 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, everybody, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Jason Ponton is here as the Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Technology Review. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. It's a pleasure to be here. Good to see you. Sorry, the keynote this morning. I learned that you guys think about technology in centuries. We have a long viewpoint because the magazine was founded in 1899, which makes it the world's oldest technology publication and we like to think the most authoritative. So, and it's great publication. I still get the print and obviously do online. But when you think about long-term trends in technology, how do you approach it and how is that different from other publications? Well, we've got a joke. When everyone asks me to do some predictions, I always say I'm going to be completely wrong and in the long term, it's going to have a much bigger impact than I can possibly guess. What tends to happen in technology is in the short term, the changes are pretty difficult to anticipate and it's often much more difficult. But in the long term, these changes are really disruptive. So, it's hard to remember that even 10 years ago when we had very simple smartphones, we weren't used to carrying around iPhones where every single part of our life is now mediated. So, if you imagine just 10 years ago how much the world has changed, we think the disruption can be fairly extreme after you get beyond two years, five years, 10 years and a hundred years, civilizations become unrecognizable. Well, we all have our favorite dot-com stories but look back, it was probably understated at the time. Was it not? Was it not in the value creation? Well, we used to mock at the time those of us who were cynical, the idea of the next, next big thing or the dot-com era, but the companies that were founded then would survive, like Google, like Amazon, have entirely transformed the way we think about very basic human activities like shopping or looking up information. Yeah, so in your keynote this morning, well, first of all, many have seen your TED talk, if you haven't, you Google Jason Ponte Ted and check it out, it'd be 1.601. A million people. Pretty good. So congratulations on that. Now you attacked that topic in 2013 when we were all wondering, all this new technology wave, are we ever going to use it to apply to solving bigger problems? But we've started, haven't we? So the TED talk addressed why it was that Silicon Valley in particular was addressing small problems or fake problems and three or four years ago, people were very animated by the smallness of apps. Even apps that were fairly useful, like Uber or Airbnb. The question I asked in the TED talk is how are we going to feed the 9.6 billion people who will be alive in 2050? How will we provide them with clean water? And most difficult of all, how will we provide them the energy which the emerging world has a legitimate desire to have the same standard of living that we've had here in the West for a hundred years? And I think of the three years since I've given the talk, there has been a kind of an emotional shift in technology circles. People want to take on big problems. Founder's Fund, a venture fund founded by Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, says you promised me flying cars and instead I got 140 characters. So I think there's a powerful desire to take on bigger problems. But the problem is that technology is organized to technology investing and technology entrepreneurialism is organized for fairly short time periods. Seven years, you're in, you're out, you make your billion. And really big problems take, well, going to the moon involves 400,000 people, 20,000 organizations, and its height around 5% of the US GDP. And going to the moon was quite easy. So if you think of something really big, like reducing energy, so it's net zero with its carbon emissions, that's a civilizational challenge. That's like building the pyramids. And I think technology won't be able to do that alone. It'll require politics, it'll require social commitment, and it'll require ordinary people to say they care. I wonder, because, take the moonshot, or we're at an IBM show. IBM is over 100 years of innovating. Where do we get the massive effort and capital to make those big bets? Because there's not too many companies that can say, oh, we're going to put billions of dollars into efforts. The old sandboxes, I grew up in New Jersey where Bell Labs is there. It's no longer what it was there. So where can that great effort and innovation come from? Let's go and give due credit to IBM for having created a whole range of technologies that did create our modern technological civilization. But it is probably true that over the last 15, 20 years, the great era of corporate research labs where they were essentially liberated to do whatever they wanted has been under assault. Even, I'm sorry to say this on an IBM show, even at IBM, there's been a desire to have a much stronger connection between profit and research. But there are labs still doing work. IBM's doing really important work in memory at Baidu. And Google, they're doing fundamental work with artificial intelligence. And Microsoft is doing an incredibly daring bet around quantum computing. So you can't find these OACs of corporate research. But the truth is these big projects probably take a political commitment. So if we want to make a big inroads about carbon emissions, there'll probably have to be some kind of global agreement like there was at the COP21 show, COP21 conference to begin to reduce carbon emissions globally. So government involvement obviously is part of that. What came out of Apollo? What was the sort of societal impact of Apollo? Well, so there's that wonderful Kennedy speech where he gives a rice university and he says, why go at all? And even at the time, he knew there would be a cynical, a cynical interpretation that we were going because the Russians were there. But Kennedy says, why do we do these things? We do them because they're hard. So going to Apollo, going to the moon did a couple of things for Apollo. First, it was a grand statement of human adventure. Everyone who went to the moon, all the surviving astronauts, sort of created a new sense of the fragility of our earth. But it also created a whole variety of technologies that we now take for granted. And not just the silly ones that everyone knows like Velcro or the Byro, it created fundamental breakthroughs in navigational technology, in the way operating systems work. It created a variety of operating system languages. So you can never predict what the benefits of these big projects are going to be. But every single time in history we've made these big bets, it's paid off in technologies that ordinary people have used as well. Thoughts on SpaceX? I love SpaceX. So I think in the beginning of space travel, it did require a kind of governmental effort. Most of the people working for NASA had been drafted from the Air Force and it probably took an effort like that. But we've made about as much progress as we're going to make and now we need to unleash the entrepreneurial power of markets to do the next things. So between the Bezos Blue project and Elon's SpaceX project, we need to drive down the cost of putting things into space to the point where they're a fraction of what they are now. And then I think a whole bunch of interesting startups might arise. So I would infer from your comments in your TED talk and other comments that you're a proponent of a Mars shot. As opposed to, and there's been some debate regarding where do we put the resource? Should we try to habitate the moon? It might be more productive for society if we do that. What's your take on Mars versus the moon? I think we did the moon. I think we've already been to the moon. And they've done that. And human beings have always explored. You know, there was no record at all of Neanderthals ever leaving the bounds of Europe. And but think about it, for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings did something really strange. They got to the edge of a body of water and with no reason to believe there was anything out there, they got into a tiny little boat and they set out because that was next. And what's next is Mars. A couple of years ago, we went to interview the slightly miserable guy whose job it is to plan the Mars mission. And he knows in his heart of hearts we're not going anytime soon. He knows going to Mars would require a colossal investment of money. And there were some basic technology problems we haven't solved yet. Human beings would get cancer probably if they went to Mars with all the solar radiation. So my deputy editor, a guy called Brian Berkstein, said, why are you doing this? This guy is approaching retirement. And he said, well, here's why. Because one day, 10, 15 years from now, someone's going to want to go. And they're going to say, didn't they plan that back in the teens of the century? And they'll take down my plan. And someone will say, there it all is. That kind of heroism in the face of frustration I find very appealing. Elon Musk says that he is going to be the first man to die on Mars. Which is a gloomy and morbid but also kind of heroic vision of that Mars is next. You made a comment today in your keynote about AI had a 30 year winter. And it's true, right? AI, we used to, first of all, we were intrigued by it. And then we just sort of laughed at it and then just ignored it for a decade. And now it's back in a big way. What kind of problems do you think we can solve with AI? There've been a couple of things in the last five years which have truly surprised me. One was gene editing, but the other is artificial intelligence. And what's amazing about the breakthrough in AI is it didn't come from a brand new technology. It came from a technique called deep learning, which had been proposed in the 60s. The algorithms had been written in the 1980s and they didn't get anywhere. And for reasons that would make a lot of sense to IBM, we didn't have powerful enough computers and we didn't have enough data. So the early deep learning programs, they stacked pattern recognition just three or four levels deep. You can't do much when you do that. But when you have gigantic data farms with thousands of servers yoke together, you can begin to build up layers a thousand deep. And really fundamental forms of intelligent activity suddenly become possible. Things like pattern recognition, seeing patterns in weather, in financial systems, driving, driverless cars, really weird things start to happen that you wouldn't anticipate. Now, a word of caution is in order. The history of AI has always hit these moments of frustration. So there are going to be things that deep learning can't do. There are going to be things that deep learning is bad at. But at the moment, it is probably the most exciting era in computer science in decades. Jason, in the keynote this morning, you spoke a little bit about the innovators under 35. I did. Can you share with our audience a little bit about it, maybe a couple of examples? Yeah, so for 16 years, Technology Review has identified 30 innovators under the age of 35 who we think are going to transform the world. Now, we've had some success during this. You'll recognize some of the names, people like Mark Zuckerberg, like Larry and Sergey from Google. It's important to say that when we found them, they were, if not unknown, they weren't very known. There have been other people who are perhaps less famous than the tech titans, but who have been tremendously influential in their way. Folks like JB Straubel, who's the actual technology genius at Tesla, and Helen Greiner, who created the first commercial robots. Here at the Edge, tomorrow afternoon, we brought 12 of our, excuse me, nine of our young innovators with us, and we're going to give the IBM audience a taste of the kind of thinking which these young people have in common. What they all share, they're members essentially of an attention deficit order. They can't focus on anything for very long, but when they do, they bring this kind of blinding attention to the thing while they're in the midst of it, and then they go on to do the next thing, and they are also all powerfully motivated by desire to do good in the world. They don't mind getting rich as well, and some of them are at this point, but they were essentially motivated by the desire to solve a big problem, and that's very MIT-ish, and that's very MIT tech-review-ish. Global security, I think of Stuxnet. Again, government involvement, even though nobody will admit it. Global security and technology's ability to solve those problems. Well, I used to say that no one would take seriously the idea of their internet security until there was a Pearl Harbor moment. But that happened with Stuxnet, right? Some unnamed nation-states essentially took down the national infrastructure of Iran and devastated their nuclear program. Imagine how we would feel if the Iranians had done that to us. At the same time, there have been really embarrassing corporate leaks to Sony, and just recently, we've watched the Democratic National Committee and a former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, have their emails hacked. So, I have to believe that after years of saying no one would care, and people still not caring after Stuxnet, the sheer social embarrassment for companies and individuals might be beginning to shift this just a little bit. I know this, that many CEOs now regarded as one of their biggest liabilities, and they're looking to companies like IBM, like HP, like FireEye, to give them a measure of safety. But in the end, internet security only derives from us using these things with a modicum of responsibility. There are some basic things we should all be doing, like not clicking on a pop-up when it says, click on me to go and keep our system safe. Bad behavior trumps good technology every time, doesn't it? All right, we have to leave it there, but I'll give you the last word. Sounds like you're doing some really interesting things at Edge, but what's new for you guys? What should we look for? Well, the thing which I am most interested in writing about at the moment is this idea of gene editing. It's a technology called CRISPR Cas9. It allows people with very basic biological experience to go in and directly edit the genome of a plant, of an animal, or even of a human being. So just as I describe it like that, you can hear that with a little bit of science-fictional speculation, it will have tremendous power, but it will also give us some real challenges. We'll have to ask, how much do we want to rewrite ourselves? And with that, I'll leave it to your audience to read about CRISPR technology review.com. Jason Ponton, we'll leave it there. You guys do great work. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Edge. We'll be right back.