 Hi, I'm Kevin Finner and I work here at the national academies. I direct our committee on science engineering and public policy and with Jay Lloyd and Dan Sarowitz from ASU. I edit the journal issues in science and technology. You'll find some copies out on the table and I Just want to say as a bit of inspiration to get us launched. Just a little practical information. There is Wi-Fi here in the building. There's no password if you just open your browser You'll immediately be taken to the page and be able to log in and the restrooms are out this way and around to the right I think that's all the essential information. I have And just as a little bit of inspiration if you don't know the National Academy of Sciences We were charted in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln and I think it's a bit of inspiration that in the middle of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln decided to help create the National Academy of Sciences where scientists would provide guidance to the government on issues where their expertise was relevant and he also signed into law the legislation that created the land grant university system to educate scientists and engineers for the future So I think considering what was happening around him the amount of vision and foresight that he was able to exercise in that circumstance hope will be an inspiration to us all and and particularly to those of you who write science fiction who are helping us try to keep our eyes on the future and Above the immediate phrase so thank you all with that I'm going to introduce Ed Finn from ASU in the hieroglyph project to get us started. Thank you Thanks very much Kevin and Welcome everybody excited to be here and to see so many of you here So I'm the director of the Center for Science in the imagination at Arizona State University I'm an assistant professor there as well and I'm the co-editor of the hieroglyph anthology And today our event can we imagine our way to a better future is Using that book as a launchpad for a series of conversations about big ideas that are Technically feasible things that we could actually do and we're also using it as a launchpad to think about not just what we can do but what we should do this event is Is Something that actually started at Future Tense in a lot of ways in a conversation that Neil Stevenson Who I'll be introducing momentarily had with the president of ASU Michael Crow in 2011 And so it's really nice to come back and do another event with Future Tense as we reach this new milestone in the project Future Tense is a partnership between Slate Magazine the new America Foundation in Arizona State University Which looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and society In addition to doing events like this Future Tense has a channel on Slate and We're also Delighted that this event is being co-hosted by issues in science and technology Which is a forum for discussion of public policy related to science engineering and medicine And thanks again to the National Academy of Sciences for hosting us a couple of quick moderation notes This event is going to be live streamed. So keep that in mind when you throw things at the stage Please wait for the microphone if you're going to ask questions and for all those Zoe Lofgren fans. I'm sorry, but She was unable to make it today or zoe So I'm afraid she couldn't be here today. So let me introduce Neil and get us started For those of you who don't know Neil Stevenson is the New York Times best-selling author of the three-volume historical epic the Baroque cycle and A number of novels including Remedy, Kryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Anathem and the forthcoming Seven Eves He lives in Seattle, Washington Neil Thanks, and thanks to everyone for coming. This will I guess be Take the form of the the tri-annual report to the the shareholders of This initiative I'm not going to dwell a lot on the origin story. I think it's been been covered It's already been alluded to a few times. We were at a conference on synthetic biology and crow and I strayed from the the script and and ended up having this conversation about about doing big stuff getting big stuff done and and why we don't seem to be succeeding at that anymore and The result was an experiment in fiction Which has just recently been published in the form of the big blue book that you can see copies of around here called the hieroglyph anthology and it presents a number of Ideas from various science fiction writers about interesting Kind of world-changing projects that might be undertaken in a reasonably optimistic Vision or at least non pessimistic non dystopian vision of the the future so I Thought I would use most of my 15 minutes to to talk about some Some things that we learned or at least some some observations that I've made over the course of this this project I basically got got got three sort of new things to throw into the into the mix here one Came up actually yesterday evening at dinner and I thought I would just air it out Since it kind of struck me as an interesting idea. That was The idea that it wouldn't hurt maybe to try to come up with some negative hieroglyphs. We've got a whole a whole book now of Relatively positive ideas, but the point has been made it turns out that dystopia has its defenders and So we've heard from a number of people with giving completely reasonable arguments in favor of writing dystopian Fiction and the one that stands out of course is 1984 and the concept of big brother which In a way has been highly productive and socially beneficial negative Image negative hieroglyph that everyone kind of understands and understands it would be good to to avoid So so maybe the next maybe the next Go round could could be unremittingly dark the The the guidelines that The riders were working with were to avoid as much as possible the three H's those being hyperspace holocausts and hackers the The theory was that we wanted the the stories in the the book to feature things that Scientists and engineers could plausibly undertake in their lifetimes And so we wanted to avoid any kind of Super technologies that violate the known laws of physics or that we didn't want to give people Excuses to not do anything. So for example in my story, which is about a tall tower The towers made out of steel and we don't use any fancy new materials. Why not? Well There's been people have been talking about space elevators for a long time But the conversation always gets to the point where it is pointed out that we need new materials Super strong materials to make a space elevator and at that point everyone kind of stops So so no hyperspace No, no holocausts small H. It's just a way of saying that we wanted to avoid The dystopian kind of tone that's taken over a lot of science fiction particularly in video games and film and television and then no hackers was a way of saying that instead of Writing stories where people find clever ways to exploit Existing technologies technologies that are kind of big immutable things that were created by other faceless entities That they should kind of be the faceless entities them themselves making the big new technologies that maybe a next generation of hackers would would would play with and What we the result of the experiment is that our Writers were happy to to do without The first two ages, but that the sort of hacker narrative is pretty unkillable. There's still a strong a strong interest and and kind of affection for the idea of Technological innovation as being the province of rag tag groups of outsiders and working with Working with kind of disruptive technologies like like drones and 3d printers so and that's all well and good, but I'll just point out that That's not where most actual innovation really occurs. It tends to occur in giant corporations and Government-funded labs and and and other such institutions and so I don't have a Great conclusion to draw here, but I think it's noteworthy and maybe some food for thought during the rest of the day that that People no longer seem to be looking toward the big institutions as being places where creative technological thinking can occur so So food for thought there the the third and last point that I wanted to make is Something that I talked about a bit in a little piece that was published in slate a couple of days ago So you can find it there if you want to somewhat better articulated version of what I'm about to say, but the I For most of my life have assumed that the scarce resource the reason that I don't have a personal jet pack or the opportunity to travel to Mars or Live on a space station is is clever ideas and that we don't have enough ideas It's a it's a kind of self-flattering thing to believe because I see myself as being one of the clever ideas people and it's it's gratifying to think that We live in a kind of 19th century patent office vision of the universe where You've got inventors sitting there with their their better mousetrap waiting for the world to be to pass to their their door the What I've well, I've learned as time has gone on is that Nobody cares about your clever idea. There's lots and lots of clever ideas. There's a glut of of patents and If you actually want to move beyond merely coming up with an idea and maybe getting a patent you have to raise money and raising money is a exhausting and dispiriting process not everyone who has is good at inventing things is good at at raising money and And so many are the people who've invented clever ideas only to spend the next couple decades of their lives applying for grants or or trying to create startups and and pitching their idea to to VCs So if you are in that life if you're if you're if you're in that that world of searching for for capital To to make your idea a reality. It's very easy to to come to the Conclusion that the scarce resource is money that that what we want is is capital and only if we had a little bit more of it We would be able to turn some of these ideas into reality If you zoom back and look at the larger macro economic picture that appears not to be the case there's all kinds of Research and statistics Suggesting that we are awash in capital The capital isn't worth very much because it's so plentiful that corporations and wealthy individuals are just sitting on top of great big piles of Cash and not feeling motivated to invest that money in new ventures So to to figure out why that's the case is is beyond my scope But based on sort of anecdotal Evidence and conversations that I've had recently with with people who actually know about this stuff It appears that that what is lacking is the kind of a person who can be entrusted with a big pile of money over a period of several years and And and people In that in that category need to occupy kind of an intersection On on the Venn diagram, which turns out to be a pretty small intersection. You've got one circle Which is people who are? technically sophisticated and passionate enough about an idea that they're willing to devote Something like five years of their lives to to pursuing it in full time to the exclusion of other professional Activities and accepting the risk that at the end of that five years it may fail And they may not they won't get those those years back So passion dedication we all kind of know that those are required attributes for an entrepreneur, but if If someone like that is is going to be entrusted with a significant significant amount of money by by a capitalist in the sense of somebody who has the the wherewithal to deploy capital They also need to have a number of other skills associated with with business management they need to Have the kind of social skills needed to lead an organization and inspire people and get them working together Well, they need to have enough basic knowledge of business to read a spreadsheet and And to sort of operate an organization in a in a competent manner They need to have the ability to hire people and when necessary to fire people And to keep the the organization moving forward on a coherent path So these are all the attributes that we associate with with CEOs And by that I don't mean the CEO of a giant company like Home Depot or something, but CEOs of small tech startups There are lots of people right now in the Silicon Valley who are Who whose aspiration is to be a CEO in exactly that sense and who are getting involved in various startups Peter teal has has recently Leveled a criticism of Silicon Valley culture to the effect that it breeds a kind of attention deficit disorder among entrepreneurs where if you're your plan is to to fail quickly You may you may fail so quickly that you never succeeded anything And you don't devote yourself to a specific project long enough to actually get anything done So I don't claim to have an answer to this problem, but In a general spirit as I said of issuing the the tri annual or quadrennial report of this this project I thought it might be useful to Nudge the steering wheel in a slightly new direction and and provide some other Some other themes that maybe we could be attending to During the the various Panels that we're going to have have today So with that with one minute and 32 seconds remaining in my 15 minutes I'm gonna I'm gonna cede my time as they say Locally and we can move on to the next phase. Thanks