 We're now going to segue into a short presentation that's going to capture some of what a number of us have mentioned earlier, which is the interplay between the development of technologies in a time of war on the battlefield and how they're brought back. And in some cases, maybe not. I think there are also lots of examples of technologies deployed in war where people imagine that people imagine will have widespread commercial domestic use and then there are some surprises either way there. This is also an opportunity for me to embarrass Tori Bosch, who is our great editor at Slate and she's sitting in the back. Hi Tori, yes. So in addition to events, as most of you might know, Future Tense has a dedicated section channel as they're called online on the Slate.com website and Tori blogs and manages that site and assigns and edits a lot of great articles often pegged to these events but also separate from the events. And I mentioned that at this point because our next presenter, Konstantin Kakaes, who is a Schwartz fellow here at the New America Foundation, writes a lot on technology and a number of guys including frequently for Tori on the Future Tense channel. And if you go now to Slate, you will see an article that's related to what he will be presenting on today, which is bringing the war home. Thank you, Andres. I wanted to echo Andres' thanks to Tori as well as to Adam Sneed, who's running around here in a blue shirt and has been integral both to this presentation and to the whole day, I think. If I can figure out how to advance the slides. There we go, forward and back. So this may seem like something of an odd quote to many of you. It's the second half of a quote that's better known to the extent that it's become a cliche, beating swords into plowshares. The second part of that, which is from the Bible from Isaiah 2.4, is says that they shall turn their spears into pruning hooks. You don't hear that as often. The question is, when are things actually useful? And part of what I wanted to do is we have a lot of discussion here. You have Michael Toscano telling you that drones can cure world hunger, that there's this enormous pent up promise in them. You have Professor Missy Cummings telling you that drones are safer and more cost effective than manned aircraft. Part of what I'm here to say is, when is that actually true? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. The drones, if you take the predator, reaper, and global hawk together, they crash three times more often than the fleet average for aircraft in the US Air Force. So how can someone say they're safer when also they crash three times as much? Now that may change in the future, but at the present, they're much less capable than they might seem to be. Part of the way I want to understand this is to think a little bit about the historical context that we're in. We're in a moment where drones have been incredibly useful on the battlefield in the last decade, and they're now coming back. I wanted to try and think about some examples in the past that we might sort of reason by analogy to. This, you can't really see it very well, but there's a little nuclear symbol up there. This is an NB 36. It was meant to be an atomic powered airplane. Now this might sound like a very silly idea to everybody today. Between 1946 and 1961, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission spent about $7 billion trying to make a nuclear powered airplane. This airplane flew 47 times, carrying a 3 megawatt reactor. The reactor didn't actually power the airplane because it was experimental. So it had regular engines but was flying around with a nuclear reactor. And this seemed you can go back and read all kinds of ideas of nuclear power. It's better than previous things. It's cleaner. It lasts forever. We'll throw our airplanes on nuclear power. Didn't happen. It was actually technically quite difficult. This is a familiar looking mushroom cloud. This is from part of Project Plowshare, which was, again, a long effort. There were 35 nuclear detonations between 1958 and 1975. Project Plowshare was a project to look at peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Part of it was Project Chariot. You were going to use atomic explosions to create artificial harbors. There was Project Ditchdigger to build new canals, both in Panama and in Nicaragua. In fact, when they were building Interstate 40 in California, there was a feasibility study conducted with the California Department of Transportation to use nuclear weapons to cut a new line through the mountains east of Ludlow, California to build a new interstate. There was also a sort of a precursor to what we know is fracking today, a number of nuclear tests done together with the natural gas industry in which you would explode a nuclear weapon underground in order to free up natural gas. This may all seem sort of neither here nor there in a discussion about drones, but the point I want to make is that nuclear weapons were tremendously useful in war. There was a large group of people who said, okay, these things are great. Therefore, let's use them for peace. They turned out not to be very good. Time Magazine, January 1964. This is the canal example that I was giving you. And there were many, now sort of looking back, this seems like a ludicrous idea. At the time, there were many smart people who thought this. These sort of trying to look at the engineering trade-offs, the economic cost-benefit analyses are not easy things to do. We can look back in retrospect. One of the main sort of people behind the beginning of the nuclear-powered aircraft was Enrico Fermi, one of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century. He's not, it's easy to misapprehend how good things are. Supersonic travel is another thing. JFK addressing the graduating class of the Air Force Academy on June 5th, 1963. At the time, Lyndon Johnson had just concluded a study of the economic feasibility of the economic and technical feasibility of an American commercial supersonic aircraft. Those are JFK's words. JFK said, Johnson looked at this. His technical people, they think it's great. It is my judgment that this government should immediately commence a new program in partnership with private industry to develop at the earliest practical date the prototype of a commercially successful supersonic transport, superior to that being built in any other country in the world. Of course, it didn't happen. There was a lot of discussion at the time of America will lose its competitive edge if we don't do this, etc. We didn't do it. The sky didn't fall in. There was a race. This was in 1963 that he gave this speech. The British and French did it. They built the Concorde. They built 20 of them. It was essentially a failure. It didn't, the market wasn't there. It was too expensive. Of course, I'm cherry picking examples here where there were military technologies that proved to be too expensive or created too much radiation were for some reason or another impractical in a civilian sphere. Here's another example. That's a GPS satellite. GPS had been in the works for a long time. I was sort of gathering steam in the early 80s. In 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by the Russians after straying off course. Ronald Reagan said he would open up GPS to civilian use. A lot of the original discussion was still quite muted. There wasn't an immediate sense that GPS would become nearly as prevalent as it has. A receiver cost $20,000 even in 1988. So they were talking about putting GPS on commercial aircraft. Chrysler was starting to talk about putting them on cars. But GPS is an example contrary to the ones I just gave you of a military technology that became very, very widespread. Why did it do this? It got a lot cheaper. And it did something that there was no other good way of doing it. Now the question is, are drones somehow analogous to GPS in that they can be a lot cheaper than the alternative and do something that there's no alternatives? Or are they like some of these other examples where there's something that was very useful in wartime, not as useful in peace? Part of the question you want to ask is how difficult things are technically to do. I wanted to go back to Rosa's example this morning of, can an enterprising person get a gun and tie it on their UAV that they bought for $400 and then have a weaponized drone? And the answer is basically, Rosa said, oh, I can't do this, but maybe someone who's better. It's really hard to do that. Raytheon can do it. It's not something that a hobbyist can easily do in a way that would be remotely effective. It turns out you need to aim the thing, you need to control it. This is not simple to do. Here's an example that I think is a reasonable sort of historical analogy to the drone. That's Sikorsky, the father of the helicopter, not the inventor per se. This is Life Magazine from 1943. You had, in this time in the Second World War, helicopters were first rising to prominence. They'd been around for a long time, but they were now starting to be mass produced. Samuel Solomon, the president of Northeast Airlines in 1943, prophesied that there would be air taxi services. You'd have a helicopter would pick you up in your office in Boston, take you to your office in New York. Now, this sort of exists in a very limited sense for the very, very rich, but he thought the mail would be delivered by helicopters, there'd be networks of hundreds of helicopter taxi stations, and helicopters would be like taxis. They aren't, because it's very expensive to do so, not because we couldn't do it in principle. You had a helicopter taxi, so all this sort of idea. We'll go back. Coming back to drones, the question that I wanna ask is essentially an economic one. And as I was saying, these are difficult questions to get right, but I think our intuitions collectively have been skewed because of the utility of drones at war. I wanna take a specific example, the KMAX, which Professor Cummings mentioned, which is an unmanned cargo helicopter which delivers cargo to remote bases in Afghanistan. If you're flying into the mountains of Afghanistan, there's lots of reasons you might not wanna have a pilot. That's a lot less true if you're flying cargo from Memphis to O'Hare. The benefits you get from not having a pilot in a war zone, many of those benefits are conspicuously absent over American airspace. Taking another example of the economics of drones at present, and this may change over the time scale of decades, but for the foreseeable future, if you don't have an autonomous drone, you still have a human in the system. You're still paying that human, regardless of whether the human's on the ground or in the airplane. Today, a drone like a predator costs about $5 million, of which about a million is the sensor package, about 4 million is just the airframe itself. A Cessna, which you could get used for $100,000 or new for $250,000, can carry the same amount as that predator can for roughly speaking, a tenth of the cost. Now the Cessna can maybe fly for eight hours instead of 24 hours, so there's trade-offs there. If you're flying over rural Yemen, you might not be able to fly your Cessna because you're based at a remote place, you need that long loiter time. There's plenty of good reasons why the Air Force and the intelligence community have used drones where they have. Those reasons don't apply over the US, and you'll say, yes, I can go out and get a drone for $300, but the cheap drones are not that capable and the capable ones are not that cheap. These smaller drones take the dragon flyer, for instance, which law enforcement has bought, the Seattle Police Department bought them and then returned them after public outcry. It can loiter for 20 minutes. That gives it a niche capability. It doesn't make it useless, but it doesn't make it capable of flying overhead for as long as, say, a Cessna can. There's a Cessna moving on, part of how we think about what drones are capable of, so a few people already today referenced this example, of drones delivering beer. This is essentially a fake news story. The events at DeBix take place in August of 2013. It hasn't happened yet. It might not happen. If it does happen, it's a gimmick. It's attracting publicity. We're talking about it for this South African beer company. It doesn't mean that drones are actually going to be economically doing this all over the place. And explicitly in this popular science story about it, it says it offers a good idea of what commercial drones will look like in action. And I would say that that's wrong. It offers a bad idea. It attracts attention. It hasn't happened. It might not even work in August. It certainly won't work on a large scale. The same way that Shane was asking earlier if drones will replace bicycle messengers. Turns out there's a lot of sort of hipster dudes who like to fix gear bikes who'll do things for pretty cheap. And can you do that cheaper than them with a sophisticated drone that might have to get recharged every 20 minutes, not anytime soon. I wanted to look quickly at a real news story. This is from last week's New Yorker. It's about a fancy new LiDAR sensor detecting making archaeological discoveries in the rainforest. The sensor costs about a million dollars. It's the state of the art. They had to get special export permission to fly it over Honduras. And the sensor was flown on an aged Cessna 337 Skymaster with a third of its paint, a streak of oil down the fuselage. You can put new sophisticated sensors on very old airframes and have them work very well for a lot cheaper sometimes than drones with equal capability. And it's something to think about in terms of when we think about how quickly will drones be adapted? How good will they be? It's going to take time because they not only have to be able to do something, they have to be able to do it cheaper than the alternatives can. So thank you very much.