 But I do want to start by introducing our two distinguished participants for the lunch conversation. At the end here is Dr. Michael Crowe, who I'm sure most of you know is the president of Arizona State University, which is the third leg in the triad that supports the Future Tense partnership along with the New America Foundation and Slate. Dr. Crowe has been president of ASU since 2002. Before that, he was the vice provost at Columbia and the chief strategist of Columbia's extensive research enterprise. He also helped to found the Center for Science Policy and Outcomes in Washington, which is a think tank devoted to the link between science and technology and positive economic and environmental outcomes. Directly to my left is the writer Neil Stevenson. As I'm sure most of you know, he's the author of a number of bestselling books, including the Baroque Cycle Novels, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, and Snow Crash, and also Zodiac is another title of his. He was an advisor in the creation of Blue Origin, a company that is pursuing private space launch. And he was also involved in the creation of something called the Intellectual Ventures Lab, which is dedicated to supporting new inventions of all kinds. Maybe we'll hear a little bit more about that in a moment. Since this is a lunch conversation and we're going to range pretty widely, I thought maybe we just start before we get into the explicit topic of government policy and relation to technology and just talk a little bit about the role of the imagination in thinking about these futures. We have Neil Stevenson here. One of my favorite literary stories is about the writing of the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, which in fact the anniversary, I believe the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein is coming up. So it's especially relevant here. And the way Frankenstein happened was a dinner party game, Shelly and Mary Shelly and an Italian friend of theirs who was also a writer had ran at a villa in Italy and they were all sitting around after dinner. And it's a kind of parlor game. One of them proposed that they all come up with a ghost story. And Shelly wrote a story which I think has been more or less forgotten. Their Italian friend, whose name I've forgotten, wrote something that was even more forgettable. And Mary Shelly went away and came back a couple of years later having written Frankenstein. The first science fiction novel was written by a woman, of course. It is also, if you haven't read it recently, a fascinating, terrifying book which embodies this sort of fear of scientific discovery, which was a major theme in the romantic movement. The romantics were afraid that science was going to destroy all of the poetry and beauty in the world. But Frankenstein is so terrifying. Of all the books I've read to my children, they claim not to be scared by anything, any movie or anything. But about halfway through, they asked me to stop reading Frankenstein to them at night because they found it so terrifying. But with that as a kind of interlude, I wanted to ask you, Neil and then you, Michael, as well, to sort of talk about the role of literature and the imagination in understanding the kinds of things we're talking about. Because, you know, at the level of science, these are often hard to grasp. But it's writers like yourself who make them understandable to us. Well, the feedback that I get from people in the tech business who read my stuff is that it's useful as a kind of shared understanding of what a possible future might look like. And so a lot of our technological systems are so complicated now that it's very difficult for somebody working on some small part of it to get a kind of synoptic understanding of what the end product might eventually look like. And the story that I kept hearing, and I assume it's apocryphal, but it may be true, was that there was a certain era in Silicon Valley when people were going into meetings with venture capitalists and throwing snow crash onto the table and saying, this is our business plan. And I mean, obviously it's not a business plan per se, but what it is is a kind of unified coherent vision, I guess, that brings together a number of different technological possibilities. And once you've read it, you understand what that vision looks like. And so if you're sitting around with some other techies or with some venture capitalists or whatever, you can use that as a shorthand because we're just trying to implement page 37 of snow crash or what have you. And that seems to be of great value to people who would otherwise be stuck into somewhat narrow and specialized kind of cubicle. Michael, we're pretty familiar with what might be called the anti-synth bio-reading list of Frankenstein, Brave New World. Do you have a kind of pro-synth bio-reading list? I know you're a reader of science fiction books that help people grasp these things and they don't have a purely negative outlook on where it might be going. Yeah. Let me give a couple of comments on that. I remember, and I'll use myself as an example, when I was in the science and technology policy program at the Maxwell School at Syracuse on Tuesdays, we used to sit around and watch that what was then, this is 82, 83, the technology run amuck movie series. And the purpose of that was to just get a sense of all of the sort of additional consequences that could come. These are all science fiction movies like Blade Runner and things like that, that all of the consequences that might come from technology if in fact it was able, as it often does and can and maybe even should in some ways, run amuck. And so that's sort of a deep background for a person that if you were to ask me what I do and you had long enough to listen to the answer, I'd probably distill it down to the fact that I'm a knowledge enterprise architect. So Neil's a writer and an entrepreneur and I'm an architect, but I don't design buildings or things, I design organizations that create knowledge and they create things like outcomes like synthetic biology or nanotechnology or what have you. And I can say that at least personally as a knowledge enterprise architect, I've been heavily influenced by a wide range of literature including science fiction and I'll pick three specific examples. Asimov in Foundation Trilogy conceptualizes this planet trend tour and this highly integrated social, behavioral and natural science tool called Psycho History or something like that. I remember the exact name of it. And Hari Seldon is the master of this and he becomes capable of predicting the future in a way that it becomes a threat to the government and the empire of this massively complicated millions of worlds, trillions of people, civilization that humans have evolved into and so the notion of knowledge integration and knowledge pursuit towards an outcome that then has unbelievable consequences through predictive capability had a massive impact on me. A second writer, Neil himself had an impact on me with the Diamond Age and some will laugh because there's people in the room that are a part of the National Center for the Social Implications of Nanotechnology. So in Neil's futuristic view of a nano infused world with nanotechnology at all levels and other technologies being used the social implications as portrayed by Neil's fiction had a big impact on me, Dan Sir which is in the room somewhere, I don't know if it had an impact on him but ten years ago we were trying to design a way in which the social implications of nanotechnology could be thought about at the same time as it's being developed as opposed to waiting until after it was developed. Several attempts went along to design that kind of center ultimately at Columbia when we were on the faculty there, we were defeated, ultimately when we got to ASU we were able to affect more change, different views in Washington, we won one of the two centers that focus on this and so it had a massive impact on me. The third, not science fiction writer, a science journalist, Janine Benyes, I don't know how many of you know her and her whole biomimicry foundation and her book on biomimicry had a massive influence on me from an architectural design perspective in conceptualizing what we built at Arizona State University called the Biodesign Institute which was an effort on our part to take all the disciplines that we could bring together and find a way where we could take all of the platforms that nature provides to us, that could be bio-platforms or photonic platforms or whatever, all of the systems that we are a part of and how might we use those systems and draw insight and perspective and begin developing our technological pathways from those platforms rather than the more simplistic crude and often destructive ways that we've engaged in things in the past and so those are three examples, they're not the only examples but those are three examples where knowledge architect me influenced by literature both science journalism and science fiction, some science journalism is actually fiction because you know that what they write isn't actually true but and so there's sort of a line there but nonetheless a lot of influence on me. Do you want to add anything to the reading list? The thing that jumped into my head, I guess it's not an addition to the list but in this morning's session there was a discussion of possible malign results of widely distributed synthetic biology tech and the, in the world of the diamond age there's, partly what I was trying to do there was to create a coherent fictional world in which that kind of technology was widely distributed in which everyone wasn't dead and the mechanism that's posited in the book by which that comes about is a sort of artificial immune system whereby it's a technological sort of defense in depth that the society erects for itself in order to defend against unknown kind of nanotechnological and synthetic biological invaders. Before we get into anything sort of too nitty gritty about government's role in this I want to ask you both a broader sort of philosophical question which is whether democracy is well suited to supporting the kind of cutting edge synthetic biology research we've been talking about here. You know I mean democracy is a great system for many things but I think we all recognize that it has that popular, too much popular sovereignty has limitations in certain areas, federal reserve and decisions about scientific research might well be one of those areas where it's necessary to provide a degree of insulation from public opinion or from reactions to public opinion to make the right kinds of decisions. Michael what do you think about that? I mean is this an area that is, you know, cutting edge technology research highly compatible with democracy or is it problematic? Well it must be highly compatible with democracy because the last 65 years of this democracy have seen unprecedented technological advances derivative of decisions made by democratic bodies and so therefore using this sort of old college, you know, sort of philosophy therefore it must be the case. Now that doesn't mean that it necessarily will continue to be the case going forward because there are certainly stresses and strains which maybe we'll talk some about but there are certainly stresses and strains that are out there about speed of change and our particular first generation American democratic model. I mean we're still living within the first model of American, the first draft, if you will, of American democracy. It has its stresses and its strains. We're at a particularly stressful moment right now as other competing models are putting real time stresses on our decision making capabilities and I think that, you know, we're going to see changes, many of the changes may be hard but if the question is can democratic societies like the United States be compatible with fantastic scientific and technological progress, the answer is obviously. Yeah and what if the question is slightly different which is how much do you need to insulate the policy making from say, you know, direct public pressures. I mean, Congress is not, you know, a great example of understanding of these issues or, you know, why it's come decision making. Nor have they ever been and so the history of the Congress of the United States is anything but gentle or calm or pleasant. It is an arena for argumentation and basically debate with winners and so because it operates on that basis it is a winner take all system and in the way that we've structured our democracy, those that win, they control the appointments to the Supreme Court. They control the leadership of the key committee chairs in the Congress. They determine the tax structure. They determine whether or not the National Science Foundation will have funding or not. They control through their review and approval process the members of the National Science Board. They control all aspects of the organizational infrastructure under which scientific decisions are made and most of those individuals are not scientifically trained. Many are scientifically literate. Many are not scientifically literate yet nonetheless they're able through advisers and counsel and a broad pluralistic system of engagement in representative democracy. They're able to derive decisions that are quite sophisticated and quite complicated. Look at the things that they have structured. Massive intellectual enterprises like the NIH or the NSF and evolving cumbersome at the moment patent law that's derivative of actual verbiage in the Constitution. Those are all things derivative of this at least this democracy as it's presently working. So it is under stress and we can talk about how it might change but it is working and it has been effective to this point. Well Neil I wonder if you might challenge that at all. I mean you wrote this piece which we have up on Slate today I think about the development of rocket technology as an example of how government policy works in practice and it's a fascinating story and it's essentially satellites look and work the way they do because of decisions government made you know often in result to well to simplify they were not all they were not all purely rational or wise decisions. What I'd say is that is that democracy's at least this democracy can be incredibly productive supporter of research provided it's just existentially terrified of some external non-democratic country that wants to destroy it or that is believed to want to destroy it because as long as that's true I think it sort of focuses everybody's attention and so all of the kind of chaotic influences that we get in the House of Representatives kind of get tamped down a little bit people say well you know listen it's time to shut up and get this hydrogen bomb built because we have to build it first. So as long as there's that kind of fear driving the process then I think we do end up building amazing things like you know the interstate highway system or space launch technology and when it goes away I think we lose momentum pretty fast and so right now I don't see a lot happening in those kind of big tech projects like we used to have back in the Cold War and I'm not arguing in favor of you know having big existential you know threats we don't in a lot of ways we don't want to go back to those days but it does focus the mind and I assume you think the threat of terrorism post September 11th is not a great example of that looking at the development of security technology I think it's too diffuse and it's not you know it doesn't it doesn't drive somehow it doesn't get people's competitive juices going in the way that the Russians did I mean you know the Russians you know there was an enemy right I mean those guys and the stuff that they built the alternate culture that they created a whole kind of alternate civilization was a truly awe-inspiring threat and a challenge and something that we could compete with and the fact that there are so diffusely organized terrorists out there who want to blow up planes doesn't seem to have quite the same galvanizing effect on our culture Michael when you you know the right look at the range of cutting-edge research that's going on at ASU do you think the principle is the more people know about it the better or are there areas where you think you know people this is so prone to misunderstanding that we're better off doing certain things relatively quietly without a lot of public scrutiny I support as being as transparent as is possible and assign the responsibility for transparency to the scientific community itself so one of the things that we are experiencing right now I think is a too wide of a gap between the the general understanding by a broad cross-section of our citizenry about where we're going technologically and where we're going scientifically and why we're going in those directions and so what we have as a population that is at least at the moment very trusting so for instance in areas related to health outcomes here we are falling continuously in terms of relative performance so of the OECD nations were 24th in health outcomes and longevity right now with the highest cost most rapidly increasing cost highest rate of investment in terms of science and technology from the public sector and very large investment from the private sector so we've got we have very unevenly distributed health care outcomes across our population something that we state publicly that our democracy intends to make more more even yet we're failing at that and I think that it is a general lack of sophisticated or sophisticated enough discussion and dialogue dialogue about what we're doing and where we're going and why we're going there that limits us and so I'm I'm supportive of both at the university and elsewhere of as much transparency as is feasible how about it at your your invention lab which is a private sector institution but I mean do you do you do you think everything people are working on there can be understood and should be widely known by the public well a fair amount of what's going on there is at least the stuff that I can that's been made public is relates to things like disease control and so there's a number of as an example a number of inventions being worked on there that relate to the control of malaria distribution of vaccines to third world locations where it can be difficult to to transport medicines before they spoil and and other kinds of I would say humanitarian inventions that who's whose purpose I think is immediately obvious and and then and then beyond that you can you can in the level of sophistication in in modern technology is such that you can very rapidly get into realms that are difficult for even even specialized kind of scientifically sophisticated persons to really follow so it's it's my kind of cynical take on it that the sort of public democratic consensus about science has always been largely manufactured and that back in the 60s back in the 70s the the kind of centralized television networks that we had and and kind of relatively limited bandwidth of information created a sort of cultural milieu in which people tended to trust science and and viewed it as a benevolent thing that was going to lead us onwards to improve standards of living and in the last you know 10 say 10 15 years it's become way more complicated because of the internet and the availability of many differing points of view on the internet and on top of that I would say a kind of cynical exploitation of that by some people who want to spread misinformation as a way of getting people getting a certain political base whipped up into a froth so so I think in in terms of the public relationship to technology now it's not so much about the scientific facts of what technologies really can and will do as it is about how they're being portrayed by people who are kind of good at manipulating the opinion channels available on the internet Michael that's rather cynical view isn't it well it's cynical it's it's let me let me just add a component to that I mean so so in 1939 the American government spent less than a hundred million dollars on research and most of that was focused on a few things related to aviation development a lot of things related to agriculture and things that were at the point at that time basically considered almost nationalized industries and then World War two changed everything and we had a manifesto come out of the end of World War two written by a van of our bush and a few other people that sort of laid a first-generation highly simplistic incomplete view of a contract between the scientific and technological community and the citizens of this democracy and in that conceptualization it was very simple it says please give us money to do science let us decide what science we want to do and we'll give you national defense and economic security and health security they didn't use those words then but that's what they meant and then and then all will be good well as we become more sophisticated in the in the last 65 years now people say well yeah let's look at that health security thing what we'd like like is life extension and what we'd like is fairness and equity and what we'd like is greatly diminished cost for that life extension and what we'd like is to be able to you know understand the basics of it and please carry that out what we've what we've what we failed to do now and I might be cynical with Neil here a little bit is we have not realized that our democracy sets our objective functions and the scientists and the technologists need to meet those objective functions and where they're not meeting those objective functions as they aren't now in a number of areas like environmental sustainability renewable energy systems health care outcomes and so forth they need to go back and rethink what it is that they're doing or how they're doing it because the democracy is saying and has said for decades this is what we want you to do this is what we want you to achieve we're trusting you to figure out how to do this we may constrain you here or there in terms of things we want you to do or not do but that part of our democratic decision-making equation in my view has broken down within the actual conduct of the scientists and the technologists themselves they're no longer or not to the extent that they should be focused on the social outcomes that the democracy is willing to make the 200 billion dollar investment that they're making this year in science and technology or about that versus what they were making before we had this contract which was almost nothing that's where the the democratic system is in need of updating and repair with within this particular context yeah well let's talk about this question of government support I mean what my what's the ideal scenario for you how how big should government be in supporting this kind of research that we're talking about here and how do you draw this line I mean that you know the familiar concept is government support the basic research but not the applied research but here we're looking at in synthetic biology areas where first of all the applied research may not be very commercial and may have tremendous benefits and second of all where the line between what's what's basic and what's applied may be very porous that that basic and applied thing are basically convenient tools used to advantage who's ever using them and so the beyond that it doesn't really mean that much I mean it it's a useful construct for some things to classify some things one person's basic research is another person's applied research one person's applied research is the tool for the basic researcher to advance their fundamental quest for knowledge having said that I think where things are breaking down in terms of the amount of funding is that we've we've now decided that we have this highly simplistic grossly oversimplified model please give us money to do science do research and we'll tell you how many publications we've had and we'll see how we're doing against China and Germany and Japan and so forth and so on and so long as we're like out producing them and as long as we have more math majors and so long as we have this and that and those are indicators but those are second or third level indicators the real indicator should be has lifespan in the United States for all socio economic groups actually advanced at what rate is it advancing where are we lagging why are we lagging and we should measure our scientific investment and our technological investment not for everything but for a lot of the things that we do based on a set of outcomes now our our Congress has difficulty doing that they've tried and they try many times but it breaks down and so how much it you know the amount of money that we would invest would be determined by how important is the outcome that we seek how much progress are we making toward that outcome what primary secondary and tertiary benefits are we gaining from those investments as we seek that outcome and right now we don't have a logic that works that way for the most part you see what what Neil was saying before about the kind of you know national fear or national competition do you see that as a major motivating factor I mean certainly people respond to the idea that the United States either has the opportunity or the need to be the dominant player in new technologies well I mean I certainly it certainly is the case that economic development and economic success of of our country in the present structural mechanisms by which the economy advances are highly driven by technological advance so we know that that technological advance and economic growth are highly correlated we know that technological advance is now highly correlated with scientific activity so the answer is yes but toward what end toward what purpose so what is it that we actually want as the outcome because it turns out that these scientific and technological advances that we're investing in will produce certain outcomes the outcomes that they have produced up to this point are a list of very good ones a list of not so good ones and a list of horrid ones all from the same investments that have been that have been going on and so we ought to move forward where we have a longer list of really good ones a longer list of some pretty good ones and as few of these horrid ones as we can possibly lay our hands on I mean we're still dealing with nuclear proliferation from a decision that we made to develop a certain kind of weapon that we thought that we could contain we haven't been able to contain it it's not containable no technology is containable in that sense and so that is is out and about and is moving forward in differentiated ways and and so forth and so are there better ways for us to think through what we want to do how we want to do it and where we want to go yes can that be done in the democratic structures that we have yes with some modernization is it easy no but you have to actually want to think about it and when you're trapped in Simpleton land like we are right now right now the the the basic debate this is true for university presidents for others it's like more money more money more money more money and everything will be good well not hardly more money for what more science what science well the science that we think up to do what it'll be good well maybe yes maybe no yeah except for the stuff we ban or the oh you know I'm really so sorry about that like that that that thing that that device that is detonated in the city and then the city doesn't exist anymore except for stuff like that yeah well Neil I mean you're an investor I gather in these you know in these private sector ventures both around space no no oh well you certainly follow them very closely yeah so I guess my question for you is sort of envisioning these futures how much of the innovation is driven by government decision-making government support and how much of this is just happening in the private sector whether the government gets on board or not well I think that the what sort of so the kind of implicit question that that's that's being raised is yet at what point do you just say you know what I don't need to deal with this democratic process anymore I'm just going to go out and raise funds in the private capital market and I only have to talk to one smart investor you know or a few smart investors to get the support that I need and there has been a wave of people from the technology world who we have you know once they their company has gone public or whatever they're able to to just personally invest in new technology projects at a scale that actually is worth doing so I think that is kind of the new wrinkle that has emerged venture would that be an example yeah he puts down his own money he raises other capital he's advancing towards a certain objective yeah yeah yeah yeah so or or people who've maybe made made money in one sector and but have an interest in a different one like these guys yeah yeah I'm trying to think of like Tesla is there a the some of the Google guys and investment Elon Musk is right right so he's so he started out with with one thing which is PayPal and but he's he's supporting R&D in in a completely unrelated you know sector or multiple unrelated sectors of technology so that's kind of the new wrinkle and you know depending on how democratic you like your technology policy to be you can see that as either a scary threatening development since it takes it out of the public sphere and makes it all kind of behind intellectual property wall or you can see it as a great way to circumvent the limitations of squabbling Congress people yeah but there's still the issue and we'll open this up for questions in just a second but there's still the question about what to restrict and those restrictions are you know Congress can restrict what yeah what what kind of research the private sector can pursue what sort of role do you each see for government there I mean is there you know partly from the from the perspective of reassuring the public about where this is not going to go but also simply from from the point of view of you know responsible supervision and the kind of scenario you're you're talking about with the creation of you know potentially super destructive organisms you know how does how does government go about the restrictive side of this as opposed to the support side of it that's where I actually get a little bit worried about it because in the older model kind of the more Cold War model than I'm talking about government's doing both it's supporting it's fostering it's partnering and it's also exercising a restrictive kind of regulatory function but at least it's involved on all sides of the game and if we get into a situation where the government's only involvement is restrictive is to veto things then I think there's you know my concern is that any anything that the government's capable of regulating becomes kind of a political football and whoever is best at manipulating public opinion gets to veto you know whatever project they personally stand to to lose from I mean when it comes to nuclear policy which the example you're using you you know it's easier in a way because only government still really only government can do it this the proliferation issue but in terms of the basic research and the creation it sort of couldn't happen without government support with the kind of synthetic biology research we're talking about as Andrew Hussle was talking about you know this may be a kind of garage movement where people are pursuing a lot of this in a very in a very lo-fi way you know outside the purview of big big public projects you know for those of us that live in America I mean you're gonna have to face up to the fact you live in a democracy and in that democracy there's gonna be decisions made by the people that we elect and they're gonna make decisions that are more or less informed my own fear right now is that as the scientific and technological elite continue to move at light speed to synthetic biology and to this and to this and to this the folks that we've elected collectively sitting back in Congress are like what is that what are you talking about what is oh is that related to this thing that we're hoping that oh okay well that's fine I want you to go ahead and keep doing that but this other thing over here I don't know that's somebody tells me that that's like a living human or this isn't a living human or this or this or this and so as as this as this debate progresses I think the main thing that we have to do is we have to remember that we're focused on a set of outcomes we have these democratic decision making bodies I deal both with the Congress and the Arizona legislature and I was there yesterday came in on the red-eye last night from the from meeting with those folks there they wouldn't track tremendously well with the complicated nature of the of of synthetic biology evolution and the investment in fundamental discovery that would lead to these new life forms that we could construct so that from these life forms we could achieve these objectives so what we're what's happening right now is that we're in a moment in time where the scientific and technological elite are out way ahead of these democratic processes that we have and so you say who do you blame for that or who do you go to to me I go back to the scientific and technological elite and say well you got two choices you can either slow down which is not in your nature to do because you're driven by what you're discovering and as you're learning moving forward or you can step back and take the time to do a better job of educating what outcomes we're working toward or coming into alignment with those outcomes or doing a better job of educating those that are electing the people to the offices that are going to be making these restrictive decisions because at the end of the day those individuals in those elected positions can restrict anything they want anytime they want like that you really think they're they're educable Michael I mean you're talking about you know you're talking about I mean it's interesting that you put so much of the burden on the people who have to do the better job explaining but I absolutely unequivocally think that they are educable and I believe that because I've seen it happen I've been involved in those processes I've seen it actually occur we are continuing to make great progress we're continuing to make all kinds of good decisions as we go forward but the more elitist and separatist and only driven by scientific outcomes that the scientific and technological elite becomes and the less focus they become on a set of collective outcomes that we're working toward using healthcare is to me the most obvious example that everyone can understand you did all this science and what did you do for me you raised my costs and now I have the lifespan equivalency of I don't know like Cuba you know a less wealthy less R&D intensive country and so forth and so unless we can figure out how to do a better job at that then this gap will grow and they'll be in my view more and more restrictions more and more restrictive opportunities less and less well-informed decisions that are made it'll be an anchor or a drag until such time as there's a correction that comes back and says oh we're ever so sorry we really would like these resources and so we're gonna have to actually spend some time learning together about what we're doing outcomes how we're doing it process of science and so forth and so on and so as opposed to the argument that you hear every once in a while I remember this famous phrase that somebody said with the defeat of the superconducting supercollider for Texas one senior physicist came in and was testifying before Congress and he was irritated at what he called the defeat of this project by the C students the C students that's it I mean that's sort of the gap at its widest form right there clearly what I'm hearing is that our future as a technological society depends upon science fiction writers because that's the you know I mean I'm half joking and half serious because that's kind of what science fiction writers do is explain some of these things in a way that is hopefully entertaining and accessible I just think that we need to find a way to make more money out of it because I didn't realize until now just how important we were have you heard of any cases of science fiction writers being commissioned to produce a piece of science fiction for effect really does that happen okay but I think you're exactly right Neil because if you know if Michael is saying that that we with the filter of what Congress can understand is unavoidable let alone the filter of what the Arizona legislature can understand it is the creative ability to help them understand it which does is we're coming back to the point at the beginning about literature is absolutely central Jack Ryan who you know is a synthetic biologist and then all your problems are solved right and try to develop some of those but they sort of went in multiple directions down usually the path of near mortal destruction of everything but crime is a kind of bad example here isn't it because I mean there is that you know there was probably a lot of bad understanding about climate change and some other issues absorbed by people through reading Michael correct fiction is fiction right all right well let's open it up for questions here and why don't we start in the back here and we'll just I'll just work our way around yes you sir my name is Arnold Kling I guess here in Washington we just automatically equate governance with Congress the president so on here in the United States but it seems seems like a we've heard a lot of things today that suggests that well we could have kids doing things in garages there was a map of a one of these consortium that had pins all over the world that they weren't just located in the United States much less in Washington DC and of course I've I have read snow crash and I have used it to try to explain things and in that's that book the US government is introduced as kind of a comic character so should we be broadening our thoughts and this is one more example the internet is not governed by the US government it's got a very different governance structure so should we be thinking about alternative governance structures than what we're used to alternative governance structures doesn't sound like something I would know about but I don't know I mean what I mean in the general answer I would give you you know is yeah all the time it's you know evolve or die and and that's true for everything that's true for institutions that's true for universities that's true for government structures it's true for American democracy yeah you have to evolve I don't know about governance being the the right word I mean you know I focus most of my comments obviously on the United States because we're actually talking about a democracy there are some of our competitors who aren't that and so there that's a different classification a different analysis a different model but in the in the system that we're a part of do we need modernization of our decision-making mechanisms absolutely do we need all kinds of reform and advancement yes that's why I stress this notion that that we have and I've written a little bit about this you know we have an overly simplistic model running at light speed right now producing scientific and technological alternatives that the rest of the of the decision-making apparatus that exists around it not related to the actual scientific and technological decisions isn't capable of fully grasping there should be some cause for concern for that not knee-jerk negative concern but positive concern how do we get engaged in the right kind of ways to get the kinds of outcomes that we think we're getting by making these investments or if not making these investments creating the environment or the climate where investments are made by someone other than the government that produce positive outcomes for the society yeah I just want to inject one question before the next one Michael is there any other country that you think does it better better was a better better approach to these that is driving more positive outcomes or no not better in the sense I mean I think the one thing that's happening is that too many countries are trying to mimic what we've done because their first generation is behind our first generation and so you see that even in the design of universities and how they're evolving and where they're going and so I think this is an area for a lot of attention I do know that Europeans tend to be asking more of the sophisticated questions about outcomes positive and negative so if there's a place where questions are being asked that that are really shaping this overall conceptualization of the outcome model I think that's probably in Europe yeah the lady in the background and there's a microphone coming around my name is Rebecca McKinnon I'm a Schwartz fellow here at New America Foundation I just wanted to follow up on on the gentleman's question and maybe if there are other people in the room who have experience with multi-stakeholder governance models it might be really interesting to hear from some of them because you know as as I'm hearing this discussion and I think Mr. Crow raises an incredibly important point that our political structures are not capable of dealing with our technical innovation and ensuring that our technical innovation takes place in a way that is in the public interest but at the same time is the nation-state the correct level at which to be addressing these problems when you have so many other nations that are working on technologies and you know so it's all globally interconnected and similarly do we really need to be looking very seriously at multi-stakeholder models like the Internet Engineering Task Force you know the way I can coordinates you know names and numbers for the for the domain name space the way IP addresses are coordinated you know the way the the worldwide web consortium where you know there's there's some very interesting emerging you know efforts at multi-stakeholder global governance there are a lot of problems with them but I wonder if some if if a really serious and detailed look or exploration needs to be made in that area and I'd really love to hear from anybody else in the room who has further insight. Great question. You want to go ahead Michael. Yeah I would just say yes I was on the Internet Tube board for a number of years which is a governance attempt of certain aspects of the Internet competitive with other other aspects of the Internet largely controlled by universities sort of emanating out of the University of Michigan and at the end of the day very complicated but effective as a boundary spanning kind of organization between users and suppliers and standard setters and competitors and so forth and so one can count dozens and dozens and dozens of creatures that are out there performing all of these functions within the general environment that we've constructed and so this multi-stakeholder environment in this highly pluralistic democracy that we live in here in the United States does produce these organizational transformations to try to do some of these things some of them work more effectively than others the Internet I'll just go back is infinitely simpler in terms of its long-term implications in my view than synthetic biology by comparison and the earlier speaker maybe he's still here yes this notion of sort of using verbiage and terminology to sort of link them as if they are of the same impact and complexity not that you were trying to do that we have to be cautious about that just in the sense that they are similar and related similar and relatable connectable and advanceable but very different in terms of outcomes because the Internet can't affect ecosystems it can't affect human biology directly by itself in that sense where synthetic biology is not late to a very complex process of biological evolution unless you want oh sorry sorry we've all not knocked our microphones off at this stage it's a question all the way over here sorry we're not getting on the microphone but just speak up yeah hi that's much better my name is Maria Farrell and until recently I worked for ICANN the multi-stakeholder global governance body working in it you know trying to get it get on top of some somehow this technology that was just changing world and I can tell you and as Rebecca says they're interesting multi-stakeholder models my my answer to this question can technology policy be democratic would be well maybe it can but I tell you right now it's like 1930s corporatism and it's basically controlled by governments and large corporations and I hate to sound like a raving lefty because I'm not but you when you look at the the I'll give you an example in two weeks time there's going to be a meeting where the US government has decided to stop a five-year multi-stakeholder process that says hey let's open up the domain space to everybody in the world have lots of new top top level domains they want to stop it because intellectual property lawyers and some very particular religious fundamentalist interests are opposed to it and it's just so easy to get in the way of these multi stakeholder processes so I would say and technology policy can be democratic but these are even when you look at where we've tried to to deal with those issues in a multi-stakeholder way it is so open to capture and so it's a lot harder than it looks they have they have power to the extent that the United States government is not actually giving up ultimate power you know do you have any any thoughts on that that's that's the first sort of cynical thing that pops into my head when I hear the word stakeholder being used is exactly that kind of situation where if if stakeholders just a code word for giving somebody veto power then sooner or later they're going to probably use it ideally there are stakeholders in the more literal sense that they've got a stake in the positive success of the venture whatever it is and so they've got some incentive to see it actually move forward and succeed let's see in the front row here and just the microphone coming your way and please just to remind everyone keep the questions brief and my question is very simple the Supreme Court has ruled that life can be patented patent and I wonder how this will impact you make it sound like anyone can invent anything in his or her garage however if life can be patent how will this affect this the synthetic biology industry and as she had mentioned what role will corporate America have in this and what outcomes can you predict or perceive from that ruling from the Supreme Court saying life can be patent someone can own it with that limit use of it and also access to everyone if someone has a monopoly on it who sets the prices how is it distributed to the common people in the public yes Michael is you know was that is that a good decision I mean should you be able to patent an organism you know what's interesting is that we're gonna we're gonna spend a fair amount of time maybe a few decades Paul Berman a dean of the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law is here our law dean is here and Gary Marchant one of our law faculty members who's the head of our Science and Technology Law and Society Center looking at exactly these kinds of very complex issues we're basically they haven't even come up with a diaper for us we're so young in this particular arena and so we're like a newborn in this arena still laying in the warming table and so the Supreme Court is gonna make a series of decisions driven by what driven by legal contests between organizations that bring their contests to the Supreme Court for resolution when a contest comes to the Supreme Court for resolution the only thing at stake are the parameters within the defined contest that is the way the court works and so on that particular contest that was that particular ruling that particular time given those particular dynamics and so given that we're so new into this and we're dealing with so many different things we've got a lot of thinking to do about courts and rulings and judgments and speed of change and all kinds of things and so science technology in the law is a vastly underdeveloped area of the law which is in need of serious attention yes sir right here microphones coming your way thank you my name is Richard Benedict former career for our service in the State Department and ambassador responsible for international environmental negotiations and I do have a question I think that we are underestimating the current social and political context in the United States which is largely based on short term considerations profits consumption and not enough of a consideration of science we see this in the climate issue we did see it under the for a while in the ozone I was responsible for the ozone negotiations as I mentioned and it was only when it went up to President Reagan oddly enough as some people might might not have guessed that he overruled some of his principal advisers and came out for our decision for our position for a strong Montreal protocol on ozone but we're now in a situation where the country is actually in a anti-science populism and dominated by philosophy I just like to have your reaction because otherwise it seems to me that we're living in kind of an art or that we're debating in an artificial atmosphere we think we can solve things easily if only everybody would be reasonable but the current atmosphere both political and social I would cite this creation is a museum for example is very much anti-science and how can we overcome that you're working in an anti-science context that's too too driven by greed and short-term profit and interest it's just I mean you're here I'm with you you're preaching to the choir here man the I was I was just thinking about it in the you know in the context of the Chinese high-speed trains so they've got this amazing high-speed train that runs between the Shanghai Airport and Pudong and it's it's awesome you know it's something that we really ought to be worried about in a competitive sense that they're building stuff like that and we've still got the passenger trains that we've got but we're not Sputnik we were terrified of you know because it went over the United States territory and it beeped you know and so and so we put a huge amount of effort into addressing that it was a long-term program that that worked but the for some reason we're not scared of the high-speed train in in China and and we don't respond to that competitively in the way that it would be in our interest our long-term interest to do and I don't know so I share your assessment of the problem but I don't know what to to do about it particularly I don't know if there is a way for a genuinely democratic kind of decentralized nation to deal with those kinds of things unless it's scared to death why do we look at that Michael and not draw the conclusion that hey perhaps the Chinese model is better at planning investment scientific research and that not having to go through this democratic decision-making could be an advantage well it's not an advantage it may look like it's an advantage but it's not an advantage because there's a lot more I don't want to get into Chinese versus American politics and outcomes and social well-being and rights and so forth I want to address the ambassador's earlier comment so I generally agree with your concern about the nature of discourse and rhetoric and the angle of attack that various sides look at but I'm also an individual that tries to look at the net net outcome so for all of its tumult and for all of its violent verbally violent interactions and the arguments and so forth our democracy has still decided to do certain things we do have a thirty billion dollar plus investment in the national institutes of health that's derivative of those processes it may not be targeted on exactly the right things it may not be having the right effectiveness that it needs to have we are able to actually even conceive of the nature of solution routines to the to the ozone problem in the Montreal protocol and global climate change and global climate warming and so forth because we have hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of expenditures going into climate modeling and climate assessment and so forth so we are at the highest level of scientific energy and creativity and know how that we've ever been where we're having difficulty what we're having difficulty doing right now is focusing it to produce certain kinds of outcomes and so so yes there's anti science yes there's anti this and anti that and I have been involved in the front line on the front line of some of those debates and struggles and it is always the case that if the scientific and technological elite approach the democratic decision-making mechanisms that we have in the country from a position of haughtiness or elitism or separatism or give us the money and leave us alone and go away and so forth then you will get these negative reactions always back and forth now back to this notion of of evolution and so forth that you were about here this all the time the number of people that don't believe in evolution as a percentage of the population is probably smaller than it's ever been there's just more of them by number by number you shake your head however you want to shake it in Arizona which is not exactly known as a hotbed for new thinking we were able to launch a school of human evolution and social change without a single political response well Texas is another place all right we have a lot of questions here right here you've had your hand up good afternoon I'm Patricia writes and I'm from the National Academies but please don't blame them for what I'm about to say I guess I'm really concerned about how we're using the term democratic and democracy and I'll admit I'm a political scientist even though I'm at the National Academies and you know we talk about you know let's not compare ourselves to China because Lord knows they're autocratic and we're democratic well I'm I'm afraid that those may be the completely wrong categories because I think the main difference now is we used to have money and now we don't they they didn't used to have money and now they do and to really put this in terms of freedom democracy I find almost embarrassing and you know what we've got in this social sphere of ours right now is the seems splitting because there's no money when there was plenty of money around everybody was kind of happy well there isn't anymore and the people who have more power and money are doing a better job of claiming this the common space but I think that has a lot more to do with the fact we don't have money than that we are a democratic country we spend more on defense per year than all of the other nations on the planet combined I see okay sir in the front row here microphone's coming here right Mark need I wanted to follow up with Michael sort of parallel to an earlier question but this time on people who were elected on platform small government they make me they get the science you explain it to them they say you're right Michael this is a good investment it'll pay off 12 15 years down the road but I made a commitment to the people who elected me that I would balance the budget and I can't afford to support that 30 billion dollars I need 200 billion dollars I'm gonna start to take that money I'm concerned are you concerned about that and I'm concerned in other democracies in Europe where budget pressures are tremendous that's gonna be a major concern whereas in the non-democracies China they can say we can invest for 15 years because we don't have to run for reelection in two years well I mean the last two comments are connectable if you if you believe this fundamental premise about the money is is that the heart of the issue that isn't exactly what you were saying but using that as as an example so so why is it that the that the democracies right now have the lowest rate or the slowest rates of economic growth and so there's a series of fundamental questions that we have to ask ourselves related to that because the politicians are faced with the fact that deciding that there's certain levels of taxes that they don't want to go beyond which is their prerogative since they are the taxing determination group they determine what the taxes will be given where we are in terms of our rate of economic growth certain things that we're attempting to do we can no longer afford and so as you're looking at all of that one has to look at why are why is it that that the democracies are the slow growers right now what is it about what we're doing and how we're doing it that have turned out to make that the case and perhaps that's something that we ought to take a look at you want to add anything to that I mean going going to your spun example you know it's not just that we had a common enemy and and some of the context was people trusted government and government was more solvent I think the there is something about and this is just kind of an intuition that I've got so I might not stand up to hard analysis but I think that there's something about the way that we improve existing technologies over time that leads to a state of lock-in where it it becomes very difficult to introduce radically new technologies so I've been you know since I was a college student I've been interested in sort of alternative fuels and different ways of getting energy and it seems as though those are always just around the corner but what I've been hearing since you know in the mid-1970s is that you know wind power or solar power is still just a little more expensive than oil than burning oil and and so pretty soon real soon now it'll get cheap enough it'll become competitive with oil and then we'll see a change in how we get our energy but it never seems to happen and I think it's because the markets kind of adapt the the the entrenched technologies are kind of one step ahead of the new technologies that are trying to replace them and always have a way that they can cut their prices or whatever and respond to any new competitive pressures that come along so the this phenomenon of lock-in technological lock-in is something that's of great interest to me right now and I think that democracies and particularly financially strapped democracies may be more vulnerable to it than other kinds of governments because if if you don't have a kind of dictatorial regime telling you to make a major change and if you're trying to be frugal with the resources you've got then your best option is always to take the system that exists now and make tiny little incremental improvements to it over time instead of swapping it out for something kind of new that's how we end up with Amtrak and the Chinese end up with their you know their super trains I think we have time for two more questions if they're quick sir sir just one second we can't quite hear you without the microphone Nigel Cameron sent for policy on emerging technologies very brief question question of context in 10 years time are we going to be having the same conversations we were having the same conversations 10 years ago I'd love our two I'm rather extraordinarily insightful panelist to give us some sort of sense of you know what are the odds we're going to be in a fundamentally different situation what are the odds we're going to be talking the same way thank you go ahead let's say 90% will be in the same situation yeah yeah I don't think it'd be 90% I actually think that your life isn't the same as it was 10 years ago individually or personally your family circumstances are not the same there's too many variables so therefore how can it be the same what happens when we're when we're working at this particular level is that we're at the aggregate level we're at the systems level and we're talking at the systems level aggregate level and system level things don't observably change dramatically in time frames related to that except on very rare occasions like in certain parts of the world going on as we speak but even then even then there were events that led to those things and so I would say yes it will be fundamentally different although the system will not be fundamentally different by that time the nature of the discussion will have to be different because these simplistic views that we have of synthetic biology right now they're not simplistic in the sense of technologically simplistic but it's not deployed in the field with a thousand examples that are having impacts across a number of places and it might be within 10 years you're talking about the factories that we heard about this morning and other things that drew indy I don't know if drew is here is drew here speaking tomorrow I think but Stanford professor drew indy is talking about the kinds of the bio fabrication plants he's putting together and so forth those will be in place those will be operating those will be advancing and so therefore below the aggregate the discussion will be very different at the aggregate it will be similar but I think afflictedly the gentleman in the front row is gonna ask the last quick question microphone coming up Stefan Richter with a globalist Michael it's not the money you say and you started out by saying good but you started out by saying we're only in democracy 1.0 in the United States Western democracies as a whole have similar problems with not having too much money right now we're all in tight circumstances but what strikes me as somebody who was born in Europe and now has spent 30 years in this country is that the real difference in the end is that we're lacking an amazing amount of social cohesion of will for cohesion between elites and everybody that's the one thing with the Europeans at least with this similarly little money have the ability to then engage in a longer planning horizons to do environmental transformations energy transformations and major major challenges that we face right now will only work such as changing an energy system if somebody's willing to plan ahead for three decades and do you think we'll ever get that fixed because that seems to be the first thing because otherwise we're not just stuck here for a decade with the same topics but longer and you can both either answer that or have a last word about anything you want well there there probably is more cohesion in Europe you know following a war that killed 30 million people on the continent 65 years ago I mean unbelievable stresses that were culminating in that conflict that led to completely differentiated outcomes in the case of social cohesiveness in the United States it waxes and wanes and comes up and goes down we happen to be at a moment where we are seemingly not as cohesive as we might be it's because we're focused on our differences more than we're focused on our commonalities we're focused on what separates us more than we're focused on what has connected us I believe that we will return to that again because there's no fruit that can be born from this focus on separateness there's no fruit there's only fruit from a focus on commonality Europeans learn that the hard way Americans have learned it in the past in the hard way we have an opportunity to advance maybe not in the hard way so I'm optimistic about us returning to in fact the New America Foundation and ASU have another project at Joint Center in social cohesion that we're launching on February 22nd so that's another area that we're focusing on what brings us together what are the common points that bring together and how might we take advantage of that you have a concluding thought for us yeah I you know the bulletin the atomic scientists has this clock where they set the hands closer to midnight depending on how great they see the peril of atomic destruction and I've been thinking for a while that we should have a sort of calendar that basically tells us how many years it's going to be before we become Afghanistan and you know because there's a country with people who are fiercely proud and independent like to do things their own way and and heavily armed and quite religious and I'm being somewhat facetious I don't think that we will end up as Afghanistan but you can kind of see that calendar moving up and down you know like after the Tucson shootings there was suddenly a wave of of national goodwill for about 24 hours around the time of Obama's speech where it felt like we could add a few decades back on to the Afghanistan calendar and then it you know it comes back at other times so I you know I think that something will eventually come along that'll create more of a sense of national cohesiveness and and maybe get us behind effecting some of the changes that we need to to make but it's hard for me to see right now what that might be and we're going to follow that with a lighter note thank you both very much thank you