 So let me introduce David. David is the chief technologist of the Computational Research Department at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He received a BS in mathematics from Brigham Young University. His PhD is in mathematics from Stanford University. And David has published three books and over 100 technical papers in the general area of high performance scientific computing and computational mathematics. He has also published some papers in the area of science and religion. So today, David is going to talk about, if I get to the right one, in the past few decades, there's been breathtaking advances in science and technology as we've heard from some of the mentions of the approach to this quote unquote singularity. And our daily living patterns and social institutions and religious institutions have all been affected. Unfortunately, for those who dislike change, the forecast is for more of the same. It's going to be unrelenting, even accelerating change for decades to come. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and medical technology are all poise for dramatic advances. And I'm not going to read the whole abstract, but David's going to let us in on what that has in store for us as far as dangers that we need to look out for. And how can we direct these developments for good and not evil? So I'll let David go. Thank you. I mentioned here that the Berkeley lab wanted to do a promo for some of the scientists. And so I actually selected and got my photo here on the side of a shuttle bus that went between the Berkeley bar station and the lab. And so this was featuring some of some stuff by some papers I wrote about pie. So in the background, those are real digits of pie. Can I ask you to speak into the mic, please? Sure. Sure. Very much. Thank you. Yeah, OK. So anyway, that's what this is. I might mention, if any of you are interested in this, I have put both the paper and these actual PowerPoint slides on my website. So no one ever has to actually attend any of my talks. They just go to my website. You can read it. OK, so I was just talking with Catherine Haglund at lunch and we were over our sandwiches. And we were talking about this curious trend where in some academic circles over the past few decades, it was fashionable to question whether science really makes progress. And even some notable figures such as Thomas Kuhn questioned whether the science really was making any progress to fundamental truth. And this, I think, really started to get a lot of momentum. A lot of post-modern writers were involved in this. And a lot of this was punctured with this so-called hoax where this physicist, Alan Sokol, wrote an article with a lot of this jargon and actually got it that there was complete spoof, nonetheless, and actually got it published in the leading post-modern journal. But nonetheless, there's still a lot of this mentality out there. That's really surprising how often you hear it. And even like Will and Ariel Durant, some of you have that 11-volume story of civilization. And in sort of an additional volume, they wrote called Lessons of History. One of their questions was, is progress real? And I think perhaps most of concern to me is sometimes I even hear talk like this. Even in some of our church meetings, people say, oh, society's just going to hell in a handbag and nothing we can do about it. And they always see everything in terms of decline. But to me, as a scientist and a technologist, this talk like this is just incomprehensible. I can't even relate to it, much less agree with it. Because everything we see in the scientific world and in modern technology is just one of relentless and frankly inspiring progress. And what I would like to argue here in this talk is that progress is not something we should fight against. But it's something that we as Mormon should embrace, that we should not only embrace but identify with. Doesn't mean that there aren't challenges and problems. But I think Mormonism at its core is a progressive religion. So anyway, just a very brief history of the past, say, 50 or 100 years, I think we have to agree that it's been really a remarkable period. More people than ever before have had opportunities for higher education, far more than in previous decades or centuries. We have the media, radio and television, which in spite of it being a mixed blessing, nonetheless, it really helps a lot of people stay abreast of modern what's happening in the world. The computers, I still remember the time when computers were some very expensive things and large cabinets in a big room in a government laboratory. And then they started to appear, say, in some larger universities and businesses. And then finally, I remember the time of the Apple II first. And the Apple started to come and appeared in the home and the IBM PC. And now I have one in my nice Apple iPhone here in my pocket. And you might say, well, it's not really fair to compare my Apple iPhone with a supercomputer, say, of past year, because after all, my iPhone has a lot more memory than those supercomputers. And there's a lot faster, too. So anyway, all of these, the internet. And we're just starting to see now a whole new wave of medical technology and pharmaceuticals. And science has not stood still. Every week, there's some new development, some new discovery. We're pushing forth the frontiers. No one can deny that there is progress going on. And I would say there's even moral progress. People that follow long-term trends have noted that the number of armed conflicts, in spite of what we may have the impression from reading the news, is actually declining sharply. And part of it is that this phenomenon that our worldwide economic system has made warfare among major trading partners unthinkable, because it would disrupt our economies. Nonetheless, there are downsides. There's no doubt about it. A lot of people are getting left behind. We're producing trash and pollution as prolifically as we're producing products and services. And this business of global warming and fossil fuel dependency, this is really rare to said in the last few years. The internet, millions of new jobs have been created with the internet. But on the other hand, 90% of all email spam and the pornography and viruses, clearly there's just an awful lot of trouble there, too. I think it's also important to note that a lot of particularly more fundamentalist conservative religions, I'm thinking like a lot of some of the evangelical sects, have been greatly challenged, particularly by findings in modern science. They were used to thinking more of the Bible as being a complete description of the world. And they're very troubled to see scientific developments that weren't described in the Bible. And the whole business of creationism has reared its head and continues to be a challenge. These are groups that are continuing to try to pressure state legislatures to bring creationism into the classroom. So there's been a lot of downside. But what's the current hold? What will the future hold? Well, like my introducer mentioned, there's unfortunately going to be more of the same. There's recent developments in things like nanotechnology and is sure and is that this Moore's law of computer technology is going to continue unabated probably for decades to come. It's just astounding. Here in some ways, the computer processors, maybe individual cores are not getting faster, but there are more cores on a chip. So we can still get multiple times more work done. And as software starts to become written to take advantage of all of these, we will continue to see this increase in power. And certainly memory continues on this same curve. Artificial intelligence is making great strides. Just in the past few years, there've been a lot of some real great improvements in some of these intelligent softwares. I put here just a little list of some of the lingo of the modern era. How many know what all of these terms are? Ah, we have one, two, two hands, three, four. I myself just have to continually be, keep up to try to keep up with things here. I had to, a couple of years ago, I had to ask someone what Facebook was. So again, just a very brief here, I won't go into some of these developments, but things like that one time it was just thought that computers would never be able to match a human at plain chess. Well, we all know that's 10 years ago now. A world champion was soundly defeated by a computer program. In my business, scientific supercomputers, it's just up, up, up, we continue, every year there are more and more powerful computer systems that continue to press the outer envelope of what we can do with these large-scale scientific simulations. So much that many people now are saying that these scientific simulations are a third fundamental mode of scientific discovery after theory and experiment. We have so many of our phenomena that we can simulate on the computer that are too expensive or too dangerous to do an experiment with things like the Earth's climate or an exploding supernova that we can't really do at all, but we cannot study on the computer. And medical technology is really starting to take off. Some of the people have mentioned that some of the developments that they, some of the optimists are boldly predicting 100 to 120 year life spans and those are some of the more conservative ones. Other people are just boldly saying that the whole we will start extending life indefinitely. And so here's just a graph that's in my line of work in scientific supercomputers. It's called the top 500 list. It's updated every six months of the world's most powerful 500 computer systems. And if we look at the number top, the number 500, that's the center curve. And right now we just recently went above one petaflops, which means 10 to the 15th or a million billion floating point operations per second where a floating point operation is like a say a 16 digit add or multiply. So we're on this curve, it just relentlessly upward. No sign at all that that's leveling off or that we're coming to an end there. So what are some of these issues that about these developments? Certainly there are a lot of dangers here and even some of the optimists are acknowledging there's some real dangers ahead. I mean, when sir, your favorite sci-fi movie here, you know, it's just about anything you want to imagine from computers getting smarter than their masters to gray goo of nanotechnology running amuck. Some of you have heard this article why the future doesn't need us by this computer technologist, Bill Joy. And even some of the very more optimistic observers like Ray Kurzweil that's been mentioned a couple of times here already. Even he acknowledges there are some real dangers. We've got to be careful. We've got to carefully manage what's ahead. Unfortunately, I think everyone also agrees we can't do much to stop it. You know, how are we gonna tell someone who's handicapped that they can't use some great new artificial arm that can be controlled by certain thought impulses just because some of us who have all of our faculties are just a little uneasy with that or how are we gonna tell some Chinese farmer that he can't plant some great new rice strain just because a few overweight Americans are a little uncomfortable, you can't. The best we can do then is to manage the advance of this technology and make sure that it is for good and not for evil. Here are just a few issues that we, sample issues that we might think of. Like how can we encourage constructive use of technology and yet make sure that some of the bad things don't happen. Someone gave the example of a parent's wanting to design a deaf child. How can we legally and in our society, how can we have laws and regulations that would prevent this type of thing from happening? And what about this digital divide between the haves and have nots? A lot of people are getting left behind. A lot of people are being, a lot of students are being graduated without the level of education that they need to really be functional in this future society. Clearly that we need help there. Someone has mentioned how will in the future when we have intelligent computers enhanced humans and conventional humans, how can all of these three races of people peacefully and respectfully coexist? So we just mentioned education. I think this is clearly a top priority. The US is not moving ahead. It's falling behind by numerous measures. In the meantime, we are overcoming this deficit by importing a lot of very bright people from China and India. But now they have opportunities in their own countries and they are returning to their home and not coming here. So we can only use that card so long. We've got to fix our educational system. Fortunately, the LDS church has always had a strong tradition of education. Let me just mention here. I think it's interesting to note some of the earlier speakers have already talked about this idea of progress in LDS thought and how this has really been a central aspect of our religion that's really quite unique. I'm always struck by our statement of the ninth article of faith. And I was reading this book called The Idea of Progress by Robert Nisbet. And he said, mankind is advanced in the past, is now advancing and will continue to advance for the foreseeable future. So whoa, I've heard this before, but there really is a real resonance here that I think is just not widely appreciated in the church. Here are just a few quotes that I'll just go through here. Well, we have a few more minutes. Brigham Young mentioned that the great, the main spring of all action is the principle of improvement. It says that we have this principle within us to continue to increase and to treasure up truth until we become perfect. Or he says that if we have lived for millions of years in the presence of God and angels, will we cease learning? No, we'll continue. This is very much different than a lot of the traditional Christian view of what heaven is all about. And he specifically emphasized of how our religion encompasses all of the truth in the world, whether it be scientific or religious. BH Roberts, much in the same vein, he even argued that with the restoration it was part of this great awakening of modern science. And one of his writings, he just says, he really recommended, he says, to give attention to and credence to scientific research is to link the church of God with the highest increase of human thought and effort. More recently, Hubey Brown in a book that was published with some of his writings, he mentions how that we should be in the forefront of learning in all fields. And he says that revelation doesn't just come through a prophet of God directly from heaven, but it also comes in the laboratory, in the test tube and out of the thinking mind in the inquiring soul. Already, I can see a lot of us are thinking in similar terms, we've already had mention of this philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I believe is how he's pronounced. He mentions how that if we would incorporate this idea of progress into our world view, that how that this would immediately and radically put an end to this war between science and religion that's been such a problem. And to mention the transhumanists, I've read some of their writings, Mark Gettys, who's one of the leading transhumanists, he said the following, he pointed out that this desire for immortality is not only something that has been taught in all major religious traditions and through history, but he notes how that it's really the fundamental principle behind morality. Because if you know that you are gonna have to be responsible for something, you know, five years, 10 years, a thousand years, a million years into the future, then doing something that's wrong or unethical is unthinkable. And that I think that's a really interesting thought, that the immortality itself is the basis of morality. Just one more quote here by Albert Schweitzer, just a really inspiring quote. He says, to affirm life is to deepen and to someone who affirms life experiences life as its own and he accepts as being good to preserve life, to promote life, to raise it to its highest value and also to destroy life or to repress life is the fundamental principle of morality. I won't read it all, you can read it there. But just I think a very, very important principle that immortality in eternal life really is the basis of religion and to the extent that we identify this and see the progressive view and Mormonism of advancing to, that our current life is just part of an immortality where we are eternally progressing. This is just such a wonderful and beautiful principle that I think we should shout it to the world. So just in spite of the many dangers and challenges, I think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic. This is a great time to be alive and I'm really glad that I am here here and now. I don't look to the past with nostalgia. I wanna be here now, thank you. So we have a few minutes for questions. The Catholic, the state and the Church of the Groups had a very high proportion of the people of higher education and this is true, it's specific. So I'm really concerned that many of those people who've been educated are trained in this sort of Mormon culture to not question authority, not question doctrine, to really be non-creative in their thinking. So my question is, you may not know that, I'll link it to the open question. What would be the proportion of LVF people who really do creative thinking versus the world in general? I don't know how we measure that, but it's an interesting question, yes. Well I do know of Stephen Jones who's an LVF who worked at the University, which is around the same time that up on the question we're working on co-fusion, there was a big controversy about that, that there has been new sightings in journals in China and in Japan having positive results lately and so it's kind of like an example of an LVF science and scene in self-communication. Yes. Part of the response to that question from the press where you were, one of the recent studies, I'm not using it for the time being in the updates, but a decade ago or so ago, you looked at education level curses, activity and faith. And it was found that in most cases the more educated your person was, the less literary they were in their faiths. How else would the LVF define that? Yes, that's very interesting. I was pretty saying that there's a study that showed that the LVF church boxed the normal trend that higher education leads to lower levels of religious activity and faith. Yes. One of the difficulties you mentioned at the top, but didn't discuss, was the problem of keeping some of this advanced technology out of the hands of those who would misuse it. How do you do that? By other technical methods, in other words, we have to apply technology to keep technology private, or in other words, to restrict its access. And so there are no easy answers, but it's just something we have to be aware of all the time. I think if we're redesigning the internet and we may have to, we would design it from ground up for security. The people originally designed it didn't have any idea of the sort of malware, the stuff that would go on. Our ethics have not very often kept up with our technology. It doesn't take much more to clone a human than it does to clone a building. What then? It hasn't happened yet. It might, I know that's a big issue. I don't know what the answer is though. Okay, we'd like to thank David for coming. Thank you.