 It's now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Timothy Schultz. Dr. Schultz is associate dean for academics. He joined the Naval War College faculty in 2012 and in 2014, assumed the role of associate dean for academics for electives and research. He previously served as the dean of the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. His research interests include the transformative role of automation and warfare and the impact of technological change on institutions, society, and military strategy. His most recent book with Johns Hopkins University Press is The Problem with Pilots, How Physicians, Engineers, and Airpower Enthusiasts Redefined Flight. He spent most of his aviation career as a U2 pilot, enjoying the view from interesting regions around the globe. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Schultz. Thank you, Mike. Let's start out with some basketball, if that's all right. Who was or is the greatest professional basketball player of all time, the greatest of all time? I hear Michael Jordan, Bill Russell, and that's it? LeBron, some Australian guy. Any others? OK, keep them coming. Larry Bird, one of my favorites. He's on the short list. Anybody say Wilt Chamberlain? OK, Wilt Chamberlain, that is the correct answer. Greatest of all time. And here's why. Wilt Chamberlain had the most singular moment in all of basketball. He is the only player to ever score 100 points in a single game no overtime. Nobody else has really come close to that. He did that when he was playing for the Philadelphia Warriors, the night of March 2, 1962, against the hapless New York Knicks. If you know Wilt Chamberlain, you know he's a big guy, 7'1", about 245 pounds. He is a presence. He is a big man. So that night, he got the century mark, 100 points. And in doing so, he broke another record. He's 28 of those points were from free throws alone. So he was getting fouled right and left. 100 points, 28 points from free throws. But what's interesting, even more interesting about that game, is that Wilt Chamberlain, for those 28 free throws, he went to the line 32 times and he sunk 28 out of 32. That's almost 90%. It's 87.5%. That's excellent by anybody's standards. But for Wilt Chamberlain, it was unusual because in previous years, he shot about 50% from the free throw line. He was a terrible free throw shooter. Shaquille O'Neal, by comparison, shot just over 50%, about 52%, another big guy in the NBA. But that season, Wilt Chamberlain was trying something different. He tried a new technique and he bumped his average, here's percentage up to about 60%, and that night shot 87.5% to get to that 100 point margin, that 100 point goal. So how did he do it differently? Anybody seen pictures of it? Yes, he didn't shoot like this, like everybody else does. He didn't shoot overhand, he shot underhand. He shot granny style, like that. That is a superior way to shoot, especially if you're 7-1 and have these really long arms because your arms hang symmetrically, biomechanically, it's the easiest way to make a free throw because if you're Wilt Chamberlain, all you have to do is sort of lean forward and just coax the ball into the basket. It's much easier to shoot a free throw that way, there are far fewer variables that you're introducing than you are shooting that way. But after that 61-62 season, he stopped shooting like this. He stopped improving and he went back to shooting like this, his percentage plummeted to 50%. A couple years later, he was shooting 38% from the line. That's awful. Anyone of us in here could shoot 38% from the free throw line while being stung by bees. It's an easy thing to do. Why did he abandon this approach? Yeah, the answer's simple. It's just because it looks stupid. In his own autobiography, he said he stopped because he didn't want to, quote, look like a sissy. So for Wilt Chamberlain, he abandoned a superior technique. And this is important in basketball because in a close game, what the opposing team will do is they'll foul the big man or they'll foul the poor free throw shooter and that way that person will go to the line, maybe make one of their two shots and it's sort of a soft turnover. The opposing team gets the ball back and has an opportunity to score two or three points. If you can improve your free throw percentage, even if it means shooting like this, you disrupt the enemy's strategy. Wilt Chamberlain chose not to do that. He chose vanity over victory. How he looked was more important than winning. Same thing for Shaquille O'Neal. Somebody asked Shaquille O'Neal, why don't you shoot like this? You would be a better free throw shooter. Shaquille O'Neal's answer, he said he would rather shoot 0% like that than ever do this. But why is that? These professional players, all they do is talk about winning and strategy and teamwork, yet they don't pursue a superior strategy or superior technique. They choose not to disrupt the opposing team's strategy. Do you see that in your organization and your institution? This clinging to vanity, this clinging to tradition at your own interests because you are more concerned with how you look than with the ultimate outcome. That's part of human nature and you will see it in military history and elsewhere and you're gonna see it a few times today in the next 55 minutes or so and we might come back to the basketball example. But I need to explain what's going on up here because this is a little unusual. Today I wanna take us up to about 70,000 feet or so and talk about some big picture elements of innovation in the information age. You've been down at the operational and tactical level today. You got some really interesting talks yesterday I've found a variety of things. I'm gonna revisit a few of those along the way but I'm gonna try to give you some different perspectives and talk about some concepts that are relevant to the information age like cybernetics and the panopticon and weaponization and what this might mean for the modern technopia that we live in. But first, some perspectives. Perspectives on technological change. Why do I have an image here of Michelangelo's David and whatever this is. She, he, it, a cyborg of the imagined future. Both of them are telling a story. You know the story of the scriptural David, the biblical David, a young man, a shepherd, the youngest of several sons. He goes out and he meets on the battlefield in the valley of Elah about 3,000 years ago, this giant warrior, Goliath of Gath. Goliath is like wilt chamberlain only with a sword and a shield and wearing armor and really angry and wanting to destroy whatever opponent the Israeli army is going to send out to him. Nobody has the courage to go out and finally David steps up and goes out, puts on no armor, rejects putting on armor and goes out armed with what? He's carrying a sling and he is in Michelangelo's depiction of David. It's hard to see but in his right hand he's carrying a stone, a stone that he picked up from the riverbed and put in the sling, got within striking range of Goliath, slung the rock atom and that precision guided munition hit Goliath right here. Goliath goes down for the count, not dead. David comes up, takes Goliath's own sword and liberates Goliath's head from Goliath's body. That's the story of David the underdog. Michelangelo is telling that story but he's adding a lot more to it. He was commissioned in the height of the Renaissance, 1501 at ground zero of the Renaissance, Florence, Italy, the city state, the Republic of Florence to carve a statue of David and this is the genius, the masterpiece that Michelangelo came up with. The proportions are huge, it's 17 feet tall, it weighs about six tons. This gives you an idea of the proportions. He started it in 1501, he finished it a little less than just three years later. Michelangelo was only 26 years old himself and he creates this masterpiece and it's a representation of Florence, not just the biblical David. Florence the city state, Florence the seat of the Renaissance, the seat of power, look at David's gaze. This is a gaze of defiance, naked defiance, if you will. He reminds me of something that Major General Ryan said yesterday, this notion of the individual edge, a person who has these creative abilities to outwit and outplay and outplan their opponent. That was the David of Scripture and that was Michelangelo's David, that was the David of Florence of the early 1500s. Look at his expression, he's looking at Goliath, he's looking into the future, he's confident, he's resolute, he's defiant. You can see in his gaze imagination, ingenuity, innovation, this was Michelangelo's man of the future, this was the way to face the future, this was Florence's future and we can learn something from that. While the time remembering that David was armed, there's the rock in his right hand, an asymmetric weapon. But this other figure, yesterday Dr. Duncan talked about how humans are getting to the point where we can exceed the limits of our biology. I would add to that, we're getting to the point where we can exceed the limits of our own innate natural cognition. Michelangelo set David free from the stone. Modern technology may set us free from our own biological limitations, our own cognitive limitations. Is this a David or a Goliath of the future? We'll see, but it will be a product of the information age, ultimately, should it come to pass? So that gives us a little perspective and as a historian, I wanna dive a little bit more into a historical perspective and argue to you that people in the past weren't really that much different from us. People throughout history change only in their costume or in David's case, a lack of a costume. Human nature does not change. We are still motivated by fear, honor, and interest among other things. Peter Singer on this stage yesterday said, the average millennial takes how many selfies in their lifetime? 26,000. Photography was invented in the 1830s and here's an image from 1839. It's the first selfie. We were doing this as soon as we had invented photography. This guy's name is Robert Cornelius, the first known selfie. We haven't changed. In the late 1800s, we invented film, movies. What's one of the first things we made movies of? Cats, cat videos. Let's drop a cat on film and see why it lands on its feet. This bottom one, that was made by Thomas Edison. Two cats boxing each other. This was the high art of the 1890s. Here's a cartoon from 1906 in a British magazine. Look at these two individuals in the park. Look what they're wearing. They each have an antenna sporting from their, emerging from their headgear and each in their laps is a wireless telegraph. The caption, if you can't read it says, these two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message and the gentleman, some racing results. You see this at the dinner table now, a hundred years later are in restaurants. Use yourselves, these are your teenagers. Human nature hasn't changed and that also applies to the profession of arms. Here's how the British admirals in the advent of steam welcomed this new innovation. They feared it. They feared change. They clung to tradition. Clearly the wrong approach. 75 years later as the Royal Navy is starting to get serious about the use of submarines, here's one of their senior admiral's points of view. He thought if you capture a submarine at sea, you need to treat that crew like pirates, bring them back into port where they will be hanged. Why? Because submarines are this. They're underhand, unfair, and damned un-English. Submarines are shooting underhand. That doesn't look good. That's not what we're about in the Royal Navy yet that's how you win. We've been to the future before. You all recognize not this individual, but the imagination of a young boy. Right now we're at a period of rapid change, a lot of fear, a lot of wonder, a lot of hand-wringing. We've experienced that scale before even of a greater potency. Consider 1947 and 1957, some of the things that were emerging into our society at that point that were very worrisome or at least game-changing. I'll give you some examples. Breaking the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. 1947, the development of thermonuclear weapons. Here's an image of some people enjoying a nice afternoon poolside at a motel in Las Vegas. Nothing says the status quo has changed more than when you're poolside at your hotel and you gaze out at the horizon and you see a mushroom cloud. The development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the establishment of the Air Force and the CIA, the first nuclear submarine, beautiful skyline there in the background. Children practicing duck and cover. The development of the first transistor, they're much smaller now. Sputnik, game changer, 1957. The pill, game changer, 1957. Think of the social second and third order effects that caused. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by Watson and Crick, initiating the genomics revolution. No mention of this period would be complete, of course, without acknowledging the technologies of Velcro and Tupperware. And of course, the Frisbee, back then it was called the Pluto Platter. This was their salesman. Quite possibly the creepiest looking salesman of all time. They didn't get everything right in the 1950s after all. So some perspectives on technological change now in the modern information age. What's different? I'll just argue to you that we're in a period of nonlinear growth and it's due a lot to this notion of computation and interconnection and globalization and innovation all clashing together and creating new things and new opportunities. Instead of this young man and his imagination, we still have a young man with his imagination but now he's using technology to see the world differently, to capture his imagination differently in the information age. You all know about Moore's Law. It was mentioned multiple times yesterday. I'm just gonna point out that this curve really started to bend in around 2007. I'll get back into why that is later. And Moore's Law was probably starting like most exponential curves to level off a little bit. We'll see what happens in that regard. What I really wanna mention here is in general, and this is a generalization, the capability of technology is rapidly increasing over time. And it depends on what technology that you might be looking at. In some areas we're in the flat part of the curve like quantum technology. Other areas we're in the steeper part of the curve like artificial intelligence. It depends on what you look at it. But as we all live in the present and stand on this curve and look this way, because we can only look into the past, it looks flat. We can't look around and see how steep, how quickly it's going to get steeper. Because after all, we can only walk backward into the future and just make guesses, educated guesses about what it might be like. But this is a strategic conundrum for us. How do we get to where the technology is going? How do we figure that out first? This hockey stick shaped curve gets steep in a hurry. Thomas Friedman points out in his book, his recent book that the Admiral mentioned yesterday, thank you for being late, that this hockey stick shape reminds him of what the great Gretzky said, one of the greatest hockey players ever. Gretzky said, I was successful because I didn't skate to where the puck was at, I skated to where the puck was going. Do your institutions do that? Do you do that? Does our doctrine do that? At best, our institutions and doctrines skate to where the puck is at or where the puck was quite a long time ago. They're not very adaptable. How do we skate to where the puck is going? And by the way, how do we bend the curve for humans? Human capability doesn't really change over time. I very generously gave it an upward slope here, but anybody in this crowd who has a Twitter feed or a teenager would argue though, that's probably a slightly descending line in terms of human capability. Later on, I'll talk about how we are trying to bend the curve in the information age. Let me briefly talk about convergence in the information age. Dr. Duncan mentioned most of these ideas earlier. I'll touch on a couple of them briefly, namely precision warfare. Here's a Hellfire missile on the wing of a Predator aircraft. This is a coming together of the revolution in precision guided weapons and the information age, and also the media age because the media reports on the outcome of these precision strikes, collateral damage, things of that nature. Recently in the news, they're talking about a variant of the Hellfire missile that doesn't have an explosive warhead. Instead, the warhead has been changed to six blades that pop out, and that way you can hit an individual without causing a lot of explosive collateral damage. This is the ninja bomb or the ginsu bomb. It's basically like a flying anvil with machetes sticking out of it, and you can cause significant damage but not excessive collateral damage. Here's somebody's car who had a sunroof recently installed, probably by something like this, with minimal collateral damage. We see convergence in the age of robotics, ISIS using drones in a very clever way, particularly in Mosul. We see convergence in the internet of things, more on that in a bit. We see convergence with bioengineering and the information age. This is a digital biological converter so you can print out biological samples or enzymes or synthetic cells. Dr. Duncan talked about that yesterday as well. We see a convergence of the information age and nanotechnology and how that's going to help computation and communication. We see a convergence with quantum computing, still in the flat part of the curve. I'll get into quantum computing a little bit later as well. But those are just some ideas, some things that are underwritten by the information age and converge with the information age. To help understand innovation in the information age, I wanna spend just a moment on cybernetics. This notion of theory of information that aid the teaming or the improvement of human machine teams to make them more capable to bend that curve of human capability. So briefly on cybernetics. The term was coined in 1947 by this guy, Dr. Norbert Wiener. He was one of the three titans of the information age in the 1950s, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann and Alan Turing. They ushered in an entirely new perspective, a new way to view information. And Norbert Wiener presciently said that when we get better computing mechanisms, we can do things with almost any degree of elaborateness of performance. And we are seeing that in the modern age as the curve is bending with computation and cognification, we can create these wildly elaborate human machine systems. And we can bend that curve of human machine teaming. Cybernetics has been around for a while. I'll give you one example of the rapid evolution of human machine teaming. You might also look at this as an OODA loop. A lot of you out there are familiar with the OODA loop. Observe, orient, decide and act, especially you marines out there. I know you love to study the OODA loop. It's awesome, Colonel John Boyd's OODA loop. The OODA loop is just how to use information in a positive feedback cycle to do the optimal thing and to adapt to your environment and to take charge of your environment. We see that in aviation, this development of human machine teaming so humans can start flying at night and in the weather. They couldn't do it before this was invented, this artificial horizon that let you detect where you were in relation to the horizon of the earth and help you avoid spatial disorientation. The first all-blind flight was flown by Lieutenant James Doolittle in 1929 using this very attitude indicator. It revolutionized the way that we see aviation. A few years later, 1933, this is a fully operational autopilot. It was called the first robo-pilot by the New York Times because it helped a test pilot named Wiley Post fly around the world in just seven days. He had to sleep half of that time or a third of that time and this autopilot flew the aircraft for him during those longer legs. In 1933, this is human machine teaming in a cybernetic information exchange feedback cycle. We see this with the Norden bombsite in World War II. The pilots aren't flying the airplane anymore. The bombardier isn't, the bombsite is because it flies a much better aircraft than humans can. We see the roboticization of bombers in World War II. This is a remote-controlled hookup to a B-17 bomber so we can fly it full of explosives in the high-value targets in Europe. Unmanned aircraft. This gentleman is operating an unmanned B-17 just after the war. He's flying it into a mushroom cloud to detect the effects of radiation on aircraft. Thankfully, it's an unmanned aircraft. In 1947, an aircraft equipped with sophisticated sensors and autopilots, a cybernetic system of elaborate performance, took off from Newfoundland and flew to England and nobody on the aircraft ever touched any controls at any time from takeoff to flight to landing. 1947, we can see how sophisticated things were back then before digital computers. So that's kind of some perspective on cybernetics of the past. In the present, we see the repurposing of humans from this guy to this guy. They're doing essentially the same thing, but in a much more sophisticated way. This is a pilot from 1929 and I'm using these aviation examples because this reflects a lot of my own personal research, but it's relevant to the information age. He was equipped with oxygen equipment in 1929 in the flight of Haltz, dude, but he still relied on all of his natural physical stick-and-rutter skills. An F-35 pilot, and I'm gonna step on the egos right now as some of my fellow aviators, your physical skills don't really matter much anymore most of the time, and in some aircraft, all of the time. Rarely, I should say, do they matter because the machines fly the aircraft. Yes, I'll say it better than you. Welcome to the modern age. I'll get some hate mail about that, but so be it. This F-35 pilot says, you can look through the jet's eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the world. That's true. Human vision, that's so 20th century. It's not nearly as good as what these sophisticated sensors and computers can do for us now. In an F-35, you're fighting beyond visual range. If you're fighting within visual range, things have not been planned or executed correctly. That's not how this weapon is designed to fight necessarily. The computer sees the world better than you and makes decisions and converts you to the position, an important position of a systems manager. This pilot is still valuable because he or she is sitting back and being more creative and managing the overall system. That's still important, but the nature of what they do has changed in a cybernetic world. A few years ago, the chief of staff of the Air Force said that the idea of one pilot controlling one aircraft was a, quote, neanderthal way of thinking. Nowadays, we're doing a lot of research on a one pilot controlling multiple aircraft, multiple unmanned aircraft like this QF-16. It can go off, do something operational, then it'll automatically rejoin when it's told to and you can continue on with your mission. We talked earlier about selfies. This is what it looks like when a robot takes a selfie. They take them as well. The wingbot coming to an aircraft formation near you in the future, perhaps. Here's what the secretary of the Navy said a few years ago about the F-35. It's the last man strike fighter aircraft the Navy's gonna buy or fly, perhaps. The sentiment is interesting. These types of aircraft will gain increasing importance, I think, in this cybernetic information age. So in terms of this new human machine teaming that lets humans do different things, let's look at the development of cyborgs. What might those look like? Not as sophisticated as that image that I juxtaposed with Michelangelo's David. But there's some progress in some areas, like neuroengineering. DARPA put in $65 million recently into the ability to connect the human brain to the digital architecture, ideally to do it wirelessly. And that will involve implants like what you see here. Or something like this, a neural mesh that goes on the brain. Elon Musk has a company called Neuralink and they're developing this. They stand by for some announcements from Neuralink pretty soon on their recent advances. This gentleman's name is Nathan. Nathan is paralyzed from the neck down. Nathan is controlling this prosthetic arm and hand with his mind. You can see surgically implanted in his head through his skull is this interface. But the goal is to make this a wireless interface and it will change Nathan's life. In the future, a Nathan, they could do all sorts of things with those prosthetic devices just by thinking about it like we do right now. They're embodying themselves in this prosthetic technology. In the future, a person like Nathan, maybe they're gonna be a surgeon or something like that. It can transform that human machine relationship. Cyborgs also take different forms through genetic engineering. The use of CRISPR clustered randomly interspace short palindromic repeats in biospeak. It's the new thing in genetic engineering that lets you do very precise and intentional things where the dawn of the gene editing age. Here's an example. They genetically engineered a dragonfly. They changed the steering neurons in its spinal cord so they're sensitive to light and they put a little backpack on it that puts in little pulses of light on those steering neurons and it lets you steer that dragonfly wherever you want it to go. And you can power that mechanism with a little solar panel, put a little camera on it and now you have this little micro drone, no kidding cyborg, a true convergence of animal and machine. Just as a quick aside, here's something else interesting that's going on courtesy of the genetic revolution. And it gets to the point about the information age and the information revolution. Information can be digitized, converted into ones and zeros. As Dr. Lewis Duncan alluded to earlier, we're coded mechanisms as well, not ones and zeros but four base pairs, G, A, T and C, the four nucleotide base pairs in the DNA molecule. Who here has seen the movie Gattaca? It's about genetic engineering. Why is it called Gattaca? G, A, T, T, A, C, A. Those are the four base pairs of DNA, G, A, T and C. Hence the name. Those Hollywood writers were very clever people. Well, what they've done is they took one of the very first movies made in the late 1800s, the film of a galloping horse. They digitized it into ones and zeros. Then they converted it to DNA in the four base pairs. They implanted that new strand of DNA into bacteria. They multiplied the bacteria, selected some bacteria random, decoded the DNA and were able to bring up this image out of DNA. They've done the same thing with Shakespeare sonnets. They've encoded them into living organisms. Same thing with Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of nucleic acids in 1953. What would you encode in your DNA now that we know it can be done? I know most of you after this year will certainly want to encode Klaus Witz's on war. Or maybe Thucydides, the Peloponnesian war, things like that. I think this is going to be the new tattoo, the new tattoo craze. You can carry this information with you, family pictures, whatever, in your own DNA, possibly. What's interesting about that I think though for the information age is it gets to the notion that the nature of information has changed. We're coded mechanisms and when you convert things to code then you can manipulate it wildly. You can use your ingenuity and your creativity like Michelangelo's David. If you will. All right, let me get into the notion of intelligence, specifically artificial intelligence now. And you know quite a bit about this. It's been mentioned a few times in the last couple of days. I just want to hit a couple of highlights and points worth thinking about. One of them is the rhetoric surrounding artificial intelligence. Works soon going to be unemployed or eradicated by or enslaved by our robot overlords, whatever they might look like, Cylons, Hal 9000, who knows. The provost, Dr. Duncan, showed this image yesterday, cover from Time Magazine, what it says here in the small print, if you believe humans and machines will become one, welcome to the singularity movement. This is when machines surpass human capabilities but can also fuse with humans and humans can be downloaded digitally and immortalized. That's the singularity. It's a phase change in human history. Some people think this absolutely will happen by around 2045. It's a myth of the future. It might happen, we don't know. I think it's more of a techno mystical ideation of the future. Who knows because the future will be built and controlled by humans and maybe we won't want to pursue this and maybe we'll just painfully pull that plug. It's going to be up to human agency. Not our robot overlords. General AI, I would argue to you we're still a long way, an unfathomably long way from general artificial intelligence because we don't even understand human intelligence yet. So, turing powerful intelligence, the inability to distinguish from AI and human intelligence, I think we have a long way to go. Others may disagree. Fascinating movie, by the way, Ex Machina, profound insights on artificial intelligence. Warning, it is rated R for a reason, but the writing is extremely clever. So here's some of the reality of AI that most people can agree in on. One of them is that every time we think we're achieving true artificial intelligence, it turns out that no, it's just really good computation and it's not even close to general artificial intelligence. When IBM computers, big blue, beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion in 1997, people thought, oh, it's the end of the species. The computer overlords are now here. 22 years later, we're still doing okay. More on Gary Kasparov later. Self-driving cars, that's a form of narrow AI. Kasparov was beaten by a form of narrow AI. It's sophisticated computation, but what we really mean by artificial intelligence, we're still pursuing that. It's still out there in terms of general artificial intelligence. Some trends in AI. We've gone from the programmable age to the cognitive age, and this, think about that image of Moore's Law that I showed you, around 2007, when the curve really started to get steep. That's when we started uploading, digitizing things, massively, uploading them to the cloud. We digitized photos and all kinds of files and records and audios and spreadsheets, everything, that piece of information that could be digitized was and uploaded, and then we created algorithms to make sense of it. And we got into this cognitive era and we used these mimicries of neural networks to help build a capability, a deep learning neural network that could do things like facial recognition or translating from one language to another. That was due to that bend in the curve that we saw in Moore's Law. So that's a trend in AI. Another one is, maybe we don't call it artificial intelligence, but just alien intelligence. Not only will AI think faster for us, but it'll think things that we can't think. It will just seem alien to us, and it'll be a useful tool in that regard. But we really don't know what some of those things going on in neural networks are. It's alien. AI might also be augmented intelligent. It can augment our intelligence. It can cognify our world for us. That's what the Chief of Naval Operations was talking about in 2017. Cognitive computing decision where machines are helping interpret the environment for us. DARPA just poured $2 billion into development of third wave AI. Not the ability to calculate, beat Kasparov and chess, or to learn through deep learning neural networks, but the ability to reason. Now we're getting towards general AI. What's that gonna look like? I think it's probably gonna be further off than many may predict. We'll see. But the world is being cognified around us. You utilize cognition all the time. How many of you didn't know exactly how to get to Newport, Rhode Island, and used a paper map? Zero of you in here. You use something like Waze. It cognified the world for you. We use Turn It In at the Naval War College. That's artificial intelligence. Uber is artificial intelligence. Some of you are wearing Fitbits, artificial intelligence. It cognifies, it interprets the world for you, and it helps you be more creative and to do other things. Well, we're also going to cognify warfare as well. And we will be aided in that by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is also playing the role in the information age of a panopticon effect. Panopticon means just to see everything. Pan, all or everything, optics. Panopticon, where you can see constantly and recognize immediately according to a famous French philosopher named Michel Foucault. That's what a panopticon does. And it gives us the capabilities of big brother and big other. Big brother relies heavily on a panopticon. The ability for concealed inspectors to see you, you don't know if they're watching you or not, and it makes it feel like they are omnipresence. This idea was brought forward by Jeremy Bentham and his brother Samuel in the late 1700s. This is how a prison yard works. You don't know if there's a guard in the tower because the tower has tinted windows, but you have to assume a guard is there, and that absolutely shapes your behavior. It's a panopticon-like effect, and it is pervasive, and some might argue pernicious. And it's widespread. Even Tolkien appreciated that. There was a panopticon in Middle Earth. Sauron in Middle Earth. He could see everything. You couldn't hide anything from him. What would Tolkien think of his modern beloved London? This is a panopticon in London, especially if it can do facial recognition. You don't know if it's looking at you, identifying you or not. You see this panopticon effect, and here are some facial recognition cameras for sale, by the way, somewhere in Asia. You see these panopticons set up in... Anybody know where this is at? It's Tiananmen Square, perfect place for the Chinese government to erect some panopticons to exert control over society. We also see an exertion of control over society through a different type of panopticon. You can wear them. You can do facial recognition with them as well. And what about this form of making people readable and legible and controllable? This notion of a social scoring mechanism because everything they do that's digital, that's online, that's with their phone or whatever, it's available to the government. It can be seen and rendered by the government and it can identify you, whether you want to be identified or not. That is a panopticon-like effect. Of course, it's not just in China. You see these things everywhere. New York City, it kind of looks like a port-a-potty on a port-a-panopticon, if you will. You don't know if a cop is up there or not, but it's gonna shape your behavior on it. It absolutely will, whether or not somebody's sitting in there. That is a modern-day panopticon. And it's being used big time in the digital world. This is big other. It's a term used by Shosana Zuboff in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Big Other is pervasive. This is a rendition of the Internet of Things. You are a thing in the Internet of Things. And the Internet of Things knows a lot about you, the TV that hears you, the house that knows you, the book that can read you. Some of you may have a Nest thermostat hooked up in your home and hooked to several different apps. And these things are pretty sophisticated, connected to different apps. They can communicate with your refrigerator, with your car, with your watch, with your oven, with your doorbell. These things establish a pattern of life for you. It interprets what you do. It perceives what you do. And we think establishing patterns of life, that's something that a predator drone does over a village. This establishes a pattern of life in your own home that can be exploited for commercial reasons by others. It is a panopticon hanging on your wall. I think they should redesign it and make it look like what it really is. The Hal 9000 computer, because Hal 9000 knows what's best for you. Humor is good when it's based in truth. Your phone told your Fitbit, told your Nest thermostat, that told your Sonos, that told me that you owe your wife an apology. Two dozen red roses are only $29.99 for a limited time. Welcome to the Panopticon of your own home. Bought to you by the Information Age. And now your Panopticon can stare outside of your home. If you have one of those ring doorbell camera things, it can see the neighborhood. And various police forces in a growing number of cities are asking for permission to access your ring doorbell so you can create a sort of a panopticon in your neighborhood. It makes you more secure, right? Who wouldn't want to be more secure? This is how they measured pilots in 1947 to fit them better with helmets, part of that human machine integration. They're just measuring the morphology of this pilot on the cover of Life Magazine, the measurement for future flight. That's one way to measure humans, but now we can do it in a more sophisticated way thanks to the Information Age, thanks to the fact that we can be digitized. Here's something that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google said almost a decade ago. You give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are, we know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about. And we can also get you to think about what we want you to think about. We might be able to shape your perceptions. Peter Singer was talking about that a lot yesterday. That is a type of panopticon in the Information Age that Jeremy Bentham could never have imagined. And in the modern age, we can be rendered differently. We can be atomized into ones and zeros in that information we use to help or hinder us. We can be profiled. We are digitally stopped and frisked all of the time, some times by the mechanisms in our own homes. Welcome to the Information Age. Welcome to the concept of the Panopticon. All right, now how do we weaponize this stuff? Weaponizing the Information Age takes a lot of different forms. I'll just talk about three of them. Big data, this notion of algorithm warfare. How do you cognify war? And this is a really interesting quote by Bob Work. Actual intelligence and insights at speed. We can cognify warfare. We can have advanced algorithms giving us not just this condensed intelligence but insights at machine speeds, not at human speeds. Insights much faster because we need that to be competitive. Peter Thiel, one of the royal members of Silicon Valley, he's already saying that AI, narrow AI is what he's talking about, focused AI, specific AI. It's already pervasive in military technology. I think everybody gets that now and it's just gonna become more pervasive. And he did this as part of a significant criticism of Google for backing out of Project MAVEN and the Cognification of War and Algorithmic Warfare, yet they're helping the Chinese government do things that we find a little reprehensible. In the weaponization of the Information Age, the old legacy devices, satellites orbiting overhead our beloved U2s, which still fly, flying overhead. Those are important legacy sources of highly classified information. But now we have so much more information in the dataverse, in the technium. Are we going to learn how to use it? Are we gonna break down those stove pipes in the intelligence community to use that correctly and to use that to gain greater insights at greater speed? How are we gonna weaponize big data? Are we serious about that yet? The Kill Web is a weaponization of the Information Age. We have these elaborate interconnection between airborne platforms and people on the ground and tactical operations centers and ground systems and centers and different continents, all talking to each other to create effects on the ground at machine speeds, at as fast as the kill chain and the Kill Web can go. It's all connected by these 10 roles of ones and zeros of information flying around to create the greatest effects in the quickest possible amount of time. Consider this reaper and it's equipped with this thing called the Gorgon Stair, a really sophisticated suite of cameras that can take high resolution images, collect tons and tons of data of a small city, or parts of a big city, and can help you gain insights. And I'm using the term flying killer robot, or flying killer panopticons up here because this is a panopticon. You don't know if it's there or not, you don't know if it's looking at you, but you have to assume that's the case if you're one of our adversaries and that shapes their behavior, of course. And I'm mocking people who call these things flying killer robots, MQ-1s and MQ-9s, predators and reapers, they're as far away from a robot as you can get because they still have sophisticated levels of human control. Nevertheless, what they are carrying under their wings and under their nose is highly digitized. It's persistent. It can render things and people on the ground legible. You can make sense of them. You can do forensics. You can find out, okay, a car bomb went off. Let's backtrack over the last five days and see what the pattern of life was that led to that car bomb going off and then we can have attribution as well. And something to think about in the digital and the information age is all of this data that's collected and in the kill web as well that I showed earlier, the chat rooms and the radio broadcast and the emails, those are all part of the permanent record now as well. That media doesn't go away. So there's an accountability for the people who use it because their actions will be assessed according to our values and there will be a permanent record of it which we're not used to when we fight our wars. Network platforms, cognification of war, current fleet good, adding more platforms better, more capable platforms even better but you gotta network them to bend that curve. You gotta get them talking to each other at machine speeds. That's weaponization in the information age. Earlier on this stage in the previous panel, Dick Kroll mentioned the term desinformatia. That's a term from the Stalin era, the Russian for disinformation. The Russians have been practicing this perfecting it for quite some time and it's the notion, this notion of disinformation that you can challenge the very nature of truth. You can get people to the point of wondering what truth is. Is there such a thing? And if it exists, how can I know it? And if people are starting to ask themselves that question, they're more easy to manipulate in a disinformation environment and it has sometimes more force, more power than our traditional legacy weapons. Especially when you can weaponize the narrative with deep learning neural networks and AI and you can do these deep fakes and it matters a lot when nuclear weapons may be involved. You're familiar with Putin recently saying whoever becomes the leader in this sphere of AI will become the ruler of the world. Vlad's not saying he wants to become the ruler of the world but whoever becomes the leader, they're gonna be the ruler of the world. And I looked at this and I thought, wait a minute, I think Vlad has been around a long time. So that is my effort at a little bit of fake news for Vlad. I think it's the same guy. I love Peter Singer's talk about like war yesterday. I'm not gonna dwell on that but he's getting a lot into this sort of soft weaponization of the information environment. How do we do that more in terms of our military institutions? That's gonna be up to your creative thinking and how we weaponize the information age. So we're living in this technopia for lack of a better term, this technological environment. Some people call it a technium where it's this social technological environment that's evolving all the time, deeply permeated by our technology. What does that mean? And it brings up three questions. These are classic questions. I didn't make them up. These were made up in the 18th century by a philosopher named Emmanuel Kant. He thought these were important questions to ask ourselves, what can I know? What ought I do? And finally, what may I hope? I know hope is not a strategy. I'm not saying it is but I'll get into why that might be important here in a minute. But in the modern technopia that we live in, what can we know? Is it or will it be a dystopia or a utopia? I personally don't like this framework. I think it's too black and white. It's too mannequian. It's too binary. I mentioned earlier the weaponization of war and I had quantum technology there. Quantum technology is going to be weaponized but it's still in the flat part of the curve but I've been thinking about that in this utopia thing. It's kind of like a quantum qubit. Quantum technology is based on ones and zeros. It's binary, black and white, one and zero. But a qubit, it can be a one or a zero or it can be a one and a zero simultaneously or it can be something between a one and a zero and two quantum qubits can be entangled with each other to help you store and encrypt information. So when I see two binary things like a utopia or dystopia, I go back to a metaphor of the qubit. Let's look at this differently. You can have a utopia and a dystopia at the same time like a qubit can be a one or a zero at the same time. It matters what your perspective is. Some people will interpret now and the future as utopia, others as a dystopia. What matters is that humans will still make the world even as technology help remakes the world of humans. Humans will still be in control. So this is a subjective element. That's something I think worth knowing but what can we know that really comes back to Gary Kashbrov. He gave us an important lesson about what we can know based on his being defeated in 1997 by a computer and he was displaced as the world's best chess player. It stung him. He was devastated. 20 years later he writes a book. Deep thinking, when our artificial intelligence ends and human creativity begins, he realized years later that being beaten by a computer actually made him not just a better person but a better chess player, a better chess player. He became more creative. Machines have allowed us to focus more on what makes us human, our minds. Gary Kashbrov embraced that and realized it. Now he feels like he is better because he is more creative. That's what we can know in this modern technological age, this modern information age. If that's what we can know, what ought we do? I love this Farside cartoon. Hey, they're lighting their arrows. Can they do that? Apparently they can. What we can do is find new combinations to make what we do more effective. To use our ingenuity and to use our imagination and that will take many different forms. What we can do is try to bend this curve of human capability. Will it end up looking something like this? We don't know. That's an imagined future, which may or may not come to pass in some similar form. But if we think creatively, we can determine if that's worth pursuing. And thinking creatively, and General Ryan mentioned this yesterday, the 9-11 report condemned us for a lack of imagination. What can we do? We can have more imagination. That is a key underlying element. And you've seen this quote before, I've shared it with you from Abe Lincoln. We must think anew and act anew. We must disinthraw ourselves and then we shall save our country. How do we think anew and act anew in the information age? And as we mature into this information age, this technopia, we're gonna make mistakes that we never dreamed of. Some of those mistakes will be serious. We're gonna violate Pericles' admonition. I'm more afraid of our own blunders than the enemy's devices. That requires free and critical thinking on our part. So let's go back now finally to our friend, the legacy, the legend, Wilk Chamberlain. You can see what he wrote in his autobiography. I felt silly. I felt like a sissy shooting underhand. I know I was wrong. I just couldn't do it. He couldn't bring himself to do it. He chose, he was a great player, but he chose not to be the best possible player he could for those personal reasons. Wilk Chamberlain's seven feet one inch, 250 pounds, afraid of nobody. It's like Goliath. But like Goliath, he was felled by a little thing, by his ego, a dramatic impact on his capabilities. So now, what should I hope? Kant's third question. What should we hope about the future? I guess in the best possible scenario, maybe now we're entering a renaissance, a renaissance age like Michelangelo's renaissance in the early 1500s. We'll never know, because you can't tell when if you're in a renaissance during the time. Only historians will be able to tell you that. But what will historians tell us about this time? Will we be looking to the future, like David, with defiance and resolution and imagination and ingenuity? And what will that future look like? Will it look like this? Will we be changing ourselves significantly? Will we be shuffling off part of our biological coil? Or will these enhancements just feel like amputations? Will they not really be what's right and good for us? The novelist and scientist Charles Snow wrote in the middle of the 20th century that scientists have the future in their bones. As members of the profession of arms, you need to have the future in your bones, the future in your marrow. But you also need to have the future in your minds. As another scientist, B.F. Skinner, put it, the real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do, whether people do. So I look at it this way. What may I hope? I think we can all hope to think differently. David thought differently. Michelangelo thought differently. Machines are developing the capability to think differently. Will you and I think differently in the information age? That's something that we can hope for. All right, folks, thank you for your attention. It's 1601, Mike said I could go to 1605, which gives us four minutes of questions, go. Quick questions, over to you. And you all have been asking excellent questions the last couple of days. I've really been impressed. And so now you're coming to a dead stop, aren't you? I'll go ahead, we still got three more minutes. I limit my, yeah, Cliff Stewart, United States Navy. I limit myself to two questions a day. A little bit louder, please. Okay, Cliff Stewart, United States Navy. I try to limit myself to two questions a day. Please. So here's one. You talked about the binary point of view, dystopia, utopia. I worry that we're not gonna decide that, that personally I think business is deciding that. So how do we monitor whether or not we're being led in a direction, kind of that matrix syndrome where we don't even know, we're not even aware of ourselves. Yeah, well we even know it. If our perceptions are being managed, if our preferences are being shaped by our online activity in subtle ways, will we even be aware of it? It's that big brother type of phenomenon. I'll go back to what Peter Singer mentioned yesterday. I thought it was important when he talked about, we need to teach ourselves the basics. Just like he teaches his children to cover their mouths up when they sneeze so they're not polluting other people. We need to just develop the basics to know, know thine enemy. He should have quoted Sun Tzu, perhaps. To know what's out there and know what it's trying to do to you. I think that's the first step. To know that if something is free, well it's not free. You are the commodity. You are the one who's paying the price in some other way. People are making money or gaining advantage off of you. I think the first and primary step is just realization. And then flagging things that we know are exploitative. Flagging things that are the products of deep fakes. Saying here's, as Peter Singer said, here's this tape of Nancy Pelosi doing something she never did. That's fine. You can put that on the internet as irony or commentary but it just has to be flagged. We need to develop that consciousness, that those standards, those ethics to demand that of the businesses that we create and support. It's just a hypothetical answer to a question that's only gonna become more important. That's just one perspective. All right. We are just now coming at 4.05. I promise we'd stop at 16.05. So my final words to you will be what I like to tell students when they first show up and before they leave. And that is just act justly, love mercy, walk humbly, go forth, confront evil and press on. Thanks for your attention. Thank you.