 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well good afternoon and welcome to our first issues in national security lecture for this calendar year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. I'd like to note that some of us are here in person. Others are gathered via Zoom and we hope you all enjoy the presentation. Brewerable Chatfield is on travel and is unable to join us this evening but I welcome you on her behalf. Over the 2022-2023 academic year we will be offering 16 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world from our resident faculty. This is intended to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. We also welcome participation by the entire Naval War College extended family including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and members of the military spouses of Newport. The college will be pleased to offer a certificate of completion for all participants who attend at least 70 percent of the offered lectures that's 11 of the 16. You can participate here in the audience via Zoom or even by watching the lectures when they're posted on YouTube. We'll ask you to keep track of how and when you participate and we will ask you to self-certify your completion towards the end of the series. Looking ahead on 24 January Dr. Hank Breitman will speak on humanitarian assistance. Okay on with the main event during the presentation it follows our virtual participants should feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we will welcome questions from our local audience and we ask that you use your microphone if we call upon you so everyone can hear the questions. Today's presentation will provide some perspective on the evolving relationship between human and machine. Dr. Schultz will use historical and modern concepts to examine how human machine fusion advances our creativity how we can deal with fears associated with robotic overlords and Orwellian concept coincidences and he will touch upon what it means to be human in the age of technology. Tim Schultz is the college's associate dean of academics. Prior to joining the Newport faculty in 2012 he served as the dean of the US Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Tim earned his PhD in the history of science and technology from Duke University in 2007. He is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, Colorado State University, the Air Command and Staff College, and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Formerly a US Air Force colonel he spent much of his aviation career as a U2 pilot enjoying the view over some interesting regions of the globe. I'm pleased to pass the microphone to one of the smartest guys I know, Professor Tim Schultz. Thank you, sir. That's right. Okay, thank you, John Jackson, and welcome everybody here in person and out there in the virtual world. It's a pleasure to engage with you this evening about a topic that I'm really interested in personally and professionally. This sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative and always fascinating relationship between humans and machines and this evolving human and machine relationship. I'm going to give you a perspective tonight as a historian of technology which means we'll be looking backward into the past, seeing what lessons we can draw from there as we evaluate our current circumstance and together we can kind of peer over the horizon into the more distant future and see where those pathways might be leading us. I see this evolving human machine relationship as sort of a frontier, an unknown unexplored country. It's always evolving and always changing before our eyes, and they were college graduates. They're comfortable with working and operating and thinking and leading and fighting on the frontier, the frontier of sea and air and land and space and cyber and this human and machine relationship which informs all of those. Before I really get into the details about humans and machines, though, in fine naval work college tradition, I want to start out by coming at things from a different angle and not talking about the subject at hand because I want to come at and we teach our students to do this, come at things orthogonally at a right angle, differently. Don't just think outside the box but stand on the top of the box to get a better view and just try to re-examine the problem sets or the situation. So with that in mind, I'm not going to talk about technology right up front. Instead, we're going to talk about basketball. I know there are some basketball fans with us. Who would you say is the greatest basketball player of all time? I hear Michael Jordan. Do I hear anybody else? I hear Jordan again. Some fervent Michael Jordan supporters. Larry Bird, maybe. There are others out there. The correct answer is Wilt Chamberlain, and I think this gentleman was thinking, somebody was thinking about Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain was the greatest basketball player ever. He was a big man, 7-1, ranged between 245 and 275 pounds, a dominant force on the courts. In the 1961-62 season when he played for the Philadelphia Warriors, he averaged over 50 points a game. Nobody's ever come close to that. It's news if somebody scores 50 points in a single game. That was his average for a whole season. He really is the greatest player, though, because he had the greatest game ever. In the winter of 1961, excuse me, 62, Wilt Chamberlain, and by the way, the area's there. You can see the dominant force. He was playing, the Philadelphia Warriors playing New York Knicks, and Wilt scored 100 points in regulation. Didn't go over time, 100 points. Nobody's come close to that. I think somebody scored, Kobe Bryant scored, I think, 81 points in a game, and that was a big deal. Wilt scored 100 points. In that game, he shot 32 free throws. So he went to the line 16 times, 32 free throw attempts, and he set another record and made 28 of those. So it was 87.5%, which is a wonderful, exceptional percentage rate for making free throws, and that put him right at that century mark, that 100-point game. But that season, he was doing something a little different. In the season before, he was a terrible free throw shooter. He shot about 50%. And we see that with big guys in the NBA, like Wilt, like Shaquille O'Neal, Shaquille O'Neal, good player, dominant player, but terrible at the free throw line. Such was the case with Wilt. So he wants to fix that. And in that season, he dramatically improved his percentage from 50% to 60%, which is a noticeable improvement. And he did it by approaching the game differently, in a way that is a little surprising. There's Wilt Chamberlain shooting a free throw in 1962. Granny style, underhand. Do you ever see anybody shoot underhand nowadays? Probably never. Do you ever see anybody in a college team, men's or women's, or even in the WNBA, do any of them shoot underhand? Nobody shoots underhand, but it's a much better way to shoot biomechanically. It is much more efficient. It's much more accurate. And when you have a wingspan like Wilt Chamberlain with these really long arms, you can just plop the ball into the basket. It's almost like a layup. And in that game, that epic hundred-point game, he made almost every free throw that he attempted. And he got that hundred-point mark. Next season, though, he goes back to shooting in the traditional style, shooting overhand like everybody else, almost everybody else. And his percentage plummets to 50%. A couple years later, he's shooting 38% from the line. That's terrible. Any one of us in this room, including John Jackson, could shoot 38% from the free throw line. Maybe 40%, John. Why did he stop this far superior technique? The answer actually is pretty simple. It's pretty human. Here's what he said in his autobiography. I felt silly like a sissy shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I just couldn't do it. So he stopped this winning technique. And it is a winning technique because if you are in a close game and you're the big man like Wilt or Shack or somebody like that, and the game's getting down to the wire, the opposing team, they just have to foul you and you're going to go to the free throw line and you're going to shoot poorly, and maybe you'll make one basket and the other and the opponent gets the ball and it's like a turnover and they can then go and maybe score two or three points. You deny the enemy, the opponent, its strategy if you can just be a big man and shoot better from the free throw line. But players don't do that. They don't deny the opponent that strategy. Why? Because of image. Because they prefer vanity over victory. They would rather conform than command and take charge and change the nature of the game. They are so compelled by how they look and by tradition. That's what they value even more than winning. Players and coaches, they always talk about win, win, win, but something else is more important. And that's vital for us to understand as we think about our own institutions, our own organizations, our war fighting organizations. What are we doing that appeals to our vanity more than victory, that appeals to the way we conform rather than the way we might command or lead? I'm going to come back to this idea a couple of times when we talk about the relationship between humans and machines because it is relevant in terms of this ongoing adaptation between the two. So I'll put the basketball away for a few minutes at least and we'll pivot now a little bit to the real subject informed by this different way of looking at things and understanding what made me really motivate humans some of the time. I'm going to go over some frameworks, the general ways to look at this evolving relationship with technology and what it means to be human in the age of technology. I'll give you some examples of the fusion of humans and machines, some of the fears associated with machines out of control, machines taking over, machine subjugation of humans. And then we'll look at some of the frontiers, these over the horizon promises or possibilities perhaps. But I first want to talk about this unique image, this fist bump, something's going on here that's a little bit different. It's not just any fist bump, as you can tell, and also because of the personalities involved. You recognize the person on the left there as President Barack Obama. This is from 2016. He is fist bumping with a gentleman named Nathan Copeland who's sitting there in his wheelchair. Nathan is paralyzed from the neck down, but he's controlling this prosthetic arm, not with blinking his eyes or moving his lips or anything. He's controlling it just by thinking about it. He has this neural interface and it's this new technology that's being demonstrated here. Nathan is at the frontier of technological change and it's changed even in the last seven years since this image was taken and we'll get a little bit more into that. But this is a pretty epic fist bump, I think. And Nathan Copeland, he's a fascinating guy. Think of what he and others like him could do as this technology advances, what they could become. He could be a surgeon. He could be a pilot, a drone pilot. He could be any number of things rendered possible by advances in technology. But to understand this, I want to talk about a few frameworks or ways to think about humans and technology. And I like to say that the first rule of the future is to look into the past. We have been there before. And one of the key underlying assumptions that I make, one key tenet to my argument, is that human nature doesn't change. We recognize ourselves in the past. Don't we recognize this young man? We've all felt that imaginative. We know people, children who feel that imagination just take over them. It's a wonderful human image. We've all been there before. A mentor of mine likes to say that even though technology changes over history, humans do not change over history. Human nature doesn't change over history. He argues that humans change throughout history only in their costume, only in what they wear. And that's all. There is something to that argument, I think. Here's some evidence. This is an image from 1839. Photography was invented in the 1830s. And shortly after it was invented, what do we do? What do photographers do? They turn the camera on themselves. This is the first known selfie by a guy named Robert Cornelius in 1839. I'm told that millennials now will take an average of about 26,000 selfies in their lifetime. This was selfie number one. Human nature changes not. Another example. A couple of decades after photography, we get into the development of motion pictures, movie cameras. What's the first movies that are made? Movies of cats. Cat videos are the first movies that are made. This is a film called Boxing Cats filmed by Thomas Edison himself in 1894. Human nature does not change. Here's an image from 1906 from a British magazine. And it's making a forecast for 1907. It has a woman on the left and a man on the right. They have this wireless telegraph, each of them in their laps. That's what the term back then was for what we now call a radio. They have this aerial antenna each sticking out of their hats so they can get better reception. And the caption 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 your dinner table and at restaurants all of the time when a man and a woman or family members seated together and they're doing this and they're ignoring each other. Human nature doesn't change. Only in their costume, as you can see. Let me give you some military examples of sort of a natural human impulse or reaction. The British Admiralty, they were very fearful of the advent of steam power because it would change the status quo and potentially disrupt their dominance. Steam vessels will strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the empire or so the thinking was in 1826. You can't blame them for thinking this. A few decades later, you see a similar thought with regard to the advent of submarines. Here's what one Admiral said, submarines are underhand, unfair, and damned unenglish. If you are at sea and you capture a submarine crew, then you sail them into port and you hang them by the neck until they are dead because they are criminals, they are pirates, they're unenglish. See what I did there with underhand? Submarines, it's like shooting underhand. It's almost like cheating, but it's kind of, I guess, within the rules, but it upsets the nature of the game that everybody's used to. Organizations resist that type of change until it is used against you. And then maybe your attitude changes as we see with this type of technology. So the future, yes, we've been there before, human nature tends to be pretty consistent. Another lesson about the past and that we've been there before is we've been through times of tumultuous change before. Right now we all feel like we're in one and indeed we are. I held up an iPhone a minute ago that was invented or presented in 2007, just 15, 16 years ago. It seems like so much has happened in just that short amount of time as we all walk around with much more advanced versions of that iPhone that can do so many more things than even Steve Jobs visualized. But let's look at a period of time where there was a lot of rapid change. I just want to give you evidence that we have been there before. This is from 1947 to 1957, just a 10-year span. In that 10-year span, we break the sound barrier with the Bell X-1 jet aircraft. We develop thermonuclear weapons. And by the way, I love this image from the early 1950s. All these people enjoying a poolside vacation at some hotel in Las Vegas. But look up on the horizon. It's a mushroom cloud boiling up into the atmosphere. When you see that poolside in Vegas, you know the status quo has changed. Imagine what's going through their minds when they see that. The ICBM was developed in that same timeframe. The first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, came online. Children were practicing duck and cover drills at school. The transistor was invented. They've gotten much smaller in the subsequent years. Sputnik in October of 1957, jolted the status quo, caused an enormous shock in the West. The discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, Rosalind Naut pictured, unfortunately, it ushered in or it enabled the genomics revolution, which we're experiencing today. The pill. This is a technology, a revolutionary technology. It opened the door to vast societal change, which we're still experiencing now and will continue for an untold number of years. Ten years, a lot of things going on. So we've been through rapid times of change before. We feel though that something might be a little bit different now. There's a book called by Friedman from the New York Times. It's, thank you for being late. He talks about technological change. He likes it when people are late, so he can think about thoughts that have been intriguing him. And he comes to mind or to this notion that we've had a lot of change going on recently. And it's taken on a different kind of character because of combination of these things, computation and interconnection and innovation, all coming together, especially that computation piece. And it's increasing the rate of change, and it makes it seem almost like it's out of control. So we have still our human imaginations, but now they're captured differently. The same type of young boy, just as imaginative, but now he's seen the world differently. He's perceiving it differently. Maybe he's thinking about ways to manipulate it differently due to all of this rapid advent of new enabling technologies. I like to portray it in graphical form as technology's capability, having a sort of an exponential growth or an exponential increase over time. Thanks to this combination that Friedman talks about of computation, interconnection, and innovation, this curve represents a nonlinear growth. It would be an example of, say, the number of people who have smartphones or the number of drones in the sky, small drones up to airliner type drones, the number of nanotechnology patents, the number of cyber attacks, the number of people who have had their DNA sequenced by 23andMe or some other firm, things where the more you get or the more you change, the more you even change after that, this nonlinear growth. We are in that period. This is a challenge for Naval War College graduates. It has strategic implications. How do we keep up with this technology? We walk backward into the future. We don't know where this curve is going and how we're going to keep up. Thomas Friedman also likes to note that this curve is shaped like a hockey stick, and it comes to mind for him. Wayne Gretzky's famous quote, the great Gretzky, famous hockey player, his quote, I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. How do we educate our Naval War College graduates so they skate to where the puck is going to be? How do we discern where this technology is going and where it's taking us, especially as technology's capability seems to be rapidly increasing, but human capability, it doesn't increase like that. I very generously gave it a slightly upward slope here, but those of you familiar with teenagers and TikTok and Twitter would probably argue that it's actually a downward slope over time. Questions makes me question our confidence in the future, but it's up to humans, it's up to strategic thinkers, it's up to inventors, it's up to Naval War College graduates to figure out how do we bend this curve so humans can keep up with technological change and maybe utilize it, exploit it for the better. Bending the curve, as we call it, and one way to do that is with human and machine teaming, fusing humans and machines together in novel ways to make them both better and to amplify human capability. So let me talk about fusions now for a little bit, which includes this human and machine teaming. Here's one example from the late 1940s of poor human machine teaming. The Air Force was interested in pilots being able to withstand more Gs. If you're flying an aircraft in the seated position, you can withstand up to a 9G acceleration force, but if you're laying down, you can almost double it. You can withstand about 18 Gs. Turns out though, this is a very impractical way to fly and engineer the aircraft around a pilot laying flat. It just didn't work. It was a poor fusion, so it was abandoned. What really took off though was human machine fusion, human machine teaming that involved information, and it came from the mind largely of this gentleman here. His name is Norbert Wiener. He developed the term cybernetics in 1947. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word for steersmen, and a steersman is one who says steers a boat but is compensating for changes in the environment, and there's this information feedback loop to keep the boat on a straight course. Cybernetics is really just a fancy term for information feedback. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician. We think this is a simple concept, but mathematically it's very challenging, and he did the math on it. He posited that if you have adequate computers and adequate sensing power, you can do just about anything and have almost any degree of elaborateness of performance, and humans can be integrated into that cybernetic system. Cybernetics has really defined the second half of the 20th century, and Norbert Wiener was one of the three great titans of the information age, along with John Von Neumann, who was involved with the fundamental improvements in the digital computer, and another gentleman named Alan Turing. I'll talk about Alan Turing here in a little bit, but cybernetics matters. I'll apply it here in a minute. Who are the best pilots, I sometimes ask? Here are some famous ones, Lindberg, Charles Lindberg, this gentleman in the middle is William Hopson, a famous airmail pilot from the 1920s. This is Jacqueline Cochran on the right, a test pilot in the 1930s and 40s, first woman to break the sound barrier. Excellent pilots, but really the best pilots are ones who learn how to integrate themselves with a complex system and find out what machines do better and what humans do worse and compensate for both. This was a fundamental change that started to take place in the 1930s and 1940s. Here's an excerpt as an example from 1943. This is the flight manual for a B-17. It instructs the pilots. Below 10,000 feet, you are a flyer. You're controlling the aircraft with your physical skills, your senses, your cognitive skills, but above 10,000 feet, you become something different. You are a redesigned machine. You are a component, a node in this cybernetics system where you are exchanging and processing information and the heart of this cybernetics system of the B-17 is not a human. It is a machine. It's the Norden bombsite. This is the heart of the B-17, the most important part for its mission because it is linked up to the autopilot. It controls the aircraft and its bomb run far better than any pilot can. The machine is better. We can see here the bombardier operating a bomb site. He links it up to the autopilot. The pilots remove their hands and feet from the controls and let the automation fly the aircraft in that cybernetics system. Those are pilots doing what they need to be doing. In that same era, we took all of the humans out of some B-17s, completely roboticized them and turned them into remote control bombers. There's this pretty sophisticated approach. Even in the 1940s, in 1937, the future five-star general in charge of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Hap Arnold, he said, we need to relegate the human flyer and elevate the mechanical flyer. He saw this coming, this changing human-machine relationship. After the war, he said, I think the time is coming when we won't have any men in a bomber. That has come to fruition today. Just after the war, we see an image of this change in the nature of the human-machine relationship. This electronification of the pilot, this processing of information now is becoming more important than anything else in terms of controlling these aircraft. In 1947, a transport aircraft took off from Canada, flew all the way to Britain, and it did so with a full crew on board, but the crew never touched the controls from standing still on the runway in Canada to coming to a full stop on the runway in Britain. They never touched anything. It was entirely electronic and automatically controlled. Very sophisticated for 1947, and things have only taken off since then, and now we see a modern pilot, a modern aviator operating a remotely piloted aircraft like a Predator or Reaper drone. This is a more modern manifestation of that cybernetic human-machine fusion. Here's an image of an unmanned F-16, a QFF-16. You can see there's no pilot there. A recent chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force said this notion of one pilot and flying or operating just one aircraft, that's in the Andrathal way of doing business, because now pilots can control multiple aircraft from their one aircraft using automation. Arguably a better way to do business, and I really like this image, by the way, we talked about selfies earlier. This is what it looks like when a robot takes a selfie, when a robotic F-16 wants a selfie, there it is. Come a long way from Robert Cornelius in 1839. Here's another modern cybernetic system, a fusion of humans and machines to the point where it's so sophisticated it may be the last man-strike fighter that the Navy will ever buy or fly. And similarly, the chief of staff of the Air Force about the F-35 says it's like a computer that happens to fly. This is a result of human machine fusion in the modern age. Here's something Elon Musk said recently, which angered some of my fellow Air Force aviators, but there you have it. Fighter jet era has passed. It's drones. That may or may not be the case, but a case can be made for it. But there are other fusions. My research focuses on aviation oftentimes, but I want to give you some other examples. For ground warfare, you've seen images of these robotic mules or dogs, things that can help out our ground forces. They're getting to the point now where you can command them with voice. They can sense you. They can sense if you're getting fatigued. They can sense your motion, how you comport yourself, and they're exchanging information that way. And they're altering what they do because of that in a cybernetic system. This notion of cyborgs has been around for a while. And there are a lot of cyborgs walking among us. Some of you know people with pacemakers or insulin pumps or cochlear implants. They're cyborgs, technically. They're a cybernetic organism. That's where the term cyborg comes from. Cybernetic organism, an organism that has machines fused with it that are used to exchange information and operationalize that information. Soon, maybe we will all be natural-born cyborgs. Nathan Copeland, who I showed you earlier, he's a cyborg now. And a pretty cool one at that. And there he is, again, at that cybernetic frontier. What's interesting about Nathan, though, is you can see, if you look at the top of his head, he has these things literally drilled into the top of his skull. And they're heavy cables. It's this big apparatus, a bit clumsy. Well, there are improvements being made to that to make it just something the size of a little bit bigger than a quarter and implantable underneath the skull wireless. And you can just recharge it by putting a recharger pad on the top of your head. And it can establish that neural interface with some type of machinery. And that's sort of what it would look like here. To implant that, by the way, human surgeons can't do it. They don't have the skill. A robotic surgeon is used because it has much finer motor skills to do the delicate implantation of this into the human brain. Welcome to the modern age. Welcome to modern cybernetics. There's actually, like everything else, there's an app for that. Or soon will be where the Neuralink app, you instead of using your keyboard and mouse, you could control it with the activity of your brain just by thinking about it. Maybe your children or grandchildren will be using that sort of thing. Maybe you will be. This is one of the out there ideas with human and machine fusion. It's called the singularity. Some of you may have heard of this before. It's this point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But along the way, we learn or we're taught how we can download our own brains, our connectome, our neural network into a machine and become immortal. This small print here on Time Magazine, it says, if you believe humans and machines will become one, welcome to the singularity movement. This is a myth of the future. This is somebody looking at where that curve might be going, where the technological trajectory may possibly take us. I would think of it as kind of a technomistical ideation. This may never come to pass, but the current state of technology has people thinking about this sort of human-machine interface. I want to get now, though, into some of the fears involved in this evolving relationship between humans and machines. My favorite examples are here on the screen. You all know this entity on the right, the Terminator. Oddly enough, the Terminator is the only character to make Hollywood's list of top 100 villains and Hollywood's list of top 100 heroes. And we all love the Terminator, right? This image on the left, this is from the Stanley Kubrick Arthur C. Clark production from 1968, 2001, A Space Odyssey. This is the HAL 9000 murderous computer. And if you think about it, you look at it, look at the Terminator's eyeball. It is a nod to Stanley Kubrick and the HAL 9000 computer. It is a small version of the HAL 9000 computer. HAL, HAL 9000. Some think it was a play on words for IBM. If you add one letter to the alphabet to HAL, you get IBM, because this is where Stanley Kubrick imagined IBM might go in terms of creating computers that may want to murder us someday for their own reasons. Speaking of IBM, it struck fear into some people when an IBM computer defeated the greatest human chess player ever, Gary Kasparov, back in 1997. People thought, oh, this is the end of human dominance. Shocked Gary Kasparov. He thought he was going to utterly vanquish this computer, and he didn't. He was clearly defeated. It helped generate some fears of the modern age, but I want to get into some renditions of those, this notion of Big Brother and Big Other, and also loss of control. What do I mean by Big Brother? We all are familiar with this novel from 1948 by Orwell. This notion that a highly technologized society can completely control its citizens, that's a modern fear of technological growth and its subjugation of humans as it unemploys us, or enslaves us, or eradicates us. We see in this Orwellian world, or an element of this Orwellian idea, this thing called the panopticon. Panopticon just means something that can see everything. Pan means all, like pandemic. Panopticon is the ability to see everything. This is an old idea from 1798. It's this notion if you put a guard in a guard tower and tint the windows, the inmates have to assume they're being watched all of the time, and it exerts control over them. They'll change their behavior because of that. It's called the panopticon effect. We see it in the modern world all over the place. If you think you are being observed, or that you might be observed, it changes your behavior. China figured it out. This is Tiananmen Square on the left. The people there are being very subtly subjugated to control because they know they're under constant surveillance. The chairman sees all, and therefore the chairman perhaps knows all as well. We see this panopticon effect in the West as well. Here's a modern panopticon, keeping honest people honest in London and in Washington, D.C., and in New York City. This is a portable police panopticon. You don't know if a police officer is in there looking out at you. You have to assume that is the case, and it shapes people's behavior, especially if this is recorded and exploited. It can become even more powerful. And we see that with these two Chinese police officers. They are sporting the latest in panopticon fashion with their sunglasses because integrated into their sunglasses are these tiny little cameras. And you can see that they're wired to their handheld device, so they have the immediate ability to do facial recognition and look for people of interest out in the public to see constantly and recognize immediately that's real power over people. This is a digital stop and frisk. And there's not much that a citizen walking by can do about that. And there's some facial recognition imagery there. Here's another powerful panopticon, and each of you has one on you right now. I know it. A smartphone. It is recording or gathering information about you that might be of interest to the state or to others. Here in China, they have a social credit system, and these young women are displaying their social credit scores. They're proud of them. This is to help the government ensure that everybody's happy and safe and secure and monitored and controlled with their social credit system. So the panopticon in your pocket can be rather powerful, which makes me do this notion getting away from big brother to big other. This is a term used by Shoshana Zuboff in this book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where she talks about how private firms exploit information that can be used to kind of shape and control your behavior. And it happens to all of us. Here's what she says about the Internet of Things, the TV that hears you, the house that knows you, the book that reads you. This is the Internet of Things, and all of us are things in the Internet of Things. We are all interconnected, and there is information being shared about us. Does anybody in here have a Nest thermostat at home? John, you do have one. I'm thinking about getting one. I mean, they're really cool. They can link up to other smart devices in your home, whatever those might be. They can kind of discern and establish a pattern of life for you, kind of like a predator drone orbiting over a village establishes a pattern of life of the citizens in that village. Well, your Nest thermostat can establish your pattern of life to help you, to help you live a better life, right? But it's kind of creepy. It's kind of a big other thing that you're putting on the wall in your house. I think they should redesign this just a little bit. They're almost there, but they should redesign it so it looks like what it really is, the murderous computer from the 1968 movie, The Howl 9000. The Nest thermostat hasn't become Howl 9000 yet, but you never know. You also, some of you may have a ring doorbell. It's not monitoring necessarily the inside of your house, but it's monitoring the outside in your neighborhood. That could be super useful. It's very secure. That's a societal good to a point, but it's also a panopticon looking outward as well. This is something the CEO of Google said, Eric Schmidt, and it's kind of creepy, I think. 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 it all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about. And look when he wrote this, 2010, 13 years ago. That's an eon in terms of this rapid nonlinear increase in technological change. So think what those systems can do now and can discern about you and about me. That's a big other. There's also in terms of fears of technological change and how it relates to humans in the real world, this notion of loss of control. And the issue at hand here is this loss of cognitive control. Some systems are so automated, you don't understand how they're working. And when you lose cognitive control, you lose physical control. This contributed to the disaster of the USS McCain, where there was a loss of cognitive control, loss of cognitive awareness. There was confusion about what the steering system was doing, about how to change what the steering system was doing and how to manipulate the ship and where the ship was. And it resulted in a physical disaster. The airline captain, Soli Sollenberger, who landed that airbus on the Hudson River a few decades ago, he famously said that with modern technology, it changes the nature of errors that are made. Losing cognitive control is a new type of error in our relationship with technology. So if there's a change in the nature of errors that are made, it suggests there's a change in the nature of our relationship with technology. We see here another image of the USS McCain and the result of that loss of control. There was also a loss of cognitive control in the two airbus, excuse me, the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. The autopilot, the automatic system was doing things that the pilots didn't understand why it was doing it, and they couldn't regain physical control over those aircraft and they crashed and killed everyone on board. You lose cognitive control when you don't know what the automated systems are doing, and then you lose physical control. A very poorly engineered system in the 737 MAX aggravated by a lack of training for those pilots in how to turn off that system. Another element of this loss of control is this fear that humans will just be out of the loop completely, and humans and machines will be making decisions entirely independent of humans and not no longer subject to human control. This is the thesis of the campaign to stop killer robots, this notion that predator and reaper drones, they're fully automated and out of control. That's factually incorrect. They are under actually exquisite levels of human control. In the future though, they will probably be more automated and what will that mean for the ability of humans to exert proper control. We see this depicted in various different forms of art here as well. This brings me to the final section here on the notion of frontiers. A key aspect of this frontier of the human machine relationship, human versus machine, is this notion of a cognition. I've already talked about cognitive control. The former editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, he compares cognition to electrification. Electrification, we all know about that. You plug something in and it gives you the ability to do new stuff or things you couldn't do without it, like eat your food and make ice and watch TV and all of those things. In cognition, you're not plugging into an electrical network. You're plugging into the cloud and the cloud can do things for you that you could not have done yourself. Here are some examples of cognition, things that you have done for you or help augment your awareness or make life more convenient for you because it does a lot of the thinking for you. When you drove here to Newport, Rhode Island for the first time, most of you probably did not use a paper map. Most of you probably used your iPhone and a program called Waze, and Waze can know where the traffic jams are and reroute you in real time. That's not something humans cognitively can do, but with cognition plugging into the cloud, we can do that. That's part of the frontier that we're already operating in. What about cognifying warfare? To what degree is warfare and will it be cognified by intelligent machines and should it be? Is that a good idea because warfare, after all, is political in nature, fundamentally political. It's a dual. It's a human scourge. It's a human event. It's a human phenomenon. Here's some examples, though, of cognition of modern war. This is an unmanned system, which John Jackson talks a lot about in his Unmanned Systems Elective, putting a plug in for your elective, John, which is outstanding. Here's what the CNO said a few years ago, we're in a new age of cognitive computing, machine assistance to help us all make sense of that data. Last year, the Navy conducted Project Overmatch. You see the USS Fitzgerald here up in the top operating with this vessel here in the bottom, which is either unmanned or optionally manned, and the Navy is trying to figure out how to integrate these types of manned and unmanned systems for greater lethality and greater resilience. Here's what the CNO had to say about that. He's talking about man and unmanned teaming. We've already talked about a little bit on man and man teaming today. The man loop is going to be an important piece for a while before we get to a point where it's hand off with a high degree of autonomy. This is what many people fear, but this seems to be where the trajectory we are letting the trajectory take us at this point, the cognification of war. We see this on land as well. This is a Russian device from 2021. It's equipped with a machine gun, an artillery tube, and a flamethrower. So now we have the Russians are developing an unmanned flamethrower. What could go wrong in that scenario? Although I think the Russian project here has been somewhat derailed by our friends in the Ukrainian armed forces who have sent the Russians back a bit. A former Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, talked about the cognification of warfare, this new frontier of algorithmic warfare, where due to these cybernetic systems with increasingly high elaborateness of performance, they can do a lot of our thinking for us. They can take terabytes of data and make sense of it and use his words, these types of systems in this new frontier of combat, they can provide actionable intelligence and insight at speed. And when he says at speed, it doesn't mean the speed of human thought. He means the speed of machine thoughts. That is how we compete in the modern battlefield. Another notion of cognifying combat, I'll go back to aviation. Here's an image from World War II of Colonel Benjamin Davis. Colonel Davis had sharp eyes, very fast reflexes, and a killer instinct. And he had a pretty good mustache as well. Here's a pilot from the Vietnam War, Colonel Robin Olds. Colonel Robin Olds also had sharp eyes and fast reflexes and a killer instinct and a rocking good mustache, an iconically good mustache. These two gentlemen, excuse me, they operated primarily based on their own physical and cognitive abilities. The seat of the pants flying and their awareness of the battle space through their own human senses. That has changed. Here's a modern F-35 pilot. This F-35 pilot no doubt has a very sharp eye sight. Fast reflexes and a killer instinct, mustache is probably optional. But the sharp eyes are also aided by machine vision. In his visor, this is a $400,000 helmet that he's wearing. It was $400,000 five years ago, so who knows what it is now. On the visor is projected information by the computerized system to give him situational awareness about the battle space. So he doesn't really have to look around himself. It's projected there for him by computers. He has fast reflexes, but things are already also happening at machine speed form. The decision making is happening at machine speed and just presenting him with information about big picture decisions. He has a killer instinct, but if he executes a kill, it's going to be different than the two gentlemen on the left because the modern F-35 pilot is going to kill BVR beyond visual range. He'll never see his opponent, his foe more than likely. The computers will see it and the human pilot will authorize the decision to fire that missile and shoot down another aircraft and he'll never even see it in the typical battle scenario. I wonder if these two older pilots who flew and fought very differently, if they would look at a modern pilot and think, is that fair? Is he cheating somehow? That's kind of not the rules of the game. It's not the traditional fighter pilot ethic, but the modern fighter pilot, the way he or she fights is by commanding the information battle space. That's what makes the most effective pilot. That's where the killer instinct is that might be doing things in a non-traditional way, but it is by far the most effective way. As this F-35 pilot says, you can see, you can look through the jet's eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the world. That's more important than how you see the world in this high tech, high, fast-paced battle space. Another frontier looking backward is robot warfare. Here's an image of robot warfare from 1944, late 1944. On the right is a German V1 robotic cruise missile somewhere over the English channel and it's being destroyed by the Spitfire aircraft just on the left and the Spitfire aircraft is destroying it by flying right up next to it putting its wingtip under the V1's wingtip and doing what it's called V1 tipping. It flips the wingtip up and it knocks the V1 out of equilibrium and it spirals down in the English channel. The V1 was a robot that could not react, it could not think. But what happens in the modern era when we have robots that can think and that can react, you can't just tip them out of the sky like this. As a matter of fact, this was demonstrated by a trial put on by DARPA and a couple of other organizations where they pitted in the simulator and experienced fighter pilot against an artificial intelligence that was controlling the other aircraft in the simulation and it was this this alpha dogfight trial and it turns out the software was much better than the human wetware and in a series of five contests the artificial intelligence won every time. Now it was a little bit unfair because this was a simulation and the artificial intelligence knew the exact parameters of the human controlled opponent which wouldn't be the case in the real world but as machines become more sophisticated you kind of get the idea that this artificial intelligence will be a real adversary of note. You may not know in the future if you are in a battle in combat or a battle of wits with a human or a machine. They've passed the Turing test. They've surpassed our ability to distinguish whether or not they might be human or machine and this is what Alan Turing was getting at in 1950 and here he is on the 50 pound note which was recently released in Britain. He came up with this notion of the imitation game or the Turing test as it became called is when computer intelligence gets to a point where it can mimic human behavior and you can't tell the difference that really is kind of a tipping point in terms of the advance of that computer type of intelligence. I like his quote here at the bottom and this is on that 50 pound note he says this is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be and that kind of summarizes a lot of what I've been talking about a foretaste of what is to come in the shadow of what is going to be or what it what may be because we don't know what's going to happen we try to think of what may happen. Some of you have heard the term sea change I think we're in the midst of a sea change possibly it was coined by Shakespeare in his play The Tempest and it's just this fundamental change in this case a sea change into something rich and strange machines may seem like they're becoming something rich and strange humans integrated with machines cyborg type of humans maybe humans are becoming something rich and strange or the human machine system that integration is becoming something rich and strange somebody with a neural implant a modern-day cyborg may seem rather rich and strange to us think about what this might mean in the future for your children and grandchildren will they become something rich and strange will they be augmented in ways that we don't imagine right now will these augmentations be good for humans or will these augmentations become something more like amputations and make us feel a little bit less human in some ways what trade-offs might we be talking about this brings me to this question of will ethics keep pace what do we really want for humans in society and for our virtue and our for our character it's a pacing problem that neighborhood college graduates have to think about ethics and norms and laws always trail behind technological change so in the interest of asking of answering this question in true neighborhood college fashion you answer a question by asking three other questions these are questions from Immanuel Kant what can we know what should we do what may we hope well for us if machines learn humans can unlearn we can we can start thinking outside of the status quo we can reject we can challenge our resumptions challenge presumptions that have set themselves up as truth as humans operate humans need to orchestrates have a higher level of reasoning and control as machines imitates that's where human creativity comes in humans create as machines are artificial humans it is up to us to be ethical Gary Kasparov came to understand this after he was his stinging defeat in 1997 he actually came around and thought this was a good thing for me it learned me how to it learned I learned Gary Kasparov learned how to be more creative after that it kind of expanded the the whole perimeter of his mind and it felt he actually felt more human after that he learned how to think anew so we can act anew and that's an old line from Lincoln in 1862 I share with all of the incoming students we must think anew and act anew and that means for now in the current age and in the future as well will we think anew and act anew will Chamberlain tried it for a time but vanity was too powerful big guy huge man powerful man but he was felled or inhibited by one small thing his ego he would rather conform than command and that's a lesson for us it's not a criticism of him necessarily necessarily but it's a lesson for us in terms of what we humans deem as important what do we think is important about our identity and what we're willing to do and to not do and how might that change over time so what may we hope probably the message we should take out of this is machines are learning how to think but what's more importantly will men and women think so we've covered a lot of ground here and it's a it's a complex story but the story of technology it's a story about the future it's a story about peace it's a story about war but it's a story that humans are going to write and not machines and it's a story that naval war college graduates are going to writes and I'm confident they'll write a good one so thank you for your attention here and out there in zoomland and I'm going to turn it over to John Jackson thank you Tim that was terrific and I'm going to go home and shoot a bullet into my toaster I just don't trust these machines are there any questions here in the auditory Gary do we have any in zoom now we've gone right to the 531 point so the right at the hour point so I think we've exhausted the time for questions but that's okay the good questions will come later as we all continue to ponder this this future all right good thank you very much thank you all