be Google Glass who the heck knows but there's going to be a founder and entrepreneur that's going to explain to us here's an application for Google Glass you haven't thought of that's going to make it very clear why we want to chase that and not just wearing a pair of glasses. Mark Andreessen was on CNBC yesterday talking about the perils of public companies and basically while it was somewhat self-serving I tended to agree a lot of what he was saying I mean the barriers for a public company are now so high but now here you are with service now what's that experience been like taking the company public? I guess if you're always beating on the upside that helps but there's eventually going to be some bumps in the road so what's your opinion on the whole public market and what's your stance on that? Well the position I have is that it's better to stay private because you can do a lot more so there's only two or three reasons to go public one is a branding event your competitors will say oh it's a small private company they're running out of cash and so on since your financials are not public some customers may tend to believe it second is to finance a company although one thing I'd argue is that if you've got a great investment there's lots of money whether you're private or public and third is to provide some liquidity for employees unfortunately the liquidity for them is not something that happens overnight you know one day you go public the next day is not the day that you sell all your shares and so it really comes down to a branding event and our position is keep companies private until they get very strong practice for a year or so onto what it's like to be public have your financial house in order then go public and always start with a no first and move the weight towards a yes because the IPO is simply a day in the life of the company as you're trying to build a great business it's not the other way where you go public let's all go public for the heck of it so start with a no justified to a yes your life was changed and you better have control over your forecast your financial systems and so on prior to being public yeah so service now obviously New York Stock Exchange selling to the global 2000 the biggest companies that had to help from a branding standpoint it helped a lot because all the fight in the business or in the market that was spread by our competitors we're not financially viable well I think the whole world sees that we are way more than financially viable all that junk that a local salesman is going to say against another local salesman in a heated sales situations it's completely out of the market because now what you're dealing was with facts and we knew that our facts were way better than our competitors facts well there's some ancillary benefits too it wasn't the motivation for going public but prior to going public cash flow was king and you had to invoice a certain way and now you've got hundreds of millions of dollars in the balance sheet and so you're able to it gives you greater financial flexibility as well yeah we had cash flows as a private company and as a public company it's not that if you have a lot of cash that you can spend it for the heck of it you have to justify a model why doing so is the right thing cash is always available if you have a terrific company there's people that are willing to throw cash in bucketfuls at you so it's not cash we talked, it was interesting to hear Frank today talking about Facebook he went public just after the first major IPO and technology right after Facebook he called it the face plant IPO tongue-in-cheek but then of course you had work day as well and you guys seem to be more work day like you know kind of similar transformation even though you're going to IT is that a fair comparison? Yes I think it's a fair comparison is that it's two fabulous SaaS companies you know about six months ago if I asked someone what's the great the second greatest company in the SaaS marketplace nobody could name it Salesforce nobody knew number two now people know it's Salesforce it's work day and it's service now it's a fair comparison I think that both companies have a very long-term market opportunities and I think both companies have stand-alone possibilities have the possibilities of being large and stand-alone companies for many years to come So Sequoia obviously great firm you know one of the leading venture capital firms in the west coast in the world what sets Sequoia apart? We've been in business for 40 years and we've been on top of our game for 40 years or on top of the business I hate calling it a game We tend to high We do high sports analogies here that's okay No there's dangers with sports analogies because the moment I mentioned team and a sports team there's only room for five people on the basketball team who starts and that's Sequoia if you've got 10 people we're skillful we have room for all 10 of them so I'm always a bit leery of the sports analogy but it's the culture of people that came from humble beginnings who have a deep-rooted need to win who have good business instincts who are willing to learn and who are willing to be business partners and that's a key set of words business partners to founders to help them build a great business over the very long term You've spent some time in business development and sales over the years How has sales or has sales changed over that time frame? Some things have some things haven't I remember 15 years ago, 20 years ago where you could not get to what we call the SMB the small businesses because the cost of sales was too expensive now due to telesales and the internet that you can get there but there are some things that have not changed if you've got a sales force they should be very well paid they should not have a high base they should be able to make a ton of money sales leadership should come from a former sales person so some things have changed and some things are deeply rooted in the DNA of a sales person and may never change All right, Doug Leone, we're out of time but one last question is we're observers of service now outside observers what should we be watching for what are the things that you would ask us to pay attention to? Watch how deeply ingrained throughout the many departments of a company the service now software becomes not just for IT service management but for a variety of applications written by employees of that company for the benefit of that company All right, Doug, thank you very much really exciting to have you on theCUBE great job, congratulations like you said, you're not done yet so good luck on your future journey it's really a pleasure Thank you, thank you very much All right, everybody keep it right there we will be back with our next guest this is Service Now's Knowledge Conference I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick this is theCUBE we'll be right back after this short break


Rhaol fgrifinoedd, dros y ddweud gan gweithio o'r bron, efallai nawr yn y gafodd hon, a ond y cwmfor pensionerol yn y Daessu Gweithreidol. Mae'r iawn rydyn ni'n Iesu Gweithreidol yn y niwn 1 agnodol gyda'r newydd. Mae hyn sydd wedi ceisio i mi wneud ar ôl i amlwgau amlil oherwydd am y cyfanyddau. Mae'n i ymhwyl mewn gwiriaeth cerdyniaeth cyfan. Mae'r cwestiynau o'r gweithreidol er mwyaf amlinef og y llaw. We're also curating questions from our social media audience and I'd like to say a very warm welcome to our audience watching us live on weforum.org. My name is Oliver Khan. I work for the forum. I'm proud and pleased to be joined by Rodney Brooks, the founder and chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, a manufacturer and, of course, Stuart Russell, professor at the University of California in Berkeley, USA both experts in their own right. Rwy'n golygu, oeddwn yn gweithio'n cael ei weld o'r hwnnw, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n cael ei gwael i'w ffraith. Felly i Elon Musc yn ymweld i'r lleol, oherwydd yna'r aeitfawdd ar gyfer y gwirioneddau bryd yn Cymru? Yr hyn o'r pethau'n gweithio'n gwirioneddau. Rwy'n gweithio'n gwirioneddau'r pleiddoedd fel Ylon yn gweithio. First of all, Elon is a very brilliant guy, and people take what he says very seriously. He had recently read a book by Nick Bostrom called Superintelligence, which talks about the long-term question of AI, which is what happens if we succeed in creating general-purpose superhuman intelligence, which means systems that can make decisions that are much more accurate than those made by humans, that take into account more information, that look further ahead into the future. And so, very roughly, you can think of it as a little bit like playing chess with a machine, where you all understand that machines can defeat us very easily at chess because they can look further ahead into the future and they're more accurate. And now just extend from the chess board to the entire world. You don't really want to be playing chess against a superintelligent machine with the world at stake. So this is the question that Elon is talking about. But I think the way it's been portrayed is that, number one, it's described as if he's talking about the present. He's not talking about the present, he's talking about the distant future. It's very hard to say how far away that future is because to reach that level of capability in machines requires quite a few conceptual breakthroughs and those are very hard to predict when they will take place. The other thing that people are misunderstanding perhaps is that when he's saying this is potentially a risk to humanity, it's a little bit like saying that, as HG Wells did in 1912, that the creation of atomic weapons would be a risk to humanity and that was certainly right. But it wouldn't make sense in 1912 to say, oh, then we better stop doing physics. And that's the lesson that people are taking from what Elon is talking about, that perhaps we should stop doing AI because at some point in the distant future, success in a certain kind of AI in general purpose intelligence might pose a threat. But the way I interpret what Elon is saying is posing a challenge, that if the AI community is working full steam ahead trying to create general purpose intelligence, then it's the job of the AI community to understand how to make sure that the systems we build remain completely under our control. And at the moment I would say that AI community has not put enough thought into the question of what if we succeed. Also respond, Stuart mentioned chess playing as an example and I think that illustrates an important distinction that many people outside the field of AI don't make. Inside the field of AI we make it but it's so natural to us we don't necessarily feel we have to explain it. And that's the difference between performance and competence. So a chess playing program has very high performance and today's chess in the 90s IBM's Deep Blue beat the world chess champion. Today you can get any number of programs run on a laptop that are better chess players than any human being in history. So they have very high performance but they don't have the competence that would come when a person plays at that level. A person who is a chess master can teach someone else how to play chess better. Those programs can't teach how to play chess better. A person who's a chess master knows that there's a lot of psychology in playing chess. Those chess programs don't know that. Those chess programs aren't aware that people exist. Those chess programs aren't aware they're playing a game. They can't play tic-tac-toe. They can't generalize. I think this has spurred people on deep learning a technique has been very, very successful. More successful than I think five years ago most AI researchers would have predicted. At a couple of tasks, one is for speech understanding for the low level decomposition of speech signals and so our speech understanding systems have gotten much better. Secondly, the very popular demonstration is in image labeling. There was a story in the New York Times not so long ago showing how these programs could label images and the example they show there is some people playing Frisbee and the system says this is a group of people playing Frisbee. But if a person can label that image they can answer a lot of other questions about that image that the programs can't. They can answer how many people in the image happens to be three. The programs can't answer that. Where's the Frisbee? Can't answer that. What is a Frisbee? Can't answer that. Who is interacting with the Frisbee just recently or in the future? Can't answer that. Who is looking at who? Can't answer that. These are things that a person that could label that image would understand about the biggest story around Frisbee instead with deep learning. It's just able to give that label. And I think that makes people like Elon Musk mistakenly assume that we have super human intelligence level coming almost immediately and I think that's probably a long, long, long, long, long way off. And Romney, I wanted to broach that risk subject early on because I wanted to now come to you and as a manufacturer of robots that generally do nice things, helpful things, you've said recently in the media that this year as a producer of robots is going to be a tipping point as such and a knee in the curve in the industry's growth, I believe. Tell us a bit more about what's happening on the ground and maybe from a business perspective. In my particular case my company is building robots to go into manufacturing. The traditional robots we've had before have been dangerous and you have to put walls around them, cages around them and they are very difficult to program. So what we've done is try to build a robot that it's safe to be this close to and I am, you know, a stewardess safe from me and that it's easy to get to do a task. And they are going into manufacturing in the US. We've been having them for about three years, now putting them in Europe and in China. People often say to me, how could you want robots in China for manufacturing but as many of you probably know, that manufacturers in China are having a lot of problem getting enough labour. The recruitment and retention are the two biggest problems for manufacturing in China. China has an incredible, incredible advantage over the rest of the world because it has this amazing supply chain that's been built up over the last 30 years. So manufacturing is not going to go to Africa or somewhere else where there may be more population. It's going to stay in China but just, you know, wages have been going up 15% per year in China so it's not like wages have been held down in manufacturing but there's not enough people who want those jobs and so there's a real demand for automation and robotics for those to maintain China's lead in electronics and other manufacturing. Okay, let's get a sense of who has any questions at this stage. Okay, so let's go to the lady here in the front row please. Could you give us your name and your affiliation please and also mention who you would like to answer your question? Please don't make it me. Thank you. Thank you, Olivia. Yan Qing from China Business News. I would have this kind of feeling. But no matter what, it's not entirely clear how important it is. If you want to look at the movie of this machine man, in the movie, a young man, a machine man, a machine man pushed out, is he really a machine man with this kind of feeling? It's not clear yet. Is it important? In many cases, he has the same reaction to the machine man, the same behaviour. So whether we treat robots as if they're conscious will depend to a large extent, I think, on how the robots look and how they behave and the question of whether they are actually conscious may remain a mystery. In some ways, it remains a mystery for us. You don't know for sure that I'm conscious.  That's the state of the art in consciousness science right now, is I know I'm conscious and I guess you are. That's about as much as we know. Why the question matters? Because if the machine can have consciousness one day, they will control human being and now the other went around. That's the core of the question I think. I think this is an important thing to get straight. The ability of a machine to control the world or control human race has nothing to do with consciousness whatsoever. The ability of a machine to control the world or to beat me at chess has to do with its ability to make good decisions, to make decisions that achieve its own objectives. That doesn't require consciousness. Chess programmes are not conscious, but they make much better decisions than I do. There's absolutely no reason to think that we require consciousness for machines to make good decisions in general in terms of their interactions with humans and their ability to control the physical world. The only real question that consciousness raises is the question of should we accord rights to robots? If there arises a movement, if a large part of humanity believes that machines are conscious, they will be calling for machines to have rights. At the moment machines don't have any rights any more than cars have rights. That's the one question where it makes a difference and we may have philosophers and lawyers arguing about this for centuries without reaching any conclusion. I'll come back to consciousness in a minute, but I want to answer your first question. You talked about perception, action and cognition. I'm going to talk about each of those in turn. Research on perception is going exceedingly well right now and part of that is driven by the video game industry. The video game industry has made 3D cameras very low cost and with 3D cameras being low cost, it means researchers at any university in the world can now work on 3D vision. When you go to a computer vision conference or a robotics conference, there are many, many, many papers about trying to understand cluttered scenes, the sort of scenes that happen in real life where there's lots of stuff there. Now they're working differently than a person. They're labelling. They're understanding the function of the objects they label in the same way that a person labels them, but nevertheless it doesn't matter in some sense. It's going to lead to a lot better robots. On the action side, we of course have robots that can move on wheels well. We don't have them doing that well on walking yet and the thing that's closest to my heart is dexterous manipulation. We've been working on that for over 40 years in robotics and AI and the robot hands we can build today are really not much better than they were 40 years ago. We have not made very good progress with that. This thing that we each have two of are amazing, amazing devices. In order to make progress on them, you need to make progress on four things at once. You need to make progress on materials because our hands do a lot of what they do because of the material properties of our skin. You need to make progress on sensing within the skin which is hard for us to figure out how to do and video games haven't helped us there. You need to have complex mechanisms because we have so many degrees of freedom and you need new algorithms and you need all four moving together at once and that's been very hard to get research teams funded to work on. Dexterous manipulation, we're not doing very well in walking. Cognition, we have systems which can plan better and Moore's Law has been very, very good to planners just faster computers have meant algorithms have gotten a lot better. My own experience is it's very hard to get people in industry to want to adopt programs that make decisions through planning by themselves. They want the machine to do the same thing every time. They don't want it to be better sometimes and other times. So getting that out there is a challenge and requires a different way of thinking. We're all used with our smartphones. We're all used to the software sort of automatically being updated and getting better but in industry that's not the way people are thinking at the moment. They don't like to lose that element of control. Getting to consciousness. Will we ever have conscious machines? I think I'm a machine. I am a machine. I don't think there's anything else. It's just biomolecules. Biomolecules working on the physical principles. So I think we have an existence proof that machines can be conscious. I think we have no idea what consciousness means except our own perceptions of it as Stuart says. And I think it's going to be a long time before we do. And the last point is you went from consciousness to control.  My four children still love me. So I don't know why everyone thinks just because you have a smart machine that it's going to hate people.  And they're machines. That's a common idea that the machine will suddenly wake up and decide that it doesn't like people. That's not really the issue. The issue is how do you put a purpose into a machine and objective such that when the machine which is by assumption more intelligent, more capable than we are when it chooses what to do to achieve that objective we want to still be sure that the actions it takes are ones that we are happy with. King Midas a long time ago he's a famous figure in mythology he asked for a special power which is that everything he touched should turn to gold. And what happened of course was he got what he wanted and his water turned to gold his family turned to gold his food turned to gold and he died of starvation and thirst and misery. He got exactly what he asked for and then it wasn't what he wanted. So there's a famous paper by Norbert Wiener who's a very brilliant mathematician from the 20th century written in 1960 and he said if you put a purpose into a machine you had better be absolutely sure that the purpose is really the one that you desire. It's very difficult to be certain of that when the machine is going to carry out this purpose it's going to come up with plans that never occurred to you as a human being as being ways of achieving that purpose. So this I think is the core of the problem that Elon Musk is talking about that Nick Bostrom is talking about that other people are talking about machines do things in ways that you don't expect you still want to be sure that you're happy with the results and how do we make that happen that's a really difficult question. Fortunately at the moment it's not immediately urgent because the machines are not that smart you know chess programs just play chess moves they're not in the taking over the world business but it's hard to predict when those breakthroughs will occur and I always like to give an example from history of chess and nuclear physics. So Ernest Rutherford was the leading nuclear physicist in the world just as Rod is one of the leading roboticists in the world and in 1933 on the 11th of September he gave a famous speech where he said that essentially we will never find ways of extracting energy from atoms. The next morning Leo Zillard another physicist read about this speech and invented the nuclear chain reaction and a few months later patented the nuclear reactor and described how a nuclear weapon would work. So the prediction that something is a long long long long long long way off in the future Rutherford said it would never happen and in fact it happened in less than 24 hours so it's a little bit difficult to make these predictions of when those breakthroughs will occur I think in AI we're somewhat further away more than one breakthrough maybe four, five, six it's hard to say but I do think that we need a lot more work on understanding how to put the right purpose into a machine so that we like the results. I'll just respond to Stuart there I think he and I disagree somewhat here I interpret the way Stuart talks as we have the current world and then we have this machine whose purpose we don't quite know very well but in reality technology doesn't happen that way so before we have a machine which does something really bad to us we'd have a machine that was quite angry and annoying and before that we'd have machines which were slightly annoying and so I think we will have a process of evaluating what we want to suddenly appear all at once in a sense nuclear bombs did appear at once but with $3 billion of $1940 investment and thousands of people working on it in a war situation where it was kept secret but I think these sorts of things once we don't have any machines with any purpose at the moment in any desires or goals we don't have any, not even in labs they have objectives at the point that's what we mean by purpose is simply the machine has some objective which is supposed to optimize that's all it means it's not just coming from out of the sky and suddenly this super smart machine it's going to come gradually as we've seen with self-driving cars self-driving cars didn't suddenly get on the road it's been a long process since 1988 we were talking about earlier this morning and still they're not out there and still we're pretty sure they're not quite good enough yet to let go on the roads You can see a lot of effort into getting the right panel here because we want them to have a bit of a frisson and bang against each other We sound like we have the same accent even though we come from opposite sides of the world I just want to put a shameless plug-in for our issue briefing at 6.30 this evening which will actually have some neuro-scientists so you can ask them about memory and plant and those kind of consciousness questions then and hopefully we'll get even more a wider, more diverse array of answers to that one Any more questions from the floor? Okay, lady over there, perfect Thank you My name is Jie Xiaoting from Xinhua News Agency Xinhua News Agency this is the state media of China My question is about what if the artificial intelligence grows into a different thinking pattern that we cannot understand that we cannot communicate with them For example, we have the artificial neural networking people put things into them and they can intimate the humans handwriting but you cannot change the handwriting if you are not satisfied with some part of it because you don't know which line of their expressions is slightly different You can't talk to them actually You can just educate them You cannot directly change them What if the artificial intelligence think in a totally different way that we cannot communicate with them? Thank you For example, right now we're not sure how intelligent dolphins are We don't know where dolphins are conscious We're not good at understanding Our understanding of animal cognition is changing rather rapidly right now compared to where it was very recently I think the point you make about artificial neural networks one of the things that gets back to my point before is the difference between performance and competence If a human has a certain level of performance they have a competence which includes some ability to explain what they're doing or at least to rationalize what they're doing Most of our AI systems do not have that yet which leads me to think that they are Sorry, Stuart a long, long, long, long, long way from consciousness I think this is a good question My own research actually is in methods that are somewhat different from artificial neural networks where they are, in some sense, inspectable You can understand what it is the system knows and you can actually ask it questions about what it believes and why it believes that With a neural network technology it really is a black box You have a system with 100 million elements Each of those elements is adjusted in various directions The parameters are changed If you look at the Google vision systems, for example that are quite good at recognizing different categories of objects how they do it Nobody knows All we know is they do it pretty well in many ways as well as a human being can given the same examples They've done some little experiments where they look at, they call it dreaming where you can have the system sort of generate images from its own internal circuits and then you look at some of those images and they look funky, they look weird they have eyeballs on stalks and strange creatures which are mixtures of lions and cats and dogs and so on but that's about as much as we know There are some internal sub-parts of this large network that perhaps describe different parts of objects and somehow they're combined and mixed together to do recognition If you're concerned about making sure that the machine is going to behave in predictable ways this may not be the best technology to achieve that We're rapidly running out of time but I just want to get a couple more questions and I'm going to go back to one of your comments you made earlier about the community not really putting a thought into the risks What can we do to future-proof this situation? Is regulation of this industry, this science possible? By people writing on whiteboards and writing mathematical formulae you can't pass a law saying as soon as you get to alpha plus you've got to stop right there in the middle of the equation you can't go any further But regulation could at some point be applied for example if you're going to put a trading system into the stock market it might be reasonable that that trading system satisfies certain properties so that we know it cannot destabilise the market in the way that has happened in the so-called flash-crash which was a result of algorithms that were not particularly well-designed interacting with each other in ways that nearly destabilised the real economy and it was only because they built-in circuit breakers that essentially stopped trading on the stock market and then unwined all those trades that they managed to rescue the real economy from what would have been a big disaster So it would seem entirely reasonable that either by self-regulation or by legislation trading algorithms on the stock market should satisfy certain properties that prevent those kinds of runaway behaviours You can imagine later on with self-driving cars we would want again the same kind of assurances that those cars have been properly designed the algorithms are properly designed so that they know how to react just like we have driving tests for humans now before they're allowed to go out on the road we may need something a more mathematical kind of test to show that a self-driving car does the right thing In the longer term, it's much more difficult because we don't know the shape of the AI systems that we'll see in 20 or 30 years' time what kind of regulation would make sense The other thing that we can do to future-proof is actually to change the way we educate the engineers in the field I think at the moment if you look at civil engineering the idea that a civil engineer would design a bridge without thinking about safety at all is completely bizarre The meaning of the word bridge means something that you can walk on without it falling down but the same is not true for software and AI software so there needs to be a change in the culture of the field so that when we build intelligent systems we are thinking about their effects on humans and making sure that they are safe and predictable and that requires building in those things into the education system Very briefly, if you can I agree completely that we can't regulate science because we don't know what's going to be good and what's going to be bad regulating deployed systems, absolutely I disagree somewhat with the emphasis that Stuart puts on mathematical proof I think that's going to be very difficult we've had horses in our societies for thousands of years we had no mathematical proof of what they would do but we had a general understanding of their performance characteristics we knew don't stand right behind a horse we knew don't let a match next to a horse's eye so we knew the parameters under which horses were generally safe and if a particular one was a real problem they were culled from the herd and gotten rid of so I think that will be more how many of us a lot of laws were written around horses and how they could be controlled but no mathematical proof To write things off because this is what we do at the forum we look at opportunities and challenges looking not too far into the future but both give us your greatest opportunity and the greatest risk in the coming year or two from artificial intelligence in as few words as possible It takes me that long to get through my email so I think one of the things I'm most excited about is the potential for progress in understanding language and that we will move, not in a year or two but in let's say five to ten years we'll move from the current generation of search engines which index the web but don't understand anything to systems that in some limited ways can understand everything that they read a system that has read essentially everything that the human race has ever written and extracted information from it and synthesized that could be ten times more valuable to human society than search engines have been and search engines have been a very valuable addition to our civilization so I'm very excited about that possibility in terms of risks this is a risk in the next year or two is the development of autonomous weapons where nations and companies are moving quite rapidly towards the capabilities for robots to be used in warfare in ways that are not directly under human control and I know that the Chinese ambassador for example at the United Nations in Geneva has expressed grave concern about these possibilities as has the Japanese ambassador, the German ambassador and the Vatican, the Pope is strongly opposed to autonomous weapons so this is a question where we need some serious policy discussions and it has to be done soon because otherwise there will be an arms race and it will be very hard to get back to the status quo from that In terms of opportunities, I think the opportunities in Europe in North America and China are around the aging population in all those societies, of course Japan in all those societies there's been a demographic inversion going on not enough younger people to look after older people so AI and robotic systems which let individuals maintain control of their lives longer I put the driver assist technology as an example of that it lets people drive as they get older longer than they would without those driver assist technology so it lets them keep their independence I think there's going to be a tremendous pull across Europe, Asia and North America for technologies which let the elderly maintain their lifestyle and their independence longer My big fear is there won't be enough robots The risk is not enough robots are being manufactured What a fascinating session we could be here all day I'm sure but we'll have other meetings and appointments to get to Thanks so much gentlemen, it's been a real pleasure having you here for our first issue briefing of the morning Thank you all for joining us We're actually here right back here in ten minutes talking about the digital transformation of industries and looking to have a digital revolution transforming society in ways that we're not even aware of so I hope you can join us but for the time being this session is now closed Thank you very much indeed


You can help a child improve their language skills by asking them a variety of questions. You can ask them questions that start with the words who, what, when, where, why, or how. For example, if a child says they played a game today, you could respond with who did you play the game with? And they may say, I played with my friends. Then you could ask them, what game did you play? Or, when did you play the game? And you can do the same thing with where, why, or how. Doing this activity will help the child understand the different kinds of question words and how to respond to them.