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Sept. 2, 2022 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
01:55:51
The Transhumanism More Than Meets The Eye Watchalong!

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Transformers Summit Preview 00:06:06
Hey, everybody, Jason Burmes here, and buckle up, we want to say thank you to Mary Hurst right out of the gate.
She says, this is excellent.
I don't know if it's so excellent.
Let's just say that for the next at least hour plus, we're going to be doing a watch along with this Washington Post-driven and moderated Transformers summit from 2016.
And it's actually about two hours long.
And how did I come about this?
Well, I was looking for open forum information on cyborgs.
And all of a sudden, I come across this Transformers Summit.
And I see a cyborg artist, somebody I've seen in the news before and seen in magazines, who has an implant, but then he has this retinal antenna out of it.
Like it's ridiculous.
You know, it's beyond parody.
And I start watching it because I'm like, you know, I'm interested.
This is the kind of stuff that I do for my research.
And I'm thinking maybe I'll clip some things out.
About four minutes into just the moderator and Washington Post guy.
And he says, sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Samsung.
And I'm like, all right.
I go, I should probably just do a whole watch along with the crew as we do this because this thing is going to be wild.
And we already got a lot of tippers.
Thank you guys so much.
Sandy, thank you so much for supporting the broadcast.
We hope a lot of people can do this one because it is going to be a long one.
So I also start jumping around.
And of course, DARPA is represented there.
Meta is represented there.
The Carlisle group is represented there.
And then on top of all that, there's a person named Martin Rothblatt, who is a transgender advocate, and I would assume transgender person.
As soon as I went to it, I'm like, oh, and they're into therapeutics.
And another story I was going to, you know, talk about was printed organs.
And basically this next step in transhumanism, they're coming out with the synthetic human beings, right?
Technology that's been around for a very long time, but now they're showing stem cells and they're getting you ready for the internet of bodies and the idea of AI and robotics and automation and the fourth industrial revolution, right?
And during that whole thing, she starts talking about using drones to bring people like printed organs and special types of drones.
This is going to be a wild ride.
I miss some stuff.
Katie Couric, I think she moderates like the last third of this.
It is going to be a sight to behold cybernetics.
But here's the thing.
There's always going to be a positive spin on it.
All right.
There's always going to be a positive spin on all this technology.
Well, at least to Harare's credit, we just don't need the vast majority of the population in today's world.
And I would actually encourage people to listen to his very frank TED Talk from less than a month ago because he basically says, look, the reason that people are so upset right now, they don't feel like they have a place, they're angry, is because they're not part of the next story and they don't want to come to that realization, but they're not part of the future of humanity.
And that's why this trans issue, that's why I said transformers, you know, I just talked about Martine Rothlet.
If you look at my thumbnail, that's actually somebody from RuPaul's drag race.
And although they weren't red colored, they were like cyan.
I messed with the coloring a little bit, but no, they didn't have regular toned skin.
Because non-binary, transgender is really just a movement towards transhuman and fluidity in your new digital identity.
Because once they have this trans movement going, it's the virtual age for the plebs, right?
You upload your consciousness to these virtual worlds.
Meanwhile, what really is happening is the technology they're about to sell you on, right?
There's somebody in there from pancreatic cancer and their research, right?
And what did Joe Biden mumble like a year ago that there's going to be this DARPO-like initiative to cure cancer now?
These are real stories.
All right.
So they're going to have that super class, that Uber mention that uses all this technology to empower themselves, meanwhile enslaving humanity in a transhumanist nightmare to get them to accept a post-human future where they upload.
And that's where we are at.
So before we get going on this journey, on this adventure, it's going to be a long one.
I want to remind everybody, I'm a documentary filmmaker.
Loose Change Final Cut, Fabled Enemies, Invisible Empire, a new world order to find.
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I want you to watch them and share them.
We're on YouTube, but we're fully demonetized here.
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The links are down below.
Here we go, folks.
Now, we're going to have to rewind a little bit.
I was jumping around and checking this stuff out.
But let's do it.
Let's bring it to the Washington Times gentleman here.
I'm sorry, Washington Post.
I don't want to smear the Times.
Engage With Climate Change 00:10:56
It's Transformers, everybody.
Oh, and I knew it.
Now, a discussion about medical technology and new inventions to aid the disabled.
It was part of the Washington Post's Transformers Summit held on Wednesday.
This is two hours.
And again, they always pose it as it's going to be helping humanity because technology is that double-edged sword.
I'm Fred Ryan, welcome to the Washington Post, and we are delighted to welcome you here this morning.
Thank you for joining us.
We're sitting in the center of what we call Washington Post Live.
It's a new initiative that extends the reach of our journalism through live events, streaming, and pairs our journalists with leaders and decision makers to dissect and explore the most important and compelling issues of our time.
The idea of today's conference on Transformers actually began with a conversation we had here about the transformation that's underway at the Washington Post.
And what a transformation it was.
It's always been a mouthpiece for the establishment.
But if there's been any more poison under the Bezos era in the media, I don't know about it.
We've gone from what was once a locally focused newspaper to a multi-platform, digital-first news organization serving a broad national and global audience.
And although we've made amazing progress and in many ways are leading the industry, we will always view ourselves as being in the process of transforming and never fully transformed.
The process of transforming and never fully transformed.
It's an industry.
And remember, this is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Samsung.
Because like so many industries, the media space is changing so rapidly that the process of transforming can never really be complete.
With advances in technology, the speed and the scope of change is only increasing, it's only accelerating.
So achieving or maintaining the status quo will never be sufficient.
So for all of us in journalism today, whether you've just started and you're early in your career or you're at my stage, the reality is that our entire profession will be a time of continuous and increasing change.
And that's the culture that we are embracing here at the Washington Post.
Well, for any business, transformation is a delicate balance.
What do you utilize and preserve from the past?
And what do you set aside to create room for the future?
Well, for us, the pillar of journalistic excellence has always been and will always be fundamental to our mission.
But the rest, that's going to be determined by constant innovation and experimentation.
As part of our transformation, we've embedded more than 80 engineers within the newsroom to quickly bring stories to life in new and innovative ways.
Our technology team now creates our own extensive and flexible site architecture, and we're now licensing that to others.
We're constantly testing and experimenting and never standing still.
We have bold ambitions to continue to grow both across the country and around the world and to be a model for a rapidly changing industry.
Think about that.
They really have done that.
And it's not because people pay attention to them.
It's because they have a leviathan behind them financially.
Again, they have to be the authoritative voice.
And talk about a mouthpiece for the very, very dangerous authoritative narratives against Assange, against Russia, even Trump and their administration, right?
Against democracy in general.
And I mean, I almost did a watch along with the Biden thing.
It's just too much to watch.
I mean, what he's saying is very dangerous.
And then he goes to shake the hand of nobody if you haven't seen it yet.
I mean, they're coming for you.
I just did a piece for the River Cities Reader that'll be coming up in the next paper where I highlight the MIAC report.
And I want to remind people, the MIAC report goes after both sides, baby, because there's multiple reports.
It's everybody.
So for purposes of today's conversation, how do we translate the broad disruption that we are witnessing around the world in all sectors into a thought-provoking event?
I think we've accomplished that today with a very unique lineup of voices who are pushing the boundaries on really every aspect of our lives.
The Transformers program is anchored by visionaries and innovators in the fields of space exploration, artificial intelligence, impact philanthropy, national security, and much more.
Billionaires and their puppets within the military-industrial complex.
Space exploration.
Philanthropy.
We'll be discussing breathtaking changes that are forever altering the way we live, connect, and learn from the social platforms we use to communicate to the cars we drive, or more accurately, I should say, that will drive us.
Today we'll explore efforts to define mortality and what that means for our Oh, we're going to define mortality.
Again, they're getting ready for a virtual age where they say you can upload your consciousness.
Our future.
And we even have the father of the internet here to explain it all to us.
And despite what we may have heard a few campaign seasons ago, this is actually the father of the internet.
To start us off, I'd like to thank our presenting sponsors, Lockheed Martin and Samsung Electronics.
Please join me in conveying our appreciation.
Thank you, Lockheed.
Yay, Samsung.
Thank you.
That's when I knew I had to do this.
And I would also draw your attention to the program where the rest of our supporting sponsors are listed.
Now, on the way in, you may have seen some students that were building robots.
They're part of what we call the Roporter competition that we're holding here today.
Roporters.
Because the way that we gather news has changed dramatically in many ways over the past few years.
Virtual reality, 360 video, and drone robots are helping journalists to tell stories in new and engaging ways.
So we've challenged a team of top science students from five major high schools to build a functioning robot that can help collect information from places that would otherwise be unreachable for journalists.
That competition is underway right now, and we will be announcing the winners to you later today.
I mean, who needs people on the ground when we can just have robot surveillance?
And then Big Brother, they get the live feed, right?
And then they can decide what goes out instead of like real time.
So they can control narratives.
Or, you know, in the future, where bandwidth isn't a problem and obviously AI can change things in real time graphically, we've already seen the deep fakes.
You can just alter it with like a three-second delay that nobody will know about.
Great stuff.
But now, please, to start our program, please join me in welcoming Shankar Chandra, the head of Samsung Catalyst Fund, to say a few words.
Shankar.
The Samsung Catalyst Fund.
My God.
These people.
Good morning.
Thank you, Fred, and thank you, Washington Post.
I'm honored to be here today representing Samsung Electronics.
It's a privilege to join you all today to listen to you and engage in a conversation about technology and how technology is going to impact us as individuals, a society, as well as our country.
Perhaps just to kick it off here today, you're going to listen to some amazing speakers.
These are the speakers that represent innovators who really are bringing in the next technology revolution.
And you as audience get an opportunity to engage with them, really help shape the conversation of how technology is going to in turn influence us as people and as society.
At Samsung, we are very privileged to actually work in the technology industry.
We do this every day.
As we look out there into the future, we see some very significant challenges we face as a society.
Climate change is one, shifting demographics, chronic illnesses, and the rising costs of managing chronic illnesses.
Well, so healthcare and climate change.
You know, I just can't help myself every time we talk healthcare and climate change to remind everybody that we have health for peace and peace for health via the World Health Organization and a transgender cloud man woman with a dove and a bunch of symbology for that.
I just, every time I hear about that, you know, again, this is a 2016 video over here.
But you know, whatever climate change, you know, climate change.
Security, privacy, these are all very significant issues.
We think technology has a role to play there.
In just the last few years, there's been some significant technology breakthroughs.
For example, deep learning, deep neural networks has been an amazing development.
The human brain has been an inspiration for how these new technologies have come together.
And deep learning is giving computers an ability to see as well as have a dialogue with us.
And that's going to be transformative.
Quite similarly, some of the new big data analytics techniques are deeply influencing how quickly we can analyze DNA sequencing and also how inexpensive that's going to become.
This biology to technology and technology back to biology.
Biology to technology and then technology back to biology.
BioNano era, anybody? Is creating an amazing virtuous cycle and we think we as partners can engage with that and make a transformation in society.
We in Samsung believe we can't do this alone.
We would like to engage with you in a conversation.
We'd like to figure out how we work in an open collaborative way and then make a fundamental difference in harnessing this technology.
Let me perhaps at this point give you a little bit of sense of what we have outside this room.
At some point today, if you'd like to get a vision of what Samsung is doing, we have some demonstrations of our gear VR.
If you have some time, please stop by and take a look.
And now everybody that has one of these Oculus type devices is in the metaverse.
Martine Rothblatt's Vision 00:02:33
Finally, I'd like to thank Washington Post for having us here, for giving us the opportunity, and thanks to all the speakers in the audience.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Hands on.
Oh, come on.
Can we get on icon?
Almost fast forward.
I guess we'll jump to offer GP sort of morning and welcome to Transformers.
My name is Neely Tucker, and on behalf of the Washington Post, I'd like to introduce you to our first guest, who is a stunner.
It's actually sort of impossible to imagine the modern world without our first guest.
One of her college theses, or college theses, became one of the first satellite television companies.
She was also the president of the first company to commercially offer GPS devices in cards.
After that, she created SiriusXM and was one of the founders of the entire idea of satellite radio.
It's not a bad start to your career.
She left Sirius more than 20 years ago to found a company to assist her youngest daughter, who was at the time dying of a then-incurable lung disease.
The resulting company is United Therapeutics.
It's now a $6 billion biotech.
It's based in Silver Spring.
It has extended, if not saved, the lives of tens of thousands of people, including her daughter, Genesis, who's now in her 30s.
Ladies and gentlemen, Martine Rothblatt is also the recipient of this year's Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative Award, which is devoted to LBGT issues and puts her in an interesting issue because she has a company, or part of the company, is based in North Carolina, which, as you know, right now, she might get arrested for going to the bathroom if the governor had anything to do about it.
So I do want to point out again, you're 10 minutes into this presentation and the first person they're talking to is a transgender woman, all right, that's going to tell you about the transformers in this, what, transhumanist agenda.
Just, you know, no coincidences there.
Ladies and gentlemen, Martine Rothblatt.
Martine, one of the basic concepts that you're interested in, it's not just improving lives, but it's actually immortality.
Digital Doppelgangers, Cyber Consciousness 00:15:14
That we're all going to live forever.
And Martine, I might mention, has sounded a religion, as one does, known as Terrorism.
It's based on transhumanism.
And you have the idea that we're not just going to live a long time, but we're all going to live forever.
We're all going to live forever.
Again, 10 minutes into this, bad boy, 2016, Washington Post pushed.
DARPA's coming.
Carlisle group's coming.
Okay?
Foundations and philanthropy's coming.
But let's just start out with new religions, immortality, living forever, transgender rights, and transhumanism.
Kim Iverson's looking for somebody to talk about this whole trans issue.
Well, I'll tell you right now, nobody's going to talk about it more hardcore than I am.
So you guys follow her or watch her stuff.
Why don't you push for me to get on there?
Because it needs to be, I mean, think about what we just watched right here.
Wow.
Tell us your concept of immortality and how that actually would work.
Thanks, Neely.
It's a great pleasure to be here.
The idea is one that has been percolating up from lots of people in the information technology industry for a while.
Perhaps Ray Kurzweil, who is a prolific inventor, is best known for the idea that as our abilities in the information processing industry, computer software, storage of more and more of our thoughts and our ideas outside of our body becomes easier, more automatic, less expensive,
that ultimately we're going to have sort of digital doppelgangers of ourselves that are stored in the cloud and are able to present themselves to any manner of devices.
And that as thousands and thousands of software coders and hackers and people in the maker movement work to make the software that runs these digital doppelgangers ever more lifelike, ever more human-like, there'll come sort of a tipping point when people begin to claim that these digital doppelgangers have achieved what we call consciousness, an ability to have a sense of themselves, hopes, fears, and feelings.
And at that point, I think the activity will move to the legal arena as to whether or not these digital doppelgangers really are conscious, really do have an independent legal identity.
And kind of the trend of progressive thinking is once there's a scientific consensus, and in this case it would be the science of psychology, that being the science of the mind, that these digital doppelgangers are in fact cyber conscious, then they'll begin to acquire the sorts of rights and protections that we assign to even our pets,
laboratory animals, and to quite a high extent to primates like chimpanzees.
And so in this way, ourselves will kind of morph into a sort of digital consciousness that is recognized by the law as being alive.
And you've got a kiddie.
So let's just unpack that whole thing.
First of all, Ray Kurzweil heads up Calico, Google's immortality division.
Let's start there.
All right.
And when she's talking about these things, did she notice she said scientific consensus that these things are conscious, trusting the science?
I mean, this is the real deal, guys.
May of 2016, people have been talking about transhumanism for a very, very long time, but now comes the rollout.
And they are not shy about what they're talking about.
Digital doppelgangers, it goes beyond that.
All right, that virtual age.
Everybody wonders, I mean, I know this audience doesn't, why we go to this document again and again and again, but it is because eventually they want to bring you, first of all, bots, Borgs, and humans of 2025, really pushing that, pushing it through Musk.
And then right here, that bio-nano era, 2020 to when, underneath that, what is it?
It's the virtual era.
All right.
It is the virtual era.
Make no mistake about it.
And that's it.
It's more than just transhumanism.
It's post-humanism.
I want to make it extremely clear.
And on the road there is this idea that you can be non-binary, zeros and ones.
You can have a fluid gender.
You can take any form.
Forget about a man or a woman.
Forget about just body modification.
Those digital doppelgangers can be anything within the metaverse.
Let's keep it going.
Kitty hog type of project on this, Bina48, named for your lovely spouse, which I have talked to and as many others.
It's sort of a head on the table at this point, but it talks to you.
And you've described it.
This isn't the finished product of where we want to go.
But Bina48 is the kitty hog basis of how this, you call them doppelgangers.
Can you say robots?
Yeah, robots are just as good.
And if you put in, I kind of have the idea like, you know, the Matrix where they were plugging stuff into the back of people's head.
I have the idea that you upload everybody's personality or consciousness onto what amounts to a thumb drive and then you can upload it to the cloud.
So you're always there.
And you can just plug it into a robot and there you are.
Right, but it's becoming even, that's Bina 48 in the screen.
And that was from a recent episode of Morgan Friedman's series on the National Geographic Channel about the nature of God and religion and whatnot.
So we did this project to really inspire young people and I'd say young girls in particular to become coders.
And when they have an opportunity to speak with Bina 48 and see that even today in our somewhat primitive 20 teens, we're able to write software that can respond idiosyncratically.
She doesn't give the same answer any two times.
It's a robot.
It's not a she.
It's not a he.
It's an it.
I just want to put that out there.
But again, they're normalizing all this to the point now where we have Sophia, we have Grace for medicine.
Remember, Bushnell tells you, and Bushnell, the man that wrote that document, chief scientist of NASA, all right, he tells you that product, protit, product, productivity improvement really means automation and robotization of everything coming in.
And there's no prescripted questions.
You can ask her anything.
I'd say she's way better than Siri.
Cuter.
I'd say Amazon's Alexa is just about catching up to her.
And I'm sure because there's thousands of people working on Alexa, she'll soar right past being a 48.
But this type of software inspires young people to become coders.
And it's why I'm so confident that cyber consciousness will emerge because it's not just our foundation or a couple big companies working on this.
There are tens of thousands of people throughout the whole world who can make cyber consciousness.
They don't need a factory to make it.
They don't need a lot of investment to make it.
All they need is any kind of digital device to talk to the cloud.
I want to ask how close we are on this because the question is sort of if I go outside and I get hit by a bus and my arm and leg gets amputated, well, I'm still me.
And if I need a lung transplant from United Therapies, I'm still me.
How much of my brain can I change?
What would be your answer?
How much can you change and still be you?
Yeah, Neely, it's a great talk question, and it's somewhat in the realm of philosophy and somewhat in the realm of psychology.
And as with most things in life, ultimately it'll be decided by lawyers.
Be decided by lawyers.
Let me repeat that.
Be decided by lawyers.
And I want to point out again in this documentation.
All right.
First of all, you already have the human brain interfaces that are out there.
Okay.
And we've talked about this before.
This right here is a RAND document.
We've talked about the intervices.
And, you know, again, he's a cyborg artist.
He's part cyborg, part artist.
Okay?
You're going to see these things, but they want you to move as far away from thinking that you actually have something special, aka a spirit, a soul, or actual consciousness.
That's what this is pushing right here.
I mean, my God, it's unreal.
But it's as real as it gets.
And these are the people with billions of dollars in power and are outside of the law in most cases.
Lawyers will decide.
The scientists have long known that people forget a vast majority of what they experience.
And it's called the Ebbinghaus curve.
That over a period of like even a week, we forget over 90% of what we experience.
But things that are really important to us, that have emotional content, they stick with us forever.
And that's what most of us refer to as our soul, you know, that part of us that doesn't change.
So, in terms of you, whether your soul can be transferred into a cyber conscious form, it's going to be something that happens gradually.
And even today, there's a lot of debate on whether or not dogs and cats, for example, have a soul or are conscious.
I think, I mean, I feel they do.
And I think most people in society are moving in that direction.
The day when you could gratuitously kill a dog in a horrible way, I mean, that was nobody would stop you from doing that in the 19th century, and even for most of the 20th century.
Now it's a crime in most states to do something like that.
So I think that we're going to get to a point where there are friends of cyber conscious people, especially if it's a cyber conscious Neely.
That person's going to have a lot of friends and a lot of fans too, probably.
And I think very quickly we'll get to a point where we say that that cyber conscious individual has a soul.
It's Neely's soul.
And even if, God forbid, Neely's body ends in a car accident or some other death and disability, Neely did not end.
Neely's identity continues in this cyber conscious form.
And that's the big lie.
Again, the age of spiritual machines.
Catherine Kahn, thank you so much for that, Tipski and Hutch over at Rockfin.
So again, it's the movement of this idea that we can create consciousness.
No, we can't.
And I'm sorry, no matter what they do, this replication will not be you.
It's the big lie, okay?
Digital doppelgangers.
Let me ask you one more about sort of the frightening aspects of this, because there would be some people that none of us want to live forever.
Hitler, for example.
Nobody wants this guy to be able to upload, right?
So where do you get into sort of eugenics was a real thing in this country.
In other words, you know, 20 years, 80 years ago, we're going to call people to make the toll tribe better.
You're a nice person to run this project, but how do we avoid sort of digital eugenics and cyber robot cyber people?
Where does that come in?
Who gets to participate in the program?
Great question right there.
About as real as it gets, because this is the next level of eugenics.
Yeah, Neely, I'm kind of, I have the point of view that this is not something, a realistic thing to really fear, because all of this cyber consciousness and all of these robots that are being developed are being developed in an environment, which even though it's a human-made environment, our socioeconomic system, it's still an environment much like the natural environment.
It's just us humans are the selection factors.
And so the laws of Darwinism still apply.
And the so-called bad robot problem or the Hitler robot problem, there is going to be nobody that wants to buy a Hitler robot.
If a Hitler robot emerges and begins to do bad things, the same thing is going to happen to the Hitler robot that happened to the real Hitler, which is the rest of society is going to rise up and quash it down.
Totally ridiculous.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
It's not even a question you should fear.
But the people who are promoting that technology and empowering themselves through that technology have always been social Darwinists.
And they're the transhumanists.
So do you trust this person?
So there's no market really for an evil robot, evil software.
Does that mean that evil robots and software will never exist?
No, I don't think it means that because there's always mutations in the environment and there will be bad people and bad robots that emerge.
But the vast majority of billions of people that comprise all the decision-making in society through their economic powers and their political powers will quash down the bad people, the bad robots.
And so I think it's a self-correcting problem because humans, overwhelmingly good humans, comprise the Darwinian environment in which all of this cyber consciousness will emerge.
Let me ask you while we're still on future questions.
You've got, this is my favorite project that you do.
You have a herd of pigs in West Virginia that I like to call genetic mutant pigs.
They're genetically altered.
But the purpose, it relates to United Therapeutics.
You are raising these pigs for possible future lung transplants, which would vastly reshape lung plants in the United States, if not across the country.
Tell us a little bit how that works.
Sure, Neely, thanks.
So ever since my grandmother received a pig heart valve because her heart valve had gone bad, I'd been aware of the fact that pigs' hearts and for that matter lungs and other organs are very close to the same size, shape, and function of human major organs.
Shelf Life Dilemma 00:10:26
So, as our youngest daughter developed this fatal heart-lung disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension, I learned rather quickly that the only cure for it was a transplant.
But the problem with transplants are that there are way too few organs to go around for everybody who needs them.
And secondly, organ transplants are kind of trading one disease for another disease.
You're trading the end-stage organ disease that you're dying from for a chronic organ rejection kind of disease that ultimately takes the life of many, if not most, people who receive transplants.
So, I set about to solve this problem, inspired by making sure that our daughter would be able to live a normal life.
And I went then back to school and got a PhD in xenotransplantation, which is the science of genetically modifying the pig genome so that its organs can be not only the same size used for humans, not only because they're the same size and shape, but because by genetically modifying the pig genome, they won't give rise to the kind of chronic rejection which has flawed animal-to-human organ transplants in the past.
So, you look at this again, and it's going to be who can afford it.
They're not going to give this technology to everybody.
It's very real, just like the stem cell technology we were talking about.
So, genomically changing these things, and that's the next business.
And ultimately, if the genome can be modified really, really nicely, the individual can receive those organs and not have to take a lifelong immunosuppressant.
So, within my company, United Therapeutics, we purchased the early leaders in this area, a company called Revivicor off the campus of UVA in Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
And we now are definitely the leaders in genetically modifying pigs' genomes so that not only their lungs but also their hearts and their kidneys can be used in human transplants.
All of the recent records that have been announced by the NIH program in xeno heart transplant come from the United Therapeutics on pigs there, as well as our own records in lungs and kidneys.
And our goal, which I feel really confident we'll achieve, in fact, I'm much more confident we'll achieve this goal than some of those earlier satellite communications projects that you mentioned, is that we'll be able to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs through the modification of the pig genome so that there'll be an unlimited supply of hearts, livers, kidneys,
and lungs that can be tolerated by humans without the need for lifelong immunosuppression.
So, let me just say this: no.
Nope.
Nope.
Again, that's what I was telling you.
They put all this technology out there like you're going to get it.
But just think about the nightmare of the last two and a half years.
Were you able to get cheap and available medication for everybody?
I'm just pointing that out there.
Was that a possibility?
Timetable.
So we are on schedule to have our first clinical procedures, which means using these organs in people by the end of this decade.
And by the way, we hope for regulatory approval less than 10 years from now.
And I'm pretty confident that by the end of the 2020s, there will be literally tens of thousands of people a year receiving organ transplants from as a result of xenotransplantation.
I don't know how far it's gone, but we should look that up.
Again, this is 2016.
Give us some idea of how quickly you've made progress on the disease that affected Genesis and others.
How many people were alive at any one time when you started United Therapeutics with this, and how many are alive now?
Yeah, it's one of the things that's the way you say it, it comes out kind of odd, and then you think about it, and it's really good.
When Genesis was diagnosed, there were only 3,000 people with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
She was diagnosed right across the city here at Children's National Medical Center.
And so we were told that she would die because everybody with this condition died.
I knew I did not have time to get this whole organ transplantation thing going.
So I left my satellite communications activities and focused on finding some pharmaceuticals that would be sort of like a bridge to a bridge.
The pharmaceuticals could bridge people to the organ transplants.
And fortunately, our pharmaceuticals have proven to be successful, been approved by the FDA.
There are now in the United States 40,000 people living with pulmonary hypertension.
And so it comes out a little bit strange to say like when I started, there were 3,000 people with pulmonary hypertension.
Now there's 40,000 people.
It's like I've been doing something bad, but it's actually really, really good because that's a whole football stadium of people who are alive that would not otherwise have been alive.
They would have died already.
The mortality is like one to three years.
And how is Genesis now?
Genesis is doing great.
She's working in our company at United Therapeutics, and she's in charge of keeping everybody in the company working together through using digital media to make sure that all of our clinical trials and development activities information is available to everybody in the company.
And briefly, I mean, the project that you started a couple of weeks ago is almost tedious by your standards, but you're going to reshape how all transplants take place across the country.
You've placed an order for up to 1,000, I think it is, piloted drones that are going to replace the helicopters on top of the hospital and people go running and all that.
It's going to be a drone.
So just so everybody knows, you know, again, these things overlap with a lot of the World Economic Forum stuff out there.
And medicine from the sky, May 2022.
India, how drones can make primary health care accessible to all.
We're going to help everybody.
And by the way, xenotransplantation, this is FDA.gov you're looking at.
And it looks like in 2021, oh, there's the World Health Organization International xenotransplantation.
Let's just go there quickly.
They got guidelines.
Ooh.
Ooh, they deleted this in 2020.
Not a good look, WHO.
Don't want to get in trouble.
Don't want to get in trouble.
They are the dark overlords of YouTube.
Geez, that's out of there.
You know what?
We've got so much to watch.
Let's just hear about this drone medicine.
Okay.
So it's actually a big project.
I would say that that's a more challenging project than actually the genetically modified organs themselves.
But I had to think about that aspect of the project because when we make a pharmaceutical, to get it approved by the FDA, we have to prove to the FDA that our drugs have a shelf life of a year.
And that's why every drug company, if you look at any of your medicines, you'll see like it says refill it within a year.
The problem is, and so we can make our medicines, we can ship them to the CVSs and Walgreens, and they can sit on the shelf, and that's all fine and dandy.
But when you make a genetically modified organ, it's like a drug.
As far as the FDA is concerned, it's a drug, and it's a particular type of drug called a biologic.
But unlike medicines for other diseases, this drug has like a 24-hour half-life.
We all know that you can't just put an organ on a shelf and keep it waiting there for a year.
We can't ship it to Walgreens.
So when we manufacture these organs, which means that we explant them from the genetically modified pig, we have to deliver them within hours to the patient at a hospital to be transplanted.
There's no shelf life.
So I had to think of a whole new model for how are we going to transport all of these organs in essentially real time from the point of manufacture to the hospitals and the patients.
And I think, you know, very much inspired by the post-owner, Jeff Bezos, who I think provided an important foundation of credibility to the whole concept of commercial use of drones, I began to think about, well, maybe it would be plausible to have a special type of drone.
Obviously, this is not one that you're going to drop the organ on the front yard.
It zooms up.
So it's got to be a special type of drone.
But I know as a technologist that if you can have a drone that drops a pile of books on your front yard today, that you're going to be able to have within 10 years a drone that's going to be able to land very softly on the hospital heliport and have a person roll the organ out of the drone and to the surgeon's table where they'll take it and plant it.
So we placed this order for 1,000, what we call manufactured organ transport helicopters or MOPs.
And these will be delivered within the next 10 to 15 years.
Okay.
Bringing back to the to close on the very, very prosaic, you are this year's recipient of the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative Award devoted to LGBT issues.
You have a multi-million dollar facility employing a couple hundred people in North Carolina.
I think you were just down there.
Yes, John.
Lead us on this issue.
I know you've said you have no plans to move your facility from down there.
Tell us your thoughts on this issue and why not?
Do you stay and fight?
Do you pull out?
Leading the Fight in North Carolina 00:04:42
What are your thoughts on how to, on how to lead on that issue?
So, right.
I think that, unfortunately, I got automatically enlisted to lead on this fight because I'm the most visible transgender CEO in North Carolina, which maybe I'm the only one.
Did we stop?
Let's see.
Looks like we might have to.
Again, transhuman, transgender, Martin Ross.
People in my company who don't identify as being LGBT at all.
And they just said, Martine, this is going to hurt our recruitment.
We're always hiring people at United Therapeutics, especially scientists and technologists.
We hire people from all over the country and overseas.
They said to me, Martine, can you, you know, can our company put out a public statement that says we oppose this so when we're recruiting people, we can say to them, well, this law was passed, but our company is on record as being opposed to this.
So I said, absolutely.
And to be frank, I was a little bit nervous about, I didn't want it to seem like it was my agenda because I'm transgendered.
And it wasn't.
It bubbled up from the, especially the RD staff at United Therapeutics.
So we adopted this statement, and then the next thing that happened is the newspaper for that area.
They asked me to do an editorial interview, which I did.
And I was really gratified that just this weekend on Monday, the editorial board of the major newspaper in North Carolina all came out in support of our position, which is that this law called HB2 is not well thought out and is counterproductive for North Carolina and should be repealed.
And the thinking there is that there was no problem.
There had been no documented problem caused by any transgendered person using the bathroom that matched their gender identity.
So why adopt a whole law that specifically requires a, say, a transgendered man who could have a full beard and everything and often would at least have a nice kind of Neely Tucker beard there.
Why force that individual to go into the women's bathroom?
I mean, it's insane.
Oh, it's insane.
Now, again, 2016.
There haven't been any incident.
How about that 80-year-old grandmother who recently got thrown out of, I believe it was the YMCA for good?
Yeah, no, they haven't pushed farther and farther.
They don't need a law.
Rothblatt, transhumanism is great.
These things are great.
There's no correlation.
Don't pay attention.
And so I mentioned this in my interview, and the editorial board agreed.
And I think the people in North Carolina realized this law was not well thought of.
Some big companies like PayPal and a couple of others have decided not to go to North Carolina.
But I was clear from the beginning that North Carolina is not perfect, but we love it anyway.
And I never really agreed with the sentiment of love it or leave it.
I was, or like, you know, cut and run.
I'm just a stand and fight type of gal.
And so just because North Carolina has one thing bad, it has a lot of good things that are good.
And I'd rather stand there and change North Carolina than run away from it.
So we've got hundreds of employees there.
They have families.
Their kids are in schools and churches and everything and have all lives there.
It would be crazy to think about pulling up and leaving.
So we never thought about leaving.
We said we would stand there and fight.
And later this week, I'll be speaking at the Moogfest Festival, which is a big electronic music festival in North Carolina.
And that whole Moogfest festival has been turned into a giant protest festival against HB2.
And I think you were quoted, I saw, as saying that you really don't think the law is going to last that long anyway.
Certainly the U.S. Justice Department has a pretty damn view.
Yeah, Jim Crow laws, they just tend to wear out over time.
It's a Jim Crow law.
It's a Jim Crow law to keep somebody who identifies, you know, again, a biological man as a woman to be in your kids' bathroom.
Jim Crow law.
Pattern Pulses and Neural Code 00:08:26
Just the person.
And again, all about benevolence.
We're going to help everybody.
Everybody's going to get organs.
This digital counterpart's great.
It has a consciousness.
Huh.
Well, they do.
She said, you had been married interracially.
You have known this from when you guys have been married for 30 plus years.
And nobody blinks on that issue these days.
Yeah, but when I was born, it was illegal in more than half the states in the country.
So I just love the fact that I'm alive at a point in time when progress is not only continuing to advance, but the rate of progress is increasing exponentially.
And it makes me feel that we're all alive at the best of all times.
Martine, thank you very much.
Their fourth industrial revolution, everybody.
Their fourth industrial revolution.
Their progressive ideal set.
I'm the editor of Washington Post Live.
Thank you very much for being here.
Now we have speakers on stage who are deeply involved in how we might augment our reality and even create new senses.
I'm going to leave a little time at the end for questions, so think about if you have any.
First here we have Neil Harbison.
He is the first person in the world to have a permanent antenna implanted in his skull and for being officially recognized as a cyborg by a government.
And yes, he sleeps and showers with the antenna.
Sheila Nuremberg is a neuroscientist at Cornell Medical School.
She explores how the brain encodes visual information.
She was recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work.
She has cracked the neural code for blindness and is currently working on an artificial retina that could restore vision.
Listen, artificial retinas have been around for a while.
This is 2016.
It's a newer model.
She's going to show you some of that, actually.
They're going to show you that technology.
But we had that all the way back.
Again, all the way back when I was doing Invisible Empire.
Cochlear implants, artificial retinas.
Those are all real.
At the end, we have John Werner.
He is well known in tech circles.
He is currently a VP for Partnerships at Meta, which is a rising star in the augmented reality area.
He had been previously at MIT Media Labs.
MIT Media Labs into Meta, rising star.
I believe this is before Facebook announced that Meta was going to be their new thing and their business model.
Hmm, how about that?
Washington Post.
Welcome, our guests, and we will get going.
Neil, I'm going to start with you.
You are a certified cyborg.
What is a device implanted in your head and how does it work?
So it's not a device.
It's a new sensory organ.
So it's a part of my skeleton.
It allows me to extend my perception of color beyond the visual spectrum.
So it picks up light frequencies and then it gives me vibrations depending on the color.
The advantage is that it allows me to sense infrareds and ultraviolet, so it goes beyond visual spectrum.
And also there's internet connections, so people can send colors to my head.
People can share colors with me directly to my head, and also I can connect to satellites, so then I can sense colors from space.
So in fact, I'm using the internet as a new sense, not as a tool.
And I'm using technology not as a tool either, but as a body part, as a sensory extension.
So I don't feel I'm using or wearing technology.
I feel that I am technology.
That's why I identify myself as a cyborg, which is the union between cybernetics and organism.
So you're an artist also.
I see becoming a cyborg as an art.
So cyborg art is the art of designing your own perception of reality, designing your own senses, designing your own new sensory organs.
Your own perception of reality.
You betcha.
Again, that's what this trans movement is about.
How do you feel?
What is your perception of your reality?
You're fluid.
You're non-binary.
There's like 47 of them.
And again, World Health Organization, United Nations behind all of this stuff.
Facts don't matter anymore.
Biology is over.
And ultimately, it's because they don't want you to be a human being.
They don't want you to reproduce.
They don't want you to understand your power and that you have an actual soul, a spirit, consciousness.
They are combating that in every way, shape, and form.
Let me just stop for a second.
So you were born colorblind, totally colorblind, but yet you've become an artist through hearing colors.
I think I was an artist before that, yes.
To me, creating your own senses is an art.
Creating your own body part is an art.
It's cyborg art, the art of designing your own perception of reality.
Okay, got it.
All right, Sheila, let me go to you.
What do we know about the neural code?
And how does the brain take in this stimulus and use it?
How does it work?
Well, just in a normal, for a normal person, images come in and they land on your photoreceptors.
I actually have some slides and I can show you the basic idea.
All right, I don't know what happened to those slides.
Let me explain it.
Okay.
Oh, there we go.
So what I worked out was the neural code of the retina.
So images come in like this image of this baby's face and it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina and on your photoreceptors.
And then actually if you go to the next one, it highlights just the photoreceptors.
Okay, I'll skip that.
Okay, and then it's passed through the retinal circuitry.
And what the circuitry does is it performs operations on it.
So it extracts information and it converts that information into a code.
And the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent to the brain.
And so the key thing is that an image ultimately gets converted into a code.
And it's a code that the brain understands.
So like this pattern of pulses that you're looking at here represents this baby's face.
So when a person's brain gets this pattern of pulses, it knows that what was out there was this baby's face.
And of course it's actually a million cells that are doing this simultaneously, about 10,000 in your central retina.
So if it got a different pattern of pulses, it would know that it was, you know, like a car.
If it was another pattern of pulses, it would be a dog.
So that's how the communication goes from image into your brain.
And so what I've been working on is trying to, is that when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration, the photoreceptors die.
We can skip the slides.
I'll just explain it.
That the photoreceptors die, and so no information can get in.
But the output cells, the cells at the end, they still work.
And so the idea then is if we can make a device that can interact with these output cells and send the code in, then we could restore sight to the blind.
It sounds dramatic.
And so I worked out to a large extent the code so I can make a device that can mimic that and then send signals to the output cells and then send them to a brain.
So if we send it like a pattern of pulses that represented stripes, the patient would see stripes.
If we send a pattern of pulses that represents a face, then, you know, or a talking face, because it's movies, then the person would see that.
So we've just done this in animals.
We haven't done it in humans yet, but I went to the FDA three weeks ago and once I send the FDA application in, hopefully they will approve it and we can start a clinical trial in the beginning of 2017.
And you had good results with the animals, or at least you did.
Yeah, so I have a picture of that just to give you a feel for why the code is so important.
If you can show the picture of the baby's faces, if anybody is there.
I don't know if they can bring that back, but we'll work on that.
Let me go to John.
John, this idea of tailoring our individual realities is related to what you and your colleagues at Meta are doing.
Tailoring your individual realities.
Augmented Reality Headset Vision 00:04:01
And remember, Meta has partnered with the WEF, the World Economic Forum, to build this thing.
Okay, again, metaverse governance, economic and societal value, the transformation of everything.
You got to be paying attention here.
So this is Meta 2016.
Let's go to it.
How does augmented reality work and how do you trick the brain to see this extra information?
Sure.
Augmented reality is taking the digital information and connecting it with the physical world.
We've created a headset that you put on and you could look through a visor and see the world and see digital information connected with the world.
You could have infinite number of screens where you interact, very similar to the movie Minority Report.
You can have 3D images from CAD and you could manipulate it.
Here's an architect working on a 3D building, pulling out pieces.
You can have someone else also collaborate with it.
You can have remote assistants.
If you need to fix your washing machine or fix a jet engine or do surgery, you could have someone looking at what you're doing and help you walk you through that.
It's hands-free.
When I think of the typewriter and the keys, which the Washington Post folks use a lot, it's based on movable type and they move the keys so it would be less efficient.
So the mechanical typewriters didn't get stuck.
It's almost like punch cards connecting with technology.
I think the future of using eyesight and using gestures is a big leap forward.
There's some reports say that this is a $120 billion market opportunity to change the way we interface with computers.
So we've created this headset where you can look at the world and interact with it.
And you've seen it rendered in movies like Iron Man and Minority Report and Mission Possible.
We're bringing it to the workplace and we're creating a tool, not a toy.
So it's not based on gaming or entertainment.
It's based on productivity.
You said headsets.
So a lot of things, we hear people saying, oh yeah, but this isn't practical.
Who's going to run out and get a headset and then wear it around?
Sure.
Walk us through when we'll be able to have it.
So at MIT, I taught the first class on making apps for Google Glass with Professor Rasker.
And Google Glass is a heads-up display.
It doesn't track your hands.
There's not a Microsoft Connect type device that could see your hands.
And the heads-up display was 2010 technology and 2013.
I think it was great that Google Glass gave the hardware away.
It was almost a public relations nightmare in terms of AR.
And at the same time, Oculus Rift was bought by Facebook.
And everyone's all excited about virtual reality, which are totally submersed in digital information.
I think augmented reality is three times bigger than virtual reality.
And society really hasn't gotten the memo on it.
And the device that we've created has a 90-degree field of view.
It's equivalent of like a 4K screen.
So instead of 90 feet away, a movie theater, 9 feet away, a television, 3 feet away, a smartphone.
We want to eliminate screens and create an office place where you don't have monitors and you're not hunched over looking at these metaphors on a smartphone.
As a society, we're more disconnected, even though we're hyperly connected.
And we think the future of having glasses, like Ray-Bands, where you can just look out and see digital information on the world is a game changer.
And again, Google Glass failed at that.
There'll be another run at it.
But eventually, make no mistake, the VR headsets you see today will end up being much like a pair of sunglasses just like this, going well beyond.
And especially if you take the human brain interfaces that will probably either wirelessly connect or dock inside.
Just throwing that out there.
Does that answer your question?
Passport to Cyborghood 00:14:57
Yes, it does.
Because I'm very excited about this.
And you could pre-order the device.
It's shipping in Twitter 3.
Yeah.
And it's reasonably priced.
And it's a third lesson Holland's the Microsoft thing.
And the other thing about this is companies are sitting on tons of digital information.
And this is a tool to interact with it.
And I think it could change health, design, manufacturing.
All right, thank you.
And journalism.
You're training your brain to be connected to the internet 24-7.
What sort of information are you getting in there?
And is it sensory overload?
What's that doing to your brain or our brains?
What will happen?
So the fact of having internet in my head allows me to receive colors from other parts of the world.
And there's five people that have permission to send colors to my head.
So they can send colors any time of the day or night.
At the beginning, it was confusing.
Who are these five people?
Five friends, one in each continent.
So it feels like having an eye in each continent.
So if there's a beautiful sunset in Australia and my friend is looking at it, he can use his mobile phone to stream live images to my head, and then I'll be sensing the sunset while I'm here.
If they send colors during my night or while I'm sleeping, then it affects my dreams.
So if someone sends violet while I'm asleep and I wake up and I realize I dreamt of a violet house, then I know it was violet because of my friends.
Yeah, it's great.
Let's allow people into our heads.
I mean, just the color sensory alone is manipulation while you're dreaming.
I don't know how any of this could end up being nefarious or eugenics-based, like they talked about earlier.
My friends can actually intervene in my dreams.
We can share dreams.
We can share senses and colors in this case.
But my aim is to use the internet exclusively to perceive colors from space.
So we can use the internet to send our senses to space.
So instead of physically going to space, we can actually feel that we are there without having to go through the struggle of physically going there.
Also, when there's 3D printers that can actually 3D print our DNA, we'll be able to 3D print ourselves in other planets, and then we'll be able to have a second body there and connect via the internet.
So the use of the internet as a sensory extension to explore space is my main goal.
And I think in 2019, I'll be able to have the permanent connection to satellite.
So we'll all be- Permanent connections to satellite, exploring space, everything.
Oh, we're going to explore space.
Later on, Katie Couric, who knows if we'll get that far, because we're talking about that's far down the line.
She's talking to this guy from the Carlisle group.
She's talking about how people are more suspect of philanthropy than ever again in 2016, as they should have been, and their control, right?
And, you know, they get to it, and it's like, why wouldn't we be wary of all this stuff?
Huh?
Of course we should be wary of all this stuff.
Able to be sensitive, so mind-stronage.
We'll be able to explore space by sending our mind to space instead of physically going there.
And she says, oh, space is glamorous.
They're the glamour ones, climate and space.
Oh, it's so glamorous.
Yeah.
Hey, how'd that Artemis thing go out ago with Snoopy on board?
Hey, they didn't launch that again, did they?
That's the reality of space travel.
Especially with rocket technology, guys.
Rocket technology, a little finicky, isn't it?
That's the beginning for myself.
I'm just connecting to NASA's International Space Station like two hours a day because I'm training my brain to get used to this disconnection between body and senses.
You're connecting to the space station two hours a day and the space station is working with you on that?
No, it's live stream.
Anyone can do that.
Yes, there's live stream from NASA's International Space Station, so I connect there and I try to connect longer and longer each day.
But it will take at least two or three years to have 24-hour connection because I need training because it's overwhelming.
The colors from space are much wider in the spectrum than here, so it's overwhelming when I go there.
And you're hearing that.
She'll let me ask you a follow-up to that.
What are the implications of the human brain interacting with so much information in an immersive, constant way?
Well, one has to control it in some way because it could be an information overload.
But he does it in a good way.
I mean, not that you need my approval, but that you have the vibrations, as you were mentioning, so that it's an extra sense without interfering with your normal hearing.
And so a big part of what your nervous system does, that evolution made your nervous system do, is actually compress the information so that you can use it efficiently.
So there's a lot of discussion about the power of big data, but I actually think there's some downsides on big data.
It's overwhelming.
It'll be like going to all your college classes simultaneously and having four professors talking to you.
At some point, you can't function.
So your retina, for example, in your retina, you have 100 million photoreceptors.
So you're taking in essentially every pixel on your computer monitor.
And then the circuitry actually compresses it, gets rid of all the stuff that you don't need, holds on to what you do need, so you can maneuver.
Like I can get up on this stage.
I've never been here before.
I've never seen any of you.
I could get off the stage and walk through it and not crash into people.
And that's because of the simplification, in a sense.
So our brain has to, if it's taking in all this, it has to learn how to simplify it, which is what Neil's saying, that he has to do it in stage.
Exactly, he has to do it too.
Yeah, once you add a new sense to a body, it needs some time of adaptation.
And each person will have its own time of adapting to a new sense or a new organ, like there's two stages.
Your body needs to either accept or reject the body part, like the material, and your brain might reject the new sense.
So there's two cases of possible rejections.
That's what attention mechanisms do for you also.
It allows you to pay attention to one thing rather than another thing.
And so evolution built a way for you to control what you're taking in.
It's called focus, by the way, guys.
Just focus.
It is part of our genetics.
It is how it works.
It's our awareness, sensory awareness, right?
John, let me swing back to augmented reality.
There are still a lot of people out there who look at it as just entertainment.
You just go get yourself a headset, you have some fun, you get it for your kids.
Can you just walk us through a little bit about how this can help us in our everyday lives function better, produce better, healthcare?
I mean, any examples that you have that it's not just about a game?
Sure.
So it's great to be on this panel with these pioneers.
Neil, you're a visionary artist finding ways to see new senses.
Sheila MacArthur, Genius Fellow, who's doing some cutting edge research.
At Meta, we've created a tool.
The founder and CEO is listed as a real thought leader for wanting to create an operating system that's much more connected with how the brain works.
And that we have been, in some ways, held hostage to operating systems that are based on rectangles and based on the technology that we've used.
And we want to create a device that we can manipulate 3D holograms and do things that we couldn't do before.
If someone is going to do a cochlear implant surgery for your child and they're looking at a 3D rendering of it, and then they port it to a screen and it's in two-dimensional and then they're doing the surgery, wouldn't it be more efficient to have everyone involved with that surgery work with the 3D?
So we're excited that there's a convergence of a number of factors, mobility, the internet cloud, Moore's Law, the processing power, imaging, to create a tool that can be an extension of the body.
Again, and for this part, empowering technology.
But again, this is how they sell it on you.
Oh, we're going to take care of the sick.
Oh, we're going to improve surgery.
Oh, we're going to make your life better.
And, you know, Neil's an artist, we want to tap artists and other thought leaders to help us think about how to use this device.
And, you know, who would have thought that Solitaire was an application that Windows 3 or VisiCalc for the Apple IIe really helped get those going?
And so I'm excited to help facilitate partnerships with the design community, the manufacturing community, the journalism community, the health community, et cetera, to figure out how to use this technology that is coming.
And a lot of people said, you know, it's 10 years out.
I think it's actually much sooner.
And I love the Media Lab.
I've worked there for a number of years.
But I decided I'm going to help create this tool that can really impact society.
And I think the internet was big in 2000.
Mobile phones was big in 2010.
Apple just had their first negative growth year of their smartphone.
There's indications that we've reached a saturation point.
I think the 2020s is going to be augmented reality.
And a lot of Fortune 100s are going to need to figure out strategies, kind of like in the 90s.
What's our China strategy?
What's our augmented reality strategy?
And if anyone wants help with that, I'm there for you.
I'm going to ask Neil one more question.
Then I'd like to come to the audience.
Neil, why was it important for you to be recognized as a cyborg?
It wasn't.
It was just that I had an issue with the UK Passport Office.
They didn't allow me to renew my passport because they said that there's a law that says electronic equipment is not allowed on passport photos.
So they saw that was something electronic.
I said this is not an electronic device.
This is a body part, an extension of my census, and I feel I'm a cyborg.
I'm a union between cybernetics and organisms.
So I explained to them that I felt cyborg.
And in the end, after five months, they said yes.
They allowed me to appear in the passport with the antenna.
then this allows me to travel because airports don't really like technology.
So if you are a technology, then you are- So is it on your passport?
Does it say you can have the internet?
Does it say you're a cyborg?
So- So the picture of your passport is the official image of yourself.
So if it has the antenna, they have to accept that it's my image.
It's me.
It's a part of you.
part of you so it was a it was a it what I wasn't seeking for this I was just renewing my passport.
What's creating his reality?
It's me.
It's a part of me.
I'm a cyborg.
Yay!
There you go.
All right.
That tells us how to deal with passport offices.
Yeah, and I'm now applying for Swedish citizenship because the material in my head is Swedish, so I'm Swedish.
So I'm applying to them, saying that if you have a sensory organ that is from that country and you've had it for several years, why shouldn't you also be allowed to be from that country?
Because part of my body is Swedish.
See how insane these people are?
See how they're trying to just eliminate humanity?
Eliminate sovereignty?
Think about that.
He says, because the equipment they put in my body is Swedish and it's part of me, I should be a Swedish citizen.
I identify as Swedish.
Well, I'm in conversations with the Swedish government now.
I love it.
All right, let's see here.
How about some questions?
Gentleman over here?
William Homer, WWH Communications.
Are there other cyborg people?
Are there others that are out there with their community?
We've already, we had a discussion or presentation from the LGBT community.
This is not a community that we've heard much about.
I'm sure there must be some discrimination.
Can you talk a little bit about that side of it?
Oh, discrimination for the cyborg community.
My gay, that transformers, the Washington Post.
That's the first question.
Is anybody upset at the like dystopian clown show we've been watching for the past hour plus?
By the way, thumbs it up.
We don't even have 150 thumbs on this.
Consider supporting the broadcast, buying me a coffee, tipping over on Rockfin, becoming a Rockfin member for $99.99 for the year, doing it on a desktop, get everybody else.
Who else is doing these watch-alongs, folks?
Yes, so we are a minority group, people who voluntarily have decided to add technology into their body to extend their senses.
So there's two types of cyborgs.
There's cyborgs that are for medical reasons, regenerating pre-existing senses or regenerating pre-existing body parts.
My case is creating a new body part and a new sense.
This is a minority now, but there's Moon Riva.
She has the seismic sense.
Whenever there's an earthquake in the world, her body vibrates.
So she's constantly feeling the seismic activity of the world and she's had it for several years.
So she's used to feeling the earthquakes of the world from one in the Richter scale.
So that's a new sense and she's used to it.
There's also the North sense.
You can actually be implanted and you feel the magnetic north.
So it's senses that other species have, but that humans don't have.
So we are in a stage in history that we can actually design what species we want to be.
I consider myself a trans species because I'm adding senses and organs that other species have.
And you can add many, many more senses that other species have and organs that other species have.
And we'll start seeing this in the 20s because it's now growing.
It's happening underground.
There's already many surgeons that are willing to do the surgery anonymously in the same way that in the 50s and 60s, transgender operations were being done a bit underground.
Now cyber surgeries are being done a bit underground.
But in the end, bioethical committees will also accept that cyborg surgeries should be allowed.
So do you understand again why the transgender movement is really about transhumanism?
Do you get it?
He's telling you, just like it's underground.
I mean, this is it, man.
I didn't just imagine this.
Okay?
They don't think the future is human.
And when I say they, a predator class, hell-bent on command and control and empowering themselves with technology and enslaving the rest of us.
Joseph Maws, thank you for the tip.
Justin Cole, thank you for the tip over at The Rockfin.
It is much appreciated.
I mean, they just keep saying it.
For everyone that wants to extend their perception of reality, at least to the level of other species.
John, did you want to add to that?
So it's great to be at the Washington Post.
I think I don't know if people realize, but journalism is trying to find a business model that works.
And journalism is trying to find a business model that works because the truth clearly doesn't.
And the Washington Post doesn't care for the truth.
It does care for being an authoritative source that's promoted by a technopoly like Alphabet, Google, and YouTube in what?
The new digital age.
Where's that book?
Where's my new digital age book?
Don't tell me I don't have it right here.
I've been looking at it like the last day and a half.
Oh man, do I not have the new digital age on tap right here?
Well, there it is.
Figuring Out Brain Technology 00:06:01
There we go.
The new digital age.
Eric Schmitch, reshaping the future of people, nations, and businesses.
Huh.
These are interesting times.
I think we need more important.
We need editorial of the times more than ever.
And I think figuring out how new technology can help us interact with information is really important.
And what the future of the knowledge worker is.
And I think this community has heard a lot about Internet of Things.
But I think it's Internet of Thinking Things or Internet of the Brain.
And as we, you know, fast forward 100 years, maybe people will be able to just connect through ESP.
What are the tools that are going to help us to be a collective community?
And I think often when people have technology added to their biology, it doesn't fit.
I know a lot of people who've lost limbs have prosthetics that they don't wear because they're not comfortable.
I think figuring out how to create technology that can really work with us.
And that's where neuroscience, I think, is so important to think about how the brain works.
I think we've been held hostage by technology.
And these are really exciting times to figure out what to do with some of the technology that's coming.
Think about what he just said there about.
Technology and neuroscience and how a lot of the limbs they already have, but they promote like, via DARPA, the Luke hand, all those other things.
Think about that.
They promote all that stuff.
Well, it doesn't really work or fit right, but no, we're helping people.
We're helping people, let's get into neuroscience.
Thank you, um.
Do we have another question?
Uh yes, right here in the front row, clinical psychologist, i'd like to know if you can finish up on the pigs and how you tested what they saw once you implanted what you did?
Great question, if I understood it correctly.
Yeah well, so we, what we've done is um, is recreating, causing the neurons to fire, just like they normally do.
So you can have a completely blind retina, there's no photoreceptors, and we just jump over and drive them the output cells to fire, just like I was showing you in that picture.
So then, the problem is, is that it's hard?
It's hard to check this somewhat in animals.
So we've done this in mice.
We can have them be, you know, blind mice, of course, and like the song, and they can, they can track images.
It's hard, it's hard to do this in um uh, in primates, because there aren't blind monkeys and I cannot bear to blind a monkey just to test this.
So we're so uh, so we're just going to go.
If we get permission, we'll just go into humans and and the beauty of of working with patients is they're very motivated and if you meet, you know, a smart blind patient, then you can work together so you can send the signals in as long as it's safe, and then we can get the feedback from them as to, you know as to how well it's working.
But the key thing is, if we're sending the exact same signals, or very close to the same signals that they would normally get they, they should be able to see this, and so mice can, can track images and um, and we showed what it was like to reconstruct an image from the, from the firing patterns of a totally blind retina, and compared that to what the, what happens with the use of standard prospective right now, what's available and it and it's much better.
I have a TED Talk in this if you want to see the actual pictures, and I think Bloomberg NEWS just did a story and so it shows some of these, what it, what it really looks like.
We have time for one more.
Is there?
Um okay, there we go.
Um hello, Frank Omo, Hungarian embassy.
Two questions please.
One would be, why do you assume that sensory overload is a bad thing?
What if, let's say, somebody was?
Because normally people use very little of their brain capacity and I understand that's because the two halves of their brain are not really connected.
What if, for some reason, somebody was born with the ability to filter massive amounts of data, not really understanding everything, but being able to connect the dots and to put that information to the useful ends?
So again, why do you assume that that's not possible?
The other thing, the other question would be, do we really want to take evolution into our own hands?
It's been working pretty well so far.
I agree with him on that last point.
And remember, Dennis Bushnell already said this is the human evolution of the humans.
The evolution of everything, not just the human species, is over.
We have taken control of it.
Humankind, the media-military, industrial complex.
That's an actual quote from Bushnell.
It's over.
We've done it.
As it is.
Thanks.
Who would like to take that?
The reason I say that is if somebody could filter it, then that would be amazing, right?
But right now, being able to function quickly, like as you're asking me a question, I have to basically, I'm listening to you and I'm not paying attention to, even though all of the information, everybody in this room is going into my retina, but I've ignored it so that I can focus on what you're saying.
Focus, just like I said earlier.
Very, very hard.
Like when you're multitasking, think about when you're driving and you text.
I mean, it's just dangerous.
So we have to figure out ways, like he does, to be able to make use of the information.
And filtering it is essentially what I mean.
Filter the information so you take what you need and you can solve the problems that are in front of you.
And it would be the same with the augmented realities, finding a way to utilize it and not getting into a clash with your own brain, that you have this fantastic amount of information and then it becomes mind-boggling.
We're not totally built for it yet.
So our eye can take in 10 to the 8 bits per second of information.
The keyboard is low bandwidth in terms of interacting with technology.
So figuring out a way to take more information and do it in a way that we can be productive, creative, and collaborative.
You know, at the end of the day, humans are a collaborative species, and I think technology breaks it down and we can use technology to enhance this.
Machines And Media Censorship 00:15:05
All right.
Unfortunately, that's all we have time for.
So thank you all very much.
This was enlightening.
And if you Google any one of these three people, there is a wealth of information online about them.
Now I'm going to welcome my colleague Jeremy Gilbert up.
And we will go this way.
Research Projects Agency, Better Me Gilbert, the Washington Post Director of Strategic Initiatives, and I'm very pleased to welcome to the stage Arthy Probaker, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA.
As many of you may know, DARPA is credited with the invention of the internet, GPS, driverless cars, and much, much more.
Arthy founded DARPA's Microelectronics Technology Office, directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and spent more than a decade as a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road.
So again, venture capitalist Silicon Valley, director of NIST, DARPA, DARPA, DARPA, transhumanism, transgenderism.
It's all right here.
Washington Post.
I'm also grateful to have Gary King, who is a Harvard University professor and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Gary is an elected fellow in eight honorary societies, has more than 150 journal articles, 20 open source software packages, and eight books.
And what we're here to talk about this morning is numbers tell the truth, new tools that help make meaning from big data.
And I want to start by asking Arthy and Gary what it is that they really think that means.
I think both of us think big data is not actually about the data.
The revolution is not that there's more data available.
The revolution is that we know what to do with it now.
And that's really the amazing thing.
So if you take social media, today there were 650 million social media posts that were written by somebody and available to researchers to be able to see what people think.
Some people say it's the largest increase in the expressive capacity of the human race in the history of the world.
One person could write a post and potentially billions of other people could read it.
But how is any one person going to understand what billions of other people are going to say?
The only way of understanding 650 million social media posts for one day is to have automated methods that can understand this text.
So the revolution is not about the data.
It's about the analytics that we can come up with and that we now have to be able to understand what these data say.
2016, the Track Trace Database Society is in place.
Okay, they're getting ready for the BioNano era.
They're already running the algorithms, realizing that they need to have mass censorship, especially on social media.
Hmm?
Hmm?
Gary's talking about, I think, one of the most interesting dimensions of the data explosion, which is the data that humans are generating as we express ourselves.
And it's hard to argue.
I mean, the human race is my favorite species, so I like that kind of data for sure.
But actually, I think data has become plentiful in many, many, many other areas as well.
So if I think about the work we're doing in cybersecurity, where the data is the ones and zeros in the code, and I think about the work that we're doing to understand the radio spectrum, where the signal at each frequency and the waveform, that's the data.
And I think about the work that we're doing even to understand the signaling of the brain.
That's a different kind of data.
And I think that when you look across all of these different domains, we are in an era in which we're data-rich.
The opportunity space to start building the techniques that start telling, that give us insights from that data is vast.
And we see it commercially.
We see it in the research horizons.
I think we can talk about any of those.
I think it's really important to say as well, though, that as powerful as this data revolution is, it also has some important limitations, at least today.
And I think, you know, I just want to make sure that we don't get into a world of buzz and hype and sort of overlook what those limitations are.
So we should probably talk about both of those.
So why don't we start there then?
So what are the limitations?
Where does the gap between the analytics and tools and the availability of data, what are the challenges associated with that?
Where is that space?
There are lots of them.
Dive in.
I mean, I think that's actually the space.
So, I mean, that's actually data science, which is what we'd probably rather call it, although I love that the media invented the term big data because my folks now think they understand what I do.
And it's really a valuable thing.
I mean, it resonated with people.
People really get a sense that it's important.
And the data is important, but the analytics is really where the revolution is.
But if you think about what does the analytics do, what's the point of it?
The point of it is to try to make sense of information that is complicated and error-prone and doesn't speak to the questions you have.
So what is it that we do?
We do inference.
What's inference?
Inference is taking facts you have to learn about facts you don't have.
That's the whole thing.
Again, it's creating a profile on you.
It's also predictive in a sense.
It's pre-bunking now.
It's going to be pre-crime later.
We already heard minority report referenced in the augmented reality space.
No, they're going all the way.
It might be that the facts you don't have have nothing to do with the facts that you do have.
And then you're in big trouble.
So data analytics is the way of getting from the facts you don't have to the facts you do have.
It's never a sure thing.
But we test and we test and we make ourselves vulnerable to being proven wrong.
And we make slow progress in that direction.
But the idea that this is a separate topic, that maybe data are sometimes error-prone, isn't really right because every datum has problems with it.
Not according to the authoritative sources.
Yeah, and maybe an interesting example of some of the limitations today.
And really, I think there is so much that is going to be possible here.
But let's talk about where it runs out of steam.
One of the areas where there's enormous progress with data is in machine learning.
And a really simple place that we all experience that is, you know, I don't know if you go on Facebook or social media and an image pops up that you didn't even know someone had taken of you and an algorithm has identified that that's you in that picture.
Well, that's based on image understanding technology that's based on machine learning.
These are essentially systems that learn by looking at hundreds of thousands or millions of images that are labeled.
And from that, they learn this is what a person looks like.
This is what this particular person looks like.
And over time, these machines now have become very, very, very good at identifying what's happening in a picture, who the people are, what the action is that's going on.
And in fact, they're now at the point where they're starting to get, on a statistical level, they're getting to be as good and sometimes even better than humans at looking at pictures.
That's pretty impressive.
As good or better, this is what she's publicly talking about, than people looking at pictures.
And I know Dolly is out there right now, and you can use like the beta program or the free version where you type stuff in and the computer just makes an image.
It's out there and you can refine it.
But the important part of that was to understand that they are statistically better.
They're not perfect.
Humans aren't perfect at that either.
The machines aren't perfect either.
I think the really important thing to recognize is that in this case, in machine learning for image understanding, when the machine is wrong, it's wrong in ways that no human would ever be wrong.
It's just going to be a different kind of mistake.
And everything that we do is structured around the way humans make mistakes.
So think about a self-driving car.
Or in my world, we just launched, we just christened a self-driving ship.
They're both based on this idea that you can sense what's going on around you and learn and adapt and be able to operate without collisions, whether it's collisions on the road or collisions on the open ocean in our case.
But in both of those cases, I think you have to recognize that as powerful as these machine learning systems are, there will be mistakes that happen.
They won't be the kinds of mistakes that we currently indemnify for or have insurance for because they're not based on the way humans make mistakes.
And when you start to unpack that and you start to try to ask why did the machine make a mistake that's different than what I would make.
Today it's still pretty much a black art how these machine learning systems work.
They don't have a way of explaining how they've adapted themselves.
A black art.
I love that reference.
It's a black art.
To be able to recognize pictures.
And until we have deeper understanding of those systems, I think we just need to recognize that there will be places that we do want to use that technology and other places where we're not going to yet be ready to use it.
Are you implying that we have almost too much faith and too much trust in artificial intelligence and the machine-generated learning algorithms that we have now?
Is the public, do you think the public pres- Look at that fake smile, man.
Like, you trust that woman?
Think about that thing.
That's some joker-esque shit right there.
Zooms that they have, they are more trustable than they actually should be.
I think sometimes.
I think sometimes our narrative about these technologies is just extrapolating from the enormous gains that we've made in the last few years to a place that's not realistic.
But in fact, I think there are, in my world, and to go from a new technology capability to a system that the Defense Department and that our military will use.
Ooh, new technology capabilities that our military will use.
Huh.
Huh, you mean this is a warfare document?
You bet it is.
Wait a minute, don't they tell you that it takes about, oh, I don't know.
Let's read it right here for everybody, because I think it's important that it takes, oh, I'm sorry, my bad folks.
Takes about 40 years for them to bring it out, sometimes more.
It takes about 15 years to produce it.
Huh.
That's great.
These are the same people that are going to genomically change the human species.
Right there.
Genomic design and repair.
Directed evolution.
Cross-species molecular breeding.
Just they're the best.
They're number one.
Transhumanism.
And rely on, we have a very rigorous process to make sure that these systems work and that we can trust them before we turn decisions over to them.
So I'll give you an example.
I think there are places where we're not going to be ready to have the machine just decide and go do what it needs to do.
And some examples might be a self-driving ship in a very congested environment.
We're still going to want to have a human in that decision loop.
There are other places where I think we're ready to have machines make decisions for us.
Machines make decision for us.
Autonomous machines.
Taking human beings out of military decisions.
An example might be in cybersecurity where, for example, if you're trying to defend your network and attacks are coming in, we are at a point now where we think the power of machines, looking at the patterns in the ones and zeros and the net flow data, that those machines are going to be able to see the patterns of attack and discern what's happening and alert you so that you can do something about it in a way that humans simply can't.
And that's a case where if statistically they guess wrong, the world doesn't end, right?
I mean, it's such an advance over what we can do as humans that it's going to be very, very valuable in starting to get a handle on cybersecurity.
Yeah, let's just let the AI run wild in cybersecurity.
Great.
Don't worry, the world won't end.
If you think of the kinds of methods that are developed to analyze data in this field, they range from fully human, which doesn't really work.
I mean, it works fine at the micro level, but it doesn't scale.
No human can process the amounts of data that are coming in today.
You can go all the way on the other end to a fully automated system, which tend to be extremely efficient and incredibly dumb.
Like imagine a driverless car where you don't tell the car where to go.
It's not going to be very useful.
The best technology, the best technology in most areas is human-empowered and computer-assisted, right?
So human-empowered and computer-assisted.
The computer doesn't tell us what an interesting idea is, although more and more it can help us get a sense of the potential interesting ideas, but it's only the human that's going to choose those.
So I give an example of social media a minute ago.
One of the things we did is download all the social media posts in China, and we learned that we were able to download all the posts before the Chinese government could censor them.
Wow.
So we're looking at censorship in China by getting all social media posts at once.
Let's pay attention to this for a moment.
So we had all Chinese language social media posts that were censored and all Chinese language social media posts that were uncensored.
And we looked at what everybody knew was the case.
Like they're censoring it for a purpose.
What's the purpose?
Well, you censor anytime you're critical of the government, right?
Or there's going to be a protest or something like that.
Wow, doesn't it sound a lot like America now?
Just weird.
Just anything.
Wow.
So we used that lens that was given to us to analyze these data, and it didn't make any sense because there was just as much censored posts that were critical as censored posts that were supportive of the government.
So it didn't make any sense at all until, and we tried all kinds of other ideas.
The ideas are the human part, right?
We tried a lot of ideas.
Data and big data and data analytics don't make the process of coming up with ideas automatic.
That's not going to be automated.
It'll be assisted, but it won't be automated.
So we looked at it through this lens, and we looked at it through this lens.
Nothing clarified.
Until at one point, my graduate students and I said, wait a second.
We thought that they were censoring criticism.
Maybe they're actually censoring protest and not censoring criticism.
Because we all thought that they were the same thing.
Once we separated the two and looked through those lenses, actually it became incredibly clear.
They don't censor criticism.
They do censor the protest.
I mean, you can say to the leaders of China, you can say in social media posts, the leaders of this town are all stealing money.
Governments Censoring Protests 00:15:27
Here's how much.
These are the bank accounts they have them in.
And by the way, they all have mistresses, and that won't be censored.
But if you say, and let's go protest, that'll be censored.
In fact, if you say, the leaders of this town are doing such a great job, let's go have a rally in their favor.
Censored?
Okay?
They don't care what you think of them.
They're a bunch of dictators.
What should we think of them?
They only care what you can do.
If you have the power to move crowds, then they're worried about you.
They're not worried about foreign governments invading.
They have nuclear weapons.
What are we going to do exactly?
They're worried about their own people.
They're worried about their own people.
Biden gave a speech about those MAGA people again today.
But again, it's anybody.
It's not just white supremacists.
It's going to be black supremacists.
Anybody that goes against these great narratives.
Just want to point that out as we're listening to this.
Those ideas.
Governments worried about their own people.
Those ideas didn't emerge from our terrific data analytics.
I love our analytics.
That's our contribution.
But it only assists us in coming up with the ideas.
Once we come up with the ideas, we can try out things.
We can make ourselves vulnerable to being proven wrong.
We can test the hypothesis.
And then, like in this case, fortunately, we came up with the idea that was completely consistent with the data.
I think that's a great example of the human and the machine together.
Because you would never have done it without the data either, right?
That's right.
That's right.
You absolutely need the data, but the data by itself isn't very good.
The great thing is it's empowering us.
So it used to be we were like astronomers who were standing on our toes, stretching out our neck, and squinting, right?
So now we have all the, you know, not only the photons, but we have, you know, the equivalent of great telescopes.
But even that is not good enough until you have the idea of what you're seeing and the analytics for how to process the information.
Although the thing that's most interesting, I think, about that work is that actually you were using tools to interpret a huge amount of information that would not have been processable, but really in the end to understand other human intent.
Is that common?
Is it common that we're using these artificial tools to help us understand other humans?
Absolutely.
So how did people study censorship before in China?
Well, there was one person that would write one post and notice that that one post was censored.
And humans are incredibly good at seeing patterns.
In fact, look at the clouds when you walk outside today.
You'll see elephants and camels and things like that.
We are completely lame at seeing non-patterns.
So the way we studied censorship was one person would see one post, it was censored, and they generalized from that to the entire Chinese bureaucracy.
So what we did is we had the first aerial view of this whole thing.
This is just an example.
It's the same kind of thing in many other areas.
We had the first aerial view where we could see millions and millions of posts.
Around 13% were censored every day in different topic areas, coincident with different kinds of events.
We were the first people to be able to see this.
Once you see this, it reveals all kinds of different things.
It reveals the intentions not only of individuals, it reveals the intentions of organizations.
So think of this giant organization designed to suppress information in China.
It's so large that it conveys a lot about itself if you look at it at scale.
It's like a big elephant tiptoeing around.
It leaves big footprints.
Yeah, it does.
Just like big tech in this country leaves big footprints and the narratives that they try to manage via Twitter, via YouTube, via Google.
WND just got kicked off of Google.
You click on there, it's a harmful website.
WorldNet Daily, been around for decades.
We'll see you later.
Yeah, it is pretty easy and the people know what's going on.
Are we doing anything about it?
I guess we can't.
Joe says if you try to do anything about it, he's got F-15s.
And when we look at scale, we can see the footprints.
It's so interesting because in many ways we believe or know that the government is using similar artificial intelligence and analytic systems to try to understand what the public is saying, and I think to bring out some of these sentiments.
I guess it suggests that the tools can be used for very healthy and perhaps less healthy outcomes.
How do you balance as you build these systems that allow you to understand people's unspoken intention, how do you ensure that they're used in ways that we feel ethically comfortable with?
I think that is a core question that is what you said is true of every powerful technology.
And human history says the technologies, I mean, I'm a techno-optimist and I believe that technology has actually advanced humanity over many, many, many centuries.
But it's certainly true that how humans use the technology has always been for both good and for ill.
And so this is a question that I think has to be integral to all the work that we do at a place like DARPA since our job is powerful new technologies.
And we have tried to address that question by first and foremost just getting those ethical issues on the table.
It's been an interesting thing that I've observed.
In the Defense Department, I have the privilege of working with a lot of senior people in military leadership positions.
In the military, it is so woven into the training of what it means to be a warfighter.
The ethics of that business, a very serious business, is something that is taught and learned and trained and discussed very, very openly and very, very seriously.
It's sort of surprising as an engineer by training.
I don't think we really talk about that in science and engineering very little today, and I think not really to the degree that we need to.
Because in fact, I think that we scientists and engineers certainly don't own the answer, but I think we do own the responsibility of getting these issues out on the table.
The one that you touched on, I think, is the first obvious one that happens when it's human beings data, and that is about privacy.
One of the things that we are trying to do at DARPA in a program called Brandeis is come up with some of the technology tools that might allow us to essentially give people and organizations greater agency over their data.
We believe that if, for example, as an individual, I could share my health care data for medical research, knowing who would see it and who wouldn't, knowing that it would only be available for a certain amount of time that's reasonable, knowing that it wouldn't be published to the world, I think I'd be much more inclined to be open with a lot of my data if I had that kind of assurance and agency over it.
So, if I lie to you and tell you that we're going to keep it private and everything's going to be okay, that's all that is con, okay?
We're going to show you a technology that we're going to lie to you about.
Just give us all your data.
I just want to point that out.
So, sometimes the answer is, I think, going to include technology components that can help.
And I think if we could somehow break what I think is a very painful trade between privacy and security today, I think that would be a huge advance.
I think it's also important to be clear that there's never going to be a technology that's a magic wand and lets us just sort of wave these problems away.
They're deeply human societal issues that I think we'll all be grappling with for a long time.
I would just add: so, inside a university, we're under very strict rules, so you don't have to worry about us.
Before we do anything, we have to get approval.
Harvard, bullshit.
MK Ultra lets you know what he just said is bullshit.
But in the public, there is a debate, which you're raising basically about, well, there's more data, there's much better analytics, we can understand much better about what people are doing.
Aren't there going to be privacy violations?
Yes, absolutely, that's something to worry about.
But at the same time, as we worry about that, don't forget the good.
Don't forget the good.
Would you all be willing to give up some of your privacy to live 10 years longer than your life expectancy?
Ask yourself that question because it's not an unrealistic question.
And it's not Will you give up your privacy so you can live longer?
Again, they're all for you're going to have organs.
They're going to be on tap for everybody.
You're going to live longer.
You're going to be immortal digitally.
You're going to have new magical senses.
Just got to give us all your privacy and all your autonomy biologically.
Great ideas.
Not just live longer than, it's not just live longer than expected.
It's live happier lives.
It's live more convenient lives.
It's all kinds of other things, live safer lives.
All of those things.
I'm not saying that's the right answer to the political debate.
I'm just saying there's two sides, and both sides affect every one of us.
And we just shouldn't give away the good.
We're on the research end of things, and so we see the good coming down the pike very vividly.
And we don't want any of us to miss that.
At the same time, we have to protect everybody's privacy because we're not going to be able to get access to the data to find these wonderful things about the future of humanity.
So I want to pose one more question to our panelists, and then I'll open it up to see if there are questions within the room.
Given DARPA's history and some of the things you've talked about, the use of robotic systems, artificial intelligence, was social science, this kind of quantifiable, quantified social science research, is that a natural fit?
Where does that, does that telegraph DARPA's intentions in any particular way?
Or is it just one of many things that you're looking into?
It is definitely one of many things that we are looking into.
But I think I'd like to be very explicit that I see a huge opportunity with people like Gary and other leaders in this field.
Social science is being reinvented because of the availability of massive availability of data coupled with these very thoughtful techniques that.
Social engineering.
And the methodologies that are developing.
That I think.
Psychological warfare.
Social engineering.
I think it is going to allow us to ask questions that have been dead ends in social science for a very long time.
We have a new program called Next Generation Social Science that is specifically about building the tools and the methods that would allow for a new generation of social science research.
We've covered NextGen.
It goes long, long, long past.
Just that, by the way.
It's an integration into this whole nightmarish system.
And NextGen 2025, coincidentally, just like that document, is right around the corner.
Research that could be done on a different scale than graduate students that are getting paid 20 bucks to do an experiment, research that could be reproduced and scaled, research that could be investigated and sort of seen from the outside in a very different way.
We chose in that example, it's a very basic research program, but we wanted to have a particular sample problem to work on.
In that case, we chose the question of the question we're posing is what are the key factors in collective identity formation.
And as you can imagine, this is something that is essential in our world.
If you think about the stability operations that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan that we're still, in many ways, still engaged with.
These are some of the most core questions about any social group is when do a group of individuals believe that they are a collective whole and what causes that to break apart.
Collectivism, folks, another thing we talk about, authoritarianism, collectivism, they're against the rugged individualist.
They're against autonomy.
I don't think we have very good answers to that.
Certainly we don't have practical answers that can help anyone who's trying to do something on the ground today.
And our hope is that through developing these techniques, we'll get some new insights in that area, but also develop methodologies that scale across many more areas.
And, you know, just to step back, for our mission at DARPA, which is Breakthrough Technologies for National Security, I think it's actually very hard to imagine an area that's more important to national security than understanding societal behavior.
The fact that we have vast new opportunities to do that, I think, is something we definitely want to tap into.
She tells you, societal behavior, that's about national security.
Joe told you, you're the enemy if you disagree with us now.
Fabulous.
Are there questions?
All right.
I think we probably have time for at least one, maybe two.
With the incredible job that DARPA has done and is doing, do we really need DIUX, which isn't apparently going that well anyway?
DIUX is an initiative in the Defense Department to try to connect the DOD better to the commercial tech community.
The first part of that activity is in the Silicon Valley area.
I actually think this is a really important opportunity for the department.
DARPA is designed to be deeply engaged with the technical community.
My hundred technical program managers are rarely to be found in their offices when I walk around because they are out in the world.
They can't get their jobs done without talking to people in universities, in companies, defense and commercial, small companies and large.
So that's inherent to our business.
Much of the rest of the operations of the department are jobs that keep them in their offices and talking to each other.
And I think Secretary Carter has really underscored how important it is to start building channels through, you know, creating a permeable membrane so that commercial technology flows in and out of the Defense Department much more broadly.
So I actually think it's a very important initiative and one we hope to see making great progress.
Well, DARPA's had a 60-year history, but again, our core job is to work with a very broad technical community.
So, in our DNA, is this idea that we're out in the world?
I think it's really important for many other parts of the department, more of the operational parts of the department in particular, to start tapping where commercial technology can make a big difference.
I think it can be very helpful.
These are also special cases of a general phenomenon that's happening, which is it used to be that pretty much all the data in the world was inside universities because we created it.
Now, most of the data in the world is out there, it's inside companies, it's in governments.
And so, the only way that we can do our job, the only way that you can do your job, the only way that companies can do their job is to talk to each other, is to have way more connections than before.
And so, finding a treaty so that companies and governments can share their data without individuals feeling the privacy is violated, and so academics and other researchers can have access to the data to produce new value for everybody is a really important topic for the politicians or for someone here to solve.
New value on having all of your data and handing it over to the minions of the predator class.
Great idea.
I'm really sorry about this, but we are out of time.
So, I will.
So, we're going to stop that.
There's the Katie Couric segment with a panel of three, which I think is interesting.
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