 Okay, good afternoon everyone and welcome to our to our Lou with August Cole. The robot made me do it which has to be one of the best titles ever. I love the title. And Mr. Cole has a very long and fabulous biography which I'm not going to read but I am putting his website into chat if you would like to look at this really cool website. August is a noted author, especially co author with PW Singer. Many of us are familiar with the ghost fleet book which was widely popular and wildly popular especially in military circles. But they're also part of a broader sort of, I guess, movement I would say around the idea of useful fiction. And we use fiction to inform policy and other sorts of debates. And as a philosopher myself, by the way, for those of you don't know me I'm Dr. Pauline shakes Korean and I serve as the stock deal chair in professional military ethics in the college of leadership and ethics. And so fiction is near and dear to my heart as a part of the humanities and helping us think about human nature and, and questions of ethics. I read burn in the summer and I have to confess I am not like a sci fi fantasy kind of person. I read it with someone like oh what if I don't like this but I just love the book so much. I think it's because of the main character really. But there are also lots of great philosophical and ethical themes in the book, which are super interesting. So we are super lucky to have August here as part of our leadership and ethics series, which will continue tomorrow with Dr. Christian Miller talking about honesty, but this is a chance and a space for us to talk about questions around leadership and ethics so I guess it's going to talk for a few minutes. And that part of the session will be recorded and then we will open it up to questions and discussion. I am going to moderate that that piece of our conversations so if you have questions, you can certainly come off Mike and ask a question. But it's also helpful if you can put your question into chat so I can just sort of direct traffic a little bit. So, so without any further ado, I'm going to turn it over to August Cole. Thanks for being here on this really appreciate it. Thank you for the invitation, and it's a pleasure to connect with the group. The, you know, the interest in fiction writ large thankfully is growing for its relevance in, you know, the defense and security communities and so my hope is that, you know, this sort of a talk can be of use to you in the in the ways that you think about not just the present but of course, the future. So the talk I'm going to share screen here in a minute and kind of walk you through I'd like, you know, essentially 17 slides or so. And what that's going to do is bring some visuals to the way I'm going to be talking about not just the book burn in that was mentioned but kind of how and why I feel like this is a really good way to think about the present, like I said but also the future. So, many of you of course know Red Storm Rising this is a book that I read, you know, literally when it came out. And it was so successful, I think at the time and helping me as a young kid grown up in Seattle really thinking through, you know, what the story might actually look like, you know, a third World War of the Soviet Union, you know, I'd always been interested in diplomacy and military affairs and photography and things like that as they as they're related to try and understand what was going on. And yet no one until you know Clancy's book and really stitched together I think a narrative that was both realistically, you know, researched, but also, you know, bound up in this fairly, you know, conventional thriller story. So, you know, fast forward to 2015 when Peter Singer and I released Ghostfleet. It was a coda in a way I think to the journey that I'd been on. You know, a journey that started with me, you know, really thinking that history was a great way to understand, you know, what was, you know, the kind of arc in the 90s of the kind of the American experiment and its role in the global stage. Journalism then became my more immediate focus because I didn't want to sit in libraries. And so I spent a lot of time working in financial news for marketwatch.com really at the cutting edge of like the disruption of the news business. And then that led to the Wall Street Journal after graduate school. And yet, you know, I got to the journal in 2007 and working in DC reporting on defense industry intelligence contracting things like that. And realized that I kept wanting to write about what was going to happen. And for me, I think that became such a powerful force in my own mind, and as well as the transformation of the news business that I realized that I had to leave like this this career that I had really been invested in emotionally I love the service side of it. I love the kind of exploration that we're, you know, allowed to undertake as a serious reporter. And so I applied all that energy into fiction. And what I really found was that the same skills in reporting and connecting with an audience that, you know, could be like it is at the journal when you're writing a front page story, you know, the CEO of a company but also like, you know, to your parents about the issues of the day. And so the journey then became one of trying to figure out how to do that. But like a lot of writers I have in a manuscript that's like on my hard drive that never got published. It helped me get an agent after a couple years of trying was a long journey. And the reason why I'm talking about this this backstory is because it's a very circuitous path that a lot of people have and trying to figure this out. I think that there's no clearly defined, you know, almost algorithmic way to, to, you know, make a path in the, in the kind of world of being a futurist, especially one that wants to use fiction it's sort of an experimental or prototype approach. But what that unsold manuscript allowed me to do is team up with Peter Singer and both of us had read Red Storm Rising and both of us have been affected by, I think the really interesting combination again a fact and fiction that the Clancy had done. I really wanted to think about some of the other aspects of the national security environment that weren't being looked at, you know, back in 2013 when we kind of first started to link up on this. And the big question that we felt wasn't being talked about enough was China. And this was of course not a, you know, 2012 release when we started 2013, not a popular time to be talking about this. But yet we felt like it was important enough based on the trend lines that we were seeing that we would undertake a project that that became ghostly to do it in a fictional way. It's a big Clancy's legacy, and really push it in a way that allowed us to develop a narrative that reflected the realities of war the 21st century. So space and cyber, you know how the book starts, you know, unconventional warfare gorilla warfare, you know, our features be told from an American point of view is with US insurgents and Chinese occupation. It's like the role of anonymous the role of space privateers was really really interesting for us to try to kind of rethink what the, you know, aspects of warfare might be like that the the kind of conventional wisdom was missing and so, you know, in this kind of gambit we put the book out there and try to see how people would react I mean quite literally, you know, prepared that people might laugh at us for trying to write fiction. Yet what we what we came to understand though was that it struck a nerve that we were able to speak to some of the greater truths that were out there about this big question of China's rise. You know today it's a fairly, you know conventional topic when you're thinking about great power competition etc. But at the time it wasn't. So then we started thinking after ghostly you know what to do next we could have written a sequel. There's a couple scenarios we came up with that were pretty cool, but it really wasn't what was on our mind in terms of what people were missing. So when we started to look at this question of the unanswered really the blind spots that we had in in the kind of American security community, we actually started to look inward, you know, to the US, and looking at the, you know, the forces in technology in politics in culture and how they were going to be transformed by this you know algorithmic, you know progression in commercial society in popular culture etc. There's a world that we describe in this book Burnin where there's everyday robotics, you know we're AI and persistent data shape everything in our experiences in part through augmented reality overlays. Yet we have some of the same problems that that we're wrestling with today, you know far right extremism populist politicians, big tech, including with some of those forces to try to kind of steer the country in a path that that not everyone is going along with. And what really you know I think struck struck home this summer when the book came out was, you know how much of the social contract that we had spent, you know, a couple of years as we were writing the book unpacking and kind of looking for its fault lines. You know, we're kind of laid bare in pieces, if you will, you know during the COVID epidemic, and the kind of systemic risk that entails the questions that it raises around how we use technology either to try to, you know, heal some of those riffs or whether we you know widen those those gaps are certainly in the mind. Now Burnin is a story, not like ghostly it's not a war story it's a story about an FBI agent Laura Keegan was a robot partner, a first for the Bureau and she's counterterrorism agent hunting down anti technology terrorist who really wants to kind of tear the country apart. And what's what's I think important about the book and the role that technology plays. And this is a challenge in a lot of writing I think about you know the next 20 years and even a little bit beyond is that many of the inventions or transformational technologies that that are, you know, day to day pieces of tech that are woven into everything from like parenting, you know, drones in the home to, you know, persistent surveillance and data on your own family members that you can access, and that in the way that we might use an intelligence community today to really novel use cases where you know you're actually putting technology into roles that society hasn't quite contemplated yet like in the case of Burnin law enforcement. And, you know, at the same time, you're not trying to kind of bind to the hype, right I mean I think there's so much, you know, buzz obviously that gets pushed into conversations about new tech. It's easy to be led a little bit astray I think and thinking through the human factor which I'll as I'll talk about, I think throughout hopefully you'll understand it is one of the best ways to really credibly create futures that that are useful. And ultimately, you know the power of AI is, I think, one of the, you know, most underappreciated in terms of its significance, you know, for all facets of society, and not necessarily in the ways that most people think and this is just some art from Google's deep dream image generator that I think is disturbing and fascinating and often in the talks that I give I like to use these kinds of images because it shows you, we are in this kind of otherworldly like era where we don't quite understand what we're creating. And then, you know, Fox AI as they call it is used in everything from translation technologies like Google translate to analytics that that you know shape financial markets and other facets of society that are absolutely critical to kind of a functioning system. And yet, you know what I what I want people to start to understand and start to appreciate is that you know how we live in this world is as crucial to understanding what the future will be like as anyone invention. You know, I'm not by liberal arts background talking here but I feel like it's a really valuable and important perspective that is not considered enough that focusing to purely on technologies can lead us astray and thinking we've mastered a certain kind of capability or transformation and then realizing that we've unleashed something wholly, wholly different. You know, we are at a reckoning right now about the role of technology, particularly data, as it represents individuals as it represents, you know, the value of large groups of society, whether we call them countries or, or, you know, the kind of sub national, you know, Appalachians that are that are out there. Generally, though, you know data is is is pivotal to everything and increasingly so because of this AI revolution. Now this quote is really important I think you know Ida Tarbell was one of the muckraker journalists who really exposed how standard oils monopoly behavior, which on Rockefeller was, you know, a problematic for the country and was somebody who really helped the nation understand facet to the American economy that that wasn't I think completely understood. And, you know, this is a quote obviously that speaks to, you know, the, the kind of her understanding of like, you know, capitalism and conflict. But you know you can change a couple words in that quote. And it really strikes me as even being more apt for a moment today, especially if you think about Facebook or Google as the standard oils of, you know, over 100 years ago. So the first and most imperative necessity and war is data for data means everything else men guns and ammunition, and fittingly to that Clive Humby the British math mathematician, who a few years ago said you know data is the new oil. I've often thought that data is a new ammunition that nothing will happen in conflict without the data that is required for you know the military action to take place. If we are though in this data rich world if we are in this moment where you know technology is driving so much how do we make sense of it and again this is my humanities bias probably again but I've turned to storytelling, you know, ficcant, whether it's fiction intelligence, or useful fiction which is a framework that is I think more considered and something that Pete might have been working on to kind of explain is a really important way to to do so. There's some tool among many to be clear. It's not the end all be all, but it is incredibly useful for doing everything from checking the blind spots that we have about technologies that we place a lot of faith in, whether it's you know GPS systems like ghostly talked about warfare. Should the US has access to those are over the horizon satellites, whether it's in burn in with the perils of big data and the ways that extremist groups and big tech might use them to you know shape society in ways that are not not, you know, pointing to America fiction it needs to go. You know it's it's a bit tongue in cheek this notion of ficcant I mean it's not literally supposed to be an int. But yet it's the same time finding a way to communicate within the national security community, the true utility of fiction it's been very effective to do so. And you know my hope is that that as people read more science fiction read more future oriented fiction, they'll begin to see the value in terms of having people understand this character driven approach which all good stories do. And that goes to this and Pete I recently wrote an essay to this effect which I can put a link in the chat. But what you know we wanted people to understand is that you know ficcant in useful fiction is as researched as any nonfiction paper that all the rules in a story that govern real life that we experienced every day. You have bad luck. There's weather, things like that. It has to be present in these sorts of fictional narratives to it's certainly the case in burn in where we, you know, go to great pains to describe the environment that our characters live in and so that you have situations that are rendered real, not just because there's a lot of research that's faithful to the technologies but that the places that we describe in Washington DC are in a sensory sense, you know very closely related to what it's like to experience them today. And so the other rules are, it's really important to think about effect, you know what's the ask, you know, for those of you that write op eds, or write speeches, you know I think this is a really important thing to always consider and it's something that with the, especially the shorter stories and the kind of commission sense that Pete and I have been doing for groups from, you know, NATO to a CT to the, you know, Norwegian Army or the British Army, and other groups is really thinking through what's what is what are you trying to communicate to the reader right is it to raise questions is it to, you know, introduce ideas and that I think is one of the fundamental aspects that underscores that useful aside to things. There's a great track record to this. You know obviously they have a war college there is already you know fiction being used in courses and curriculums, you know books like ghostly but others. And that has been doing some great work back to what the war fighting lab did a few years ago, and a project that the Atlantic Council helped with to create a short story annex that accompanied their Marine Corps strategic environment forecast. And that, you know, essentially the fictional annex was downloaded and, you know, greater number than than the actual forecast itself. It's a full force right you're looking at the, you know, 18 year old 19 year old up to you know senior officers. There are a few tools better, you know, both at the cognitive but also at the kind of creative level to engage people and finding ways to share ideas which is increasingly challenged, especially if you're a writer in a very visual media rich and also offers a little bit of a way to hack that because our brain is very predisposed to understand narrative as a storytelling tool, often more so than analytics. When we are I think cognitively kind of overloaded by the environment we're in. There's plenty of other really good examples in the contemporary sense. We have the crew lack center Marine Corps University, where I'm also a fellow is shepherding through. The third volume of crowdsourced, you know, grassroots graphic novels that are really effective at not only producing, you know, visual content like comics. Yes, you can read comics for work that are that are asking important questions about the ethical use of the rules of war. You know what is an adversary, big fundamental questions, but also the act of doing so is incredibly valuable to those who are involved in their communities, because what you're able to do is essentially use a different part of your brain and kind of change that neuro plasticity to start to thinking about problems and solving them in different ways. There's a myriad other examples out there the Austrian Defense College, you know, is working on this heavily under General McRyan British government has been working on this in similar efforts and in various communities are an army with the mad scientist project has done incredible work on making this accessible to all which is a big tent approach that I really applaud. The, you know, the visual aspect of it to of course is, you know, can't be left out this is some art that was commissioned for a story I wrote called Arctic night for the Norwegian army. And you know what the story, you know, was about really was a reframing of what you know, people might be fighting over in the Arctic in a different sense of what we contemplate today. What could a NATO member be on the sidelines between a Russia China conflict over access to Arctic ports and economic interests. Now that the visual art that goes with it is really effective because it allows the reader to kind of shortcut a little bit into the own their own imagination of what that scene might look like this is a Russian soldier with an exosuit. But it also, when you think about how do you share your ideas, you know, in 2021, while social media is a hugely, you know, valuable tool for that, especially if you're reaching new audiences and so having the spoke art can be extremely effective, because we know how people react to content social media, you know, visuals or everything. And so, you know, when you undertake these kinds of projects it's really good kind of lessons learned, you know, to that. There are other really interesting aspects of this story that I thought that I think are relevant to the questions about technology were the ideas of, you know, automated and autonomous commercial systems being dual purpose you know today we have citizen soldiers and sailors who are in reserve or You know, imagine the future that you have a UPS truck that can dual swap with a logistics role for, you know, the force for at the Norwegian army. Imagine you have lift capability, right, that has a similar types of like our craft fleet today the civil reserve air fleet, but on a much more smaller kind of tactical level which in Europe, you know, given the geographic distances is a much more kind of intriguing concept. There's a lot that we get wrong when we talk about technology, you know, this is one of the bots that came out of the consumer robotics boom. Incredibly popular as you can see, you know sold out really intriguing a way to kind of help people understand coding understand you know what it's like to have kind of everyday robotics and yet, not long after the startup crashed. It's a reminder that how we predict different technologies will be relevant in the marketplace but also I would also extend that to the strategic environment is really difficult to do. And you know we have to remember these rules of the real right you know technologies, especially as we have more and more that are emerging from the civilian sector have to you to the rules of the market. That's often very difficult for you know a military analyst to understand if they aren't versed in you know how venture capitalists work or how you know public equity markets, etc, or even the other sovereign wealth funds invest in technologies like a I out of Russia. That's all critical to the understanding of a real kind of tapestry in the landscape and being able to predict accurately. If not entirely correctly, you know what the kind of boundaries of a realistic environment the future might be like. So, you know, Turner analytics is one of the, you know, premier technology, you know, consulting companies out there. They have something called the hype cycle this is one of their older ones from 2018 that I think is actually really useful because I think you can do a similar exercise for military, relevant technologies and to be sure all these have military applications, whether it's iot or blockchain etc. But the point is that you know you have essentially way of misunderstanding technologies that can be spread quite widely in an analytical exercise like this allows you to essentially slice that a little bit, whether it's hypersonic capability, you know, is there really the threat environment that that is a poses an answer to, or is it a matter of a question that didn't need to be asked. I'm not positing one way or the other but the point is that we have assumptions that we often take for granted they get programs of record behind them. This can lead to investments in doctrine and policy and little on hardware and software that that may not be, you know, tracking the actual progression or trend lines and conflict. There's other civilian tools out there like this that I think are really interesting for the world building that goes into creating these fictional worlds, because again everything has to be rooted in the real. And yet the ultimate and most important part is the human dimension. This is just a still frame from the spike Jones film called her with, I think, which I think describes in a really fascinating way, our relationship with technology it's about a lonely guy who has greeting cards in a kind of futuristic type la falls in love with the operating system on his phone. The operating system is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. And it's really interesting back and forth and has a somewhat predictable end but nonetheless I think it shows you the future in a way at the emotional level of our relationship and of course dependence on some of these some of these things that we are just starting to appreciate today. I mean how many kids out there are growing up, you know, with Alexa almost as a family member. If obviously embodied per se, but at least playing a role in that discourse that goes on in everyday life. I think that's where films like this can be really really effective and trying to get us to understand to pause to reflect on the way that these technologies are changing our lives and matters that we can intuit but can't quite always put our finger on because these are complex issues, and there's often many different sides. This is a news clipping from the summer before last about some of the economic disruption going on in Southern California. This was exactly the kind of thing we've been thinking about for burn in that there are winners and losers in the next turn in is a book that set in the 2030s, and many of the technological and economic and social changes of the next 10 years will of course set up what happens in the 2030s and, and that's the thesis I have, you know, essentially for America, you know, especially vis-a-vis China to that you know the next decade is crucial for setting up the 2030s. And by extension I think after that, if we have big breakthroughs in tech like I would expect around quantum computing and other facets that much of the 21st century is actually sort of lines drawn. But to this labor battle in the port of LA it's really interesting situation, because increasing automation was, you know, threatening or is threatening to upend the traditional role that labor plays in unloading ships from the port which is one of the busiest in the world, of course from China and other production centers in Asia. And so you have independently contracted drivers who want to move as much freight out of the port as possible. It's something that suits them. You know, these are 1099 workers, they are not part of unions, they are not part of, you know, larger companies are independent contractors, many of them who essentially are either owning their own rigs or leasing them. And you have, you know, traditional longshoremen unions who are working on behalf of a system that is predicated upon a human role in what is becoming an increasingly automated process and so they are fighting it. And their equities are in of course this traditional approach to logistics. And so you have two sides that are pitted in a fairly intense, you know, you know, battle I mean not in the literal sense thankfully, it's not quite like what we described yet and burn in. But nonetheless you can see the forces being arrayed that are really consequential for, you know, potentially unraveling even further the American capitalist system or you know the economic system, and by extension the social contract right. The fragility that comes, you know, further into the American experience is going to be ushered in anyway by these automated technologies. So when you step back and think about, you know, what are the rules then, you know, so much is in flux if there are so many gray areas around tech, you know, this is from a off road rally that is called the gambler 500. Bring a junker, you know, drive your car off road and, you know, the the back roads of, you know, pick your state as chapters all the country. What I love about it is that it really speaks to the ad hocory that I think is really crucial in understanding how to use systems and engineering and design and technology in ways that are probably more accurately reflect in an adversaries approach that are traditional, you know, that one program and invest trillions of dollars in it over 40 years, you know, the rules of war changing because the rules of acquisition are changing because the rules of doctrine are changing, etc. And I think something that is much more, you know, like this with effect. These are a couple of vehicles from the gambler, obviously, you know, people are spending a little more than $500 on their on their rides but the point is, you know, what you're seeing out of them though is a complete disregard for convention norm and ultimate, you know, focus on performance and experience and outcome right have a good time. Not at all directly analogous or literally analog or literally related to of course, you know, the kinds of doctrine and things that we talked about in normal military circles, but 100% related in the kind of the spirit and the change that is ahead in how people wield technology, especially this kind of junkyard hot rod, you know, conflict that will be certainly not just in the side show of great power competition but but front and center. And again is is affected by all that. And, you know, the messiness of this dimensionality when it comes to 21st century conflict is easy to overlook you know this is a scene from Capitol Hill in Seattle. It's the Capitol Hill autonomous zone which was created this summer as a, you know, mildly coercive experiment in kind of an anarchic space inside of America's technology hub. It's fascinating right this is maybe three miles from Amazon's downtown campus. It's not always skateboarding Capitol Hill so I know these streets really well. And, and to see this was really interesting because you I felt like we had a glimpse of different systems that are trying to coexist in at the same time and they're they're having less and less success in doing so. And these kinds of risks, I think are crucial in thinking through the way that we try to understand the future of warfare. You know, when Pete and I wrote burn in which is a book about of course, a civil conflict in a civil tension in America that comes from this unraveling of the social contract caused by technology and automation. There's massive questions about kind of who will be able to determine that future. And it seems ironically that the more algorithmic and kind of software we have in this experiment, you know that is the American system, the harder it really gets to control. You can see that in the uprising last week in the Capitol, you can see the ability to target individuals to get that to do things together on mass, which speaks to almost a cognitive, you know, domain and warfare or something even beyond that a human domain that I think is going to be incredibly important for military organizations and security organizations to understand, because the rules of conflict are changing. And then we're able to adapt to all that to say that, you know, I think one of the best ways of course as this Frederick Paul quote illustrates is, you know, we have to I think turn to narrative to help to help do that the complexity of it the human factor, the understanding that there are rules that are that are being broken and rewritten by those who usually don't do so becomes incredibly important to figuring out what to do about all this. So in that spirit, I'm happy to answer some questions for the balance of the time and I really again appreciate your time today.