eastern on c-span3 he will appear before the house energy and commerce committee. watch live coverage on c-span3 and online at c-span.org online saliva with the free c-span radio app. >> now, discussion u.s. sharing of technology with other countries and related security risks. we were also about whether limit should be placed on what companies are allowed to sell overseas. from the brookings institution this is two hours. >> good morning and welcome to brookings. i'm john allen, and this morning spam is about economic political and security aspects of technology transfer. i want to welcome c-span to this panel. it will be covering us and our panel will be broadcast later today. and at the very conclusion of this panel we will be followed immediately by the next panel.

there's no break in the process. just wanted to make sure you are aware of that. also wanted to announce that if you were unaware, if you haven't you did your cell phone, i would ask you to do that because sometime between ten and 11 washington, d.c. is going to test cell phone and remote device emergency broadcasting system, which means at some point i don't look down at the phone. >> that happens to be fickle in beatings, but let's did anticipate that and not have it be too much of an interruption. i really have the honor this point as the president of brookings of hosting this first panel of three terrific panelists, dr. anthony vincy, richard, and nicole turner lead. anthony is probably the chief technology officer at the national geospatial intelligence agency, or nga. i never miss the opportunity to thank your agency for the terrific support that they provided to us in places like

afghanistan and iraq and many other places so thank you very much for that. anthony has a long track record of success at the nga serving as associate director for capabilities and effect of plants and programs prior to his current role and essence of developing the agencies vital public-private partnership efforts and i think you'll talk a bit about that as we go on. a special assistant to the associate administrator for space technology of the national aeronautics and space administration, or nasa. prior to his current role, rich served in a variety of top positions at nasa and most recently was nasa langley research centers office of strategic analysis communications and business development leader. as well as the chief technology at the center at the entire center. and nicole turner lee is a fellow here brookings innocent for technology innovation within the governance studies research program and a resurgent

brookings focuses on public policy, designed to enable equitable access to technology across the united states. she's also an expert at the intersection of race, wealth and technology and comes to brookings after most recent survey as a vice president and chief research and policy officer of the multicultural media telecom and internet council and vice president and first director of the media and technology institute at the joint center for political and economic studies. we have three terrific panelists this morning, ladies and gentlemen, and i'm honored to energy spent at to guide this discussion. we will be here for about an hour for the first 30 minutes i will offer some questions to the panelists and the second half hour we'll go out to you. i don't normally ask our paddles to do introductory marks, but, of course, in the first question that i asked which would go to all three of the panels if they choose to make it introductory remark they are most welcome to do so. with that let me go to the first

question which is about technology transfer. starting first with the oval topic of discussion today, technology transfers, be they public good technologies emerging from u.s. government projects or university research, this is been an enormously, this has enormous potential ramifications when thinking of the growing tech race that we see as nations compete against each other and there is a big data and artificial intelligence and in particular which comes to my as the united states and china, for example. let's go down the line of our panelists this morning and present the opportunity think it's an opening thoughts about doing a a new definition of public good technologies? and what's the u.s. government obligations here? is this important topic at a good way to begin this overall conversation. with that, anthony, would you like to offer some? >> yes. thank you for having me. thank you for having the pair

which i think is extremely important at this particular moment in time for the country. i think looking at technology transfer, i put in the larger context of what is the appropriate role of government working with commercial industry and nonprofits and wider economic and civil society. and within that for my role at nga i think about national security and strategic kind of consequences. over history and in particular since world war ii we have kind of gone to some phases of working differently with industry and what you with the public and we've invented new approaches to doing that. the entire idea text transfer as an approach, uses of contracts, approaches like an ota and things like this and i think

right now we're watching kind of a geopolitical shift. and if you look at the national security strategy, national defense strategy we're saying the ship from, the post-9/11 world into a new era, near pure competition with china and russia. with that demand is a new approach to public-private partnerships and within that to text transfer. and seeing tech transfer as a means of strategic competition, and within that i would include not just transferring technology but more broadly transferring, sharing, investing data and other intellectual property. i look at the last sort of 40 or 50 or 60 years of government activity, and i have noticed we built up a massive asset and

resource really, whereas we used to think of natural resources is something maybe the government owned and been leased out say to the energy industry, now critical ip and data and technology kind of national asset. when you to come up with new ways to invest that asset and use it for strategic national security and economic purposes. when one of the things i've been working on at nga is to do that, which is strange for intelligence agency to think that way, normally we are consumers of data and information, not providers to interview but i think that's what we're going to have to do to strategically compete and start looking at not necessary just something we open source out of the sort of public good. i think they're still a role for that and for open sourcing things. for example, the corona imagery

was open-source for kind of historical and archival reasons but but i do think there is other aspects will be might want to not open-source it but still provide and may be treated more like proprietary information that we could unclassified of course we could provide to partners out there to universities, two companies to create technology. you brought up a eye. i think that's the major technology to source consider in this aspect where you need historical data to train some of these algorithms. all of the sudden this asset that we've developed over the last 50 years of historical data is actually important in that economy. we have to find ways to share it strategically with certain companies not with everyone and i would suggest primarily with american companies or potentially allied. think about five eyes for example, if that's what i think we're developing at nga at the department of defense and intelligence committees and some other agencies also started work

on. so again perfect timing on the topic matter and very important to what we all trying to do. >> thank you, anthony. let me turn to rich, from their position at nasa, , what are yor thoughts on this? >> one thing of what you just mentioned is that we need to make sure we think about tech transfer in both directions. as an agency that has a mission to do something technical, technologically pretty difficult, it's important for us to tap into the technological activities that are going on outside of our own development. we have traditionally used tools like sbr i to tap into small compass to get their technologies to take advantage of those within the mission but recently we're also doing a lot more with prizes and challenges. with those we can reach into a much broader committee outside of just the u.s. and tap into technologist who made in a

garage somewhere across the globe. this is really important as a look at technologies that now 70% of the research is done offshore, outset of use. for us us not to tap into that is a big mistake. we got to tap into that and the sketches of the partnerships that are to that kind of technology in order to accomplish the country thinks we are working on. i think we did make sure with a balanced discussion with the cookie tech transfer. the other side with regard to the transit subsidy something that is in our original mission statement, something we do a lot of. something we have the spinoff magazine goes out the people to get all the time for the amount the thinks that come out of the space program. it's kind of part of our culture to do text transfer. i think the thing we're recognizing, , however, is this broad dissemination of the technologies is not as effective as perhaps doing it in a more focused way. we recently began some programs around working with individual

companies come with individual organizations and particularly look at start of organizations to try to see how they can to prevent some of the technologies that haven't been developed within nasa, not only the technologies that take offense at some of the expertise come from the subject matter experts within nasa to help the companies move forward. we find we can leverage those technologies are a lot quicker and a lot faster and try to help that economic ecosystem be more robust to actually transfer the technology in a way that is much more effective to businesses grow, to create jobs, et cetera. that's something we we're experiencing with everything is going to be something very important as we go into the future. i'll leave it there for now. >> that's a particularly important point about helping the startups to accelerate the process that might otherwise taken quite a long time. no call, please spirit take you, john. -- nicol. i feel so honored to be sitting

next to these two scientistic uncle to talk about tech transfer from the perspective of civil society and what we are saying to a certain extent it is creating ethics of difficulties and challenges in tech transfer because the internet and the way it is been commercialized sort of excel with the private sectors engagement and tax the government sector when it comes to r&d. we all know the first tech trance was probably the internet and gps systems. and if we look at the way the system seven leverage as well as u.s. regulatory decisions to make the internet more commercial, we are seeing which is a lot different today if we look back, where the internet growth is outpacing what governments can do. i think that's when referencing, how do you create different types of models of partnerships. i want to address this question what do we look at what was the public good technology, and just reflect on that for just a minute. this competition has created i think a good firewall where

companies that have newly been created in the disruptive age are essentially, not mrs. o doing things for the public good. we had that first challenge where we're seeing the marketplace develop products in the commercial market that may not translate back into the public sector which is something that a record here at brookings, or vice versa we're seeing the government not able to keep pace with the private sector is doing and i think that's somewhat problematic when we look at government funding to r&d, something that supported public technology. i also think public good technologies require some level of architecture that protects citizens. i think the second pair will talk more about that in terms of civil society but there's a challenge. it public good technology that aside for healthcare that's his eye for transportation, and by mental systems, military, do not have those protections in place which i think john, , good that

your question, it creates a different definition of what we should be looking at look at public good technology. i also think it many of us in some have been watching the news, when you private sector companies that are edging into the public domain and suggesting many respects they're doing public good, there our problems and challenges associate with that. most recently with the breach i think all of us are very familiar with that is now toppled over 80 billion people. with respect to that i think what nursing seeing intensive public technology, where we're seeing private companies like google, twitter, facebook, doing public purpose things, that didn't necessarily translate with federal agencies have terms of strict scrutiny around design, content, and the benefits of that product. i've always reminded of having worked with federal agencies, things like persistent medicine at some of the technologies we are seeing advanced to r&d, the question then becomes when you

actually negotiate that are when universities, i've adapted to go to mit during the attack they were students are essentially putting patents for new products. it's a little different if you have seen the two screen television and think that's an interesting pattern on the product, out of university but when you start talking up drone technology or interference with national security systems or healthcare medicine to find itself in conflict with the private sector with public sector goals, i think it's problematic. to your question i think we need to revisit a public technology definition, particularly in the u.s. as we see the framework which we started the internet from this commercial. our decision to make the internet commercial has implications on how that actually affect civil society. >> your thoughts are then that there has to be some semblance of transference? >> yes. >> and context of public good being used in the broader civil

society? >> exactly. or the private sector will try that and we will have to catch up. >> terrific. anthony, back to you. in the world you lived in and currently do at nga, thinking about the american use every day, americans use everyday of gps and anthony is like google maps and what uber is probably doing in terms of using fake data collection individually, enhancing these technologies. but as we watch that unfold we don't necessarily always know that it's for the public good. thinking less about the data itself and more about the technology that collects that danica should there be limits on u.s. companies that are allowed to sell this information abroad or even disseminate it to third or fourth parties on the context? >> yeah, i mean, this is a particularly important question. when i again going back to think about this as a strategic issue, international student issue for the country but i would say in

terms of economic competitiveness outside of the national security realm, it's important. clearly there should be someone on technology transfer abroad. i think were all fairly comfortable with that and nuclear weapons, for example, come to mind as something that very clearly should be limited in how it goes. i think there is sort of the spectrum of what we're willing to transfer and should transfer, and some things do best when they are fully open source and available to enjoy. so gps, for example, i think revolutionized not just one industry, multiple industries globally and definitely helped the united states economy, the government and everything we do essentially every day. you can't necessarily always predict when you look at a particular technology what the revocations are going to be when you do open it up.

so my personal bias as somebody who actually came from commercial industry is that it is a bias towards opening up but at the same time putting on my national security had i realized that are some competitive advantages that want to keep within the country to support some of the industries here and support the national security community. and i think that is creeping from, again, if we nuclear weapons all the way at the extreme, i think it is creeping left as more and more issues do become particularly important for national security and you brought up algorithms and date and hardware. i i think we're creeping towards the algorithm inside and were intellectual property should be protected. i think the primary issue to think there is as you kind of creeped left and you get into from hardware into software into

algorithms, the shelflife, the half-life of these technologies become shorter and shorter. the shelflife of an algorithm might be months and sometimes even weeks. and so how'd how do you protect something like that, and is it worth, is the juice worth the squeezing you try to protected? had to kind of factor that in as well and a particular where much of that happens in open source and academic anyway. those are the kinds of points where to start kind of considering. i would suggest what it means s taking a much more sophisticated approach to how we secure and i would think about securing intellectual property and technology in the country and thinking about multiple factors, and thin figure out where in that spectrum of transference we should allow it to exist. >> let me make a comment. i asked for your thoughts on this. the speed of government is

woefully behind the advances in technology across the board, with its the production of datea or the collection of data processing of data. the emergence of algorithms, to your point about public-private partnerships, is there some hope that that concept of public-private partnerships can create a regulatory process that is faster than the speed of government to create the regulations that demonstrates a level of responsibility in the private sector to do what we all hope, which is doing good and protecting the privacy of that sort of thing? >> that's an actual question, and something i'm intimately involved with at the agency. we do have a discrepancy, and asymmetry between the speed at which technology is developing commercial companies move and the speed at which the government develops technology or really importantly here, adopted and integrates into our

operations, and how do we kind of shrink that asymmetry. i do think there will have to be some new regulatory policy statutory approaches to this. ask kind of what i i started, i think in our history we have adopted this new approaches when we determined that we need them. so into count is an example. we realized in the late 90s and early 2000 we we need to be able to communicate with silicon valley and only started better, so that required new authorities. and more recently changes and how otas are able to be used in the department of defense. i do think were going to need some new approaches that kind of take the speed issue and i would call the speed of adoption. that really the invention because i think we actually reasonably good at r&d and admitting new technologies, commercial and she is great at

inventing it and with great at buying it. it's how to adopt it faster. that's what i'm sourcing within the government now. look at things like project may even that's what they are focused on. i'm involved in project maven for that reason. and so i think that we right now can muddle through what i think it's incumbent upon congress to come up with new approaches that are going to support faster adoption. >> i think we will find, i believe it's the 12, or the 11th testament on the help of the three tech giants. we'll see some of that down in the public domain what will excellent commentary. >> can i add to that? i think a complete we are going, we do see some of the public-private sector cooperation when it comes to big data analytics, et cetera but i do think we're in the state where much of the is a regulatory framework has been focus on consumer privacy, and i

think the area we talk about privacy terms of text transfer has been more limited to the ip space at a think those conversations do need to happen. what's scary about this particular area and the rate of technology pace is it algorithmic peaceniks on the research i do it brookings is a algorithmic bias, and it's clear what happens in terms of the commercial sector, with data site is, there are not many agencies that of data site is on staff at understand algorithms and how to unpack that and are not many companies that want to give away the algorithm which is what we talk about bias. because you can't really see what's under the hood, to go when it's disproportionally affected people. i think we've made progress. the gdp are last week with privacy week in d.c. we will see data protection and privacy policy would've come to the pie. i think the u.s. and about this blog after april 11 11th probay april 11 in the afternoon when he leaves the capitol hill testimony room we'll probably

see privacy legislation begin to be debated. the question becomes with tech transfer, what we've seen in the last few months is the manipulation of what is available to sort of innovate new types of practices and procedures. with the algorithm has manipulate democratic institutions. that's a different type of regulation with the data flows are not easily identified, and not necessarily understood by all actors. i would even say in some cases the private sector, outside of the silicon valley, i would say companies who were expressing these breaches and we don't even understand what that means. i believe going forward we will have to look at this application that distinguishes between consumer control or consumer access to their own data, business or enterprise access to data and then the government transfer of data as three different verticals, that some would have to be reconciled to create a much safer and resilient system.

>> let me just add. maybe it's a bit of bouncing and we talked in the pre-conversation we had can we talk about the balance issue between these issues. there may be replication some of these new technologies but also opportunities of these new technologies. we've got to be careful not to over restrict to miss the opportunity. that's the balance we have to find the right place in the middle. as listed this idea public-private partnership is a really good one and we've done that with the airline industry before to try to move composite out into the industry. that serves, they have the speed that we don't have an order to move those technology forward and take advantage of that speed is very, very important. nasa is a pure oxygen is like the rest of the government. as china move things forward is difficult but when we can have the public-private partnerships they bring the speed in, they make it happen a lot quicker and that's important for us to move

it forward and within the opportunity space. that's important for the future. >> rach, thanks for that contribution. let me shift over to you with respect to your nasa background. we've seen the growing success of companies like spacex combined with a resurgence of interest of human travel into outer space and in particular towards mars. what are your thoughts on the private sectors will on that? are the risk associated with the technologies are visiting developed in the private sector in the context of technology transfer? >> let me make sure we got the right perspective on this opportunity, frankly, with regard to organizations like spacex, blue origin, et cetera. let's take us back a few years nasa was formed out of an organization called the aeronautics committee. that organization was really put in a position to try to help the

fledgling aeronautics industry move forward, right? they had a lot of research. they had a lot of policy discussions about how do we open up the airspace to these crazy companies that are flying airplanes around and oh my gosh, do we have to have some kind of restrictions on those, et cetera? that is the job that nasa in its history has been a part of for all of its lifetime really, is trying to help industry growth such as that it can commercialize and become something very valuable for a country and, frankly, for the world. and so we're in a new era of that now with regard to this space economy where we're seeing organizations like spacex, blue origin, et cetera, et cetera,, right, for taking similar technological developments that nasa is that over the years. taking them on a together how to do them cheaply. again this is that something nasa is good if you're we're good the technological stuff. we're not good at figuring out how to do it cheaply. spacex and is configured how to

do it cheaply sedgwick and didn't have a commercial market available. this is positive from our point we think this is, this is what should go and we are very much working to support those industries. they're using a lot of our facilities and capabilities, subject matter experts. we're actually trying to become a customer of theirs to try to get them privations up to the space station and eventually humans into space. we see this as a very positive benefit. it is the public-private partnership with the talked about in kind of a big mega economic way. >> if i can come back actually can you bring up a great point, which is relative advantage and relative competitive advantage and what is private industry good at and what is the government good at. that gets to the heart of why you would even have public-private partnerships. when i look at the government, in particular to get agencies like nasa or nga or the

department of defense, it's very good at doing certain sort of even more or less possible task, putting people on the moon. i think of the corona program, putting satellites at the american literally dropping fuel canisters over the ocean city can apply to pick it up and then in mid air and then getting it back to the u.s. to be processed and analyzed. that's just newly merely an ime feat and its incredible they did it with the technology they had. where as when you start to look at private industry is very good at something very, very different. the inexpensive is a big part of it but also being created in a way the government isn't. an example i like to use his ways. elected government approach, for example, to global traffic monitoring if we had to come up with it ten or 15 years ago would've been to go out and buy helicopters. we look at how do you monitor traffic? the local news stations can make use helicopters and a film the

traffic and the radio it down. so we should spy -- we should buy buy a lot of helicopters and you ellipses around every city in the nation and radio it down and let's go global with that. whereas ways with almost no money, and without even that in mind creator a commute of people to kind of go for our mapping purposes to start within for monitoring traffic ensuring that. and they use cell phones and use gps and now they give it away for free. that is just a very, very different approach for problem-solving that lynn's itself to very come to solving very, very different problems. and so when we start to think about these public-private partnerships we should look at it from that lands of what is the relative competitive advantage of each side and what should they play? even within that example we see an example of that is gps,

right, waves could not of been possible without gps gps cannot even possible from a commercial perspective. it's a money loser i suspect and it's really big and expensive and complicated, and just difficult to do and it has to last forever come for decades and decades which not all companies do. that's a clear role for government but then there's a clear role with something like waves for creative new uses for it. so again it's that relative advantage and it's a new way to think about how government partners with private industry. >> and just i don't sound like debbie downer, i do agree the panelists, positive ways to deploy technote and i agree, spacex is nothing looked at to provide broadband services to rural communities. so there's this report is a technology that is going on ever deeper i just think this panel is responsible not necessary standards. but some type of input output with the commercial and public sector partnership is defined of

what the output is so that it doesn't become something where you do have geolocation in the light of the government kicking themselves because the geolocation has an unintended impact or consequence that was not thought of by the commercial sector. i wanted to make sure, everybody knows that i do support it. >> it balances. >> it is. and i think that, threat and will go to the audience in just a moment, the common thread is the public-private partnership is really the way ahead here. it is something that can reinforce the public good. it can probably minimize the deleterious or negative effects. waves has the capacity as anthony set of producing enormous amounts of useful data with respect to metropolitan planning infrastructure planning and that sort of thing. but it also will tell members of my family and i stopped off on the way home and i were slightly about that. with respect to commercial involvement in the space program, i absolutely agree with

rich. this is been an accelerated. it's also very cost-effective. it's a quick integrated of technologies. the one tesla i had my eye on is on its way to morsel out of the business for a while. but i think this is real opportunity for us in terms of technology transfer both into context of national security but even more so towards integrally towards the good of civil society and the transference to civil society that is the real opportunity. you touched on that and a number of times in terms of opportunity. any go to the audience. we have a rich array of attendees this morning from a number of different organizations. and for many different countries so we welcome you here today. we will go for about a half hour. i will and straight on the hour at 11 so i 11 so i apologize fg up five minutes of your time. if you could give us your name please, where you are from, and

if you get to a question relatively quickly i would be most grateful. if not, i will find a question in what you were saying. so please, yes, sir. third row back in the moon, to the second row after that. >> john, thank you for very good presentation. my name is elliott, i'm from rockville, maryland. i used to work for the world bank. good people please define the public-private partnership a little bit more clearly? >> why don't we start with you? >> it's a loose term and it's been used in a lot of different ways, historically, everything from building highways to nih investments in health care and so forth. but the way i would use it is to

see it as, what are mutually beneficial things that the government, the public side, and the private side, primarily commercial industry but i would also include universities, nonprofits within that come what are mutually beneficial things that they can do with specific projects? and those benefits might be very different from one side and the other. so, or they might be the same. so the example that i would use is the co-creation of technology what i was saying before, the government is good creating certain technologies, the commercial sector is good at creating different kinds of technologies. how can they work together in a mutually beneficial way to come up with technology that they both want?

and so, therefore, shipping and different things at different times. and i see it as a partnership in the sense that it's not a one-way street. so it's separate from contracting, for example, where the government provides money and in return gets service or products of actually more of a street. .. anyone else? >> i want to add that i absolutely agree. our public private is often in that vein. the other kind is we do a lot is this spring competitive work

where we have several companies come together we will partner with as a team to work on technology and the maturation of technologies to a certain level that is be competitive and the these can take off in do with it competitively so both of those are models that were used. >> and i would say put with public-private partnership is an area that i do a lot with in the telecom space is you have to have common goals between the private sector and the public sector in what you want to accomplish and a fundamental interest in protecting the public interest, honestly. public-private partnership is not a partnership but a public interest or civil societies but it's not at the core of what that partnership looks like and i would agree with rich on this that the public private partnership has to be done in a way where it does not stifle innovation. you seen the arrangements where you go into the public sector private sector partnership and concerns on whether or not you can have the ideation process happening in innovation can happen because of the constraints of either the public

sector or the public and private sector in unwillingness -- electronic cupboards are a good example. we seen electronic health records become much more resilient because the public interest guided by hipaa and other sort of regulatory prescribed rules have helped private-sector innovate in a way that more readily available and i would end by saying it's the scalability of that partnership that has to generate the output and we often deal with at in my particular workwear were asked to see is the benefit to civil society benefiting one part or a block if it's not scaling in your taking the money for competitive advantage is hasn't met the criteria. >> thank you for that question, mr. horwitz. question in the second row, please. >> the left side of the room seems extraordinarily inquisitive this morning.

[laughter] we invite anyone to take questions from the right side of the room. >> thank you very much. i'm an african-american journalist and this is exciting to be at the dawn of the digital era and watch the differences that will bring for our societies. could you please make put into context how this relates to future government up until this point really the societies worked on a global system of opening economies and coordinating their economies in governments. right now we are in the midst of such populist movements and with technology being at its earlier stages although we are seeing some of its fruit we are also seeing being used and we have

described this process of where it will take time to produce relations and perfect techniques to ensure that they still serve the public good and government can do their jobs. can you put it in context. this will take a long time and yet we are on the brink of what looks like a nuclear war and so many conflicts brewing both in the public sector and global. thank you. >> who would like to take a crack at that? >> i think your question is spot on. i described this as a myopic tendencies of creators who want to see a product to market quickly. a lot of the tension we discussed and the broader goals of what that technology's impact is on society and you are correct that many more global and i would argue that transfer can become protected by people in terms of what they want to share because the vulnerability that it created by having the technology so much more widespread is not generating the

outcomes that we thought it would generate. different from a government for leveraging technology and practices to be more efficient to cutting into your democratic institutions i really do think will go into an age where those regulations happen before the innovation catches up which will be a flip-flop model of what we've seen. i think government will come in and put a plug in some of the stuff before the innovation comes out which might also create its own set of problems. i think generally your question is correct. we have to be your ways to harmonize the systems so that since we are moving into more of a digital economy the bureau of statistics put out that the percentage of gdp governed by general is certainly something that is taken up a huge portion of our attention not only in terms of the innovation but

economically so this will be a problem and it's a good problem to have but it will have consequences. >> let me add a couple points. there is enormous capacity for the community of nations using the digital environment to accelerate civil society, economic productivity and even improve government in many ways part from the come security side of it. here's where i think the community of entities which is bigger than the community of nations when we talk about entities i talk about facebook, google, some of the most significant sovereign entities when you think about sovereignty have the capacity to help the slingshot in many countries that are in the developing world that would not otherwise be able to do it on their own through public-private international partnerships have the capacity to be quite helpful in that regard. you mentioned the potentially emerging cold war part from the

dustup we're having right now the chinese there are enormous opportunities again for us to share in to cooperate the us and china on a number of issues. the issue with respect to russia and i have great concerns about where all of that is heading, brinkley. i see china in a different mode and i think we beyond the reflex for protectionism which can chill this and can chill the opportunity in other areas the capacity for the united states and china in this regard to find common ground in the digital future i think is extraordinarily important to pull countries into the community. i would hope that we don't confuse the activities right now that appear to be protectionist and that could lead us down the road towards a trade road as

being helpful over the long term for the us china relationship. >> if i could add in there, i completely agree with your point in the points that come up on the values and i'm a technology optimist. i used to work for alvin koestler who wrote quite a bit about the subject and talked about how you can skip a generation of technology and have profound effects on countries to be skipped from landline's two cell phones much more resilient and much less expensive technology that i've done a lot of my phd fieldwork was in africa and i watched this happen in real time what mobile phones did to an entire continent and that really is the promise and we all know there are downsides and there's a negative consequence for a lot of technology but the net gain to me is massive and i think we

talk about the public-private partnerships there's an onset assumption which is really important which i see in my government role more and more which is an acceptance by government at the working level that commercial industry, commercial technology is a lot to contribute to governance and government in general and that we should adopt it and this is a very real factor within government within any large organization. i think we're starting to get over that and realizing that technologies that we can use that allow us to govern and to enact our government duties and responsibilities significantly better, cheaper with a wider scale. what came up before, for example, broadband where government again in the ways and maybe we don't by helicopters but maybe we do to go hole in the ground to every house in the

country the matter how far off and that is valid and everyone in the nation should have broadband but all of a sudden there's a game changing technology that if you do broadband from space because of a company like space x and other ones that have come up with a new, much cheaper, solution and that is the promise here and we need to be open-minded as government employees and thinking about that. >> we are not likely very quickly to these questions. the gentleman that is next to the camera, please. yes, sir bobby from no one. i would be interested in your thoughts about the wealth that has been created through digital technology. that wealth is unequally distributed and the digital industry is becoming

increasingly sophisticated at the creation of roles as other industries have in the past once what has been created. do you think we have the right balance in the public, private partnership with the financial wealth that has returned to government for public purposes that public governments can make decisions about? >> no. [laughter] leave it at that. no, i think, i completely agree with you. if we go historically and we look at the evolution of technology in general and something that i always have to remind myself we started with it in very basic principles of what tech events. even with government going back. that has morphed into an economy that is not just been a static economy but internet is no longer this websites where

people go to but layers that create in and of itself its own wealth so the sharing economy outside of the general economy which is ruled by the internet and other really cool technology that you can touch, cloud computing, each of those layers generate its own sense of output, economic output, that does create this unequal distribution of wealth and access. all of this in this room we don't own a patent or technology companies are what we all should be proud to say this but we are all passive consumers in this digital economy right now. startups have incubators and government is trying to break through and this is a case where government is behind on that, too. the season were government driven and or pcs that were supported public technology applications are now just coming around to see that we've got to fill this role and facebook is not designed for what it's been used for today. it is designed to be a social network and now it's in the middle of a conversation around

algorithms and it's an absolute model that has morphed into something else. over found its spot in there impeding its own generation of wealth in its own generation of workers which is why we are wrapped into this conversation which can be so much more sophisticated. who are the people on the end that will become the colonies of this digital economy? the 11% of americans that are not online, the poor, the disabled, the rural communities, they will always be involved because their big data is what drives the new economy. even if they are not online. their lack or absence of data drives company to know where they need to deliver food what kind of investment that the smart grid system. they are still part of it but

they run the risk of becoming deeper and deeper in poverty and eventually becoming digitally invisible. to your point i think the -- the bls was the latest case to debunk what the digital coming look like but your question is critical particularly when government invests in r&d and they don't get a return back on investment or technology which was designed to solve the social problem actually creates a problem. that is where i think again a lot of us are stuck in the middle and the next time we'll talk about security but how do you begin to resolve and reconcile and create harmonious legislation or regulation that allows one part of the technology sector focus on civil society where another part of it continues to do what they do but perhaps in regular the context because again, the communications act of 1934 was designed for the telegraph later picked up by broadband and didn't anticipate the companies we see today. i think your question is a spot on and 12 equity index will continue to widen based on where you are within the topology of a

digital economy. >> that is a great question. let me offer a couple advice. the sovereignty throughout much of modern history has been shaped by the concept of westphalian society hundred and 70 which the line on the ground that circumscribes terrain and certain number of people often with a homogeneous identification all who provide their loyalty ultimately to the sovereign. that's a modern relatively modern view of the concept the west alien concept of sovereignty. somebody really is about the capacity of a sovereign to influence and that's the traditional sense all the way back to aristotle. i think we need to think differently in the public private partnership concept may be some of the thinking of how in a world where tech giants digital giants control the

modern version of the power of ancient sovereigns which is wealth and data and algorithms in ways that traditional was feeling governments don't necessarily control them and we need to think of it differently now about public private partnerships ultimately morphing into what might be public private alliances because when we think about the larger tech giants with gps, if you will that surpass many of the countries on the planet that can reach out and touch people in the numbers of billions and influence their thinking for voting purposes et cetera that's a whole different way of thinking about influence and sovereignty in the modern digital era because where it was in the past about terrain and numbers of population today is much more about the information that you control the way you will wield that information in terms of algorithm and the

outcomes that will flow from that which will be prosperity and wealth. it's a different way of thinking and i think we need to expand our view about the use the term a moment ago the community of entities we often talk about the committee of nations and it's much bigger now than the community of nations and its community of entities joined forces in a public-private partnership and we have real capacity i'm not sure that were thinking about it properly and i'll leave it at that. >> do you mind if i build upon that because i think what you have done is place this concept of public-private partnerships within the wider spectrum of how we understand geopolitics and how we understand history and i think we can go further with that thinking in terms of how different nations have different government systems and that difference will apply to how they use public-private partnerships in the nature of those relationships so i think china will have a very and already does have a very different approach to public-private partnerships when

the government deals with companies like [inaudible] than we do and how our government and the us government deals with a company like google. i think both of those types of relationships will shift over time and that is what we are starting to see now and what were talking about here but what makes it even more complicated is these companies as has been brought up here aren't necessarily just within a single government system and so google may have a very different relationship with the eu that may have with the us and it may have with china and it makes a very complicated to think about how all of these relationships will interact and evolve over time and that will be the sophistication for us on the government side how what do we actually want from these public-private partnerships with these other entities and how we will get it and that is what we are starting to think about

right now. >> this is an important outcome for this panel and importantly my cable advice tells me we have four minutes left in this panel and i've been very disappointed in the right side of room to this point. [laughter] -- is there anyone -- yes sir. i like to get quickly to a question invented the 20th gentleman in the third grade. >> thank you so much. i'm from china daily. in terms of cooperation between china and the us could you elaborate more areas physically where china can improve their cooperation to the well-being of countries and you talk about the areas where the government on the one hand to set the regulations other different industries but in the meantime need to provide sufficient funds for different industries to

develop and how does government to strike a balance in terms of the us? thank you. >> that's a very long question with a very short question but a long answer. there comes to mind immediately where the us and china in the context of the digital environment can cooperate would be in medical diagnoses and the capacity to harvest enormous amounts of information on medical research and using the right algorithms to help us get more quickly to diagnoses now that were are beginning to see can be harvested and rendered with high levels of competence. the whole business of countering terror and there are other reasons why china and the united states need to cooperate in this regard and there are real capacities in that regard, as well. i would sibley say we have not seen it play out yet but we are very interested in the same how

president xi's objective with respect to the outcomes of the 19 party congress and china's intend to surpass the united states by 1930 with emergent knows how that will play out. china has some cases advantages some people would say disadvantages in that it has at its core the capacity to create great cohesion between the objectives of governance government and the objectives of chinese companies. there is much more capacity there than perhaps in our system and i don't call that a strength or a weakness but different in what we need to acknowledge is that it will be different for us. anyone else? >> in the area of ai clearly the artificial intelligence side of what we're seeing and it's interesting and outpacing some of the things that we have here in the us but when it comes to global decision-making and problem-solving i think some of the applications there should weren't cooperation because particularly when the us takes

on issues like a couple years ago in the white house trying to solve it stop the ebola crisis some of the new applications of emerging technologies could have been more helpful if there have been more cooperation and we are starting to see the human do more of that kind of operation as an international when it comes to digital rights and so bright they should be moving into this conversation around but i would also say to your second question around on that and the interesting conversation we had tabled is to incentivize and regulate but you incentivize these digital development. hopefully we will begin to see more models like that were there are cases where we can incentivize government to have more cooperation around products and services that fit the poor public interest which will help with the allocation -- i don't think any government has enough money to support the local gdp of the company that has a come

gdp of a small country. having more of that for example, in africa with mobile there are lessons there we didn't pick up on in terms of wireless. again you have to incentivize these type of experimentation or projects to balance the regulatory work. >> nicole, anthony, thank you for participating. ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me at brooklyn's and please help me in thanking the panelists. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> while mike does housekeeping appear is a generous host to provide water for us i will introduce the -- our topic as well as the panelists so darrell west here at brookings and also the director of our center for technology innovation. we are going to continue the discussion started by john in his panelists on technology transfer and i do have to say the first panel set a very high bar in terms of both substantive as well as humor and not sure we will be competitive at least on the latter part of that and we also were able to work in references to aristotle and was feeling systems and we may or may not meet that threshold as well. you will try and get into equally important issues. i do want to remind the audience boulder c-span audience as well

and the auditorium people we have set up a twitter # that is # tech transfer so if you wish to make any comments or post any questions for free to do that that is # tech transfer. our panel will focus on security angle regarding technology transfer will be getting into questions such as when it should technology be transferred and when do sensitive products need to be protected and when should we draw the line between national security versus free trade and free exchange of information. to help us understand these issues we are joined by a set of distinguished experts. my immediate right is heather who works on the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence and published several articles on autonomous wiccans and the author of a book.

if they had aristotle we have [inaudible]. michael is a senior fellow a foreign-policy at brookings where he holds his sydney starring junior chair and author of numerous books and works on us defense strategy in american national security policy. he also served as director of research in the foreign-policy program. paul is the head of geo technologies at the eurasia group and works on global technology policy and emerging areas such as ai and big deal. prior to joining the firm he served in several signal policy positions within the us government more than 25 years. chris is a fellow in the center for middle east policy at brookings and an expert on religious and sectarian conflicts in the impact of technology on foreign policy. he also uses machine learning to

study violent extremism. why don't you start with heller. you argued that many emerging technologies are what you call dual use in nature and meaning they can be used both for a good or bad purposes and how we should think about technology transfer with dual use technology. >> thank you. to answer your question there are two ways to think about this. one to talk about content and another is the north. the primary purpose of this is basically purposes to secure the rights and lives and protections of citizens. this is very [inaudible] and the leviathans hold jobs is to protect the body politics. when we talk about technologies and regulations were talking

about regulation between civil society and civil applications of the technology for peaceful purposes in the economy. and if something is used for military purposes which is the flipside that it could be militarized in a way is for security purposes or for weaponization. we have to be careful about how we draw lines around these technologies. one way to think about this is through a series of arrangements that we already have in place given international treaties a commercial missile control regime and we have things like the [inaudible] arrangement which is a voluntary arrangement of like-minded states that want to ensure that technology developed and exported when a dual use technology starts to become so precise and what it can do and becomes more conducive to military applications so thinking about things like systems against electronic magnetic pulse

systems that the systems that can withstand a nuclear attack for the systems that can withstand extreme temperatures. when those things start to happen those begin to become what we would consider dual use. the good and the bad purpose is one way to think about the hub but it's also think about military versus civil. it depends on which side you think is good or bad. what i would think about technology about tech transfer and expert control is that the new emerging technologies are not very amenable to the current structures that we have for expert control. if you look at something like the [inaudible] arrangement you have 190 pages all sorts of discussions about what needs to be regulated at what rate and when it's here and what type of power whether it's nuclear or

software or if the frequency for all sorts of different types of technologies that are enumerated throughout that hundred 98 page document. within three lines of the documents i found something very anomalous and interesting. that is voice encoding. if you can voice code and take continuous speech and make it into zeros and ones encoded into additional frame and you can press it and transfer it at a slow rate 700 kilobytes. second that's a very slow transfer rate and for some reason that's they find it a dual use needs to be regular for expert control. i don't know when they decided that was the case and i don't know why but what i do know is about six months ago in academic decided that figured out how to do voice encoding and dropped it open and the internet and that kind of move really pushes us to

think about how we do the regulations and how we can be have more foresight about our regulations when it comes to military applications for security purposes. another thing that i would briefly draw attention to is not only do we need new government structures and ways of thinking about these types of security and military technologies or technologies that hey, i want to regulate this algorithm in the same algorithm on your phone running theory and then you will stifle innovation and stifle the ability of other states particularly developing countries to gain that technology to boost their civil society's well-being as well as their economies and you have to be careful about where you draw the line. there is another question that is equally in place so you have where to be draw the line and how do we do normative governance and thinking on hard

questions on these dual use goods but another one comes with the public private partnerships in the security room. i think one of the things we can look at now that has been in the news quite recently is the potential for a cloud computing contract for a single company to take all of the dod data is posted on the cloud for the next ten years. single company contract, ten year span. that is a lot of money. right now in the news we've been seeing is amazon is up to that contract. we don't know if they will get it but there's been lots of discussion about amazon cloud and amazon web services hosting. then we have questions about the public-private partnership and with it does in the civilian side of things and security side of things for the public global company like amazon makes that's that it will host a defensive, state military data, and what it does to where amazon operates in other countries that they say

maybe i don't want amazon to have my data if they're going to be feeding it to the us government or those type of things and how we partition that and how we keep that export and how we keep that use and how we make sure that the public-private partnership is for the good of everybody particularly those states were entities are global in nature. i think we have hard questions when we start thinking about technology and civil military and the securitization of when they are running together and difficult income getaways. thank you. >> thank you, heather. mike, you worked on great power competition particularly with regard to russia and china. what are your thoughts on wind sensitive products need to be protected? >> thank you, sarah. i won't try to rival john allen, our boss on humor or anything else but maybe i will try to rival him saying something

surprising from a brookings podium. much of what president is trying to do toward china right now is actually justifiable. not necessarily in every detail but the general thrust of pushing back on china in particular because let me try to have a historical perspective on this from as well. not quite back as aristotle but if you think about the last 500 years and paul kennedy the yale historian wrote about this releasing european powers in particular rise and fall fairly fast probably because they couldn't protect their advantages because they were living in an economy that didn't have barriers to technology transfer or theft. this is an age-old phenomenon that we've seen long before the internet and in just the last hundred years or hundred 50 years britain lost its advantage in industry and advanced technology to japan, germany and the united states among others but those three in particular luckily one of the three was us and we ultimately therefore were in a position to help fill out the rest of the western world in

world war i and world war ii which resulted partly because of this technology transfer happening pretty fast in germany in particular catching up faster than it might have otherwise. i put all this in perspective because our more recent historical reference point is the cold war and we had very little economic interaction with the soviet union during the cold war and we were very comfortable putting up a lot of the barriers some of which heather talked about in some of which were done not for proliferation purposes nuclear weapons to prevent getting to other countries but designed to help technology out of soviet hands. now we live in a world which most likely are competitive is china which is a fully integrated in the world economy and we made a gavel not just in economics but in strategic terms ten-2030 years ago and we decided to try to bring china into the western economic world as fast as we could including membership in the wto and the gavel was on front this would

help china liberalize fast enough that the risks of seeing china grow fast would be outweighed by the liberalization of china and that it would become more rules oriented participant in the international order. this sounds like china bashing and i'm not really a china basher but jim and i wrote a book a few years ago about a strategic vision for how we could get along better with china and do things even on the us side that would promote that process and recognizing china's historical rise but in some ways it's become too fast for comfort and because of the means that china has been using. darrell, you and i talked about the idea for this panel and i want to thank you for this concept of this event but we talked about this originally a few months ago when we met with michael brown and ronnie who were from the di you ask unit in silicon valley and we wrote a paper how chinese investment in

emergency access a crown jewel of american technology and they went so far as to suggest we rethink how many visas we give to chinese students studying in the united states. they had pretty drastic ideas in their paper and i'm not sure i support all of them but their analysis is pretty compelling and recommended reading for all of you and we are beginning to wrap up here by saying some of the ideas put forth to try to force china to comply with the rules -based order for technology transfer are appropriate specifically trying to make sure that until china will allow equal access to their economy we should slow down we will that's not enough strategy but certainly that's a viable beginning we support much of what president trump is doing. what i finally say is i will kick off and i'm throwing out a fire hose for presentation but i

will kick off the technology beyond the ai and the data and cyber worlds which my co- panelist are stronger than i am we have to keep her eye on the trends and that's the area where much of the other parts of the military competition occur over the next one-three decades. first of all anything with nuclear proliferation remains important not so much for china but other countries. advanced metals, advanced machinery, precision machinery and advanced timing devices and source things that are needed to make centrifuges to make bombs themselves we have to keep a close eye on those things and not lose sight of that as we try to paste in technology transfer and other domains for good and positive reasons. within the areas i do think are important regarding china in

particular we have to keep our eye on a few things such as summary and quieting technology which has been a traditional american strength and we got to try to keep, stealth technology for aircraft thing and many aerodynamic and aerospace capabilities and advanced engines and hypersonic swear china in some ways is getting ahead of us but where we have other advantages that we have to reinforce directed energy in lasers and finally nano materials which are very important for everything from batteries to the strength of various competitive where we build systems on it. these are among the areas i want to interject a note of caution in a conversation that very appropriately where we share more in special areas how do we promote economic growth through technology transfer between government and private sector and i want to remind some of the areas where we have to be particularly cautious in my judgment. thanks. >> thank you, mike. i think we have the headline on

the event now. michael hanlon endorses donald trump. [laughter] not necessarily on every topic but -- so, paul, we want to come to you. mike mentioned the china connection and the forced text transfer where companies claim they have to share their core intellectual property. i know you work with many companies so could you provide a perspective from the commercial world on how companies view the intellectual property issue. thank you. this is a huge question and i think the other panelists have outlined a lot of the themes that i would like to touch on briefly. i agree with michael in general on the thrust of some of the actions that have been taken recently. it's important to understand that the 301 accident which we are in the middle of is not about trade as much as about tech transfer so i recommend reading the report that it's 215

pages but the section on tech transfer is very important. tech transfer is mentioned 227 times in the report and you think we're in the midst of a reassessment in the us of how we do both export controls and how we handle things like technology transfer because china has for a variety of reasons become the poster boy of industrial policy and of overreach in the view of many including the us government and things like mercantilism are used and forced text transfer becomes a key issue that is driving in part this trade action and this so-called trade action. there are two important parts to that. one is this issue of how do you deal with the country that is very elaborate set of measures designed to compel and in some cases legally involved tech transfer but there are a whole host of others in the gray areas things that are unwritten rules

and documents and controlling of companies and also things like fiber espionage which is been a long-standing issue of access to technology. in part the process we embarked and now is an effort to try to roll back some of china's policies and it's a very complex edifice that they call china's technology transfer regime and it's a very difficult thing to do because some of these issues are structural and industrial policies like made in china 2025 and things like the national integrated circuit fund which is a huge pond which was once described by us government official as an effort to appropriate the global supply chain and there's a whole host of critical structure if used and what happens is us companies essentially are in the middle of this issue because us companies are doing business in china

trying to negotiate a very regulatory environment to do business they are so a lot of our clients, for example, are multinational monies that are involved in china and want included in their global operations but have to be careful how they operate in china. companies we work with by large view the situation that they can control the amount of tech transfer and can protect the secret sauce of the company but as you read in the ustr up report you realize how complicated that issue is because each company will have different problems to deal with in a different pressure to do tech transfer in a becomes difficult for companies to figure out how to navigate in that market. in part, there is a mixed feelings about this whole action that the 301 investigation has started because companies have

been successful in navigating out in protecting their core intellectual property and others, of course, have not. the business community is split on this, i think. the other piece of this process that will be important is the investment restrictions. there is a major effort in the us, of course, to revamp the city is legislation for foreign investment in the us and that is the process happening now. another piece of this action against china will be a proposal of reciprocity which potentially has much bigger indications even in the tariff fees because this would restrict china's investment in specific areas of investment. it's becoming a huge issue in terms of reciprocity. ali baba intended to build data centers in the us and oracle in microsoft and google and amazon all have to have a joint venture partner and that usually involve

some level of tech transfer is part of the deal. we are embarking on a typical period, i think in us china relations which encapsulates all these issues and the eurasia group one of our topless this year the third top risk was global tech cold war and i think the us china tech cold war is a big piece of that because again, as we look forward to things like this generation mobile china will be a big player in that and countries in developing markets will be looking for the technology leaders for 5g and the us is looking at how to build a full 5g network which china minimized or china free which is a whole other topic we could talk about. with advanced technology like 5g and particularly ai which we could talk about -- there's a lot of sense that we are moving in a world where there will be more competition in these areas then corporation. i'm also a technology optimist but i'm worried that the rhetoric in the media has tended

to focus on the competition and not so much on the corporation. for example, ai there's tremendous cooperation between china and the us and i could be jeopardized by some of these actions coming up. in any case, the bottom line is the regular system is behind on this and the wto has not worked in the form of reasons we embarked on the us government actions as focused on 301 but were in for a rough period, i think, and hopefully at the end of the tunnel there'll be some better sense of how the system can deal with us system and the global system can deal with these complex issues related to tech transfer. i will stop there. >> thank you. chris, i know you worked on social media usage by extremist groups. now, until recently people do not think of social media as a sensitive technology but you show how terrorists have used it

to recruit members. there's a similar issue in terms of off-the-shelf drones. they can be used by hobbyist or terrorist so we need to broaden our definition of sensitive technology and if so, how? >> thank you, darrell for the question. thank you for including me on the panel. tech transfer debates tend to assume that it's between states and one thing we've discovered over the last decade is that a lot of the big geopolitical events we've seen have been driven in part by tech transfer to nonstate actors so extremism, terrorist groups, their ability to use the new technology for ways that they were not considered originally. social media and off-the-shelf drones are uses of commercial technologies. i'm going to mention briefly in a bit about using dual use technologies is the core issue

is but i want to situate a little bit how tech transfer even happens to nonstate actors and terrorist groups in the first place because they don't have the resources to the big research in the moment budget and they don't have the resources to acquire cutting-edge technology so they are left with three options for getting decent technology. one is the open source movement. they can go and download and build out their own sophisticated machine learning models and they can another option is in one thing i'm worried about is what happens when some of the cyber weapons that they have built get into the hands of pretty bad actors. third is commercial appellations and in particular the cost curve of many of these technologies decreases more and more become acceptable or accessible to

nonstate actors and the challenge for nonstate actor is that even though some of them do have technical advance capabilities it's hard for them to incorporate new technologies in the same way a state would because they just don't have the same level of technical expertise or resources so i'm presenting at the un two weeks ago and the question was will terrorist groups go down and build up their own models for ai and effectively target us soldiers in syria. i would be skeptical of that because of the way ai works. need to couple the algorithm with data and if you don't have access to massive data and massive computer as well it will be hard to build your own model. what they can do is take the post models that google and others have started releasing

and incorporate it into off-the-shelf drones and i suspect that is where we will start to see this the next couple of years. i think is something we will have to pay more and more attention to. the advantage commercial bikes have is they distract the complexity of underlying technology. if you think about the big app and social media we all know about twitter and facebook and their use of social media a few years ago currently most of it is happening on apps like telegram that are intended encrypted and with a real breakthrough there is we've had the option for a while now which but what is new is you can have access to it to the smartphone app store and people forget that what the app store is doing is extracting away a lot of the complexities so it's two tabs on your phone and suddenly you have access to secure encrypted device that previously only the

pentagon or other places would have had a decade ago and when we talk about the use by nonstate actors of these technologies the sensitive technology question i'm not a lawyer so i don't want to get into the fine details but i think we need to think hard about the use of patient technologies new robotics and new drones that are commercially available very cheap and easy to use. think about the tool use nature of them in advance of their product release. if you talk to developers at facebook or google today they would probably admit they made

us take five or ten years ago when they set up their platforms and didn't architect them in a way that would make it difficult for use. i would say that going forward a lot of the commercial technologies like off-the-shelf drones there's a lot we can do to make sure they are not abused in the same way that isis and other groups have used twitter in social media. i have more to say but i believe it there. i think i've gone over my half-hour. >> thank you. i never thought about the app store but you are right. that's an important point. i have a question for all of you and then after this question will open the floor to other audience to the audience. some of you have suggested the need for additional limits on transfer. richard handled that 70% of nasa research is taking place out of the united states the question i want to post is if we put new limits on technology transfer will this encourage other countries to do exactly the same thing and a lot with this taking place outside of the dates will disarm our ability to integrate

customer cover wants to jump in, go ahead. >> i will start and maybe create down the road dynamic. i will be brief. that's a valid concern which is why i want to target the technology areas we are most concerned about into the roughly the kind groups i mentioned earlier plus maybe a couple of others. not generalize more than we have to recognizing that if we were to try to do so we would not be successful and we would slow down economic growth and ultimately it is not realistic. if you try to limit everything you will limit nothing. we will try to slow china down and has to be in specific areas but even there i don't want to slow them down as a matter of permanent policy but try to force them to play by the rules a little bit and maybe buy us a little more time so their political system matures more before they reach our level of superpowered him. >> i think that's a good

question. ai provides a good example. we are grappling with for example, microsoft and google both have engineers in china developing ai algorithms. is the us company or china company or how do we look at these types of arrangements and of course china companies like ali baba have institutes in the us and they are hiring us engineers and suffer developers so ai inherently is tool use so i think we are coming to grips with that. what michael mentioned the focus on ai and there's a sense now that ai and other things like automation robotics are becoming a part of the security innovation base and in part that is what things like the service legislation is designed to better protect. it will be complicated because the interaction between

communities and again, ai at the work on that and i looked at the collaboration between china and the valley and it goes very deep. most of china's ai engineers and software developers came through microsoft in beijing and have close ties with ali and are very plugged in. there's a lot of chinese investment in startups and in the valley that are driving innovation. we have to be careful to develop new ways to protect real national security and assets that we don't stifle innovation inadvertently because and in particular he in ai because it's new in some and for example, when the us government jumped in and determined to cbs what investments in chinese companies can or cannot do can do in the

company in the valley because people are heartburn to say the least so these are valid issues to be grappling with but the danger in extending out some of and revamping the us legal and other measures to control is the cycle areas. >> maybe i will be the debbie downer but it's a good role it played quite often. a couple of things to think about. most of my concerns are about artificial intelligence and enabling technology. we have to think clearly not just about ai but also the backbone in which you were thinking about gpu's or various types of glitches and if you

think about specter and meltdown and indicative of ways of putting off technology and other types of secrets and encryptions or whatever you want these are going to affect worldwide the way in which we can keep secrets and thinking about the facts and thinking about everything from chip to the instruction base to the firmware to the hardware to everything i think that is something we need to take into consideration quite heavily. when we think about artificial intelligence, i mean, the sensitive technology thing -- you know, i'm looking at this from an application base and not in investment base so thinking about applications that are maybe just not good ideas so for instance, we have the ability right now to generate date audio

and going back to my voice including example we can take any person's voice in his room and get about 20 hours of data through talking and i can create an artificial intelligent agent that can make it say anything and has no one to tell the difference between your voice and the computers. those ai agents can say anything. i can make it say anything and no one could tell if it is you for the computer. not only do we have artificial audio generation but artificial video generation. using general adversary nets -- when we start seeing the coupling of things like fake video and fake audio of the somebody anywhere in the world saying things that could be monitory and no one could tell the difference if that is actually the person saying it.

that is an application that, in my view, is weaponization of information. we want to talk about information operations as an area of armed conflict is something that we have engaged in for decades, well, more than that but we call it information for decades. we have to be very careful about those types of technologies that enable those military campaigns that are based solely on information. information in this new era is the heart of it. when you can up a nice information and use information to get ahead of and when you can use information to the occasion technologies to do this. we have to be very clear about what we are regulating, how we regulated and when we think it has crossed the line into weaponization the needs regulate regulation. i would walk back questions on

the structural things where you can go to school, where you can invest to just think about the application base and where you would use that application for any good reason. it might be a fancy toggle on my android phone but is it really necessary and what are the risks associated with that proliferating to nonstate actors to state actors to just your angry neighbor down the road. thank you. >> okay. why don't we open the floor to questions from the audience. you have a question, major hand. you have microphones and just give us your name and organization. right over here to the front. >> my name is jessica. i recently was working on insidious with the department of defense. my question is protecting government investments and startups and emerging technologies and ai where there is foreign acquisition particularly from china for

prototypes that receive government funding initially. how do we address issues of basically us taxpayers funding foreign countries or companies and taking over these or acquiring these technologies? ... what sort of government oversight would be adequate in looking at something as complex as ten companies all having minority investments in a startup that may not have developed a technology but it looks promising. part of the challenge, one of the challenges of the report

and its recommendations is converting that into useful legislation and then actually enabling a process to actually make intelligent decisions on this without bouncing the security and the security concerns my concern is the way it structured right now it's heavily on the national security side and it may not have the right personnel or the resources to really evaluate some of the more complex challenges that involve early stage investment in companies that are doing cutting-edge technology. there has to be a lot of thought given into how the process works. i think we will know when we have an example of that. i think the first time we hear of them reviewing early-stage investment in an outcome that involves a chinese investor

will have a better sense. what the reality is, and it's mentioned in the report that just raising this issue has already served as a deterrent and discouraged partners or people looking to put together consortiums to invest in a particular company, from having to invest in a chinese partner. that's probably already happened and could happen going forward. these are very difficult questions and i think part of the problem is resourcing properly organizations to help deal with it. >> i would also say the devil is in the details. it really depends on how far back you want to go. for talking about early-stage technologies and early-stage companies or companies formed right out of university, if you look at a lot of engineering labs, they're going to come up with some sort of new great widget and they're going to patent, and then they're going to form a company and probably much of

the money they got to do the research on the widget came from the u.s. government. we look back at google, when you look at the founders of google, they took money from the u.s. government through various types of grants so everything about sbir's and getting money from darpa, a srl, army research lab, there's so much money from these labs going into university labs that prop up the kernels of these ideas and then they get to a patentable technology and they patent it and they form a really small startup and they go out and seek support to do their startup. if you're going all the way from the generation of the idea which is funded by the united states government all way down to the investment of series a, then you have to say okay, maybe have a series a in

a series b and all of a sudden by the time you get down to see, you have external investors that you didn't plan on having your portfolio to prop up your technology. you start investing, maybe being open to other types of investors and that entire patchwork of how an idea gets funded and generated all the way to where it gets an ipo and then thinking about how to market and now i need to go into a space that has more market like china or asia and i have to has tech transfer. this is such a bees nest, a beehive, a hornets nest, one of those two credits a bad situation. it's so complex. the incentive structure that nicole is talking about is that if you are a phd student in the lab, you need grants

and the grants are going to get that will fund you for serious types, if i need to build a reactor, i'm not going to get that from the national endowment of humanities or something polemic at that from darpa or from omr. >> the one thing i would add to that, building on one of heather's points is that it's fundamentally different when the tech investment is for product versus for the talent. i think, if you look at ai in particular which you can kind of map out as a function of algorithm data, resources and talent. algorithms are wash because most of them are open source. china, u.s., neither will have an advantage. china has an advantage in data for a whole host of reasons i won't get into it. they are also may be pulling in i had in terms of their compute resources for the only advantage that the u.s. has in this game is talent and so to

the extent that they are funding our companies to acquire or to work talent is something that we need to think really hard about. the one example that comes to mind is in intruding and going from google. [inaudible] stanford to google and so i would imagine he got a fair amount of u.s. government funding through various means while he was at stanford. too complicated further we need to focus on the technology and the talent itself. >> on the talent side, with our current interest in cracking down on immigration, it could drive the talent further abroad which will make this problem much worse. other questions. >> if you can give us your name and organization. >> i am from china daily. as you may know, the icloud service this company will be

responsible for the operation starting from february this year and i'm just quite curious about your thoughts and opinions and what the consideration of such a deal. >> i think there is a complicated set of business decisions on the part of apple that this involves, there are two pieces of this, one is the jd requirements in china, apple is essentially operating a cloud service there with icloud and so they were forced to enhance their local partnership arrangement and in this case they chose this company that's associated with the government. i think also apple is also anticipating some of the

provisions under the new cyber security law in china which are still not finalized but may require certain companies involved in critical information of infrastructure division to localize data and that would include some companies although it's not clear that apple would fall under that definition. from a commercial point of view, i think apple made a decision to also, because it made sense in terms of customer service and other issues so i think it was a complicated decision to do that, i think the media has portrayed this as a security issue. apple will be keeping control of the encryption keys for users and has said that it will be very judicious in its response to legal requests, but i think there is a general sense that this is a problem, but i don't we really seen

example of the types of government requesting data from apple that is appropriate. i think the broader issue of law-enforcement access to data is part of the whole picture. the cloud act was just recently passed in the u.s. which will be an attempt to provide a mechanism for law enforcement to gain access to the data in the cloud globally. it will be very tricky for countries to be approved by congress as part of the cloud act and have a bilateral executive relationship so the data can be smoothly passed. your point is well taken, there was an earlier panel who talked about data localization and how that has become a big issue globally but in the apple case there was a number of considerations that led to that decision.

>> i'm curious how other countries are handling technology transfer. are there good examples out there? are the lessons we can learn? good or bad examples. >> you guys can get back to me in a few minutes if you'd like. if you want to pass, we can do that too. >> i will get back to the topic of our standing in the world competitively and out of broader perspective in addition to the points that were already made, this does not encourage complacency, but the meeting important point that we have over china and other countries is talent which i interpret as the entrepreneurial spirit and the people in silicon valley and elsewhere who are designing new concepts and applications, new software and i agree, but it's not just those people, it's the fact that first of all they live in the richest country on earth which also is

the center of the western community of more than a billion wealthy consumers and by the way, other people who speak english on this planet include another billion indians who are increasingly wealthy and much of africa, much of the rest of the world speaks english as a second language but the chinese are a long way away from being able to compete in these kinds of terms. also, if you had an idea to make $10 billion, you probably prefer to make it in the united states rather than in china because you have more confidence in being able to hold onto your own money which gets to the earlier point that maybe we can let these people hold onto their money little too much of the united states or maybe were concentrating wealth too much, but nonetheless that is an advantage of strong legal environment, the competitive advantage of the american economy are pretty profound and even as we try to erode them through huge budget deficits and a dysfunctional washington, there's still pretty strong foundations in place. this is not to encourage complacency but to build and put them in a broader content

and context. >> to get away from this consistent discussion of u.s. and china doing this, i think we should also think about, what i think about in artificial intelligence is really the global spread of talent. when you are looking at where you have major sources of investment as well as major sources of talent, there is going to be a giant sucking noise going to france with the new ai initiative and the fact that france is going to be giving lots of incentives for companies to go, you are looking at offices there, london as well, the mayor of london has said things like he wants to make london the center of artificial intelligence, you're looking at silicon valley, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the place. canada is putting so much

investment in artificial intelligence. you are looking at montréal, waterloo, which waterloo is one of the best universities in canada for engineering. it's where rim initiated with blackberry which of course we can talk about later but you also have toronto as a major hub. if you really want to say let's get outside of this western world or eu side of things, no one in this room have talked about israel. if you want to talk about major investment in ai and robotics, you should look at israel. they have massive advances in autonomy and ai. if you want to talk about security applications and implications in particular. we need to expand our view outward from this narrow western conception and just a power play between russia and china because then all you've done is set the frame and you're going to get blindsided in your gonna be like what,

iran has really good computer scientist? yes they do. i think it's something we need to consider. >> thank you. that is a good point that we need to broaden the discussion. we're just about out of time but will give nicole the last question. >> i want to bring this conversation and get all your feedback on the cambridge analytical facebook scandal. i'm sorry. i'm listening to you all and chris talking about isis won't develop algorithms, i'm not so sure about that. the question i have is universities have typically been under strict scrutiny when it comes to the development of products and services. a lot of them are governed into irb, there are certain stipulations when it comes to taking government money, cambridge analytical scandal was essentially laid out that it was done with the intent of

research and even though it got past alexander, it really went to cambridge analytical and was repurposed along the way which has been put up this conversation around guard rails when it comes to the commercial sector engaging in research around access to concealed algorithms which was demonstrated in this cambridge analytical piece. should we start thinking about scrutiny for the technical sector that's engaging in r&d to feel like forgiveness and will come back and try to revisit this which i think places universities outside of this realm of being much more innovative in the things they do but it also puts the additional security risk. >> that's a great closing question. any thoughts from our panel? >> we need another panel for

this one. this is such a great question. the way that i think about it is i think we do need to push the tech sector to think much harder about the negative views of what it's doing. i think the risks with facebook, i view that, let me back up and say when we are in d.c. we tend to think of policy and policymaking as this higher-level thing that happens and in rooms like this because were viewing the governance in terms of political institutions but as soon as you go into political governance it's baked into the architecture and facebook made a decision ten years ago on how to lie would the api to use and whether your data was

going to be shared with a third party. if they didn't do that they were afraid someone else would come along and they would outperform them. what we need to be able to do with conversations like this is begin to communicate with a lot of tech companies as they are building the products themselves, not ten years down the road when they already have massive network effects and 2 billion people. early on in their product development cycle, to think about what could go wrong here and obviously we can come up with legislation to target things like what cambridge analytica did. my fear with that is that this technology moves so fast that we always end up, were just and up a couple years behind, always and so i think the bigger issue is that folks like yourself, we need to go out to silicon valley and have conversations early in the development lifecycle. i think you would've flagged

that epi choice is a bad idea and it doesn't seemed like it was flagged internally. i think if we don't legislate the europeans will. the eu were of the opinion that if it happened after may 25 they might be facing some standard for data privacy which may or may not become a global standard but it will certainly driver dilatory change in europe and will influence regulatory change elsewhere. >> just to follow up on that as a fellow at the university of cambridge have to make the disclosure that we were not involved in this whatsoever. just because the name cambridge, does not mean anybody. [inaudible] let's make sure that everybody knows we didn't do that.

so one, cambridge analytica knew what they were doing. they knowingly broke the law. so, there's one side of the equation if you want to think about this that they were shady enough that they knew they were breaking the law. facebook on the other hand was just so negligent in thinking about a whatever, i don't know what you're doing, fine have some data. there was a comes flicked of negligence, some misconduct and knowingly breaking the law. that is something we really had keep in mind. the other thing to is that i like to flag the work of a friend of mine who is a professor at the university of washington who said things like look, maybe we need to set up some sort of institutional structures that when commercial sectors and if we need to start thinking also

about whether or not it rises to a dual user expert control, we need to have some sort of federal. [inaudible] finally, to again put my hat on as debbie downer, gdp are in the eu, it's already making everybody a little bit crazy about how they're going to comply with all the stuff. cambridge analytica side, even in the case of we might be able to prosecute them under gdp are but were not to be able to do is actually have any sort of arbitration institutions for the average person. they say things like you have a right to your data and a right to look at these things and you are right to arbitrate if things become wrong, but they've actually not set up any institutions for the right every course. it's so great on paper but oh yeah, you broke the law, what's the law. we don't have accord on this or the expertise on this so unless we have institutions

created alongside and you don't actually have contradictory things being said, section one here, section two here and actually contradict each other in some ways, it's a good start but i would not hang my hat on this as the regulatory system. >> we will give mike the last word. >> a very tiny thought in a much broader perspective with less knowledge the michael panelist, i was simply observed that it was sort of the last few years that the private giants are really becoming more scrutinized because, for 20 years they were the superheroes of the modern economy and you couldn't walk down the street without seeing a book celebrating bill gates or steve jobs or whoever and they could do no wrong and they were creating this new economy and they are meeting people, but the edwards noted in the government debate about wikileaks, that was taking all the scrutiny and heads on what big data was doing to our lives in an affair he is wary. that was the extent the debate through the early part of the 2h

century as i think back and perceive it, and had, the.com world is getting credit for the arab spring. facebook and twitter help people mobilize and that was the dynamic for a long time. now are entering into a world ride out the big ones will ever receive quite that much of a buy on just being good and being for the betterment of humanity without any questions being asked. the last thing i will say is if you want a general overview of ai and cyber read darrell's new book. it's a very nice summary of a lot of these other issues that we are talking about today. an early plug for your forthcoming book, my friend. >> okay, mike, lunch is on me. [laughter] i want to thank heather, mike, paul, chris, very enlightening conversation. thank you very much. [applause] >> today the u.s. conference on mayors discuss a school and public safety.

a relationship between police and the communities they serve. our live coverage begins at 2:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> tonight on the communicators, cyber security and the internet impact on democracy and voting. >> with respect to the electric sector, what i've seen is yes they are a target, as you would expect, but you also see a commitment from ceos of utilities across the country to address that in partnership with the department of energy and dhs, we have documented significant decline in internet freedom, in particular, this year we have focused on the increasing number of governments who are manipulating the internet for their advantage. >> when it comes to the implementation of china's cyber security law, for example, we have severe concerns that might be influencing and be onerous and

the inspection of hardware and source code that are not typical of the regulatory machines that we see in many places around the world currently. >> watch the communicators on cyber security, tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. this week, facebook ceo mark zuckerberg will testify before senate and house committees on facebook's handling of user information and data privacy. tuesday at 2:15 p.m. eastern on c-span three, he will answer questions during agility senate judiciary and, searing. then on c-span three, you can watch live coverage on c-span three and online at cspan.org. listen live with the free c-span radio app.