 We're now going to drill down a little bit more into the state of the technology. And for this segment, we have a very able moderator in Shane Harris. You can go ahead and come up. Shane is a national security writer at the Washingtonian magazine, one of the top reporters on all things national security in town. He's the author of The Watchers, The Rise of America's Surveillance State, which is a very good book. And I should thank Shane, because in addition to helping to moderate today, he was part of our informal brainstorming sessions on putting together the entire day. And so I want to thank Shane for his thought leadership on this subject. And now I turn it up, turn the program over to you. Okay, great, thanks, Andreas, very much. Can everybody hear me okay? Okay, so that was a great introduction to a lot of the really nettlesome policy challenges that we're facing with this technology. Now what we're going to do is sort of, as Andreas said, try to understand what the state of this technology is and where it's going in the relatively near future, because I think it is true to say that this is really poised to take off and potentially be very transformative and perhaps even disruptive, but also extremely exciting. So the two people we have here with us today to help us do that are extremely capable and I'm really excited to have them both together. First to my right is Missy Cummings, who's an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. She spent 11 years as a naval officer and military pilot in the U.S. Navy. She was one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots and wrote a book about it called The Hornet's Nest. Missy and I have had the chance to sit on panels before, and she is just packed with amazing insights and information into this stuff, and she's great. She is sort of one of my favorite people to talk to on this. And then Michael Toscano, who represents just the tremendously diverse and growing side of the, I guess it's sort of say the commercial application, the potential business uses of this as the president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, which includes government agencies and members as well, not just corporations. And previously he served as program manager for research and development for nuclear security in the Defense Department. So he brings a level of governmental insight to this as well. So the first question I want to start with is, as both of you to kind of put on your crystal ball here, and Missy, I want to start with you. And if you were looking out at the next five to ten years of the landscape domestically where drones might be used, what do you see as the probably going to happen applications of this technology? And what are some of those sort of maybe more pie in the sky that might happen given the right circumstances in the next five to ten years? What does America look like in a world of these technologies? Well, what's happening right now, it's kind of a quiet revolution. Drones are revolutionizing the agriculture industry. This is an industry where we just can't get enough people to do the jobs that we need done. And farmers desperately need the technology both for health and crop surveillance, being able to see what's happening with your, the tractors in the field who will also become robots. John Deere has an amazing set of robotic tractors. So this is a community that absolutely needs it for the bottom line. I think the next big revolution that you're gonna see is gonna be in the cargo industry in a very quiet corner of Afghanistan. There are two little helicopters called the K-Max helicopters that have, by themselves, just trucking back and forth between point A to point B, have carried over 3 million pounds of goods by themselves with just a human looking at them through a ground control station on the ground. So I think that you will see the civilian cargo community go that way as well. There certainly is a lot of interest from FedEx and UPS who can reduce costs quite a bit and possibly improve safety if you take the human outlook. So would you say that's something in the next five to ten years is realistic? I think the agriculture is happening now. I think in five to ten years you will see a much more mature industry. Japan basically does all of its crop testing with UAVs, an entire country. So in fact, the United States, we lag a little bit in terms of the implementation of that technology. The cargo, you will see in five to ten years that more military missions will be turned over to cargo. The capability is there to turn commercial missions over to cargo, but it's the regulatory agencies, the FAA, global regulation agencies that will basically slow that down a little bit. So we're probably looking at more like 10 to 15 years for that. And were we imagining then new kinds of aircraft? Or were we imagining putting sort of unmanned systems into existing planes? So you're still going to see the same FedEx and UPS planes? Or is it going to look more like? Yeah, I think the funny thing is what most people do not realize is if you've flown on an Airbus, you're actually flying in a UAV variant. Any digital fly-by-wire aircraft is capable of being a UAV. Airbus aircraft and some Boeing aircraft are highly digital, highly automated, and the pilot is really there just babysitting the aircraft. So it's actually not a huge leap. We could actually convert most commercial planes to UAVs right now with little fanfare. But what's going to happen in the future is new planes are built. They will be, they will include new types of sensors such as some LiDAR sensors and some millimeter wave sensors to actually allow them to have more capability in bad weather, for example. We'll talk more as we go on to about what the technology is capable of doing and what its limits are. So Michael, if you're looking at this from your perspective, particularly how industry sees this, what's the next five to ten years look like? Well, when you talk about the next five to ten years, the real question is when do we get into the national airspace? Because once that happens, we've just released an economic report that says within the first three years, the economic impact is 70,000 new jobs and about 14 billion of economic dollars that are going to be infused. And when you look at over ten years, the numbers go up to over 100,000 new jobs and over 82 billion dollars. But, you know, there was a couple of issues that were brought up early, if you don't mind. First of all, the weaponization of unmanned aircraft systems. And they are called UASs. If you look at the Department of Transportation or if you look at, in this case, the FAA, they are the authoritative body and they call them UASs. You all don't use the word drone? We don't use the word drone because if you go to who the experts are in this particular case, which is the FAA, they call them UASs. We call them UASs because there is a system. There is a human being and we heard about accountability. And that is truly important that there is accountability for all of these systems. Someone is operating the system and the system comprises of what flies, which is about 30%, the mission package payload or what they're carrying, the communication system that exists, the ground station and the human beings because that's what makes up the system. So any time you see any of these things, fine, that's what you need to imagine as a system that's being operated. So that being said, the FAA right now says that no aircraft, manned or unmanned, can deploy any weaponization at this point in time, okay? There is no way that you can deploy. So you can't take the young lady who had Rosa who had the fish. She can't take and put a weapon on that and use it. They are breaking the law. And if you break the law, you should be held accountable. And so that's a big key issue that I think some people don't understand is that there are provisions in place. And the police couldn't do this either? That is correct. So when you get to the point where Missy brought up agriculture, people don't understand also. And that's what I say, there's a lot of information that is either being misrepresented or not being disseminated that you realize that we have about 7 billion people in the world. By the year 2050, we're going to have about 9 billion people. There isn't enough food to feed everybody. So precision agriculture is going to be within the first deployment of these type systems is going to be in the agriculture world. And that's where there's going to be a tremendous ability for us to be able to produce more food. So when you think that you'll be able to feed millions, hundreds of millions of people, you can almost do away with starvation on the planet by utilization of this technology. That's the ramifications. That's the upside of this type of technology. It is huge. When you stop and think that if there was no privacy concern and if there was no safety issues, and if that happens in the next three years or so, the ability for us to utilize this technology is unbelievable. When you look at the students that Dr. Cummins is involved with right now and you look at the entrepreneurs that were just mentioned here, it will be unbelievable the effect that you'll have. You'll be able to understand how weather affects this planet. You'll be able to understand how nature interacts with us in a way that we've never been able to understand before. The research and the exploration that will be available to human beings to understand how to do things in a more effective, efficient and safer way is unparalleled. It's almost like the Industrial Revolution or when we made a determination, we were going to go to the moon. So this has some real tremendous capabilities that were at the precipice of unlocking the door. And in that regard to me, it seems like the big date that everyone's waiting for right is September 2015, which is when, and I want you both to chime in on this and briefly explain for the audience, the date by which the FAA has to be prepared to integrate the national airspace of this technology. So Michael, why don't you describe what that means briefly? And then for both of you, once we hit that date and the skies are sort of effectively open, how's that going to roll out? And when are we gonna start? I mean, are we gonna start seeing drones immediately over Washington or what's that gonna look like? Again, if you look at the FAA Reauthorization Bill, it does say that the FAA is responsible for that integration by 2015, the September timeframe. The FAA's role is safety. Anything that goes into the national airspace has to be safe. And that's regardless of it's man to run man. So that is their paramount and only responsibility. The FAA at this point in time is not responsible for privacy. And so that's a different issue that either the Supreme Court or the Homeland Security or other agencies are going to have to determine as far as that concern goes. But the FAA is right now identifying six test sites and those sites will be utilized to assure that we have safety in anything that goes into the national airspace. So once we achieve that, then you'll be able to understand that it's okay to fly these things and take all of the advantages that I highlighted a little bit. Are they going to be looking at this and saying, you know, setting ceiling caps or saying who can go where? I mean, what? Yes, but I think it's worth noting that this is only for small UAVs. This is not for integrating large UAVs on the scale that we're talking about for commercial aviation, particularly cargo. So, you know, everybody points to the September 2015 as some magical date, only it's actually a very small stepping stone and what's going to have to happen to have truly integrated UAV integration across international and national airspace at all weight classes. And talk about, so what has to then happen if that's step one, is step two, getting what you're talking about an order of magnitude more difficult? It shouldn't be, but the FAA is going to make it that way. Okay, why? You know, and I poke a little bit at the FAA, understanding they have a very hard job to do. It is their job to make sure that there's safe integration and we are talking about a substantial, almost it's a leap of faith. It's really more of a psychological barrier to putting UAVs in the national airspace as it is to a technical barrier. We do need more regulation in terms of what it takes to have better what they call sense and avoid. Right now, the FAA will say that the reason you can't have UAVs in national airspace is because they can't see and avoid like a human can. And for those of you who've ever sat in the front of a commercial cockpit, you will know that you can't see anything from a commercial cockpit. So, in fact, the sensors that we're trying to develop, we in terms of the community are actually going to make commercial manned aviation much safer as well because we're essentially going to put a protective bubble around an aircraft in terms of safety and allow aircraft to talk to one another. So we're talking about big technological leaps, really more in terms of integration and the infrastructure of technology than the technology itself. But you're actually talking to a group of people in the FAA who their whole life have been manned aviation. And this is actually, it's causing a bit of a crisis, identity crisis for people in the military. You know, you should look at the Air Force to see how much trouble it's causing me. If we start turning over aviation to robots, what does that mean for us as individuals? What does it mean for mankind if all of a sudden our cars and our planes and our trains like they are in Europe are highly automated? So I think where it's not just aviation that's on this cusp, I think it's many, many sectors of the transportation industry. And I think it's causing a lot of people heartache because it's redefining who they are and what they're capable of doing. Well, and on that, I mean, you were a fighter pilot. I was. You come from a very elite kind of culture that very much prides itself on human endeavor and initiative. I mean, do your colleagues look at you now that you're with MIT and like building these human robot interfaces is like you're trying to put them out of a job? And is pilot an endangered species? I am considered a traitor by many people in my community. And there's a Patrick Smith on salon.com. He's the ask the pilot guy. I mean, he chases me around to, you know, basically harass me about trying to put the commercial pilot out of work. The fact of the matter is, the heyday is over. The heyday of the fighter pilot is gone. Israel announced a couple of weeks ago that in 40 years, all fighters will be UAVs in Israel. That's a pretty bold claim. When one country comes out and says we're gonna replace everything with the UAV. But I'm here to tell you, it's really fun. It's really cool. And what makes me better than everyone in this room is that I flew a fighter and I can land a plane on an aircraft carrier by myself. But it doesn't make me better than the computer. The computer always lands the aircraft better on the carrier by itself. The computer doesn't get tired. The computer doesn't have a ramp strike at the end of the carrier at 3 a.m. The computer puts the bomb or the weapon on the target it's supposed to. And it doesn't make mistakes in terms of just trying to get the visual target. I know there's been a lot of concern in this room about weaponizing UAVs. And I definitely am in agreement that we need to revisit our policies in terms of how we're weaponizing any platform. But I am here to tell you as a fighter pilot, humans make so many more mistakes at the tip of the spear in the cockpit trying to drop bombs. Conducting warfare from UAVs where you actually have a group of people along with a lawyer sitting next to you or at least on the radio with you trying to make these hard decisions is a much better form of warfare than the kind I fought in. And so even though we're scared of UAVs in terms of weaponizing them, I will tell you that in doing so, we've actually saved a lot of lives. I wanna come back to some of these issues too that you bring up about humans in the loop, I think what we're starting to touch on. But first, Michael, I wanna ask you something on taking again this presumptive date of September, 2015 is kind of when we're off to the races. Maybe that's stretching it a bit. But give us a sense of how potentially big the commercial industry for this is because I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but right now you were specifically prohibited from using a drone for profit for any kind of commercial purpose. And I think the general sense is that there is sort of a whole industry kind of in the wings gearing up and waiting to go. So give us a sense from your perspective how big that is and potentially over the next 10 years as well, how it grows. Once we get into the national airspace, as I mentioned, and again, the FAA reauthorization bill as Dr. Cummins mentioned, it's restricted to 400 feet and 55 pounds or less. So you are talking small aircraft. And if you look at the public safety side of the house, and that's the firefighters, that's the first responders, that's the park rangers, that's the law enforcement, many of the systems they have are less than five pounds. And it has operation times of anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. So these are like a police officer that have a canine dog in the back. He doesn't use the dog all the time. He only uses the dog when he needs it for a specific application for which the dog is very good at. That's how these UASs will be used by the law enforcement. When you look at the fires that were identified, and you talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars, and you talk about the loss of life that you saw with all these fires that take place. What fire folks need is situational awareness. If you look at any devastation that takes place, whether it's mother nature or whether it's mankind created, the first responders need is good information to make good decisions. And that will save the lives of the people that they're there to protect, as well as their own lives. So this is what this technology brings to bear. So when you talk about the 2015 timeframe, if you look at just agricultural alone, which again, 80% of all of the value that you'll get is gonna be on the agricultural side and on the public safety side, those missions are very articulate. Those are very detailed. And in many cases, you can certify the platform is being air worthy. You can certify the operators being certified capable. And you can also certify the operational environment to make sure that there isn't any misuse that's gonna be taking place for these systems. So they bring to bear a tremendous opportunity to be more effective and efficient, just as Dr. Cummins mentioned, in doing whatever the mission is. The men and women that use these systems know how to do their job better than anyone else. What you're giving them is a tool that extends their eyes, their ears and their hands in order to do that job in a more effective manner. And that's a tremendous capability. So those are some examples too of a sort of large corporate scale kind of implementation, public safety. What about sort of somewhere where they're more the individually entrepreneurial side of it, I mean, the gentleman who's here from the drone user group in DC. I mean, we live in Washington where there are bike messengers everywhere. Right. Are they gonna be, are we gonna start seeing people delivering packages from office to office with drones? You have hit upon an excellent point is that the entrepreneur and ingeniousness that exist. And it's not just here, it's across the world. Once this is allowed to take advantage of, it's gonna be eye opening. There are applications that we haven't even thought about. You've heard of taco copters where they can be able to deliver tacos to you, food to you. Well, there's places in the world that during the monsoon season, 85% of the roads are wiped out. Now you'll be able to deliver medicine from point A to point B during this timeframe. So people that have pandemic diseases or where these things start, you'll be able to eliminate that in totality. You'll have people that'll use these things for, as he said, wedding pictures or putting new roofs on houses. The application, we have not even scratched the surface but if you allow these ingenious individuals to do this in a safe way and in the proper way, it will have phenomenal economic impact. I come from a small town in the South and I love Rosa's comment because my family would be the first family to whip out a shotgun as soon as one flew over in my backyard. So I come from salt of the earth environment and when my family heard that it would be possible for a UAV to deliver a can of beer, that really started to change their tune. They had to think about it. So you can see the conundrum, they could either drink the beer or shoot the helicopter, maybe they do both. After it delivered the beer. I think though, if you wanna know what's truly capable, you needed to see what happened in London about a month ago. In London, at night, there was a formation of little quad helicopters with laser lights on them. They got permission from their version of their Euro control, their version of FAA to fly in a formation over the city of London in the shape of the new Star Trek logo to basically advertise the new movie. So the entire airspace over London was taken up by this flying formation of drones. And it may sound like a small event, but it's actually a huge event because now we're really illustrating another aspect of drones, which I don't think many people think about and that's the entertainment aspect of drones. Now we're seeing formations for entertainment. You can actually go to opera in New York, the Pilobus Theater, and you can see them using the little UAVs in their operas. You can go to Switzerland to see many, many performances of many different types of UAVs. And so I agree that there's a lot of medical and critical life applications, but there are going to be applications for these technologies. They're just going to make you laugh. And I thank you from the, you know, Hollywood and the film industry looks at these things too. And you can do amazing shots with drones. And there's a huge cost savings there too. I would like to point out not only is there a cost savings, particularly for the film industry, but there's a huge safety advantage. Helicopter flying. And I'm working with the Navy right now on turning helicopters into robotic helicopters. And that's important for a very good reason. And that's because the accident rate is very high. And there was recently a group of people in a filming helicopter that crashed because they got into a high wind, low altitude situation and couldn't control it. There is something in a human body called the neuromuscular lag. And that is the fact that when you see something, some event, it takes you about a half a second to respond to that. And even if you're the sharpest pilot, even you're the best fighter pilot on the planet, you are still married to that half second neuromuscular lag. Robots, robotic helicopters do not do that. That is why when we turn those missions over, particularly low and close to the ground under slow speed conditions, we can turn that over to the robot and safety will improve. And this leads into sort of the next kind of phase or frontier of the technology. Everything we've been talking about at this point sort of suggests maybe having a human operator behind it or we're talking about how people interact with these vehicles, these robotic vehicles. But what we're inevitably pushing towards it seems is sending out fleets of these robots to do the work on their own. And so we start getting into automation or potentially even autonomy. I wanna start with you to address this from the technical and the scientific perspective. Okay, what is an autonomous drone? What does that standard mean? So there's a debate in the community over what is automation and what is autonomy. I personally define it that autonomy is when a robot has to reason under a great deal of uncertainty. So the helicopter I'm working on with the Navy is an autonomous helicopter because it is called by a person using a smartphone to say, come get me, I need to be emergency evacuated or I need emergency supplies. The helicopter takes off by itself, navigates by itself, finds its own landing site by itself and gets agreement from the person on the ground and then picks out its own landing site and lands potentially even on the side of a mountain. This is something that a human cannot do right now. So we consider this a highly autonomous vehicle because it's having to make a whole series of decisions under a great deal of uncertainty. UAVs today are automated, they're not autonomous. That is because we are heavily reliant on GPS. We stick a set of coordinates. The computer says, I need to go from where I am to this set of coordinates. It's actually very much like when you use your navigation system in your car, only there's a control feedback loop that closes it and just makes the aircraft go in that direction. Only it sticks to the speed, it saves you on fuel. So it's just automation, there's no clear line. There's a slide into uncertainty but you can actually think of autonomy as the amount of guessing that you need to do. The more guessing that you have to do in a situation, the more autonomy you're gonna have to use. So is autonomy like effectively, you know, SkyNet? I mean, the system is aware of itself and making decisions independently. I mean, sort of, you know, I hate to say that because that's probably the number one question I get asked. Are we going into SkyNet or the Matrix? Well, I mean, there are elements of that. We are giving these systems the ability to reason on their own. So for example, right now the Global Hawk which is a huge UAV, a reconnaissance UAV that's flown by the military, it has gone lost link. And lost link is always the biggest problem that we have when we're flying these systems remotely. What happens when you can't talk to it anymore? And so the Global Hawk has, on a few occasions, been able to successfully land itself after losing the link with the human. So you could argue that there's a tiny bit of autonomy in there because there was a little bit of uncertainty, it's actually very rule-based and it's a very reliable system. So what we're gonna have to do is understand that these systems are not always going to be in communication with us. And I will tell you, this is actually the biggest hurdle that the Google car is gonna have to overcome as it tries to get entry onto the roads. That how do you resolve a lot of ambiguity in the system and be highly reliable under various conditions? We're talking domestic applications for this today, but you know the military struggles with this question as well. And you know, people in the military will say we would never create a drone that had the ability to autonomously select and fire on a target. Yet there is a lot of research going into automation or autonomy or something in between in that field with regards to lethal drones. I think probably in surveillance drones, it seems like that's an area where we feel a lot more comfortable maybe backing away and letting the machine do some of its own thinking. But Michael, talk about how industry sees this too and the potential for automation or even autonomy. I mean, are there companies that want to build systems that just don't require people to use them? Again, and if I use the word semi-autonomous or automated, then people I think are a little bit more comfortable with that because they understand that there is a human being in the loop at some point in time and there is accountability. So yes, the technology is mature enough that you can have aspects of these systems to do particular functions. But you always have the ability to enter back in. And as Missy mentioned, if there is lost link or things don't go the way that you have them planned, you have backup information that says, okay, these are the rules that you follow. This is where you go to these coordinates or this is how you would do it. So safety is paramount. You have to build safety into these systems because if you don't, you'll never use these systems. So when you look at it from safety standpoint first and all the technology that is inherent into the system to make sure that it operates in a safe manner, then you'll have the ability to say, okay, I understand that I am accountable for this and I can let it do the A, B, C, and D. If I get information back from it that tells me I wanna redirect, then I have that ability to do so or I'll let it keep, continue on making the decisions that I know it's gonna make because that's what we programmed into it to have it happen. Is there just a question of efficiency here too that if we want, like say we're imagining the cargo example, like 10 years from now, UPS and FedEx are using UASs to deliver a lot of their cargo. Aren't they naturally going to want to use as many few human controllers in the loop as possible? Or do they look at this and say no, no, it's gonna be one controller per plane, it's just gonna be there on the ground not in the air? From a safety standpoint, the answer is absolutely yes. They want efficiency and effectiveness to make sure that it's safe though. So if they can do it with only having one human being involved in the whole process, then that's what they'll go to. And as those functions are taking place, they will actually monitor that to make sure that their goods are being delivered, everything's going as scheduled. And again, these planes can take off, they can land on their own, they can do, interact with other systems to perform whatever the operation may be and either deliver in cargo or in some cases picking up human beings that are in hazardous situations. Are the members in your organization or even those who aren't and you have a great view of the technology of this? I mean, are there people who are developing things that you just look at and you say, that is never gonna fly? I mean, that's no, yeah, no pun intended, but like where you look at and you just like, wow, that just sounds too ambitious or too perilous or too scary. I mean, give us a sense of like, on the far end of the spectrum where it's really way out there. As was mentioned before, for the most part, most people are very responsible and understand the boundaries of which this technology can be utilized for. There are some though that will step over that edge or will go over that line. I don't know how you stop that. There's misuse with any technology we have. We now have what we call bullying laws because people have misused this technology that we've had in around for 50 years called the internet now. When we first started 50 years with this technology, we had no envision that people would use it to bully other people. So you will have to adapt as this technology becomes more mainstream into our everyday life of to make sure that one, it is safe and two, it is used appropriately and properly and people are held accountable. That's what comes down to everything that we talk about and was mentioned by the representative, Gosner. You have to be hold people accountable for whatever they do, whether it's driving your own car, you can't go 100 miles an hour drunk and crash into people. That's illegal to do. That doesn't mean we should ban cars. So the same thing here is with this technology. If you're gonna utilize this technology for all of the tremendous opportunities that it brings to us, you have to do it in a responsible way. So on the theme of accountability and you mentioned Google cars or driverless cars if you wanna be agnostic about it, what's gonna happen when a driverless car runs over the little girl on the way to her soccer game? I mean, where is the accountability gonna come if the future is driverless cars? How riff on that a little bit and how we're gonna sort of get comfortable with this idea of handing over this almost sacred American idea of driving to a robot. It is interesting to me that of all the public outcry that's been going on for UAVs, but meanwhile the Google car has kinda slipped in under the radar and is driving around now, potentially in three states, Florida, Nevada, and California with little oversight. But you're likely to be running over the Google car far before UAV would ever fall on your head. And I think that I'm a big fan of technology and in fact my vision of the future actually for each and every one of us as an individual I think in about 50 years we're gonna see the zipped plane. It's going to be the flying car that you can order to come pick you up and it will both do the driving and the flying for you all at the same time. And in fact, NASA has a program on this called the Personal Air Vehicle right now so we're thinking about it and in the research world we're trying to get you your own car that flies. But there's a lot of steps that have to happen between now and then and this issue of accountability, if the UAV, the air community thinks we're having problems, believe me, the driving community will also have similar problems. Although I will tell you I think driverless cars have re-energized the American Bar Association because I think they realize that there's a whole new set of lawsuits that are about to come down for that and I think that is actually going to be in terms of robotics, I think the driverless car will start to become much more front and center in terms of the debate over these accountability policies because this will be part of our everyday life and one thing I'm concerned about is if in this early stage of development the Google car does kill a child it will shut the robotics industry down. It will definitely shut the driverless car robotics industry down and it could have deep ramifications for the air community as well. So I think the onus is upon us in terms of academia and industry and even in the regulation agencies to take this very seriously because what we don't want to do is take a big step forward and have a problem like that that could be catastrophic. You try me on this too, but why would it shut the whole robotics industry down? Why one accident sort of ruins the industry? If I may. First of all, understand why you would want to have a driverless car. Right now today, the risk acceptance of a technology called the automobile is we have over 32,000 lives at a loss, 6.3 million accidents in the United States and over $256 billion a year in costs associated with the medical cost and the damages associated with that 6.3 million accidents. The highest loss of life of people between the age of 16 and 19 is car accidents and 75% of those are not either alcohol or drug induced. So this is those distracted drivers that we're talking about. Okay, many of them have those belong to you or your grandkids and I would contend to you that the distraction is not the texting, the distraction is the driving because all they've known all their life is texting and when you tell them now they can't do it for an hour and a half because they have to drive from point A to point B, it drives them crazy. No pun intended there either. So this is a situation where we have an aging population where we've got over 22 million people that are over the age of 75 that need to get from point A to point B. You have a younger generation that's coming forward that has this inability to focus for longer periods of times and the purpose of having driverless cars is to get from point A to point B. Now you say, well, I'm never gonna give up my 64 Mustang. Well, just like in the horsing industry, we didn't go away with horses once the cars came out and bought 103 years ago. As a matter of fact, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. We use them for pleasure, we use them for sports, we use them for a lot of things but we don't use them to go to work every day back and forth. The same thing is going to do with driverless cars. When you look at the congestion that we have just in the United States alone, we lose 87 billion dollars a year just sitting on highways. Your car sits idle more than 94% of the time. It's sitting parked, it doesn't do anything good. So when you look at the pollution that you're putting into the environment, you look at the amount of congestion that you have, there's a better way to get from point A to point B. And whether it's a flying car or whether it's a driverless car in the future, that's where we will be going because the numbers support it, the saving of lives support it. So you mentioned that we're gonna lose one life. Well, if I could tell you that I could take it down an order of magnitude from 32,000 down to 3,000, is that a smart thing to do? Well, there's a tremendous capability there. And so yes, we're gonna have to have leadership that says when that first time it happens because in many cases what's gonna happen, and I'll just give you this from a statistical standpoint, if you're going 40 miles an hour, the tire coefficients to the surface says if you're going 40 miles an hour on a surface, it takes nine feet to stop because physics says that's what the vehicle can only do. If a human being is driving, they'll stop within 12 feet. If you have a driverless car stopping, it'll stop within nine feet. Well, if the child steps out at 10 feet, the human being would have killed them, the driverless car would not. But if the child steps out at eight feet, either one of them is gonna kill the child. And that's the reality that we have is that we accept humans to be faulty and we accept the fact that we have 32,000 lives a year that die. We don't accept machines killing human beings. And that's the thing that a driverless car is, we have to understand there's a tremendous opportunity and capability here but they're not gonna be perfect. And Missy, we'll wrap this up and then we'll take some questions through our audience, but Michael said we don't accept technology killing human beings. And so, when it happens. This is why, I mean, that is the reality. The reality is that no technology will ever be 100% perfect. But my emphasis was on these next few years, particularly in the development of technology. The American public, and I think in a more general sense, the larger world public, we're still at that place where we're not comfortable with machines taking over all of these aspects of our lives and these accountability issues are still up for debate. And I do think that in the next few years, if someone were killed by a driverless car, it would be a huge setback for the community because we're just not there yet in terms of our psychological acceptance of technology. And so, we need to make sure that we are building as safe as systems with the correct infrastructure as possible. In another 20 years, the transportation infrastructure of this country will look very different. But we're still in a very, it's a very hard place because we still got a lot of legacy gremlins driving around on the road plus the high-end cars that can park themselves and have active radar in terms of cruise control. So we're at this weird bimodal distribution of technologies and the old has got to work with the new and we're just not quite there yet. Let's take some questions from the audience and please state your name and your affiliation. Thanks. Philip Weber, Congressional Budget Office. Could you just explain the commercial prohibition a little bit more? Does it end September 2015? Does it continue? I presume all the things you both mentioned, agriculture, cargo, there must be people interested in making a buck there. First of all, the FAA is responsible by the September 2015 date. Now with the sequestration that took place with the continual resolutions, the FAA has not met most of the dates that have been established back in 2012. And I look at the FAA, they've got Jim Williams is now the UAS integrator and they are working very closely with the Department of Defense, along with DHS, along with the FCC, along with other entities to make sure that when we do get into the national airspace, these systems will be safe. And so we're talking about small. So the small rule is being worked on right now today and a lot of the safety issues that are being segwayed into small working groups that are addressing all of these issues. So it should culminate right now at the September 2015 date. I would not hold my breath that that is exactly gonna happen. I know they're working very hard and feverishly to do that. And when that date does happen, they will articulate in detail, again, 400 feet, 55 pounds or less, and the utilization of how they'll be able to utilize these systems, both in the civil and in the commercial side. And we did ask someone from FAA, and particularly Jim Williams to be here, but unfortunately they could not just see you all now. Let's go to this side here, sir. Yeah, sure, yeah. Joel, you're here for us, sir. That's okay, whichever one you want. Go ahead, sir. Hi, Bill Rankins. Got a question. What is the future relationship between drone technology and satellite imagery and are they integrating in some way? I think that's a great question because I think it gets lost on a lot of people that drones are just a flying camera for the most part, particularly in the military and in the first responder world right now. And we don't have any new capability with drones that we haven't already had with manned helicopters or manned aircraft or even satellites, right? The difference that drones make are that they're just much more cost effective. So, and that's an argument for why they are being used more often. Now, as far as the integration, I have seen some agencies looking at the integration, but they already are integrated actually in terms of satellites. UAVs that are flown in Afghanistan, for example, do have a satellite connection between them that actually allow the operator to control them from Nevada, for example, all the way out in Afghanistan. So, would satellite imagery be, it is definitely technologically feasible and I was surprised if a lot of three letter agencies weren't using that in some way. Can I just make one other point? You bring up something that's outstanding is that there is no new leap ahead technology that exists today with UASs. And though it's every sensor package that you would put on a UAS today, already exists, is already being used by man systems and is already being used by fixed systems. So, the cameras that you see on the street, the cameras that are in banks, the thermal imaging that exists today, the GPS, everything that exists today, there is nothing new. There is no leap ahead technology. There is no, so this is technology agnostic as far as it, but as Missy mentioned, now you can do it in a much more effective and efficient way. And that's what allows you to save lives, which is the big key factor in all of this. Sir, right here in the front, and then I'm gonna go to the back and then I'll come back to you, sir. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. I'm Crawford Allen from WWF. You've talked a lot about the use of visual sensors on UAVs. What about the range of other types of sensors that can be used to gather data on UAVs? How do you see that market growing in future? We, for example, are looking at electronic tagging of endangered species in the wild and using a UAV to detect the signals from those tags. How would you see that market growing instead of the sort of the live feed video imaging that you've been talking mostly about today? I would tell you it's already growing, and I love to use the WWF example. When I go give a talk around the country about the drone technology of the future, I have several of your pictures that I show because I think that the impact that UAVs are having in terms of tracking and the poaching problem is tremendous, and there are, you could probably go on the internet and buy thermal imaging cameras, any kind of remote sensing technology that you can find on any other flying platform you can put on a UAV. The only real limitation today is weight, and that is because the UAVs that we fly are so small, and each little gram that you put on a UAV will reduce, directly reduce its flight time, so that's the only limitation. It's the weight and power that she's talking about, the duration of which they can fly, but you, again, when I said you will be able to, for the first time, explore nature like we've never seen it before, this is the opportunity that that brings forward, whether it's in preserving the nature or be able to better understand it, the migrating paths, the understandings of what we're doing to the environment to allow this species to not go extinct but to flourish for years to come. Do we have time for one more question, Miss, right there? Hi, sorry, Rachel Levinson-Waldman with the Brennan Center. I'm just curious, I've heard a lot about the technology development, and I haven't heard as much about hacking or sort of anti-hacking development. I think we've already heard about drones being hacked, and so I'm just curious, sort of in both of your experience with all of the technology explosion that's happening, do you see sort of that same attention being paid also to developing protections for the technology? So I love the latest thing that I've seen on the internet that's awesome to buy is the anti-UAV hoodie, have you seen this? It's like 2,000, no, this was 2,000, it cloaks you, it's like the invisibility cloak for the UAV, and the thing that I love about this is for every technology, there's an anti-technology, and then now some new entrepreneur will go out and find the new camera to defeat the anti-cloaking device, and so in terms of financial job creation, it's great. As a program manager for the Navy, I will tell you we are very, very concerned about the GPS spoofing hacking problem, and in fact in my program, one of our big areas of focus is developing GPS-denied technologies so that UAVs can operate completely GPS-free, and so, but this is another example of the innovations that happen because hacking happens, right? Any electronic device can be hacked, period, you have to live with it, right? But we've known that for some time, and so we will develop something, and then they will develop, the enemy will develop, and then we will develop, and then I think that's life. That's an excellent point, but it's not just hacking, but it's also unintentional jamming or situations that could occur. This falls under safety. So the FAA will have to understand that in order for these things to be safe, that they have to make sure that the communications, the secure communications, and so when you look at, that is a tremendous area of appreciation that everyone has. So the banking industry right now, it will crumble if it doesn't have secure transitions or transactions that take place. The same thing is true with this technology. If you can't assure that you've got some level of assurance that this system will not be either interfered, disrupted, or hacked into, then you won't fly it. Okay, Missy Cummings, Michael Discano, thank you for great discussion, intriguing, a little scary, too. Thanks a lot. Thanks.