as well. we do scholarships. we have an organization called galactic unite, which is really focused on that. we're going to go buy all andy's books now. >> i want to hear about the next book. what can you tell us? >> the next book takes place in the 2080s, 2090s time frame. it's another scientifically accurate hopefully story. takes place in a city on the moon. and i came up with an economic reason why there's a city on the moon. and i think it's pretty solid. the main character is a woman who was sort of a low-level criminal there. so i'm going for the lovable rogue archetype. and it is told in the first person smart-ass narrative style that i do. >> when's it published? >> probably comes out middle of next year. >> looks like that's all the time we have for today. i want to thank our panelists for -- [ applause ] they're really great. really appreciate it.

up next we're going to go from space to dna. and we have eric schulte coming. he's up next. thanks very much. really appreciate it. >> so a beloved astronomer was faced with a task that would seem daunting to just about anyone. okay? if we humans were to announce

our existence in this universe, how would you do it? and more importantly, what would you say? now, i say say very lightly here because language is a very human construct. a concept we've applied to many living and non-living things to help us understand communication. but if we're being frank, what is communication? is it the words? the syntax? the grammar? in the narrowest sense, maybe. to understand what communication is, let's just imagine it's 100 years hence and we've all uploaded our consciousnesses into some reddit hive mind cloud computer managed by watson and our minds have been reconstructed with complete fidelity 100% identical to the moments of your biological life. and let's say that my mind wants to learn something. in this case how to bake an apple pie. what to do? well, i go find my favorite baker in this computer and i ask his or her consciousness how to do it. or do i?

you see, in a post-singularity world where our minds co-nestle with other minds, communication may be unnecessary. forget asking. i just transfer the information from baker to me. no loss in information. complete understanding. and as fast as light can allow. you see, communication at its heart is a measure of information transfer efficiency. increase the efficiency and decrease the chance of misunderstanding. and much like that bootleg copy of beyonce's "lem flaid" that i really want, communication in real life is wrought with inaccuracies leaving glitches in my hot sauce. akin to how we can never achieve 100% light speed travel in real life, communication in real life too never achieves 100% efficiency. and we try to achieve that more and more. but technology and empiricism move this farther. how to preserve communications for eons of time to organisms that probably do not understand

our languages or don't speak at all. at the time the answer chosen was to employ the universal language, quote unquote, mathematics. if we encode the basics of language using mathematical concepts like the fundamental characteristics of atoms and elements, we can imply a common tongue. but how to send math. in the past we've tried two methods. we send a thing or a thing-like thing. specifically we send a thing with masks or we send a mass thing like light. currently the biggest bang for our buck is to send light. it's the speed limit of causality in the universe and it makes a lot of sense. our planet has been leaking our human electric o'magnetism for many years with information about us. blast as much as you can and you get the message out all over the place. but this comes at a cost. not far from earth and still within our stellar block our

sent light fades with time and distance becoming harder and harder to hear. let's send the thing. we send our satellites, our probes, and our rovers to great success. and now we want to send ourselves. okay. but water's heavy and it's expensive to send weight in space. so if majority is identity, we're just soupy water. even if we send ourselves, we have to hope we're sending it the right way. the stuff we send is just too little. and that famous astronomer i mentioned, dr. carl sagan. he tried to send both. a thing and a signal. radio waves and a golden record. so what to do? well, the problem is with the premise. math is the universal concept, not language.

it's like light. a thing-like thing. mathematics is our cosmic information storage, like the hidden storage unit of the universe. what we need is better transfer efficiency and a language that is tangible. so we take the best parts of our two strategies thus far in sending stuff and we create a thing and we send it all over. something stable, inert, with high information density that can be sent all over like light. and that thing is dna. it's the closest thing we have to a tangible cosmic language. dna ace tool. an encyclopedia. a scribe and a megaphone. the internet's data can currently fit in a data farm the size of the state of delaware. a dna-based delaware would fit in a standard moving box with room to spare. instead of sending ourselves on cosmic fishing expeditions we insteaddynamite, increasing our chances of discovery. we send our basic operating system to both ends of the equation, increasing transfer efficiency and by transferring

our universal instructions the transfer loss could theoretically be minimized. how? well, dna in our many organic molecules are very stable, and space is very empty. sending a pebble the size of a fist doped with various dna could potentially hold not only all representative life on this planet but also past life, potential future life, and encoded in the strands themselves the math and instruction on how to use it. dna sent in all cosmic directions could theoretically make the interstellar journeys unscathed. and at least form the organic basis to start self-replication again and at most be deciphered with ease. heck, synthetic venter dna could be encoded with our entire planetary history and be no larger than a shoebox. so as a genetic engineer i must be honest. dna is a wonderful tool in our toolbox but dna's not a great predictor of what constitutes a person, a plant, or a bacteria.

>> like the soup cans tied together with strings we set ourselves with our dna and we send a condensed message of this planet. this silent tangible language of our world. math may be the universal cosmic concept but dna is the univer sal language. now if you excuse me, i have an apple pie to bake. thank you. >> this is your future. one of your boxes would go right here. >> how are we going to save the platform? >> if we want to build the platform all we need to do is build the platform. >> is there anything we should be doing. >> why are you asking me? i'm not the ceo. jack's empty chair is a better choice than i am. >> say what you will about the

chair but at least it never told me to build a box. >> hello, everyone. currently oversea two of the largest and most vibrant communities. i'm speaking of steve that's the co-founder and chief executive of reddit and we have the founder and chief executive at twitch. so first thing is first we have a couple of people in the audience that aren't intimate familiar with it. explain what you do. you're not social networks. you're not media companies. you have 250 million monthly users between you.

what's up. >> so switch was started originally as a platform for gamers to share their game strings and it was user generated. anyone can share their game streaming over twitch as a video platform and we quickly realized accidentally we built a way for you to create a gaming community and the video was an anchor that would bring people in but the chat room was the community that they would then come and join and that turned out to be really impactful in how we grew because we not only became a video platform but a place where people would actually connect with other gamers and form all of these little microcommunities around each broadcaster. >> reddit has a similar story. we started off different from

where we are today. originally we were one community and we used to describe ourselves as social news or top 40 for internet links. a place where you can find what's popular online and over the years we have grown into now a collection of many thousands of communities so what we focus on now is a place where people can be themselves online. we have sports, video games, fashion, relationships, everything in between so there's the notion of thousands of communities where people can express themselves and also the kind of larger community itself which is representative of what's going on in the world and on the internet at any moment and time. >> you mentioned these communities have changed overtime as a result of user behavior. it wasn't something that you

planned or directed or controlled by users. >> i don't know if that's the right way to express it but there's moments where we have thought that. where as the communities evolved -- as the community has done things we could not predict. both good and bad where we sit back and we're like what's our next move. but i always -- i have always been uncomfortable when i meet fans of reddit for taking credit for reddit. the always way i have described my role is we tried to not screw it up. we tried to steer it in a direction where we would like it to go and it's taken quite a path over the years but there's an evolution and we're trying to build the platform where these communities can grow and thrive. >> planning communities works about as well as trying to have planned economies or planned

citi cities. i think your role of a kmun based product is more like a gardener. you're trying to make sure that you have enough balance of sunlight and water that the community can thrive and goal. if you think you can make it higher by pulling it up you're going to have a bad time because you can't force people to want to engage with each other and want to connect and communicate. you can only provide favorable conditions and hope it happens in a good way. i like the garden metaphor. any garden you end up with issues like weeds and that can become very problematic. you put attention into what are the things that will make that likely and how do we deal with the fact that like any environment you're going to get a fertile environment for things

you don't want. >> if you're going to use pesticides to kill the weeds you might kill your plants too. >> you start laying on the round up and it turns out the rest of your garden was not round up ready and the whole thing dies and that happens to a lot of communities where they get a little overzealous trying to stamp out -- trying to put too many hurdles in the way and do too much of stamping out bad behavior. you wind up eliminating interesting good behavior as well. >> as much as i love the garden metaphor i'd like to talk about how that works practically because you both had like any community some pretty high profile incidents with abuse and harassment safety, hate speech on reddit. i was wondering if you could tell us about your philosophy toward moderating that type of speech and how it's changed since you founded your platforms. >> sure. in the early days when we were a

small team and had one community or a couple of kmuns we didn't think too hard about it. it seemed simpler. so hate speech we had zero tolerance for it. that was largely accepted by the community. over the years, reddit has grown to be much, much larger and encompass much more viewpoints that aren't representative of my own or the companies but now we have moderators that exist that didn't exist in the early days so each of our kmcommunities ar created by the users and they can run the communities anyway they want or at least that's the approach we have taken. there's nothing illegal or harassment or bullying. these policies are only as good as our ability to enforce them. how do we make sure that we enforce the rules we have?

you have good people doing good things. really amazing things. how do you make sure that you can provide an environment for them to grow and thrive and feel safe and have a good time. >> we always had kind of a, from day one, a -- we are justified in removing anyone from the community that we don't think

represents our values and that's just how it's going to be and if you start with that as a basic policy all of your communities tend to accept that's just how it is. the thing that we found really problematic overtime is we have two values twitch is a platform for the creator. we see ourselves as being creator first. when there's a tension between the viewer and the broadcaster we go for the broadcaster because we believe there needs to be a home online for a broadcaster for creator to have control and their process and run their own editorial policy.

and a lot of it was really positive and usually through negligent they don't control the community well enough and you get a lot of really bad action as a result of that. it's hard for us. the last thing we want to do is know better than you how to run your community and that makes the problem much harder than just jumping into it straight away. >> i like that you bring that up. you have a model of moderation that is old school internet. letting them control themselves obviously platforms like facebook and twitter have taken an opposite approach.

do you feel the need to take those internally? >> i would say it's something we think about but we would never do that because what you get on it is a place where you can really be yourself. people come out on reddit all the time. we think that is very important for providing a place where they can express themselves. that's what makes it special. there's a trade off and attention there but if we can -- where we focus our time is can we build the tools where people can both thrive in that environment and not negatively

effect others. and i have seen it. and it's very very different viewpoints colliding and so our role is to allow these communities to grow and thrive if they're abiding by our rules and their ability to do so

obviously. >> we have a big presence too but the problem is when you have, i don't remember exactly offhand but something on the order of -- employing staff to moderate that. this isn't like facebook posts. you have to be on it 30 seconds after they posted it because that's the entire window of impact is the 30 seconds after they send the message. we're not going to have enough staff. we would have to employ one in three people to moderate the site. it's not practical. we really wound up going to the distributed moderation route because we had no other choice than pushing that down in some kind of way. we view our role in that with not just go higher but rather go

build excellence tools that amply identify the effect internally. so identify the people that are good at reporting bad actors. identify the people that are being a force for moderation and positivity on twitch and empower them with tools that amply identify what their actions do. whether that is by assigning reputation scores or giving them more powerful tools to see more chat rooms. >> we spent a lot of time, i'm assuming you do as well. our focus is on looking for systemic issues. groups of users harassing other users.

spam with them they start to pull other people into their negative behaviors so where we are pretty heavy handed it's behind the scenes identifying those people and trying to get them out of the system. so hopefully everybody else can flourish because we believe that people in the real world are usually good. but they have a fundamental desire to share. that's what we're trying to protect and foster. >> steve i'm curious. i don't know how many people are aware but you took over as ceo ten months ago. there was a headline at the time that said you were trying to save reddit from itself. i'm curious if you think you've done that and if you can speak to the systemic issues that you have addressed or solved during that time.

reddit was in disarray. but i was not certain that it would survive so it's been a big push toward the future and that meant reminding folks. reddit was extreme libertarian free speech route. anything was allowed. >> we had a larger kmcommunity d open revolt. we had communities that were very toxic that were stirring a lot of the stuff up.

making this worse. so that was one of the first things i did was try to squash that group of users stirring this up and internally as a company it's been a lot of culture rebuilding and reminding everybody what our purpose is. to provide a place for people to express themselves. to answer your question, are we done? no. have we made great strides, yes. i'm very, very proud of that. also it's hard to see from the outside when you look at a community site especially like that there's almost no one that you can bring in that's allowed to change it's direction other than a founder because it's only the founder when you bring them back in that has this moral authority to say this is not what the website is about. we are about this and everyone

is forced to listen to you about that. he was allowed to change directions in a radical way. it's not as a ceo but a founder that needs to make course corrections because it's very hard. >> it's something unique to the area of the internet that you're in where your product is essentially a community, right? but it's quite possible for the community to develop a myth about itself as reddit did as far as, you know, absolute free speech is concerned.

to diverge in a direction that's not planned or profitable or viable. how do you deal with those sorts of issues? >> well it's funny. so we -- reddit was the first thing out of college. to summarize it it's been an incredible learning experience. we started in the same room basically we started the notion that the community wanted to exist and for example a big mistake i made when i returned just nine months ago was i was

thinking what reddit needs is a very clear contact policy. like this is what is allowed and this is what's not. and i learned this important lesson which is that it is impossible to draw a line. where ever you draw that line there's somebody with their nose right up over it just looking for the loopholes. and i met some very smart people in this process that did this for twitter and facebook and others and who are basically like you need to be specifically vague. that's an example of the lessons that could have been taught.

which i am forever thankful for. >> the things that i noticed on twitch is we have to deal with the porn issue and that's just how it is. we went through exactly that mistake which is trying to define it and i know when i see it and there's a reason you wind uplanding there which is you just try writing down a formal definition for what is and is not allowed you you're either banning things you don want to be that are perfectly good that are self-expression or valuable for the community or pornography on your website.

so what is creative expression? but that is a huge part of my job it turns out. >> well, i could talk about moderation all day. this is fascinating but i want to make sure that you guys have a chance to talk about your future plans a little bit. both of your sites are rapidly expanding. twitch has expanded outside of that. >> we wanted to broadcast doing creative work and that was in line with our commission which was empowering the gaming creators so we opened up the platform as well. the launch partner for that was bob ross. we got them to let us do a marathon of all of the bob ross channels.

had 5.6 viewers. we did a food channel and it's actually -- mostly generated a lot of people chairing themselves painting or blacksmithing or making costu s costumes. it's how do we allow them to share their passions and make a living doing so and the thing i'm most proud about is the hundreds of people that managed to quit their jobs. carpet cleaning and doing telemarketing support as lawyers and now gets to broadcast themselves streaming video games or art as a living. i don't think it's -- i don't think you can do a cooler thing than enable someone to do that. that's something i'm proud of. i'm excited to do a lot more of it in the future. >> every boy's dream right? steve what is your plan for

internet domination? >> our plan for internet domination. so we're in this interesting position where we have two classes of users. love reddit. loyal to an end. logo tattoos on people. i'm certain there's more reddit tattoos on people than facebooks and twitters and whatnot. supremely loyal users and then we have many, many, like hundreds of millions of users who don't have that loyalty yet. who don't know what reddit is and if you go to the front page, after hearing this talk you're going to be like is he talking about the same thing? because it's not representative of what reddit is. so the big challenge we have right now and the thing that i'm spending a lot of time thinking about is how do we make the fact that reddit is incredibly broad and incredibly deep, obvious to our users.

we have a ton of users who think that reddit is the center of the universe for nfl. which it is. but they don't know that this is a place where you can look at the world's greatest collection of cat's this is the place where you can find a kidney match if you're in need of one of those. that is the message that i want to -- the average view on reddit to understand as fast as possible. so we have a lot of work to do there but that's the most fun work we can do. >> well, that's all the time we have today unfortunately but thank you for joining me and before we leave i'd like to invite louis back on stage.

>> we are finally freeing you for lunch. i hope you enjoyed the morning. be back in an hour and we'll try to catch up on a little bit of time and please take everything that you brought into the roo the libertarian party is holding the national convention this weekend in orlando, florida. c-span will have live coverage when presidential candidates hold a debate saturday night at 8:00 eastern. then on sunday morning, the party chooses its presidential and vice presidential nominees. that starts at 9:45 a.m. eastern. so far, the libertarian party is the only third party that is on the national ballot in all 50 states. our campaign 2016 bus continues to travel throughout

the country to recognize winners from this year's student camp competition and recently the bus stopped in massachusetts to visit several winning students from that state. they went to the sage school in foxborough where all of the students and first through eighth grade attended a school ceremony to honor 7th graders for their honorable mention video titled "gunning for safety." and the bus made a stop in ludlow to recognize honorable mentions in a video called veteran services and james elliott won for lgbt rights, stop the discrimination. the two were honored in front of classmates and family and local eofficials, receiving $250 for their winning video. our special thanks to comcast and charter communication for helping to coordinate the visits in the community. and view all of the winning documentaries at student cam.org. congratulations to the class

of 2016. today is your day of celebration and you've earned it. >> the voices crying for peace and light, because your choices will make all the difference to you and to all of us. >> don't be afraid to take on cases or new jobs or a new issue that really stretches your boundaries. >> you spent your summer abroad on real ships rather than internships and the specter of living in your parents basement after this graduation day is not likely to be your greatest concern. >> throughout this month watch commencement speeches to the class of 2016 in their entirety from colleges and universities around the country by business leaders and politicians and white house officials on c-span. science, business and technology pioneers gathered at the "washington post" transformers summit this month

to discuss break throughs in artificial intelligence and innovation and a look at restoring light to the blind and how pigs could become future organ donors for humans. this is nearly two hours. good morning, everyone. thank you to the "washington post" and we're delighted to welcome you here this morning. thank you for joining us. [ applause ] we're sitting in the center of what we call "washington post" live. it is a new initiative that extends the reach of our journalism through live events streaming and pairs our journalists with leaders and decision-makers to dissect and explore the most important and compelling issues of our time. the idea of today's conference

on transformers began with a conversation we had here about the transformation that is underway at the "washington post." we've gone from what was once a locally focused newspaper to a multi-platform digital first news organization serving a broad national and global audience. and although we've made amazing progress and in many ways leading the industry we will always view ourselves in the process of transforming and never fully transformed. because like so many industries, the media space is changing so rapidly that the process of transforming can never really be complete. with advances in technology, the speed and the scope of change is only increasing -- it is only accelerating. so achieving or maintaining the status quo will never be sufficient. so for all of us in journalism today, whether you just started or early in your career or in my stage, the reality is that our entire profession will be a time of continuous and increasing

change and that is the culture that we are embracing here at the "washington post." well for any business, transformation is a delicate balance. what do you utilize and preserve from the past and what do you set aside to create room for the future. well, for us the pillar of journalistic excellence has always been and will always be fundamental to our mission. but the rest is determined by constant innovation and experimentation. as part of our transformation we've imbedded 80 engineers within the newsroom to quickly bring stories to life in new innovative ways. our technology team now creates our own extensive and flexible site architecture and we're licensing that to others. we're constantly testing and experimenting and never standing still. we have bold ambitions to continue to grow across the country and around the world and to be a model for a rapidly-changing industry. so for purposes of today's

conversation, how do we translate the broad disruption that we're witnessing around the world in all sectors into a thought-provoking event. i think we've accomplished that today with a unique lineup of voices who are pushing the boundaries on really every aspect of our lives. the transformers program is anchored by visionaries and innovators in space exploration and artificial intelligence and impact philanthropy, national security and much more. we'll be discussing breath-taking changes that are forever altering the way we live, connect and learn, from the social platforms we use to communicate, to the cars we drive or more accurately, i should say that drive us. today we'll explore efforts to define mortality and what that means for our future. and we even have the father of the internet here to explain it all to us. and despite what we may have heard a few campaign seasons ago, this is actually the father

of the internet. to start us off, i would like to thank our presenting sponsors, lockheed martin and samsung electronics. please join me in conveying our appreciation. [ applause ] and i would also draw your attention to the program where the rest offous supportering -- of our supporting sponsors are listed. on the way in you may have seen students building robots. they are part of what we call the ro-porter conversation we're having here today. the way we gather news has changed dramatically in many ways in the past few years. virtual reality, 360 video and drone robots are helping journalists to tell stories in new and engaging ways so we've challenged a team of top hgss to build a functioning robot to help collect information from places otherwise unreachable for journalists. that competition is underway right now and we will be announcing the winners to you

later today. but now please, to start our program, please join me in welcoming shand raw, the head of samsung catalyst fund to say a few words. [ applause ] >> good morning. thank you, fred and thank you "washington post." i'm honored to be here today representing samsung electronics. it is a privilege to join you all today to listen to you and engage in it a conversation about technology and how technology is going to impact us as individuals, as society as well as our country. perhaps to just to kick it off here today, you are going to listen to some amazing speakers. these are the speakers that represent innovators who really are bringing in the next technology revolution. and you, as the audience, get the opportunity to engage with

them, really help shape the conversation of how technology is going to in turn influence us as people and as society. at samsung, we are very privileged to work in the technology industry. we do this every day. as we look out there into the future, we see some very significant challenges we face as a society. climate change is one. shifting demographics. chronic illnesses and the rising cost of managing chronic illnesses, security, privacy, these are all very significant issues. we think technology has a role to play there. in just the last few years there has been significant technology break-throughs. for example, deep learning, deep networks has been an amazing development. the human brain has been an inspiration for how these new technologies have come together and deep learning is giving compu

computers an ability to see and have a dialogue with us and that is going to be transforming. quite similarly some of the new big data analytics techniques are influencing how quickly we could analyze dna sequencing and how inexpensive that will become. this biology to technology and back to biology is creating a virtuous cycle and we think we as partners could engage with that and make a transformation in society. we at samsung believe we can't do this alone. we would like to engage with you in a conversation. we would like to figure out how we work in an open collaborate way and make a fundamental difference in harnessing this technology. let me perhaps at this point give you a little bit of sense of what we have outside this room. at some point today if you would like to get a vision of what samsung is doing, we have some demonstrations of our gear vr.

you can -- if you have some time, please stop by and take a look. finally, i would like to thank "washington post" for having us here, for giving us the opportunity and thanks to all of the speakers and the audience. thank you. [ applause ] discover a way to hear what others saw. since before you could buy books on the internet, he was obsessed with it. transformers are dreamers, makers, doers. they are the famous, and the unknown. they are people who can see, build, or leverage an idea that by design could better everyday life. how we age, how we move from here to there. the way we relate to each other.

transformers push the boundaries of what we know. >> good morning and welcome to transformers. my name is nealy tucker and on behalf of the "washington post" i would like to introduce you to our first guest who is a stunner. it is impossible to imagine the modern world without our first guest. one of her college thesis or college thesis became one of the first satellite television companies. she was also the president of the first company to commercially offer gps devices in cars. after that, she created sirius xm and one of the founders of the idea of satellite radio. it is not a bad start to your career. she loves sirius -- left sirius more than 20 years ago to found a company to assist her youngest daughter who was at the time dying of a then incurable lung

disease. the resulting company is managed therapeutics, now a 6:00 million dollars biotech and based in silver spring. it has expended, if not saved the lives of tens of thousands of people, including they are daughter genesis who is now in her 30s. ladies and gentlemen, martin roth blat is also the recipient of this year's billy jean king leadership initiative award devoted to lgbt issues and puts her in an interesting issue because she has a company based in north carolina which as you know right now she might get arrested for going to the bathroom if the governor had anything to do with it. ladies and gentlemen, martin roth blat. [ applause ] >> martin, one of the basic concepts that you are interested in, it is not just improving life but it is immortality. they are all going to live forever. and martin, i might mention, has

founded a religion, based on transhumanism. and you have the idea that we're not just going to live a long time but we're all going to live forever. tell us your concept of immortality and how that would work. >> thanks, nealy. it is a great pleasure to be here. the idea is one that has been percolating up from lots of people in the information technology industry for a while. perhaps ray cursewhile who is a prolific inventor is best known for the idea that as our abilities in the information processing industry computer software and storage of more and more of our thoughts and our ideas outside of our body becomes easier, more automatic, less expensive, that ultimately we're going to have sort of

digital dollp gangers of ourselves that are stored in the cloud and are able to present themselves to any manner of devices. and that as thousands and thousands of software coders and hackers and people in the maker movement work to make the software that runs these digital doppelgangers ever more life-like, and ever more human-like, there will come a tipping point when people begin to claim that the digital doppelgangers have achieved what we call consciousness, an ability to have a sense of themselves, hopes and fears and feelings and at that point i think the activity will move to the legal arena as to whether or not the digital doppelgangers are conscious, really do have an in dependent legal identity and kind of the trend of progressive thinking is once there is a scientific consensus, in this case it would be the science of

ikology, that being the -- the psychology, the science of the mind, that these digital bople gangers are conscious and then they gain the rights and protections that we assign to even our pets, laboratory animals, and to quite a high extent to primates lime chimpanzees and so in this way ourselves will kind of morph into a sort of a digital consciousness that is recognized by the law as being alive. >> and you have a kitty hall type of project naped for your spouse which i have talked to and many others and it is sort of a head on a table at this point. but it talks to you. and you've described this as not the finished product, but 48 is the kitty hawk basis of how this -- you call them doppelgangers, can you say

robots? >> yeah. robots are just as good. >> and if you put in -- i have the idea, like the matrix, where they were plugging stuff into the back of people's head and i have the idea that you upload everybody's personality or consciousness or to what amounts as a thumb drive and upload it to the cloud so you are always there and just plug it into a robot and there you are. >> right. but it is becoming even -- that is 48 on the screen and that is a recent episode of morgan freeman's series on the national geographic channel about the nature of god and religion and what not. so we did this project to really inspire young people. and i would say young girls in particular to become coders. and when they have an opportunity to speak with 48 and see today in our primitive 20 teens we're able to write software that could respond

ideosyncraticly. she doesn't give the same answer any two times and there is no pre-scripted questions and you could ask her anything. i would say she is way better than siri. >> cuter. >> i would say amazon's alexa is just about catching up to her and i'm sure because there are thousands of people working on alexa, she'll soar right past 48. but this type of software inspired young people to become koe coders and why i'm so confident that cyber consciousness will emerge because it is not just our foundation or big kcompanie, there are tens of thousands of people around the world that could make cyber consciousness and they don't need a factory or investment, all they need is a digital device to talk to the cloud. >> i want to ask how close we are on this. because the question is sort of if i go outside and i get hit by a bus and my arm and leg is amputated, i'm still me.

and if i need a lung transplant from the united therapies, i'm still me. how much of my brain can i change? what would be your answer? how much can you change and still be you? >> nealy, it is a great question and somewhat in the realm of philosophy and psychology and with most things in life ultimately it will be decided by lawyers. [ laughter ] >> the scientists have long known that people forget vast majority of what they experience and it is called ebbing house curve. that over a period of a week we forget over 90% of what we experience. but things that are really important to us, that have emotional content, they stick with us forever. and that is what most of us refer to as our soul. that part of us that doesn't change. so in terms of you, whether your soul can be transferred into a

cyber-conscious form, it is going to be something that happens gradually. and even today there is a lot of debate on whether or not dogs and cats, for example, have a soul or are conscious. i think -- i feel they do. and i think that most people in society are moving in that direction. the day when you could grat tew tuesd -- gratuitously, it is a crime to do that in most states. so i think we'll get to a point where there are friends of cyber conscious people and especially if it is a cyber conscious nealy, that person will have a lot of friends and fans probably, too. and i think very quickly we'll get to a point where we say that cyber conscious individual has a

soul, it is nealy's soul and even if, god forbid, nealy's body ends in a car accident or some other death and disability, nealy did not end, nealy's identity continues in this cyber conscious form. >> let me ask you one more about the frightening aspects of this because there would be some people that none of us want to live forever. hitler, for example. nobody wants this guy to be able to upload. so where do you get into where -- eugenics was a thing in this country 80 years ago, we're going to clone people to make the whole tribe better. what -- you're a nice person to run this project. but how do we avoid digital eugenics and cyber robot and cyber people. where does that come in and who gets to participate in the program? >> yeah, nealy, i'm kind of -- i have a point of view that this is not something a realistic thing to really fear because all

of this cyber consciousness and all of these robots that are being developed are being v developed in an environment, which, even though it is a hu human-made environment, it is still an environment like the natural environment and the humans are the selection factors. and the law of darwinism still apply and the so-called bad robot problem or the hitler robot problem, there is going to be nobody that wants to buy a hitler robot. if a hitler robot emerges and begins to do bad things, the same thing will happen to the hitler robot that happened to the real hitler, which is the rest of society will rise up and quash it down. so there is no market really for an evil robot, evil software. does that mean that evil robots and software will never exist? no, i don't think it means that because there is always mutations and environment and there will be bad people and bad

robots that emerge. but the vast majority of billions of people that comprise the decision-making in society, through the economic powers and their political powers will quash down the bad people and the bad robots and so i think it is a self-correcting problem because humans overwhelmingly good humans comprise the darwin environment in which all of this cyber consciousness will emerge. >> let me ask you while we're still on future questions, this is my favorite project that you do, you have a herd of pigs in west virginia that i like to call genetic mutant pigs. >> they are. >> they are genetically altered but the purpose relates to the united therapeutics and you are raising them for possible future lung transplants which would vastly reshape lung transplants in the united states if not across the country. tell us how that works. >> sure, nealy, thanks. so ever since my grandmother received a pig heart valve

because her heart valve had gone bad, i have been aware of the fact that pigs hearts and for that matter lungs and other organs are very close to the same size, shape and function of human major organs. so i -- as our youngest daughter developed this fatal heart-lung disease called pulmonary art eerial hypertension and i learned the only cure for it was a transplant. but the problem with transplants are that there are way too few organs to go around for everybody that needs them and secondly organ transplants a trading one disease for another disease. you are trading the end stage organ disease that you are dying from for a chronic organ rejection kind of disease that ultimately takes the life of many, if not most people, who received transplants. so i set about to solve this

problem, inspired by making sure that our daughter would be able to live a normal life. and i went and -- back to school and got a ph.d in genome transplantation so organs can be not only be the same size to use for humans, not only because they are the same size and shape but because by genetically modifying the pig genome they won't give rise to the chronic rejection which has flawed animal to human organ transplants in the past and ultimately if the genome could be modified really, really nicely, the individual can receive those organs and not have to take a life-long immunosuppressant. so within my company united therapeutics we purchased the early leaders in this area, a company called rivo core offer the campus of uva in -- i'm

sorry in virginia tech in blacksburg, virginia. and we now are definitely the leaders in genetically modifying pigs genomes so that not only the lungs but also hearts and kidneys can be used in human transplants. all of the recent records that have been announced by the nih program in zeno heart transplant come from the united therapeutics of pigs and our records in lungs and kidneys. and our goal, which i feel really confident we'll achieve and i'm much more confident we'll achieve this goal than some of the earlier satellite communications projects that you mentioned, is that we'll be able to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs through the modification of the pig genome so there is an unlimited supply of hearts and livers and kidneys an lungs that could be

tolerated by humans without the need for life-long immunosuppression. >> timetable? >> so we have on schedule to have our first clinical procedures, which means using these organs in people, by the end of this decade. and by the -- we hope for regulatory approval less than ten years from now. and i'm pretty confident that by the end of the 2020s there will be literally tens of thousands of people ayear receiving organ transplant as a result of the transplantation. >> and to give us some idea of how quickly you've made progress on the disease that effected genesis and others, how many people were alive at any one time when you started united therapeutics and how many are alive now. >> it is one of the things that is -- the way you say it, it comes out kind of odd and then you think about it and it is really good. when genesis was diagnosed,

there were only 3000 people with pulmonary art eerial hypertension. she was diagnosed across the city here at children's national medical center. and so we were told that she would die because everybody with this condition died. i knew i did not have time to get this whole organ transplantation thing going, so i left my satellite communications activities and focused on finding pharmaceuticals that would be a bridge to a bridge. the pharmaceuticals could bridge people to the organ transplants. and fortunately our pharmaceuticals have proven to be successful, approved by the fda. they are now in the united states, 40,000 people living with pulmonary hypertension and so it comes on a little bit strange to say, when i started there were 3000 people with it and now there are 40,000 people. it is like i've been doing something bad but it is actually really, really good because that is a whole football of stadium of people that are alive that

would not have otherwise been alive. >> they would have died already. >> the mortality is one to three years. >> and how is genesis now. >> genesis is doing great. she's working in our company at the united therapeutics and she is in charge of keeping everybody in the company working together through using digital media to make sure that all of our clinical trials and development activities and information is available to everybody in the company. >> and briefly, the project that you started a couple of weeks ago is almost tedious by your standards but you are going to reshape how all transplants take place across the country. you've placed an order for up to a thousand, i think it is, piloted drones that will replace the helicopters on top of the hospital when people go running and all of that. it is going to be a drone? >> so it is -- it's actually a big proj erect. i would say that is a more challenging project than the genetically modified organs

themselves but i had to think about that aspect of the project because when we make a pharmaceutical to get it approved by the fda we have to prove to the fda that our drugs have a shelf life of a year. and that is why every drug company, if you look at your medicines it says refill it within a year. the problem is, so we could make the medicines and ship them to the cvs and walgreens and they could sit on the shelf and that is dandy. but when you make a genetically modified organ, as far as the fda is concerned it is a drug called a bio logic. but unlike medicines for other diseases, this drug has like a 24-hour half life. we all know that you can't just put an organ on a shelf and keep it waiting there for a year. we can't ship it to walgreens. so when we manufacture the organs, which mean we ex plant them from the genetically modified pig, we have to deliver them within hours to the patient at a hospital to be

transplanted. there is no shelf life. so i had to think of a whole new model for how are we going to transport all of these organs in realtime from the point of manufacture to the hospitals and the patients. and i think very much inspired by the post owner jeff bezos who i think provided an important foundation of credibility to the whole concept of commercial use of drones. i began to think about, well maybe it would be plausible to have a special type of drone, obviously this is not one that you will drop the organ on the front yard or something like that. >> it zooms up. >> so it has to be -- it has to be a special type of drone. but i know from technology, if you have a drone that could drop a pile of books on your front yard today, you will be able to have within ten years a drone

able to land softly on the hospital heliport and have a person roll the oregon out of the drone and -- the organ out of the drone to the surgeons table and they take it and plant it. so we place the order for a thousand what we call manufactured organ transport helicopters or moths and these will be delivered within the next ten to 15 years. >> and bringing back to close on the very, very prosayic, you are this year's recipient of the billy jean king leadership award devoted to lgbt issues and you have a multi-million dollar facility employed a couple of hundred people in virginia and you were just down there -- >> yesterday. >> and you have no plans to move your facility from down there. tell us your thoughts on this issue and why -- do you stay and fight? do you pull out? what are your thoughts on how to lead on that issue?

>> so, right. i think that unfortunately i got automatically enlisted to lead on this fight because i'm the most visible transgender ceo in north carolina, which maybe i'm the only one. um, but, i was actually -- it was brought to my attention by lots of people in my company who don't identify as being lgbt at all. and they just said, martin, this is going to hurt our recruitment. we're always hiring people at the united therapeutics especially scientists and technology gists. we hire people from all over the country and overseas. they said to me, martin, can our company put out a public statement that says we oppose this so when we are recruiting people we could say to them, well this law was passed but our company is on record as being opposed to this.

so i said, absolutely. and to be frank, i was a little bit nervous about -- i didn't want it to seem like it was my agenda because i'm transgendered and it wasn't -- it bubbled up from the -- especially the r&d staff at united therapeutics. so we adopted this statement. and then the next thing that happened is the newspaper for that area, they asked me to do an editorial interview when i did and i was really gratified that just this weekend on monday the editorial board of the major newspaper in north carolina all came out in support of our position, which is that this law called hb-2 is not well thought out and counter-productive for north carolina and should be repealed. and the thinking there is that there was no problem -- there had been no documented problem

caused by any transgendered person using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. so why adopt a whole law that specifically requires a -- say a transgendered man who could have a full beard and everything and often with at least have a nice kind of nealy tucker beard there, why force that individual to go into the women's bathroom. it is insane. so i -- i mentioned this in my interview and the editorial board agreed and i think the people of north carolina realized this law was not well thought-out. big companies like paypal and a couple of others have decided not to go to north carolina. but i was clear from the beginning that north carolina is not perfect. but we love it any way. and i never really agreed with

the sentiment of love it or leave it. i was -- or like, cut and run. i'm just a stand and fight type of gal. so just because north carolina has one thing bad, it has a lot of good things that are good. and i would rather stand there and change north carolina than run away from it. so we've got hundreds of employees there. they have families. their kids are in schools and churches and everything. and they have all lives there. it would be crazy to think about pulling up and leaving. so we never thought about leaving. we said we would stand there and fight. and later this week, i'll be speaking at the move festival, which is a big electronic music festival in north carolina. and that all move-fest festival has been turned into a giant protest against hb-2. >> and i think you were quoted i saw as saying you don't think the law will last that long any way, and the u.s. justice department has a view. >> crim crowe laws, they tend to

wear out over time. >> well, they do. and been married interracially, you know this when you have been married for 30-plus years and nobody blinks on that issue these days. >> yeah. but when i was born, it was illegal in more than half of the states in the country, so i -- i just love the fact that i'm alive at a point in time when progress is not only continuing to advance but the rate of progress is increasing exponentially and it makes me feel that we're all alive at the best of all times. >> martin, thank you very much. [ applause ] >> i'm going to turn it over to lois. [ applause ]

♪ ♪ good morning, everyone. i'm lois romano, i'm the editor of "washington post" live. thank you for being here. we have speakered on stage that are deeply involved in how we might augment our reality and even create new senses. i'm going to leave a little time at the end for questions so think about if you have any. first here we have neal harbisson, the first person in the world to have a permanent

antenna implanted in his skull. and for being officially recognized as a cyborg. and yes, he sleeps and eats with the antenna. and this woman explored how the brain codes visual information and awarded a grant for her work. she has cracked the neurocode for blindness and is currently working on an artificial retina that could restore vision. at end we have john warner, well-known in tech circles and currently a vp for partnerships at meta which is a rising star in the augmented reality area. he had been previously at m.i.t. media labs. so welcome our guests and we'll get going. neal, i'm going to start with you. you are a certified cyborg. >> it allows me to extend my it

picks up light and gives me vibrations depending on the color. the advantages is that it allows me to send infrared and ultra violent so it goes beyond visual spectrum so there is internet spectrum so people can send colors to my head and share colors with me directly to my head and i could connect to satellite so that i could send colors from space. in fact i'm using the internet as a new sense and not as a tool and i'm using technology not as a tool either but as a body part, as a sensory extension so i don't feel i'm using or wearing technology, i feel i am technology. that is why i identify myself as a cyborg. >> so you are an artist also. >> i see it as an art. it is the art of designing your own perception of reality and designing our own senses or nining your designing your sensory organs. >> so you were born color blind and become an artist through hearing colors?

>> i think i was an artist before that, yes. to me, creating your own senses is an art or creating your own body part is an art. it is designing your own perception of reality. >> okay. got it. all right. sheila, let me go to you. what do we know about the neurocode and how -- how does the brain take in this simulus and use it? how does it work? >> well, just in a normal person, for a normal person, images come in and they land in your photo receptors and -- >> we're going to show you the slides. >> they have the basic idea. all right. i don't know what happens to the slides. but i can explain. i worked out the neurocode of the retina. like images come in to your eye and it lands on your retino and on your photo receptors and then actually if you go to the next one it highlights just the photo receptors. okay. i'll skip that.

okay. and then it is passed through the retinal circuitry and what the circuits do is perform operations on it, so it extracts information and converts it into a code and it is in the form of patterns of electrical pulses that get sent to the brain. and so the key thing is that an image gets converted into a code and it is a code that the brain understands. so like this pattern of pulses that you are looking at here represents this baby's face. so when a person's brain gets this pattern of pulses it knows that what is out there is this baby's face. and of course it is a million cells that are doing this simultaneously, about 10,000 in your central retina. so if it got a different pattern, it would know it is a car or a dog. so, that is how the communication goes from image into your brain. and so what i've been working on is trying -- when a person gets a retinal disease like macure all degeneration the photo

sense -- receptors die -- i'll just explain it and no information could get in. but the output cells, the cells at the end, they still work. and so the idea then is if we could make a device that could interact with these output cells and send the code in, then we could restore sight to the blind. it sounds dramatic. and so i worked out to a large extent the code so i could make a device that could mimic that and then send signals to the output cells and then send them to your brain. so if we send it like a pattern of pulses that -- that represented stripes, the patient would see stripes. if we send a pattern of pulses that show a talking face because it is movies, the person would see this. we've done it in animals but not in humans yet but i went to the fda three weeks ago and once i send the fda application in,

hopefully they will approve it and we could start a clinical trial in 2017. >> and you had good results of the animals. >> have a picture of that to give you a feel for why the code is so important. if you could show the picture of the baby's face, if anybody is -- >> i don't know if they could bring that back. but we'll work on that. let me go to john. john, this idea of tailoring our individual realities as related to what you and your colleagues are doing at meta, how does augmented reality work and how do you trick the brain to see this extra information. >> sure. augmented reality is taking the digital information connected to the physical world. we've created a headset that you put on and you could look through a visor and see the world and see digital information connected with the world. you could have infinite number of screens where you interact, very similar to the movie minority report and have 3-d images from cad and manipulate it. here is an architect working on

a 3-d building and pulling out pieces and you could have somebody else collaborate with it and have remote assistance if you need to fix your washing machine or a jet engine or do surgery, you could have someone looking at what you are doing and help you walk you through that. it is hands free. when i think of the typewriter pd and the keys that the "washington post" folks use a lot and it is based on movable type and the mechanical typewriters didn't get stuck it is like punch cards connecting with technology. i think the future of using eye sight and using gestures is a big leap forward. there is some reports that say there is $120 billion market opportunity to change the way we interface with computers. so we created a headset where you could look at the world and interact with it and you've seen it rendered in movies like iron man and minority report and mission impossible. we are bringing it to the workplace and creating a tool -- not a toy. it is not based on gaming or

entertainment, it is based on productivity. >> you said headset. so a lot of things -- we hear people saying this isn't practical, who will run out and get a headset and wear it around. walk us there when we can -- >> so at m.i.t. i taught the first class on making apps for google glass for the professor and it is a heads-up display and it doesn't track your hands, there is not a microsoft connect device that could see your hands and the heads up display with 2010 technology in 2013. i think it was great that google glass gave the hardware away but it was a public relations nightmare in terms of a.r. and oculus rift was bought by facebook and everybody is excited by virtual reality in which you are submersed in digital information. i think augment reality is three times bigger and society hasn't gotten the memo on it. and the device we created it has a 90 degree field of view.

it is a equivalent of a four-case screen. instead of 90 feet away, a movie theater, nine feet away, a television three feet away, a smartphone, we want to eliminate screens and create an office place where you don't have monitors and you are not hunched overlooking at these metaphors on a smartphone. as a society, we are more disconnected even though were are hyper connected and having glasses like ray bans to look out and see digital information on the world is a game-changer. does that answer your question. >> yes, it does. >> because i'm very excited about this and could you preorder the device and it is shipping in quarter three. >> and it is reasonably priced. >> and it is a third less than the microsoft thing. and the other thing about this is companies are sitting on tons of digital information. and this is a tool to interact with it. and i think it could change health, design, manufacturing. >> thank you. >> and journalism.

>> you are training your brain to be connected to the internet 24/7. what sort of information are you getting in there and is it -- is it sensory overload, what is that doing to your brain or our brains? what will happen? >> so the fact of having internet in my head allows me to receive colors from other parts of the world. there is five people that have permission to send colors so they could send colors any time of the day or night. in the beginning it was confusing. >> who are these people. >> five friends. one in each continent. so it is an eye in each continent. so if there is a beautiful sunset in australia and he could send it to my head and i will be experiencing the sunset while i'm here. if they send colors at night it asks my dreams. so if someone sends violet while i'm asleep and i wake up and i realize i dreamt of a violet house but i know it was violet because of my friends. so my friends could intervene in my dreams an we could share dreams and senses and colors in this case.

but my aim is to use the internet exclusively to receive colors from space. so we could use the innoceterne send it to space so instead of going to space, we could feel we are there without the struggle of physically going there. and when there are 3-d pictures that could print our dna we could see ourselves in other planets and have a second body there and connect via the internet. so the use of the internet as a sensory extension to explore space is my main goal and in 2019 i'll have the permanent connection to satellite. so we'll be sensory and explore space by sending our mind to space instead of physically going there and that is the beginning for myself. i'm just connecting to nasa international space station like two hours a day because i'm training my brain to get used to this disconnection between body and senses. >> you are connecting to the space station two hours a day and the space station is working with you on that? >> it is live stream. anyone can do that. >> i see.

>> there is live stream from nasa international space station and i connect there and i try to connect longer and longer each day. but it will take at least two or three years to have 24 hours connection because i need training because it is overwhelming -- the colors from space are much wider in the spectrum than here. so it is overwhelming when i connect. >> and you are hearing that? let me ask you a follow up to that. what are the implications of the human brain interacting with so much information in an immersive constant way? >> well, um, one has to control it in some way because it could be information over load. but he does it in a good way. not that you need my approval. but that you have the vibrations as you were mentioning so it is an extra sense without interfering with your normal hearing and so a big part of what your nervous system does, evolution made your nervous system do is actually compress the information so that you

could use it efficiently. so there is a lot of discussion about the power of big data. but i actually think there is downsides on big data. it is overwhelming. it is like going to your college classes simultaneously and having four professors talking to you, at some point you can't fence. sow want -- so your retina for example, you have 100 million photo receptors so you are taking in essentially every pixel on your computer monitor and then the circuitry gets -- compresses it and gets rid of the stuff you don't need and holds on to what you do need so you could maneuver. so i could get up on this stage before and never been here before and seen you before and get up and walk through and not crash into people and that is because of the simple way in a sense. >> so our braiif simplifying in a sense. >> it has to learn how to simplify it, which is what neil was saying he has to do in stages. >> that's right. >> each person will have its own

time of adapting to a new sense or a new organ. your body needs to either accept or reject the body part, like the material, and your brain might reject the new sense. there's two cases of possible rejections. >> that's what attention mechanisms do for you also. it allows you to pay attention to one thing rather than another thing, so evolution built a way for you to control what you're taking in. >> john, let me swing back to augmented r augment augmented reality. there are still people who think of it as entertainment. you can just walk us through a little bit about how this can help us in our every day lives, function better, produce better, health care. any examples that you have that it is not just about a game. >> sure. so it's great to be on the panel

with these pioneers. neil, you're a visionary artist finding ways to use new senses. cutting-edge research. we have created a tool. the founder and ceo is listed as a real thought leader for wanting to create an operating system that's much more connected with how the brain works. we have been in some ways held hostage to operating systems that are based on rectangles and the technology that we've used. and we want to create a device that we can manipulate 3-d hologra holograms. if someone is going to do a c e

coccoc cochlear implant for your child -- imaging to create a tool that can be an extension of the body. neil is an artist. we want to tap artists and other thought leaders to help us use this device. what would have thought solitaire helped get windows going. i'm excited to help facilitate partnerships with the design community, the manufacturing community, the journalism community to figure out how to use this technology that's coming. i love the media lab. i've worked there for a number of years, but i have decided i'm going to help create this tool that can really impact society. and i think the internet was big in 2000. mobile phones was big in 2010. apple just had their first negative growth year of their smartphone. there's indications that we've reached a saturation point. i think the 2020s is going to be

augmented reality. a lot of fortune 100s are going to have to figure out strategies, like in the 1990s what's our chinese strategy. >> i'm going to ask neil one more question. then i'd like to come to the audience. neil, why was it important for you to be recognized as a cyborg? >> it wasn't. i had an issue with the u.k. passport office. they didn't allow me to renew my passport. they said electronic equipment is not allowed on passport photos. they thought i was something electronic. i said this is a body part and i feel like i'm a cyborg. i explained to them that i felt cyborg. in the end, they said yes. they allowed me to appear in the passport with the antenna. this allows me to travel because airports don't really like technology. if you are technology -- >> is it on your passport? does it say you can have the

antenna? does it say you're a cyborg? >> the picture on the passport has the antenna. they have to accept it is an image that is part of me. >> it is you. >> i wasn't seeking for this. i was just renewing my passport. >> there you go. that tells us how to deal with passport offices. >> i'm now applying for swedish citizenship because the material in my head is swedish. if you have a sensory organ that's from that country and you've had it for several years why can't you be from that country? because part of my body is swedish. i'm in conversations with the swedi swedi swedish government now. >> i love it. >> are there other cyborg people? are there others that are out there? is there a community? we had a discussion or

presentation from the lgbt community. this is not a community that we've heard much about. i'm sure there must be some discrimination. can you talk a little bit about that side of it? >> yes, so we are a minority group. people who voluntarily have decided to add technology into their body to extend their senses. there's two types of cyborgs. there are cyborgs for medical reasons, regenerating preexisting body parts. my case is creating a new body part and a new sense. this is a minority now, but there's a woman who has a seismic sense. whenever there is an earthquake in the world, she feels it in her body. she's used to feeling the earthquakes in the world on the richter scale. there's one sense. there's the north sense. you can be implanted. you feel the magnetic north. it's senses that other species have, but humans don't have.

we have a stage in history where you can design what species we want to be. i consider myself to be a trans species. you can add many more senses that other species have and organs that other species have. we'll start seeing these in the 20s. it is growing. it is happening underground. there are many surgeons willing to do the surgery anonymously in the same way in the 50s and 60s transgender surgeries were being done underground. cyborg surgeries should be allowed for everyone who wants to extend their perception of reality. >> it is great to be at "the washington post." i don't know if people realize, but journalism is trying to find a business model that works. these are interesting times. i think we need editorial of the times more than ever. i think figuring out how new technology can help us interact with information is really

important and what the future of the knowledge worker is. i think this community has heard a lot about internet of things, but i think it is internet of thinking things or internet of the brain. if we fast-forward 100 years, maybe people will be able to connect through esp. what are the tools that are going to help us be a collective community? i think often when people have technology added to their biology, it doesn't fit. i know a lot of people who have lost limbs have prosthetics that they don't wear because they're not comfortable. i think figuring out how to create technology that can work with us -- i think that's why neuroscience is so important. these are really exciting times to figure out what to do with some of the technology that's coming. >> thank you. do we have another question? yes, right here in the front row. >> i'd like to know [ inaudible ] on the pigs and how you tested what they saw

once you implanted what you did, if i understood it correctly. >> what we've done is recreating -- causing the neurons to fire just like they normally do. you can have a completely blind retina. we jump over and driver the output cells to fire, just like i was showing you in that picture. the problem is it is hard to check this in an animal. we've done this in mice. we can have them be blind mice like the song and they can track images. it is hard to do this in primates because there aren't blind monkeys and i cannot bear to blind a monkey just to test it. so we're just going to go -- if we get permission, we'll just go into humans. the beauty of working with patients is they are very motivated. if you meet a smart blind

patient, you can work together. you can send the signals in, as long as it is safe, then we can get the feedback from them as to how well it is working. if we're sending very close to the same signals they would normally get, they should be able to see this. mice can track images. and we showed what it was like to reconstruct an image from the firing patterns of a totally blind retina and compared that to what happens with the use of standard prosthetic right now, what's available. it is much better. i have a ted talk on this if you want to see the actual pictures. i think bloomberg news just did a story. it shows what it really looks like. >> we have time for one more. is there -- there we go. >> hello. two questions, please. one would be why do you assume sensory is a bad thing? because normally people use very little of their brain capacity.

i understand that's because -- what if for some reason somebody was born to filter massive amounts of data, not understanding everything, but being able to connect the dots and put that information to useful ends? again, why do you assume that's not possible? the other question would be do we really want to take evolution into our own hands? it's been working pretty well so far as it is. thanks. >> who would like to take that? the reason i say that is because if somebody could filter it, that would be amazing. right now being able to function quickly -- as you're asking me a question, i'm listening to you. everybody in this room is going into my retina, but i've ignored it so i can focus on what you're saying because it is very, very

hard. when you're multitasking, think about when you're driving and you text. it is just dangerous. we have to figure out ways, like he does, to be able to make use of the information and filtering is essentially what i mean. filter the information, so you take what you need and you can solve the problems that are in front of you. it would be the same with the augmented realities. finding a way to utilize it, not getting into a slaclash with yo own brain. we're not totally built for it yet. >> i can take in 10/8th bandwidths per second. we need to do it in a way that we can be productive and cl collaborati collaborative. at the end of the day, human beings are a collaborative species. >> unfortunately, that's all we

have time for for, so thank you all very much. this was enlightening. [ applause ] if you google any one of these three people, there is a wealth of information on them. now i will welcome my colleague jeremy gilbreath up. >> good morning. i'm jeremy gilbert, "the

washington post" director of strategic initiatives. i'm very pleased to welcome to the stage the director of the defense advanced research projects agency, better known as darpa. they are credited with the invention of the internet, driverless cars, and much, much more. he founded the technology office and spent more than a decade as a leading silicon valley venture capitalist. i'm also grateful to have gary king, who is a harvard university professor. gary is an elected fellow in eight honorary societies, has more than 150 journal articles, and 8 books. and what we're here to talk about this morning is numbers tell the truth. new tools that help make meaning from big data. i want to start by asking our guests what it is they really think that means. >> i think both of us think big data is not actually about the data. the revolution is not that

there's more data available. the revolution is we know what to do with it now. that's really the amazing thing. if you take social media, today there were 650 million social media posts that were written by somebody and available to researchers to see what people think. some people say it is the largest increase in the expressive capacity of the human race in the world. one person can write a post and potentially billions of other people read it, but how is any one person going to understand what billions of what other people say? the only way to understand for one day is to have automated methods that can understand this text, so the revolution is not about the data. it's about the analytics that we can come up with and that we now have to be able to understand what these data say. >> gary is talking about, i think, one of the most interesting dimensions of the data explosion, which is the data that humans are generating as we express ourselves.

the human race is my favorite species, so i like that kind of data for future, but i think data has become plentiful in many, many other areas as well. if i think about the work we're doing in cybersecurity where the data is the ones and zeros and the code and the work we're doing to understand the radio spectrum where the signal at each frequency and the wave form, that's the data, and i think about the work that we're doing even to understand the signaling of the brain, that's a different kind of data. we are in an era in which we're data rich. the opportunity space to start building the techniques that give us insights from that data is vast. we see it commercially and in the research horizons. i think it is important to say as well as powerful as this data revolution is it also has some important limitations, at least

today. i just want to make sure that we don't get into a world of buzz and hype and sort of overlook what those limitations are, so we should probably talk about both of those. >> why don't we start there, then? where are the limitations? what are the challenges associated with that? where is that space? >> there are lots of them. dive in. >> i think that's actually the space. that's actually data science, which is what we would probably rather call it, although i love the media invented the term big data because my folks think they understand what i do. it is a valuable thing. it resonated with people. people get a sense that it is important. the data is important, but the analytics is where the revolution is. the point of it is to try to make sense of information that is complicated and error prone

and doesn't speak to the questions you have. so what is it that we do? we do inference. inference is taking facts you have to learn about facts you don't have. that's the whole thing. it might be that the facts you don't have have everything to do with the facts you do have. it's never a sure thing, but we test and we test and we make ourselves vulnerable to being proven wrong. the idea this is a separate topic that may be data is sometimes error prone isn't really right because every datum has problems with it. >> maybe an interesting example of some of the limitations today -- really, i think there's so much that is going to be possible here, but let's talk about where it runs out of steam. one of the areas where there is enormous progress with data is in machine learning. a really simple place that we all experience that is -- i

don't know if you go on facebook or social media and an image pops up that you didn't know someone had taken of you and an algorithm has identified that's you in the picture, that's based on image understanding technology that's based on machine learning. these are essentially systems that learn by looking at hundreds of thousands of millions of images that are labeled, and from that, they learn this is what a person looks like. this is what this particular person looks like. over time, these machines have become very, very, very good at identifying the what's happening in a picture, who the people are, what the action is that's going on. they're now at the point where they're starting to get on a statistical level as good and sometimes even better than humans looking at pictures, so that is pretty impressive. they are statistically better. they're not better. humans aren't perfect at that either. the machines aren't perfect

either. i think the really important thing to recognize is that in this case, in machine learning for image understanding, when the machine is wrong, it's wrong in ways that no human would ever be wrong. it's just going to be a different kind of mistake. everything that we do is structured around the way humans make mistakes. so think about a self-driving car or in my world we just launched -- we just christened a self-driving ship. you can sense what's going on around you and learn and adapt and be able to operate without collisions, whether it is collisions on the road or collisions on the open ocean in our case. in both of those cases, i think you have to recognize that as powerful as these machine learning systems are there will be mistakes that happen. they won't be the kind of mistakes that we currently indemnify for. when you start to try to ask why did the machine make a mistake

that is different from a mistake i would make, today it is pretty much a black art how these machine learning systems work. they don't have a way of explaining how they've adapted themselves to be able to recognize pictures. and until we have deeper understanding of those systems, i think we just need to recognize that there will be places that we do want to use that technology and other places where we're not going to yet be ready to use it. >> are you implying that we have almost too much faith and too much trust in artificial intelligence and in the machine generated learning algorithms that we have now? do you think the public presumes they are more trustable than they actually should be? >> i think sometimes. i think sometimes our narrative about these technologies is just extrapolating from the enormous gains we've made in the last few years to a place that's not realistic, but in fact i think there are, you know, in my world to go from a new technology capable to a system that the

defense department and our military will use and rely on, we have a very rigorous process to make sure that these systems work and that we can trust them before we turn decisions over to them. i'll give you an example. i think there are places where we're not going to be ready to have the machine just decide and go do what it needs to do. examples might be a self-driving ship in a very congested environment. we're still going to want to have a human in that decision loop. there are other places where i think we are ready to have machines make decisions for us. an example might be in cybersecurity. if you're trying to defend your network and attacks are coming in, we are at a point now where we think the power of machines looking at the patterns and the ones and zeros and the net flow data, that those machines are going to be able to see the patterns of attack and discern what's happening and alert you so that you can do something about it in a way that humans

can't. statistically if they guess wrong, the world doesn't end. it's going to be very, very valuable in starting to get a handle on cybersecurity. >> if you think of the kinds of methods that are developed to analyze data this in field, they range from fully human, which doesn't really work -- it works fine at the microlevel, but no human can process the amounts of d that that are coming in today. then you can go to a fully automated system that are extremely efficient and incredibly dumb. imagine a driverless car where you don't tell the human where to go. the best technology in most areas is human empowered and computer assisted. the computer doesn't tell us what an interesting idea is. although more and more it can help us get a sense of the potential interesting ideas, but it's only the human that is going to choose those. i give an example of social

media a minute ago. one of the things we did is download all the social media posts in china, and we learned that we were able to download all the posts before the chinese government could censor them. we had all chinese language social media posts that were censors and that were uncensored. they're censoring it for a purpose. what's the purpose? you censor it anytime you're critical of the government. we used that lens to analyze this data and it didn't make any much sense because there was just as many censored posts that were critical of the government that were supportive of the government. the ideas are the human part. we tried a lot of ideas. data, big data, and data a

analytics don't make the process of coming up with ideas automated. nothing clarified until at one point my graduate students and i said, wait a second. we thought they were censoring criticism. maybe they're actually censoring protest and not censoring criticism. we all thought they were the same thing. once we separated the two and looked through those lenses, it became incredibly clear. they don't censor criticism. they censor protest. you can say to the leaders of china -- you can see in social media posts the leaders of this town are all stealing money, this is the bank accounts they're in, and they all have mistresses and that is not censored. but if you see, by the way, and we're going to have a protest,

censored. they don't care what you think of them. they're a bunch of dictators. they only care what you can do. if you have the power to move crowds, they're worried about you. they're not worried about foreign governments invading. they have nuclear weapons. they're worried about their own people. now those ideas didn't emerge from our terrific data analyt s analytics. i love our analytics. that's our contribution, but it only assists us in coming up with the ideas. then we can try out things and make ourselves vulnerable to being proven wrong. we can test the hypothesis. >> i think that's a great example of the human and the machine together because you would have never done it without the data either, right? >> that's right. you need the data, but the data by itself isn't very good. the great thing it is empowering

us. we were like astronomers they were like standing on our toes and stretching out our neck and squinting. now we have the photons and the equivalent of great telescopes. but that isn't enough if you don't have an idea of what you're seeing and the analytics. >> you were using tools to interpret a huge amount of information that would not have be been processable. >> absolutely. how did people study censorship before in china? well, there was one person that would write one post and notice that that one post was censored. humans are incredibly good at seeing at patterns. look at the clouds when you walk outside today. you'll see animals and elephants and things like that. we're lame at seeing

non-patterns. the way we studied censorship is one person would see one post. it was censored. they would generalize that the entire chinese bureaucracy. we had the first aerial view of this whole thing. it is the same example. we had the first aerial view where we could see millions and millions of posts. around 1300 were censored every day in different topic areas. once you see this, it reveals all kinds of different things. it reveals the intentions not only of individuals. it reveals the intentions of organizations. so think of this giant organization designed to suppress information in china. it's so large that it conveys a lot about itself if you look at it at scale. it's like a big elephant tiptoeing around. it leaves big footprints. and when we look at scale, we can see the footprints.

>> it is so interesting because if many ways we believe or know that the government is using similar artificial intelligence and analytic systems to try to understand what the public is saying. i think to bring out some of these sentiments. i guess it suggests that the tools can be used for very healthy and less healthy outcomes. how do you balance as you build these systems -- how do you ensure that they're used in ways that we feel ethically comfortable with? >> i think it is true of every powerful technology. human history says the technologies -- i'm a techno-optimist. i believe technology has advanced humanity over many centuries, but how humans have used technology is for both good and ill. i think this is a question that has to be integral to all the work we do like at darpa.

we have tried to address that question by first and foremost just getting those ethical issues on the table. it's been an interesting thing that i've observed. in the defense department, i have the privilege of working with a lot of senior military people in leadership positions. it is so woven into the training of what it means to be a war fighter, the ethics of that business, a very serious business, is something that is taught and learned and trained and discussed very, very openly and very, very seriously. it is sort of surprising as an engineer by training. i don't think we really talk about that in science and engineering. very little today and not to the degree we need to. we scientists and engineers certainly don't own the answer, but i think we own the responsibility of getting these issues out on the table. the one you touched on is the first obvious one that happens when it is human being's data

and that is about privacy. one of the things we're trying to do at darpa is come up with some of the technology tools that might allow us to essentially give people and organizations greater agency of their data. we believe, for example, as an individual i can share my health care data for medical research knowing who would see it and who wouldn't, knowing it would be available for only a certain amount of time, knowing it wouldn't be published to the world. i would be much more inclined to be open with my data if i had that kind of assurance and agency over it. i think that kind of answer is going to include technology components that can help. if we can somehow break a very painful trade between privacy and security today, i think that would be a huge advance. i think it's also important to be clear there's never going to be a technology that's a magic wand and let's just sort of wave

these problems away. they're deeply human societal issues that we'll all be grappling with for a long time. >> inside a university, we're under very strict rules. you don't have to worry about us. before we do anything, we have to get approval. but in the public, there is a debate that you're raising about there's more data, there's much better analytics, we can understand what people are doing, aren't they going to be privacy violations? absolutely. that's something to worry about. but don't forget the good. would you all be willing to give up some of your privacy to live ten years longer than your life expectancy? ask yourself that question because it is not an unrealistic question. it is not just live longer than expected. it is live happier lives, safer lives. i'm saying there's two sides. and both sides effect every one of us. and we just shouldn't give away

the good. we're on the research end of things, and so we see the good coming down the pike very vividly. and we don't want any of us to miss that. at the same time, we have to protect everybody's privacy because we're not going to be able to get access to the data to find out these wonderful things about the future of humanity. >> i want to pose one more question to our panelists and then i'll open it up to the room. given darpa's history and some of the things you have talked about, the use of robotic systems, artificial intelligence, was social science this kind of quantifiable -- is that a natural fit? does that telegraph darpa's intentions? >> it is one of many things that we're looking into. i see a huge opportunity with people like gary and other leaders in this field. social science is being reinvented because of the

availability of massive of data coupled with these very thoughtful techniques and the me methodologies that are developing. i think that is going to allow us to ask questions that have been dead ends in social science for a very long time. we have a new program called next generation social science that is specifically about building the tools and the methods that would allow for a new generation of social science research, research that could be done on a different scale than, you know, graduate students that are getting paid 20 bucks to do an experiment, research that could be reproduced and scaled, research that could be investigated and seen from the outside in a very different way. we've chosen that example. it's a very basic research program, but we wanted to have a particular sample problem to work on. in that case, we chose the question -- the question we're posing are, what the key factors in collective identity formation. as you can imagine, this is

something that is essential in our world if you think about the stability operations that happened in iraq and afghanistan that we're still in many ways engaged with. these are some of the more core questions about any social group is when do a group of individuals believe that they are a collective whole and what causes that to break apart. i don't think we have very good answers to that. certainly we don't have practical answers to help anyone who is trying to do something on the ground today. our hope is through developing these techniques we get new insights in that area, but also develop methodologies that scale across many more areas. for our mission at darpa, which is breakthrough technologies for national security, i think it's actually very hard to imagine an area that's more important to national security than understanding societal behavior. the fact that we have vast new opportunities told that i think is something we definitely want to tap into. >> fabulous.