 Technology has always been a double-edged sword. That's true from the very first technologies, fire, stone tools. We used to keep us warm and build housing, but they were also used in war. And we've always used technology to amplify our creative side and our destructive side. And the same thing will be true of these new technologies. Let's take biotechnology. That's a very profound transformation. The health of medicine used to be hit or miss. It was not an information technology, up until just recently. In 2003, we collected the Genome. That actually was a good example of exponential growth, because halfway through the project, the skeptics dismissed it, saying, oh, this was a failure. I told you this wasn't going to work. Here you are halfway through a 15-year project, and you finish 1% of the project. But that was actually right on schedule. It happened doubling little numbers. If you double 1% seven more times, you get 100%, that's really what happened. And it's continued past the end of the Genome project. So we now have the software of life. We didn't have that before 2003. We also have the means of changing that, not just in a baby, but in a mature individual. We can turn selected genes off with RNA interference. We can add new genes with new forms of gene therapy. We can design these interventions on computers, rather than just looking for them among natural substances. We can simulate biological processes and test out interventions in silicone, rather than a much slower method of testing them on animals and so on. And all of this has turned health and medicine into an information technology. And so these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful in 10 years, a million times more powerful in 20 years. And I believe it will give us the tools to overcome cancer and heart disease. And we're already making tremendous strides on this. It's in an early stage, but once these technologies are a million times more powerful, we really will have the means of overcoming these major diseases and extending human aging. That's the positive side. But the negative side is it also empowers people to be destructive. A bioterrorist could take today's tools, let alone the tools 20 years from now, and take a benign virus, a flu virus, and reprogram it to be more deadly, or more communicable, or more stealthy. And that specter has existed for several decades now. And there's two things to be concerned about. One is the accidental side, and one is people intentionally being destructive. The accidental side has been addressed through ethical standards. We have the so-called Asilomar guidelines in biotechnology, which responsible practitioners follow in order to prevent accidental problems. That's actually worked extremely well. The number of accidental problems over the last 20 years has been zero. And so part of the solution to prevent these kinds of downsides is to practice these kinds of ethical guidelines. But we also need to develop a rapid response system because we know that people will try to be destructive. We can't just say, oh, well no one would ever do that. Ever since 9-11, we realized that people will find some reason, some ideology to be destructive if they have the opportunity. And I've actually been working with the Army on developing a rapid response system. Just like we do have a rapid response system for software viruses, we don't just stand around without taking action against that. Every day there are new software viruses, and we have a response. They're reverse engineered, antiviral programs are written, distributed virally on the Internet, and we have a response in 24 hours. And although software viruses cause destruction, nobody has taken down even a portion of the Internet for even one second over the last 10 years. We have a technological immune system. We need to do the same thing for biological viruses. And that's a broader message for technology in general. We need to look at how they can be abused and then create defensive systems that would protect us. Now some people say these technologies are so dangerous, we just shouldn't pursue them. There's a relinquishment movement, Bill McKimmin, who in fact discovered global warming. The term global warming comes from him. And he's a good friend of mine and a respected environmentalist, but he wrote a book called Enough, saying we have enough already with advanced technology. It's too dangerous. And he cites accurately these dangers, and his solution is let's just not pursue these technologies. There's three problems in my view with that approach. It would deprive us of these profound benefits, and there's still a lot of suffering in the world that we need to pursue. Secondly, it would require a totalitarian system to relinquish technology. It's so innate in human nature to want to solve problems, and we have a whole system to pursue, to create more and more powerful technology to solve problems, and we do succeed in that. And thirdly, it actually wouldn't work if we just drive these technologies underground where they would be even more dangerous. The responsible scientists that we are relying on to create these defenses would be deprived of these tools. So it's really not a viable approach. A viable approach is in fact to realize that technology is a double-edged sword, and we need to carefully have ethical guidelines for responsible practitioners, and we need to develop defenses, basically a technological immune system to protect this from either abuses of biotechnology or abuses of nanotechnology. The most daunting ultimately will be people who try to apply artificial intelligence to be destructive, but that's really something we've lived with since the advent of technology. And some people would say, well, it's made life terrible, but I think that loses perspective if you read Thomas Hobbes as to what life was like a few hundred years ago. It was short. Human life expectancy was 37 in 1800. Most of you listening to this would be senior citizens if you were alive at all. It was poverty-filled, disaster-prone, disease-filled. Life was extremely difficult even 200 years ago. We've come a long way. There's still a lot of suffering in the world, and it's really only these tools that are expanding exponentially that have the scale to solve the problems that we're facing today.