 The U.S. Naval War College and WC has become the center of naval sea power 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 academic year. I'm John Jackson and I'll serve as host for today's event. Rara Mcgarvin is on travel and is unable to be with us but we welcome all of you in his honor and he may be out there in the zoom atmosphere so if you're out there sir good talking to you. I'd like to note that we're gathered here together in person and we also have a fairly large audience dialed in via zoom. I extend a very warm welcome to members of the LDO Warn Officer Academy and other students enrolled throughout the officer training command. Very glad to have you with us today. Since this series is was begun as a spouse oriented program I'm particularly pleased to welcome Cheryl Garvin here with us and other members of the military spouses of Newport to our get together. I'm now pleased to introduce the college's provost Dr. Steven Mariano to offer his welcoming remarks provost. So thank you for the opportunity to spend 15 or 20 minutes with all of you just kidding. So welcome everyone and Ms. Garvin welcome again on behalf of Admiral Garvin who's traveling today welcome to the Naval War College in this series and as John mentioned a little bit of a eclectic group today but to all of you that not from the Naval War College welcome and particularly those of you out there in zoom land. This is a great example of where the college has adapted it's responded to requests over time to do things differently and and as John mentioned to what started out as something for spouses as has grown and the number of topics has increased and the sophistication and the course the audience is also grown to. So we're happy to have you here at this important kickoff. I'm pretty sure that Professor Jackson is going to talk about the other events upcoming that might include you know words like zombies and and other things so hopefully that'll generate some attention. The idea here is to give you a little bit of a taste of some of the topics that the students see in the Naval War College curriculum it's not possible to replicate all three of the major courses and the electives but you'll get a sense of of the things that the students here receive lectures on and then go up in their seminar rooms and talk about and we hope you find that that interesting. We do typically do one of these a month and the schedule is provided to you it's available online and I'm sure it'll show up here on the screen. Sometimes we get questions about who can can these lectures and discussions count towards some sort of degree or credits and the short answer is no but if you participate in many of these we'll be able to give you a certificate that demonstrates your participation to sort of memorialize your involvement in these lectures and your connection to the Naval War College. The lectures are also posted up afterwards on YouTube I guess yeah and so if you miss one or you want to go back and rewatch or say hey tell a friend I just attended this really awesome lecture by Dr. Schultz and you want to share it with them it'll be up there on YouTube for you to be able to share so thanks again for joining us on behalf of the entire team welcome to hear the Lovely Spruin's auditorium at the US Naval War College. We hope you enjoy this lecture and hope you come back for more so thank you very much. Over the 2023-24 academic year we'll be offering 10 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world our resident faculty. As Provost said this was intended to give just a little taste of what the students are getting through their studies. We began focusing primarily on spouses but now we've gone to the entire Naval War College extended family members of the Naval War College Foundation international sponsors civilian employees colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and indeed people around the world. The primary purpose is to share information and learn together but we do offer some documentation so the certificates of completion if you do 70% seven out of the 10 and again whether you do them here live you watch them live on Zoom or you watch them on YouTube we use an honor system and toward the end of the series we'll ask you to say hey here's when I watched how I participated here's the seven that I did and then we'll create a certificate for you just to recognize that you were here and you learned an awful lot hopefully. Very quickly we'll go through a quick look at the future in October we'll be talking about space and national security in November will be cyber and national defense in December issues facing Taiwan we'll take off the holiday break then come back in January with China and zombies as as he indicated February we'll talk about Churchill and Roosevelt in March I give a presentation called robots that fly swim and crawl which is usually kind of interesting in April we'll talk about Russian mercenaries very much in the news lately in May we'll talk about humanitarian assistance and then in late May just a week or so before we celebrate D-Day we'll have a scholar come in and talk to us about World War II and how the D-Day operation was executed so at the conclusion of the presentation of follows we'll welcome questions from the in-person audience you'll find a microphone in front of each of your seats we ask you to use that microphone pick it up push the button and keep the button held in while you ask your question that makes sure everybody in the audience will hear and our virtual participants will be able to hurt here as well as for the folks on zoom we are welcome to send in questions via the chat function of zoom and we'll try and get to as many as those as we can so let's move on to the educational part of the event 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 deal with fears associated with robotic overlords and Orwellian consequences and he'll touch upon what it means to be human in the age of technology dr. Schultz is the college's interim dean of academics prior to joining the newport faculty in 2012 he served as dean of the air forces 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's a graduate of the air force academy colorado state university the air command and staff college in the school of advanced air and space studies formerly a u.s. air force colonel he spent much of his aviation career as a u2 pilot enjoying the view over interesting regions of the globe i'm pleased to pass the microphone on to one of the smartest guys i know professor tim schultz thank you john jackson i encourage you to attend john's lecture later in the year on robots and drones and you will understand while why his nickname here is the duke of drones nobody knows more about them thank you all for joining us this evening and tuning in out there from the ether this subject is something that fascinates me humans versus machines and i see it as a frontier this terra ignita this unknown country without its own promises and perils and our naval war college graduates our navy personnel they're comfortable with frontiers that is where they think and they lead and they fight and they win the frontiers of sea frontier of air and land and now space and cyberspace and this frontier of emerging technology as well which is making us ask the q the question what does it mean to be human in the age of technology that's a frontier we're all exploring and we're educating people here at the naval war college to help to hopefully ask the right questions something we like to do here at the naval war college is just give a brief outline of where we're going and here is kind of the four areas that i'll i'll touch on this evening a notion of some framework some ways to think about technological change and then i'll mention some fusion some different examples of this fusion between human and machine and sometimes it's an actual physical integration type of fusion and then we'll get into some of the fears that are involved with our potential robot overlords and other issues and then finally and really all throughout we'll talk about the frontiers that face us the challenges and opportunities that might face us in typical fine naval war college tradition though i want to comment this from a different direction so we're not going to talk about humans and machines here for until a little bit first i want to take a different approach we encourage our students to think differently to think orthogonally to comment things from an entirely different angle so in keeping with that let's not talk about this let's talk about this let's talk about basketball and i have a question for you who is the greatest basketball player of all time living or dead let me hear it okay you're michael jordan who else got it lebron james okay larry bird goby bryant jack smith okay any others Steph curry all good players i haven't heard the right answer yet though the right answer is will chamberlain will chamberlain is the greatest player of all time because he had the greatest season and the greatest game of all time it was the 1961 62 season and here he is during that season you can see wilt there he's a big guy he's 71 he range anywhere from 245 to 275 pounds a dominant force on the court and in that season he averaged over 50 points a game it's a big deal now if a player scores 50 points in any game in a season that was his average and on the evening of march 2nd wilts playing for the philadelphia warriors against the new york nick sorry about if there are new york nick fans out here but wilt chamberlain scores all by himself a hundred points he has a hundred point game in regulation no overtime no one has come close to that somebody mentioned koby bryant koby bryant is the one who came closest he had 81 points in one game in that season wilts chamberlain scored multiple multiple games where he scored over 70 points and on that night it was 100 points so he set a record which still stands there was another record set in that game by him he shot 32 free throws and he made 28 of those 32 free throws so again another record so that's why he's the greatest player of all time so why am i bringing up wilts chamberlain well the story here is interesting about how he played in that 100 point game and really in that whole season wilts chamberlain was before then a pretty bad free throw shooter he shot about 50 percent or so that's like shekelo neal bad you know it's it's really unimpressive big guys in the nba are typically not good free throw shooters but that game he makes 28 out of 32 free throws malcolm gladwell tells the story in a podcast of how he does this and i wanted to share it with you do you know how he did it here's how he shot like that he shot granny style he shot underhand how often do you see this happen nowadays in professional basketball and college basketball at high school basketball camps men and or women's teams do you ever see this hardly ever it's very rare but he tried this new technique that season because he wanted to be a better player he taught himself to shoot free throws underhand his free throw percentage went up from 50 percent up to 60 percent that season and that night he shot nearly 90 to get that 100 point mark but what's curious is the following season he reverted to shooting the traditional way overhand and his percentage plummeted back down to 50 percent a couple years later he was shooting 38 percent from the line that's worse than shekelo neal john jackson and i could shoot better than 38 percent from the line uh john shoots at least 80 percent from the line i'm sure her so why did he stop shooting like this the answer really is it's pretty straightforward it's for complex reasons but in a sense it's pretty simple he stopped shooting like this because to him it looks stupid he didn't want to look stupid 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 he couldn't get past that he could no longer force himself to shoot like this and look stupid he preferred vanity over victory he preferred to conform rather than transform and why he's this dominant player he can do whatever he wants but you can see there are these other influences influences that were driving what he did and it drives other players as well shekelo neal said he would rather shoot shack himself would rather shoot zero percent like this than ever be seen shooting like that it's just not going to happen for shack and just about every other player in basketball but why not if you're a big man and it's a close game the other team they just have to foul you you're going to go to the free throw line you're going to shoot overhand you're going to maybe make one of two free throws and the your opponent's going to get the ball back but if you shoot like this and increase your percentage and this is a much more accurate way to shoot then you're going to defeat the enemy's strategy but still players choose not to do that and you all you hear team captains and coaches and players talk about is win win they deny themselves a winning strategy that tells you something about human nature because this scales not this doesn't belong just to the individual but it scales up to teams to groups to parties to nations they refuse to do things because maybe vanity or maybe they're more comfortable with conforming than transforming that informs our relationship with technology and i'm going to bring wilt back into the conversation a couple of times here but i wanted to start out with sort of that different perspective to highlight this issue with human nature and it will inform how we look at our changing relationship with technology okay so here back to the the general approach and the frameworks before i get into that i want to talk about this really cool picture here this epic fist bump that's going on it's important because of whose fists are being bumped you recognize the gentleman on the left this is from 2016 president obama he is fist bumping with this gentleman on the right a guy named nathan copeland and there you can see the fist bump nathan is at the frontier of technological change he is paralyzed from the neck down but he's controlling this prosthetic robotic hand not with you know movements of his eyes or his lips or anything he's controlling it by his thoughts he's been wired so that thing can sense his thoughts and and he can move that hand and fist bump the president of the united states this is kind of where technology might be going at least in one quarter nathan is one of those people that's at the frontier but before we talk more about those frontiers i want to give you some frameworks about some ways to think about or consider technological change and the first rule about thinking about technology and thinking about the future is this simple idea that we have been there before we've faced challenges in the past and we are how also have to be reminded that throughout all these historic challenges and even now and in the modern age human nature doesn't change that's my argument to you you may not agree with it but that is my argument human nature changes not over time it stays the same a mentor of mine named alex roland he said that humans change throughout history only in their costume only in what they wear but they don't change their nature they don't change in how they think and i am going to offer some evidence of that this is an image from 1839 this is one of the first photographers robert cornelius and what did he do he turned the camera on himself and he took the first selfie this is the first known selfie from eight and goes all the way back to 1839 human nature doesn't change in the in the modern era peter singer says millennials will take about 26 000 selfies in their lifetime this is selfie number one a few decades later people figured out how to take pictures and and link them together so you get moving pictures or movies what were the first movies that were made cat videos movies of cats in this case it was boxing cats this was filmed by thomas edison himself in 1894 human nature doesn't change here's an image from 1906 it's from a british magazine and it's giving the forecast for 1907 and it's talking about this new technology these wireless telegraphs early radios and you can see this man and woman sitting in the park and you may not be able to read it but the subtitle says these two figures are not communicating with one another the lady is receiving an amatory message and the gentleman some racing results do you see this at your own dinner table do you see this at restaurants people looking at their phones and ignoring each other because they're more interested in the technology human nature does not change humans change only in their costume as you can see let's get into some military examples of this just in case you're not convinced here's the the british admiral trees response to the advent of steam these were very highly educated and experienced men yet they resisted it they tried to shut it down because it would strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the empire and we can't have that human nature decades later same attitude from some about submarines here's what one admiral admiral sir arthur wilson said about submarines they're underhand unfair and damned on english and if you capture a submarine crew at sea you should be authorized to bring them onto the shore treat them like pirates and hang them by the neck until dead because submarine warfare that's not the way we do things it doesn't comport with how we fight at sea and you can see what i did there they viewed it he viewed it it's underhand it's shooting this way it's not us it's not what we do even though it's much more effective and we learned that in subsequent decades because the stakes were a little bit higher in wars between nations so the future yes we've been there before i think all of us made sense we're facing we're in a period right now of this rapid tumultuous change there's a lot of angst about all of the change that's going on technologically all around us we've been there before though we've been in periods of time of tumultuous change i'll give you an example of one just brief period of time from 1947 to 1957 not terribly long ago but look at what those people back then were facing and we think we're facing a lot here's what was going on for people who live then the sound barrier was broken in 1947 by this aircraft the bell x1 thermonuclear weapons were developed and nothing says the status quo has changed more than if you are enjoying your poolside vacation in los vegas and you look out on the horizon and you see boiling upward into the atmosphere a mushroom cloud that suggests the status quo has changed the icbm was was created in that time period the first nuclear submarine the nautilus was created children school children were practicing duck and cover drills at school for fear of nuclear attack the transistor was invented it became a lot smaller since this first one sputnik in october 1947 it jolted the status quo it shocked this nation and indeed the rest of the world watson and crick invented or discovered the uh the double helix structure of dna along with rosalind franklin not pictured here unfortunately that ushered in the biotechnology revolution the genomics revolution that we are experiencing today the pill was introduced in 1957 think about how that helped to transform politics and society so all of these issues of change going on a short period of time so yes we have been there before but something different is going on now it seems like maybe the change might even be more rapid thomas freedman of the new york times says this is because of these three factors this notion of computation interconnection and innovation all coming together and you see these rapid advances and all sorts of technological fronts because of that that the conflation of those three things so human nature doesn't change right both of these young men they we've all experienced this they're both enthralled there they have this wonderful imagination that's the same but this young boy on the right he's he's seeing the world even differently think how he's going to grow up to see the world and maybe be able to manipulate the world and there are different opportunities that he'll have because of what is becoming different now let me let me depict this graphically here for an indication of technological change and this red line is a simple curve at showing the increase in capability over time and it's a nonlinear increase this is representing an exponential increase and this could be a measurement say of the number of drones in the sky or the number of nanotech patents or the number of people who have had their dna sequenced by ancestry dot com or 23 and b or something like that or the number of people connected to the internet or the number of things connected to the internet of things this is this rapid exponential technological change that's going on and it just seems to be accelerating and this is of strategic importance to our naval personnel to our naval war college graduates because this technological change is going to be harnessed by individuals and groups and parties and nations and pose enormous strategic challenges and as a historian I like to say that we walk backward into the future we can't see exactly where we are on that curve but we can sense that the curve is getting steeper and that change is in the air and we can see examples of that in the past Thomas Friedman likes to say that this red line is shaped like a hockey stick and he invokes something the greatest hockey player ever Wayne Gretzky said I skate to where the puck is going to be not where it has been that's what we want naval war college graduates to do that's what we want military personnel to do to figure out where that puck is going and then skate to that point to try to think ahead and anticipate those future events but it is a very difficult thing to do indeed part of that involves us as us as humans what about our capabilities the red line technological capabilities but human capabilities just like human nature human capabilities by themselves aren't going to change over time I very generously gave it a slightly upward slope here but it's probably a flat line and those of you who are familiar with teenagers and tiktok and twitter would probably give this a declining line maybe a steeply declining line in terms of human capability but what we need to think about what I'd like our graduates to do is be open to bending this curve for humans to make humans more capable and that might involve human machine teaming of various types and that brings us to this notion of fusions how do we as humans fuse in some ways with technology to help increase our capabilities what's that going to look like here's an experiment of what it looked like from the late 1940s this was a failed experiment the air force was trying to figure out how it can get pilots to fly aircraft while they're laying down rather than sitting it's not because pilots are lazy but laying down you can withstand about 18 g's whereas sitting up you can only withstand about nine g's but it turned out this was too difficult too difficult for the pilots too difficult for the engineers bad human machine teaming they gave it up it turns out the real human machine teaming is the ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses of human and machine and play to those different strengths and weaknesses and a whole theory was created about that called cybernetics cybernetic theory cybernetic mean is is greek for the word steersman a steersman is somebody who takes in information and then steers a vessel a boat or whatever based on that information and changes the direction of the system that's what cybernetics is it's the use of information to affect some type of change this mathematician named Norbert Wiener he figured it out he did the math about how information feedback systems work it turns out the math is super complicated norbert wiener turned out to be one of the three titans of the information age along with john von neumann and allen turing more and allen turing here in a little bit but he determined that adequate computers and good sensors can create a cybernetic system with almost any degree of elaborateness of performance and he's seeing this visualizing this in the late 1940s in the night 1950s and we're seeing this come to fruition now he was back in the flat part of the curve but now that curve is getting much steeper but humans have figured out this cybernetic system even before it was given the name of cybernetics i'll give you an example from aviation so i ask here who are the best pilots turns out the best pilots aren't just these famous ones that you see here but the best pilots are ones that can reimagine their role and adapt to new challenges these pilots they're great pilots from from from history one of them crossed the atlantic in 1927 charles linberg on the left the pilot in the middle william hobson he was a famous airmail pilot did a lot of great things in the 1920s he's such a cool dude i put him on the cover of my book the problem with pilots there he is william hobson john that's my shameless plug for my book apologies the one on the right is jackley jacklyn cochran jackie cochran she was a test pilot in the 1930s and 40s first woman to break the sound barrier very influential great pilots but the best pilots are ones who reimagine their roles and adapt and that's what we have been seeing in the history of aviation this sort of cybernetic phenomenon here's an example from 1943 this is an excerpt from the b-17 flight manual for pilots where it's saying telling them below 10 000 feet you are a flyer you're controlling the aircraft with your stick and rudder skills and your normal human senses but once you start getting above 10 000 feet into mission altitudes you are a redesigned machine you become something else your role changes and you have to adapt and when you're at cruising altitude during a doing a bombing run you are no longer the central part of that cybernetic system called a b-17 you're not the most important part anymore during a bombing run this is the most important part the northern bomb site this highly sophisticated device which can help drop bombs with much greater precision than a pilot can do with his normal reflexes and vision and this northern bomb site is connected by the bombardier to the autopilot so in that bomb run it's the northern bomb site and the autopilot they're controlling the the b-17 the pilots are sitting up there like this they're just watching what's going on at that point they've adapted themselves to a complex elaborate cybernetic system the chief of staff of the of the army air forces before he was the five-star chief of staff before the war he said that the human flyer needs to be relegated because we're going to elevate the mechanical pilot he saw this coming he saw this curve getting steeper at the end of the war he sees this sort of electronification of the pilot this greater reliance on on automation and he says that one year ago we were guiding bombs by tv controlled by a man in a plane 15 miles away yes they did that as far back as world war two and then he says i think the time is coming when we won't have any men in a bomber and he was right here's a here's a predator pilot in a different type of cybernetic system dropping bombs with precision somewhere in a very elaborate cybernetic system the human role has changed what it means to be a pilot has changed fairly dramatically here's another example a recent chief of the staff of the air force said that this idea of one pilot flying one airplane that's a very neanderthal way of thinking that's kind of old-fashioned one pilot should be controlling multiple aircraft which means controlling unmanned aircraft like this unmanned f16 i like this image and this one at the top because it reminds me of robert cornelius this is what it looks like when a robot takes a selfie this is that unmanned f16 taking a selfie image of itself we've changed a lot a lot has happened since 1839 with robert cornelius and even now this summer they're testing this this unmanned aircraft except they don't like to call it an unmanned aircraft they call it a collaborative combat aircraft it's more of a euphemism it's a better term and this is something that pilot aircraft can control uh one or more of these things to go out and do missions here's something a test pilot just said it's a strange feeling i'm flying off the wing of something that makes its own decisions and it's not a human brain anymore we see this rapid change in technology and we are trying to forget ways to team humans and machines together for greater effects we see this in the army as well here's robert hindline's vision from 1959 about an infantryman wearing a powered armor suit that is controlled by just the slightest movements of his muscles uh it does what it's must his muscles do this leaves you with your whole mind free to handle your weapons and notice what is going on around you which is supremely important to an infantryman who wants to die in bed which is probably the goal of most we are still on the flat part of the curve towards that technology but you can see examples of how the army might be interested in developing that kind of thing i wonder if in a sense we're all becoming cyborgs the term cyborg you've all heard it before it was coined in 1960 it's just a play on words it's a cybernetic organism when we talked about cybernetics earlier if you fuse a machine with an organism you get a cybernetic organism or a cyborg a lot of you know cyborgs already if you know somebody with a pacemaker or somebody with an insulin pump or somebody with a cochlear implant those are some pretty sophisticated cyborgs that are walking around is that where this line is trending for us are we merging man in machine what's that going to mean for people like nathan copeland and his ability to control things with his mind well here's another advance of this type of fusion that it may apply to nathan copeland you can see here where this apparatus it's drilled literally drilled and screwed into the top of his skull it's pretty ungainly elon must company neurolink has a different approach it's much more sophisticated it's much smaller the company is called neurolink their mission they want to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs like nathan copeland and of course they want to unlock human potential they want to bend that curve and this neurolink device it's tiny they can implant it under your skull you can recharge it with just a putting a recharger on top of your skull it's wireless technology and it's implanted ironically not by a human surgeon but by a robotic surgeon because the the technique is too sophisticated it requires the skill the enhanced skill of a robot and not a human and if you go to the neurolink site by the way they're looking for signups for human trials the FDA just approved just authorized human trials so take a look volunteer your friend to go for that human trial and and maybe see what happens this is kind of looking far out and far up on this potential technology capability curve it's this idea of the singularity a real true a true fusion an indistinguishable fusion almost of human and machine the fine print here on the cover of time says if you believe humans and machines will become one welcome to the singularity moment our movement this is a myth of the future i refer to it as a sort of a techno mystical ideation that is something that's really far out there it's a lot of hype but we really don't know what that future is going to hold but we do know that in addition to hype and a close cousin to hype is this notion of fear and there is a lot of fear out there about technological change here are a couple of images that have been used to develop this idea of fear we all know the person the thing on the right the terminator it's an interesting character it's the only character in hollywood that has ended up on hollywood's top list of top 100 heroes and hollywood's list of top 100 villains it's the terminator but mostly when we think about a really bad machine future it's this terminator the bad terminator villain terminator type of future this is an earlier version of a machine out of control you might recognize this from stanley cubrick's movie 2001 a space odyssey that came out in 1968 well ahead of its time this is an image of the murderous computer the how 9 000 computer that tried to murder the crew on its spacecraft and you can see here that the people who did the terminator they're kind of doing a nod here to stanley cubrick and the howl nine thousand because the terminator's eye is really identical to the howl nine thousand super mad phobic computer that sought to kill people so are we entering that kind of a future that's up to some people's imagination i think but machines are challenging us gary kasparov kasparov was stunned when an ibm computer beat him in 1997 the world was stunned as well nobody expected that and he was shaken to the core it invoked a lot of fears about the rise of machines and the rise of machine intelligence and what does that mean i'll interpret it in a few different ways a few some different lenses these notion of big brother big other and loss of control big brother i'll invoke george orwell's 1948 novel titled 1984 where society is is controlled using sophisticated technology it's this techno autocratic society everything you do is observed it's this big brother type of society everything you see is subject to do the interpretation and control of others and there's this thing called the panopticon effect that's going on panopticon is this term for something that sees everything pan means everything like a pandemic something that's widespread and optic a panopticon an early one that was conceived in the late 1700s is a guard tower in a prison if those windows are tinted it doesn't matter if there's a guard in there or not it will control what you do as a prisoner it's going to shape your actions to some degree and we are surrounded now by panopticons tmn square in china is basically a big panopticon now with cameras everywhere to help control people's behavior because the chairman if he can see all maybe he knows all and he can certainly control all and it will shape what you do and probably start shaping what you think but we see panopticons beyond these autocratic societies as well here's a panopticon in a western city keeping helping to keep honest people honest same thing here in washington dc same thing here in new york city this is a portable police panopticon you don't know if there's a police officer in this or not but it doesn't matter because it's going to shape your behavior because there might be a police officer in there this is a way of controlling people through technology but with the increase in computation and interconnection and innovation we can make this much more sophisticated here are a couple of police officers in china they're sporting the latest in panopticon fashion with these sunglasses and embedded in those sunglasses are these little cameras hooked to their little device and so they can do facial recognition as people walk by they're able as philosopher michelle foucault said to see constantly and recognize immediately and that exerts enormous power they are basically doing an electronic stop and frisk of everybody that they see welcome to the techno autocratic world another form of this panopticon effect is the panopticon that every one of you has in your pocket right now it tells it can tell the world it can tell the government things about you here are some young chinese women in china displaying their portable panopticons and their social credit score some of them seem very proud of this social credit score the government is helping them identify their social standing and they're made to feel safe and controlled and subjugated in this techno autocratic society we see a similar effect that's non-governmental it's not big brother really but it's big other and this involves what's going on in the commercial world there's this wonderful book by shoshana zuboff called the age of surveillance capitalism and notice the subtitles the human future at the new frontier of power she's exploring this new frontier of technology where it exerts control over us we have the tv that hears you the house that knows you the book that rate that read you each of us has become a thing in the internet of things and data about us is streaming everywhere for others potentially to exploit anybody here have one of these nest thermometers okay i see some hands go up john do you have one in your house i think never he has one i'm pretty sure of it i'm pretty sure of it this thing is a panopticon hanging on your wall it it monitors and thinks about your patterns of life it shares that data it helps make you more comfortable day to day you get you get it for that reason but it's kind of like a reaper drone orbiting over a village examining and and identifying patterns of life it identifies your pattern of life and that data is out there for others to exploit i hear that they're going to they're they're in the middle of kind of upgrading the design of the nest thermometer to make it look like what it really is which is a heck of a lot like the murderous howl 9 000 computer that's just my conjecture some of you have a ring doorbell as well that's a panopticon that's kind of looking outward into your neighborhood and what makes it more interesting is that it's connected to a lot of police departments so you get this neighborhood surveillance thanks to this sort of internet of things is that a big other type of thing that we should fear or maybe that we should embrace depends on on you and your context here's something that eric schmidt the former google ceo said talking about how all of this information about us is out there now thanks to our integration in the computer age and now we know where you are we know where you've been we know what you're thinking about we know who you've been with and look when he said this 2010 think now 13 years later we've gotten much deeper on that curve what this really means this is only accelerated another fear is this notion of loss of control and there's some different ways to look at this one of those is a loss of cognitive control sometimes machine systems automated systems are so sophisticated we can't figure out what they're doing anymore this informed the USS mccain accident people lost situational awareness they didn't know how to interpret data through the ship's instruments they weren't there was confusion about how to steer the ship and all this confusion led to a loss of cognitive control and a disaster i like this term that this machine control technology and advances in it changes the nature of the errors that are made and when you change the nature of the errors that are made it suggests a change in the nature of the technology itself in our relationship to it we see here another image of that the mccain disaster we've seen this in aviation as well the two 737 max Boeing 737 max accidents in 2018 and 2019 those pilots lost cognitive control they didn't understand what the automated system was doing they couldn't remember how to turn it off and they subsequently lost physical control of the aircraft because they didn't understand how to manipulate the automation correctly and it flew them into the ground i'll bring you back to this this curve this notion of technology increasing exponentially we see this from a game show from ken Jennings on jeopardy a few years ago here's what he said about being beaten by the IBM computer watson in a game that he was the best in the world at he said ken Jennings said it was alarming it kind of felt like this like this is what it's like when the future comes for you it is not a terminator IP laser eyepiece tracking you down it's just a line on a graph getting closer and closer to the thing that you can do that you thought maybe was human and irreplaceable is this line on the graph threatening to replace us somehow that's how he felt that's a fear that's out there another type of fear that's out there and by the way I love his illusion of the terminator the terminator is a distraction it's unlikely that the terminator is going to come through here into one of these doors and and start taking everybody out it's more likely that our lives will be manipulated by complex emergent AI than some type of gun toting terminator so I'm interested in that connection that he's he's making it terminator kind of distracts us from what really might be going on and this is something that a historian and philosopher Yuval Harari is interested in he's arguing that modern emergent AI is hacking the operating system of human civilization AI is now able to displace us as the sole creators of stories in the sole creators of ideas now it can create its own stories and ideas and worse yet it can manipulate us it can identify what our preferences are and and create stories surround us cocoon us with stories that exploit those preferences and help us go in one direction or another in terms of our our thoughts and our attitudes and our actions our operating systems are being hacked by emergent AI that is a significant fear of his and I think there might be something to that this gets us finally into this notion of frontiers it's not all doom and gloom there are frontiers out there that we can that we can exploit that can be used for the greater good and to greater effect and in some situations to military effect and it involves largely this notion of cognition this is a term that Kevin Kelly the former editor of Wired magazine likes to use and he compares cognition now to what electrification did for human society where you can plug things in and and things happen now with cognition you're not plugging in to an electric outlet you're plugging into the cloud you're accessing this computational power that can do things for you to help you to make you more creative to get to free you up to do other things all of these app apps here are forms of cognition I'm surmising that none of you when you were finding your way to Newport Rhode Island for the first time used a paper map you probably used your phone and an app like Waze that did the thinking for you it cognified your your navigation here and these are other examples of of how our world is cognified but what about cognifying warfare that's more and more of a thing should it be coming more and more of a thing here's an example from just a few years ago you can see what the CNO says about the sea hunter vessel this unmanned or optionally manned vessel he's talking about it's a new age of cognitive computing decision making to make help us all make sense of this data machines can do that better than we can even more recent than this is this project overmatch and things like the Navy's Task Force 59 where we're pairing manned systems like this guided missile destroyer the USS Fitzgerald up at the top with an unmanned vessel to try to amplify our military capabilities and here's what a even more recent CNO said about that he's I think in terms of manned unmanned teaming which we've been talking about this bending the curve with teaming it's going to be important piece of this for a while before we get to a point where you know it's hands off and it's a high degree of autonomy this is the cognification of warfare this is a frontier that all of you will be thinking and leading and fighting in in the future hopefully not fighting hopefully we'll be able to deter that fight but you never know we see this cognification with the term of algorithmic warfare that was put forth by deputy secretary defense bob work a few years ago this notion that machines can crunch data and offer decisions or options at machine speed which is much faster than human speed that's a cognification of warfare but along the way do humans lose agency of sorts what kind of dangers that does that invoke another example of cognifying combat i'll go back to aviation as a former air force guy i can't help it here's an image of a world war two fighter pilot colonel benjamin oh davis a famous and wonderful person who went on to do great things even after the war he had sharp eyes fast reflexes and a killer instinct very effective as a fighter pilot here's a near contemporary of his from the vietnam war colonel robin olds he had also sharp eyes and fast reflexes and killer instincts and an even better mustache than colonel robin olds what would these two think about modern warfare because the way they fought they're relying on their own senses and sensibilities in the in the battle space they're seeing the enemy they're engaging the enemy with largely their own senses although colonel olds cockpit in vietnam was significantly electronified but then it's still mostly his human characteristics that carry the day what would they think about this f-35 pilot this f-35 pilot i'm sure has sharp eyes and fast reflexes and a killer instinct probably the mustache is optional but look what's going on here the sharp eyes they're being replaced with machine vision that visor and that four hundred thousand dollar helmet that has information put onto it by the f-35's computer systems that those computer systems think is relevant to the pilot to do his or her job and to prevail in a fight the way that this pilot will fight is they may never see the enemy that they're going to kill because that engagement will be bvr beyond visual range so they're fighting a lot differently than their predecessors from earlier wars this is a highly cognified environment and so i'll bring wilte back here these two gentlemen on the left are they going to look at this this guy this pilot in the middle this modern pilot and think well that's kind of that's kind of shooting on her hand that's not really how we fight we fight with you you see in the enemy it's it's engaging the enemy up front well that's not what the modern fight might look like remember what who the best pilots are the best pilots reimagine their role they adapt they make this human machine a teamed system as optimal as possible and they have to get over any notions of of vanity or or the tradition that might hold them back here's what one f-35 pilot said you can look through the jet's eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the world 2020 vision that's such a 20th century thing now in the modern world it's computer vision and computer thinking that is really the new frontier and this brings me to the notion of robot war we've fought robots before this is an image from 1944 somewhere over the english channel this smaller aircraft on the right is a robot it's a german v1 unmanned cruise missile very sophisticated for its time the first of its kind and it's being intercepted over the english channel by a pilot flying his spitfire and that spitfire aircraft is coming right up next to the v1 putting its wingtip under the v1's wingtip and flipping the wingtip up and it's called v1 flipping that v1 flips over its gyroscope tumbles and it spirals into the english channel so you can do this if the robot can't think the v1 robot couldn't think it was unthinking but it's hard to tip out of the skies an aircraft flown by a robot that can think and that's what we expect in the future we see a taste of this when darpa a couple of years ago put together this program where they're pitting an ai flown aircraft against a human flown aircraft in a simulator and they did this alpha dogfight trial they did five engagements and the human pilot he won zero out of five times he was vanquished five times in a row the artificial intelligence flown aircraft in that simulator beat the human pilot every time i have to say this was under highly restrictive circumstances the ai knew the exact parameters of both aircraft and the engagement which it wouldn't know in the real world but this is a taste of what is being developed in this case the software was better than the wetware of the human so in a future combat scenario a modern fighter pilot a modern surface operator of some type of system they may not know if their enemy is operated by a human or a machine they won't be able to tell that other unmanned system it's going to pass the turing test it's it's behavior its competence its performance might be equal to or better than a human and this brings me to back to allen turing who i mentioned earlier here he is on the 50 pound note in angland they just redid their 50 pound note to put him on it that's how great his esteem is in britain in 1950 he wrote an important paper about how machines might think in the future and he came up with this notion of the imitation game if they can imitate a human that tells us something about machine intelligence well we are now in the frontier that allen turing foresaw 73 years ago that's what we're operating in now and i love his little quote at the bottom that's on that 50 pound note this is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be those shadows are lurking in the frontiers that we must explore and in that process since we're at the naval war college i'll use an article term we might be in for something of a sea change and that sea change is something from shakespeare one of the many terms that he came up with and it's a fundamental change it's it's it's a sea change where you are transformed into something rich and strange so is technology or machines becoming something rich and strange will that make us as humans as we fuse in some ways with machines would that make us becoming something rich and strange maybe something that's hard to identify from what we used to be and how we used to operate will we become increasingly cyborgs of some type will we have machine augmentations are will those augmentations seem more like amputations and make us feel less human we'll see how that frontier develops another question for our naval war college students and graduates is will ethics keep pace in every case of technological change laws norms morals ethics they all lag significantly behind technological change that's a that's a problem that's a problem our our leaders have to grapple with another thing they have to grapple with is this notion that's been recently called the alignment problem how do we get generative ai artificial intelligence i i like to use the term alien intelligence for ai because it's it's becoming increasingly alien to us and our ability to understand it how do we get it to align with human values that's unclear how that's going to happen that's a leadership challenge as well so these questions of how do we keep up how do we align how do we how do we act ethically these always are revert to these basic questions asked by a manual cons in the late 1700s what can we know what should we do what may we hope those are good questions that we can ask in this modern age of humans versus machines so here's some ways to look at it for machines machines learn if machines learn and they're increasingly learning then humans need to unlearn we need to unlearn perhaps some old ways of doing business and adopt new ways of perceiving how the world works and what our role is in it machines operates humans orchestrate they have this upper higher level view of of of connecting everything is together that's where human creativity comes in and so while machines can imitate humans it's really still humans that can create although that is a danger now with generative AI that's being able to create its own ideas so that's something worth keeping an eye on and as machines are artificial humans we are ethical we are the source of moral codes in a secular standpoint or we invoke other sources of morality and ethics we are the source for that rather than something artificial like a machine back to Gary Kasparov before we wrap up here I mentioned earlier when he lost to IBM's chess computer he was really stung by that but as it turns out he came to embrace it he said it made him better made him better as a chess player made him better as a human it helped him realize how much more creative that he could be so there in lies a lesson for us perhaps this is a quote that I use on day one when every student shows up at the naval war college I share this observation from Abraham Lincoln in 1862 and the importance of being able to think anew and act anew and it still applies in 2023 just like it did back in 1862 and maybe even more so now we need to think anew and act anew in this new technological age where we're trying to figure out what it means to be human will we think anew and act anew well Chamberlain tried to do it and he was successful for a while but he just couldn't keep doing that he had to revert to the old ways but the stakes weren't as high there was a basketball game maybe the stakes are higher now but this is a lesson I don't want to criticize will too much here because it tells us something about ourselves and our institutions and and the way that we think as societies we adhere to certain ways for a reason we need to understand that and how that's going to affect our capability in the future so what may we hope well the one thing we can hope and the one thing that we can do because we know machines are going to be able to think better and better but will men and women think better and better and at the naval war college we are very dedicated to educating those men and women so they can think and lead and fight and prevail at the frontier and that is what gives me hope all right ladies and gentlemen that concludes my remarks thank you for your attention and I think we may have a couple of minutes for questions John I refer I defer to you just a couple of quick questions and and then we all go home and kick our rumbas and unplug our microwaves so any questions here in the audience okay so let's see here ethical means humans in the loop forever how do we ensure that there are humans in the loop or is it as indicated earlier right now they'll be in the loop yeah well humans be in the loop really you hear the term on the loop somehow connected to the loop I think that's a fundamental question and it goes to that alignment problem with artificial intelligence how do we make sure it reflects our beliefs our morals our values what we deem as ethical how do we shape that generative AI and its programming to reflect that that's one way of human ethical and moral values staying relevant but that may be somewhat somewhat at risk but I think that's the the question that we just can need to continue to grapple with the other element of that is liability who's liable when something goes wrong in a highly automated system we'll try our best to find out who was liable in terms of the human or humans involved but will we be able to find that source of liability we have to make sure we can still do that and if we can assess liability we can also assess where do ethics come in who's in who's in charge of making moral decisions to do or to not do something and that is a real challenge in the development of these technologies I think that we need to have a type of oversight where those moral and ethical questions are asked and answered and it not just be this pro forma committee whose report nobody ever reads but somebody who has actually authority and decision-making power what that looks like will be up to more college graduates to figure out thank you sir thank you okay great thank you all okay that concludes the lecture we're going to take about a five minute break and then we're going to have a family discussion group talking with the school liaison officer here at Newport to talk about how they can help you deal with any problems your children might have in school so take five thank you very much for everyone else's come