this week, facebook ceo, mark zuckerberg, will testify before senate and house committees on facebook's handling of information. tuesday on c-span3, he will answer questions during a joint judiciary and senate conference hearing. wednesday at 10 am eastern on c- span3, he will appear before the house, energy, and commerce committee. watch live coverage on c-span3 and online on c-span.org. you can also listen live with the free c-span radio at. thursday a confirmation hearing for mike pompeo to become the next secretary of state, he currently serves as cia director and would replace rex tillerson who left the post in march. he will speak before the senate foreign relations committee thursday at 10 am eastern on c- span3 . next, a discussion on the opportunities of technology

transfer and the national security risks that can accompany these transfers across nations. panels explore if limits should be exposed to limits on selling overseas and how security concerns can be balance with free-trade and investments. held by the booking institution, this is two hours. good morning and welcome to brookings, i am john allen, this morning's panel is about the economic and political aspects of technology transfer, i want to welcome c-span to the panel, they will be covering us and our panel will be broadcast later today, at the very conclusion of this panel, we will be followed immediately by the next panel, there is no break in the process, we want to make sure that you are aware of that. if you are unaware, and you have not your cell phone, i

would ask you to do that, sometime before 10 am and 11 am, washington dc will test its cell phone and remote device emergency broadcast system. this means at some point, everyone will look at their phones, that happens to me frequently and meetings. let's anticipate that and not have it be too much of an interruption. i really have the honor this morning as the president of brookings of hosting the first panel of three terrific panelists, dr. anthony vance, -- anthony is currently working for a terrific agency that has provided a ton of support to us in places like i rock. thank you for that. anthony has a long track record of success as the nj serving as the associate director for capabilities and the director plans and programs prior to his

current role and has been central to developing the private partnership efforts and i think he will talk a little bit about that as we go on. rich is a special assistant to the associate administrator of space technology at nasa. prior to his current role, he served in a variety of top positions at nasa and most recently was nasa langley centers office of strategic communications and development. as well as a chief technologist at the center. nicole turner lee is a fellow at brookings and the center for technology within government studies and research program in her research focuses on public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the united

states. she is also an expert at the intersection of race, wealth and technology and comes to brookings after most recently serving as the vice president and chief resource and policy officer of the multicultural media, telecom and internet counsel and vice president and first director of the media and technology institute for political and economic studies, we have three terrific panelists here and i am honored to introduce this and guide the discussion, we will be here for about an hour, for the first 30 minutes i will offer some questions to the panelists and for the second 30 minutes we will go out to you. i do not normally ask our panelists to do introductory remarks, but the first question i will also go to all three of the panelists, if they choose to make an introductory remark they are most welcome to do so. let me go to the first question, this is about technology transfer. starting first with our overall topic of discussion today, technology transfers, be they public good technologies, emerging from u.s. government projects or university research.

this has been an enormous potential ramification when thinking of the growing tech race that we see as nations compete against one another in areas of big data and artificial intelligence. in particular, this comes to mind with the u.s. and china. let us go down the line of panelists this morning and present the opportunities so they get opening thoughts and do we need a definition of public technology and what is the government's idea. this is a good way to begin the overall conversation. with that, anthony, would you like to offer some comments? yes, thank you for having me in thank you for having the panel, i think this is extremely important at this particular moment in time for the country. i think looking at technology transfer, i put this into a

larger context of what is the appropriate role of government working with commercial industry and nonprofit and the wider economic and civil society ? and within that, for my role at nga, i think about national security and strategic consequences.. in particular, we have gone through phases of working differently with industry and the public. we have invented new approaches to doing that. the entire idea of tech transfer as an approach uses of sf rdc and contracts and approaches like ota's and things like this, i think right now, we are watching a geopolitical shift and if you look at the national security strategy and the national defense strategy we are seeing

this shift from the post-911 world into a new era of pure competition and with that demand is a new approach to public and private partnerships and within that to tech transfer. seeing tech transfer as a means of strategic competition. and within that, i would include not just transferring technology, but more broadly, transferring and sharing and investing data and other intellectual property. i see and i look at this last 40 or 50 years of government activity and i have noticed that we have built up a massive asset. and resource, really. we used to think of natural resources is something that the government owned and leased out to the energy industry. it has created ip and data technology and we need to come

up with new ways to invest the assets and use it for strategic national security and economic purposes. one of the things that i have been working on at nga, is to do that, this is strange for an intelligence agency to think that way, normally we are consumers of data and information, not providers to the industry. i think that is what we will have to do to strategically compete and start looking at this is not necessarily something that we just open source or is brought up as a public good, i think there is still definitely a role for that and for open sourcing. for example, the corona imagery with open source for historical and archival reasons. i do think there are other aspects that we might not want to open source, but still provide and treat like

proprietary information, unclassified, that of course we could provide to partners out there and two universities and two companies to create technology. you brought up ai, and that is the major technology to consider in this aspect where you need historical data to train these algorithms. all of the sudden, this asset that we have developed over the last 50 years of historical data is extremely important in that economy. we have to find ways to share it strategically with certain companies, not with everyone. i would suggest primarily with american companies or potentially allied, i start to think about this at nga and at the department of defense and other agencies and this is what other agencies are working on. again, perfect timing on the topic matter and important to what we are trying to do. >> thank you anthony. let me turn to rich, from your position at nasa, what are

your thoughts on this? >> we need to think about tech transfer in both directions, as an agency that has a mission to do something technologically difficult. it is important for us to tap in to the technological activities that are going on outside of our own development. we traditionally have used tools like sbir to tap into small companies to get their technologies to take advantage within the nasa mission. within this we are doing more within prizes and challenges. with those we can reach into a broader immunity outside the u.s. and tap into technologists that could be in the garage somewhere across the globe. this is really important as we look at technologies that now 70% of the research is done offshore and outside the u.s. press not to tap into this is a

mistake, we have to tap into that and we have to develop the partnerships in order to get this kind of technology to accomplish the things that we are working on. we need to make sure we have a balanced discussion with regards to tech transfer. this is something that is in our original mission statement and is something we do a lot of. we have a spinoff magazine that goes out the people look at all the time for the amount of things that have come out of the space program. it is kind of part of our culture to do technology transfer. the thing that we are recognizing, however, is that this broad dissemination of the technologies is not as effective as perhaps doing it in a more focused way. we recently begun some programs around working with individual companies with individual organizations and particularly,

looking at startup organizations to try and see how they can take advantage of some of the technologies that have been developed within nasa, not only as technologies, but taking advantage of some of the expertise and subject matter experts within nasa to help their companies actually move forward. we find that we can actually leverage those technologies a lot quicker and faster and try to help that economic ecosystem the more robust and actually for the technologies in a way that is much more effective to help businesses grow to create jobs, etc. that is something we are experimenting with and we think it will be very important as we go to the future. that is great, thank you very much, that is a particularly important point about helping the startups to accelerate the process that might have otherwise taken quite a long time. nicole, please? >> thank you john. i feel honored, i am sitting next to two scientists from federal agencies here. i will actually talk about tech transfer from the perspective of civil society and what we are seeing to a certain extent,

this is grading some difficulties and challenges with tech transfer because the internet and the way it has been commercialized has sort of accelerated the private sector engagement and taxed the government sector when it comes to r&d. we know the first tech transfer was probably the internet and gps systems. if we look at the way that those systems have been leveraged as well as u.s. regulatory decisions to make the internet more commercial, we are seeing this place which is different when we look back, where the internet growth is outpacing what governments can do. that is what we are referencing, how do you create different types of models and partnership? i want to address the question of what to we look at when we see public good technology and sort of reflect on that for just a minute, obviously this competition has created a good firewall where companies that have newly been created in this disruptive age are essentially not necessarily doing things for the public good, we have

that first challenge where we are seeing the marketplace develop products in the commercial market that might not translate back to the public sector, this is something that i work on here at brookings, or vice versa, we are seeing the government not able to keep pace with the private sector. that is problematic when we start to look at government funding towards r&d, something that traditionally supported public technology. i also think the public good technologies require some level of architecture that protects citizens. i think the second panel will talk a little more about that in terms of civil society, but there is a challenge. if public good technology is designed by healthcare, do not have these protections in place, john, this goes back to the question which creates a different definition of what we should look at with public good technology. i also think, many of us in the room have been watching the news. when you have private sector companies that are sort of exiting into the public domain,

and suggesting, in many respects, that they are doing public good. there will be problems and challenges associated with that. most recently, with the breach that we are all familiar with, it is now toppled over 80 million people. with respect to that, what we are seeing in terms of public good technology, we are seeing private companies like google, twitter, facebook, etc., doing public purpose things that do not necessarily translate with what federal agencies have in terms of scrutiny around design, intent, and the benefits of that product. i am always reminded of having worked the interface with federal agencies, things like precision medicine and some of the technologies that we see advanced through r&d. the question becomes, when you negotiate that, or when universities go to mit during their tech day where students put out patents for new products, this is a different that you have seen with a two screen television and you

think, that is an interesting product on a patent coming out of the university. but when you talk about drone technology or interfering with healthcare precision medicine that finds itself in conflict with the private sector and public sector goals, that is problematic. john, to your question, i think we need to revisit the public technology definition, particularly in the u.s. as we see the framework in which we started the internet from this commercial, our decision to make the internet commercial have implications on how that actually affects civil society. >> so your thoughts are, there has to be some semblance of transference in the context of public good being of use to the broader civil society? >> exactly, or that will be driven and we will have to catch up. anthony, back to you. in the world that you have lived in and currently due at nga, when thinking about

america's use every day of gps and things like google maps and uber in terms of using big data connection significantly enhancing technologies, as we watch this unfold, we do not necessarily know that it is for the public good. thinking less about the data itself and more about the technology that collects that data, should there be limits on u.s. companies that are allowed to sell this information abroad or disseminated to third or fourth parties in that context? >> yes, this is a particularly important question, when i go back and think about this as a strategic issue and a national security issue for the country,

i would say in terms of economic competitiveness outside of the national security realm, it is important. clearly, there should be some limit on technology transfer abroad. i think we are comfortable with that and nuclear weapons come to mind is something that very clearly should be limited in how it goes. i think there is a spectrum here of what we are willing to transfer and should transfer. and some things do best when they are fully sourced and available to everyone. gps, for example, that revolutionize, not just one industry, but multiple industries globally. and it definitely helped the united states economy, the government, and everything that we do essentially every day. you cannot necessarily always predict when you are looking at a particular technology, what the ramifications will be when you do open it up. my personal bias, as someone who actually came from commercial industry, is that there is a bias towards opening up, but at the same time, putting on my national security

hat, i realize there are competitive advantages that we want to keep within the country to support some of the industries here and support the national security community. i think that is creeping from again, if we have nuclear weapons, all the way at the extreme, i think it is creeping left as more and more issues to become particularly important for national security. you have brought up algorithms and data and hardware. we are creeping towards the algorithm side and where intellectual property should be protected. i think the primary issue there is as you creep left and go from hardware to software and into algorithms, the shelf life, the half-life of these technologies becomes shorter and shorter. the shelf life of an algorithm could be months or weeks. how do you even protect something like that?

is it worth the squeeze, is the [ null ] worth the squeeze in trying to protect this? we need to factor that in as well. in particular, where much of that happens in the open-source and academic realm anyway. those are the kinds of points that we have to start considering. i would suggest that what it means is taking a much more sophisticated approach to how we secure and how we think about securing intellectual property and technology in the country, and thinking about multiple factors and figure out where in the spectrum of transference we should allow this to exist. >> let me make a comment, obviously, the speed of government is woefully behind the advances of technology across the board, whether it is the production of data or the collection of data or the processing of data. the emergence of sophisticated algorithms, to your point, about public-private partnerships, is there some hope

that that concept of public private partnership can create a regulatory process that is faster than the speed of government to create the regulations? but demonstrates a level of responsibility in the private sector to do what we ultimately hope, which is doing good and protecting privacy and that sort of thing? your thoughts would be helpful. >> that is an excellent question and something i am intimately involved with at the agency. we do have a discrepancy and asymmetry between the speed at which technology is developed and the speed at which the government develops technology or really importantly, adopts it and integrates it into operations. how do we kind of shrink that asymmetry? i do think there will have to be some new regulatory policies statutory

approaches to this. and kind of is where i started, in our history, we have adopted these new approaches when we determine that we need them. and you tell is an example -- as an example, we realized we needed to communicate with early startups in this required new authority. and more recently, changes in how ota's are able to be used within the department of defense. i do think we will need some new approaches that kind of take this speed issue, i would call it the speed of adoption, it is not really the invention, because i think we are actually reasonably good at inventing technology and commercial industry is great at inventing it, how do we adopt this faster? this is what i am seeing within the government.

if you look at things like project maven, for example, that is what they are focused on and i am involved with it for that reason. i think that right now we can muddle through, but this is incumbent upon congress to come up with new approaches that will support faster options. >> i think that we will find that the testimony on the hill of the three tech giants, we will see some of that put out in the public domain and have excellent commentary. nicol would you like to add? >> yes, i would like to add to that, we do see some of the public and private sector cooperation when it comes to big data analytics, etc., we are in the state where much of the u.s. regulatory framework has been focused on consumer privacy. the area where we talk about

privacy in terms of tech transfer has been more limited to the ip stage and these conversations need to happen. i think what is scarier about this particular area and the g space is the algorithm piece. some of the research i do here on brookings is on algorithm bias. it is clear that what happens in terms of data science, there's not many government agencies that understand algorithms and how to unpack that. there's not many companies that want to give away the algorithm, that is why we talk about bias. you cannot see what is under the hood when it is disproportionately affecting people. we have made progress, last week was privacy week here in dc and we will see these policies come to the pipes. the u.s. after april 11, and in the afternoon, when he leaves the capitol hill testimony, we will probably see privacy legislation begin to be debated. the question, because of tech transfer, what we have seen in the last few months is the manipulation of what is available to sort of innovate new types of practices and

procedures, for example, where that algorithm has manipulated democratic institutions. that is a different type of regulation where the data flows are not easily identified and not necessarily understood by all actors. i would even say, in some cases, the private sector outside of the silicon valley. i would say companies that are experiencing these bridges every day, do not understand what that means. i do believe going forward, we will have to look at this implication that distinguishes between consumer control or consumer access to their own data, business or enterprise access to data, and the government transfer of data as three different verticals that at some point have to be reconciled to create a much safer and resilient system. >> let me just add, this is a little bit of balancing, we talked in the pre-conversation about this balance issue between these issues.

there could be ramifications of some of these new technologies but there are also new technology opportunities and we have to be careful to not over restrict and that is the balance that we need to find in the middle. as we stated, this idea of public and private partnership is a great idea. we have composites out into the industry and that serves as speed to move this technology forward and taking advantage of speed is important. nasa is a bureaucracy just like the government. as trying to move things forward is difficult, when we have these public and private partnerships, they bring speed and make it happen quicker and that is important for us to move it forward and within the opportunities base, it is important for the future. >> rich, thanks for that contribution. let me just shift over to you with respect to your nasa background. we have seen a growing success

of companies that spacex combined with the resurgence of human travel into outer space, in particular towards mars, what are your thoughts on the private sector's role on that? and are there risks associated with the technologies that are being developed in the private sector in the context of tech knowledge he transfer? -- technology transfer. >> let me make sure i have this right. let's go back a few years and nasa was formed out of an organization that was an aeronautics committee. that organization was really put in a position to try and help the fledgling aeronautics industry move forward. they had a lot of research and a lot of policy discussion on

how do we open up the airspace to these crazy companies that are flying airplanes around? and do we need to have restrictions on those? etc. . that has been a job at nasa, in its history, has been a part of for its entire lifetime. it is trying to help industry grow so that it can commercialize and become valuable for the country and the world. we are in a new era of that now with regards to the space economy. we are seeing organizations likes rays and blue origins, etc., taking some technological developments that nasa has done over the years, they are taking them and figuring out how to do them cheaply. again, this is not something nasa is good at. we are good at the technological stuff, but not how to do it cheaply. space x can figure out how to do it cheaply so we can have a commercial market that is valuable. this is positive from our point. this is the way it should go, we are very much working to

support these industries and they are using a lot of our facilities and capabilities, subject experts, etc. we are trying to become a customer of theirs to try and get provisions to the space station and eventually humans into space. we see this as a positive benefit. this is the public, private partnership, that we have discussed and a big mega economic way. if i can come back, actually, you brought up a great point, that is relative advantage and relative competitive advantage. what is private industry good at? what is the government could act? that really gets to the heart of why you have a private and public partnership. when i look at the government i look at agencies like nasa, nga, or the department of defense, they are very good it doing more or less impossible tasks, putting people on the moon, i think of the corona program, putting satellites in the air and literally dropping

film canisters over an ocean and sending an airplane to pick it up in midair and then getting it back to the u.s. to be processed and analyzed. this is a nearly impossible feat and it was incredible that they did it with the technology they had. whereas, when you start to look at by the industry, they are good at something very different. being inexpensive is a big part of being creative in a way that the government is not, i like to use the example of waze. the government approach to global traffic monitoring, if we had come up with this 10 or 15 years ago, would be to go out and buy helicopters because we looked at how do you monitor traffic? well the local news stations use helicopters and film the traffic and radio it down, we should just buy a lot of helicopters and do ellipses around every city in the nation and radio it down and go global with that. where's waze, with almost no money and without that in mind,

created a community of people for mapping purposes to start, but then for monitoring traffic and sharing that. they use cell phones and gps and now they give it away for free. that is just a very, very different approach to problem- solving that lends itself to solving very, very different problems. when we start to think about the public-private partnerships, we should look at it from this lens of, what is the relative competitive advantage of each side? and where should they play? i think even within this example, we see an example of this is gps, waze would be impossible without gps and gps would not have been possible from a commercial perspective. it is a money loser, i suspect. it is really big and expensive and complicated and just difficult to do and it has to

last forever, for decades and decades which not all companies do. that is a clear role for government, but then there is a clear role for something like waze, for creative near uses. again, it is that relative advantage in a new way to think about how government partners with private industry. >> john, so i do not sound like debbie downer, there are positive ways to deploy technology. spacex is being looked at to provide broadband services to rural communities, there is a repurposing of technology that happens every day. i just think that there is some kind of input output where their commercial and public sector partnership is defined by what the output is so that it does not become something where you have geolocation and later the government is kicking themselves because the geolocation had an unintended consequence that was not thought of by the commercial

sector. i want to make sure john, everyone knows, that i do support it. >> it is a balance. >> it is a balance. it is, and i think the common thread, i will go to the audience in a moment, the common thread is that the public-private partnership is really the way ahead here. it is something that can reinforce the public good. it can probably minimize the negative effects. waze has the capacity of producing enormous amounts of useful data with respect to metropolitan infrastructure planning and that sort of thing, it will also tell members of my family if i stopped off at the dubliner on the way home and i worry slightly about that, with respect to commercial involvement in the berm -- program, i agree -- in the space program, i agree, it's cost-effective and an integrator of technology. the tesla i had my eyes on is

on its way to mars right now, i am out of the business for now. this is a real opportunity for us in terms of technology transfer in the context of national security, and even more so, towards internally the good of civil society and the transference towards civil society that is the real opportunity. rich, you touch that a number of times in terms of opportunity. let me go to the audience now, we have a rich array of attendees this morning from a number of organizations, and from many different countries, we welcome you here today. we will go for about 30 minutes, i will end up straight on the hour at 11 am, i apologize for taking up 5 minutes of your time. and you stand, if you could please give us your name, where you are from, and if you could get to a question relatively quickly, i would be most grateful, if not, i will find a question and what you are saying. please, yes sir, third row back, and we will go to the second row after that.

>> gentlemen, thank you for a good presentation, my name is alan hurwitz from rockville, maryland, i used to work for world bank in the intelligence community. could people please define the public-private partnership a little more clearly? >> let us start with you. >> it is a loose term, it is used in a lot of different ways historically, everything from building highways together to nih investments in healthcare and so forth. the way that i would use it is to see it as what are mutually beneficial things that the government, the public side,

and the private side, primarily, a commercial industry, but i would also include universities, nonprofits and civil society, what are mutually beneficial things that they can do with specific projects? one side than the other, or they might be the same. the example that i would use is the co-creation of technology, what i was saying before. the government is good at creating certain technologies in the commercial sector is good at creating different kinds of technology. how can they work together in a mutually beneficial way to come up with technologies that they both want. they are chipping in at different times. i see this as a partnership in a sense that it is not a one- way street. it is separate from

contracting, for example. this is where the government would provide money and in return gets a service or product, it is more of a one- way street. this is a partnership in the sense that both sides need to chip something in, whether that is money or time or effort, or capability, both sides should receive something in return. again, whether that is technology or data or some competitive advantage. >> anyone else? >> i want to add, i absolutely agree, a lot of the public private partnership is in the vein where we both contribute something to the mix. the other kind that we do a lot is pre-competitive work where we have several companies that will come together that we will partner with as a team to work on technology and the maturation of technology to a certain level that is pretty competitive. and then these companies can take it off and do something

with it competitively. these are both models that are used. >> i would say would public- private partnerships, an area that i do a lot with in the telecom space, you must have common goals between the private sector and the public sector are and what you want to accomplish. and a fundamental interest in public interest. public-private partnership is really not public private with civil societies, it is not at the core of what the partnership looks like. i would agree with rich in the sense of the public private partnership has to be done in a way where it does not stifle innovation. we have seen different amir -- arrangements where you go into the private or public sector and their concerns about ideology or innovation due to the constraints of either the public sector or the private sector and their unwillingness to invest resources. i was just going to say, a good example in terms of public

interest is electronic health records. over the years, we have seen these become much more resilient because of public interest guided by hipaa and other regulatory prescribed rules that have helped the private sector innovate in a way that is more readily available. i would just add by saying it is the scalability of the partnership that needs to generate output. we often deal with this in my particular work where we are asked to see, is this a benefit to civil society? if it's only benefiting one part or block and you are taking all of this r&d money for competitive advantage, it has not really met the criteria>> thank you for that question. a question in the second row? the left side of the room is extraordinarily inquisitive this morning, we invite anyone to take questions from the right side of the room. >> thank you very much, i am marina, an afghan american journalist. this is exciting at the dawn of the digital era. we can watch

all the differences it will bring to society. could you please put into context how this relates to the future of government and up until this point, really, society has worked on a global system of opening economies and coordinating their economies and governments. right now, we are in the midst of such populace movement and with technology being at its earlier stages, although we are seeing some of its fruit, we are still also seeing this being used. you've described processes where it will take time to perfect techniques to ensure that they will still serve the public good and the government can have its jobs. could you please put this into context?

this will take a long time, and yet, we are on the brink of what looks like a new cold war with so many conflicts bring in the private sector and globally. >> who would like to take a crack at that? >> that question is spot on, i described this as their myopic tendencies of creators that want to see a product go to market quickly, this is something we have discussed and the broader goals of what the technologies impact is on society. you are correct, we are so much more global. i would argue that tech transfer will be more protected by people in terms of what they want to share because of the vulnerabilities that they created by having the technology be so much more widespread and it is not generating the outcomes we thought it would generate. it is different from a government or smart city leveraging technology and trying to get practices to be more efficient, and actually

cutting into the democratic institutions. i really do think we will go into an age where those regulations happen before the innovation catches up which would be a flip-flop model of what we have seen. i actually think government will come in and put a plug in some of this before innovation comes out. this could create its own set of problems. generally, the question is correct, we have to figure out how to harmonize these systems so that since we are moving into more of a digital economy, the bureau of labor statistics put out a report about the percentage of gdp driven by digital. this is certainly something that has taken up a huge portion of our attention, not only on the innovation side, but economically. this is a problem, a good problem to have, but it also has consequences>> let me add a couple of points. there is enormous capacity for the community of nations using

the digital environment to accelerate civil society, economic productivity, and even improve governance in many ways. apart completely from the security side. this is where i see the community of entities that is bigger than the community of nations, we are talking about facebook and google and some of the most significant sovereign entities when you think about sovereignty, have the capacity to help slingshot many countries that are in the developing world that would not otherwise be able to do this on their own through public- private international partnerships. they do have the capacity to be helpful in that regard. you also mentioned the potentially emerging cold war. this is quite apart from the dustup that we are having with the chinese. i think there are enormous opportunities, again, for us to share and cooperate the u.s.

and china on a number of issues. the cold war that you might've mentioned with respect to russia, and i have great concerns about where all of that is heading, frankly. i see china in a very different mode. i think beyond the reflex for protectionism which can chill this and chill the opportunity to cooperate in important areas, the capacity for the united states and china in this regard to find common ground in the digital future is extraordinarily important to both countries and the community. i would hope that we do not confuse the activities right now that appeared to be protectionist and could lead us down the road towards a trade war and would be helpful over the long term towards the u.s. and china relationship. >> i completely agree with your point and the point that has come up here on the value for developing countries.

i am a technology optimist, i used to work for someone that wrote quite a bit about the subject and talked about how you could skip a generation of technology and this would have a profound effect on countries. if you skip land lines to cell phones for example. much more resilient, much less expensive technology and i have done a lot of my phd fieldwork. i did that work in africa and i watch that happen in world real- time with what it did to the entire continent. that is the promise of technology. we all know there are downsides and there are negative consequences for lots of technologies, the net gain to me is massive. when we talk about the public-private partnership, there is an unset assumption that is important. i see this in my government role, more and more, this is an

acceptance by government at the working level that commercial industry, commercial technology, has a lot to contribute to governance and government in general. we should adopt it, there is a very real factor in government and not here in this large organization and i think we are starting to realize there are things that allow us to enact government duties and responsibilities significantly better, cheaper, and with a wider scale. what came out before, for example, broadband. where is government again, and the waze example, maybe we do not by helicopters, but maybe we dig a hole in the ground, every house in the country, no matter how far off. i think that is valid and everyone in the nation should have broadband, there could be game changing technology because the company likes space to -- spacex and other ones

have come up with much cheaper solutions and that is the promise here and we need to be open-minded as government employees thinking about this. >> we are not cycling quickly through these questions, the gentleman just next to the camera, please, hand in the air, yes sir? >> my name is bobby, and i would be interested in your thoughts about the wealth that has been created through digital technology. that wealth is an equally distributed, currently and the digital industry is becoming increasingly difficult with roles as other industries have been created with well and do you think we have the right help with the financial wealth that has returned to government for public purposes and public

governance and public governance will be able to make decisions? >> no. [ laughter ] if we look at technology in general, and this is something that i always have to remind myself, we really started with i.t. and very basic principles of what tech meant, even with government. that has morphed into an economy that has not just been static. it internet is no longer a composite of websites that people go to, it is actually layers to create in and of itself, the own or its own wealth, the share economy which is ruled by the internet of things and other types of really cool technology that you can touch, cloud computing, each of

those layers actually generates its own in a sense of output, economic output that does create this unequal distribution of wealth and access. all of us in this room, if we do not own a patent or technology company, or i am not sure we are proud to say this, but we are passive consumers in the digital economy right now. start ups, incubators, this is the case. i think the government could be behind on this as well. species that are government driven or supporting public technology applications are now just coming around to see that we have to fulfill this role. i tell people all the time that facebook was not designed for what it is used for today. it was designed to be a social network, now it is in the middle of a conversation around algorithms and it was an ad supported model that has morphed into something else. uber found a spot and is

creating its own generation of wealth and workers, this is why we are wrapped into this conversation and it is so much more sophisticated. who are the people on the and that will become the fatalities of this digital economy? it is the 11% of americans that are not online, they are poor, the distribution of color, the disabled, the rural communities. they will always be involved because their big data is what drives the new economy. even if they are not online, their lack and absence of data actually drives companies to know where they need to deliver food or what kind of investments they need to make in smart grid systems. they are still part of it. they run the risk of becoming deeper and deeper in poverty and eventually becoming digitally invisible. and so, to your point, the bls report was the latest case to debunk and unpack with the digital economy looks like. i think this question is critical, particularly when government invest resources in r&d and they do not get a return

on investment or technology that were designed to solve the problem, creates the problem. that is where i think again, a lot of us are stuck in the middle and i know that we will talk about security and how do we begin and sell and create harmonious legislation or regulation that allows one part of the sector to focus on civil society while another part continues to do what they do, perhaps an regulated context. again, the communications act of 1934 was designed for the telegraph, later picked up by broadband and they did not anticipate the companies that we see today. i think this question is spot on, the wealth equity index will continue to widen based on where you are within the topology of the digital economy . >> that is a great question, let me just offer a couple of thoughts. sovereignty throughout much of modern history has been shaped by the concept of west philly

and suffered t -- west sovereignty, a line on the ground that circumvents terrain and people with a homogeneous identification that provide their loyalty to the sovereign. that is a relatively modern view of westphalian concept of sovereignty a sovereign influence. influence, that is the traditional sense to aristotle. we need to think differently. we need to think differently and the public-private partnership concept the thinking about how in a about how, in a world where tech giants, , controlled the of the power of ancient sovereigns. is wealth, and data, and algorithms in ways that traditional westphalian governments we need to think a bit

differently now about public and private partnerships, ultimately morphing into what could be public and private alliances. tech giants, they surpassed many , and influence their thinking. that is a whole different way of thinking about influencing in the digital era. talking about terrain and population. now it's about the information you control, and how you influence the information. it's a different way of thinking. we need to expand our view of community of entities. we talk about the community of nations. it's much bigger than the community of nations.

their joining forces in an international partnership. we have real capacity. were not thinking better property. i'll leave it at that. i will build upon that. what you have done is place the partnerships on how we understand geopolitics and history. i think we can go further with that thinking in terms of how different nations have different systems. that difference will apply to how they use public, private partnerships, and the nature of the relationships. china has very different approach to ownerships. when they deal with a company like i do, they'll do it different than how the u.s. deals with a company like google. both of the relationships will shift over time.

what makes it even more complicated are the companies that have been brought up, they are not just within one single system. google may have a different relationship than the -- with the eu that may have with the u.s., than it does have a china. it makes a very complicated did think about how all the relationships will attract over time. that's what we have to decide, what we want from these public- private relationships. how will we get it? that's what we are all thinking about now. >> this is an important outcome for this panel. my digital capable device tells me we have four minutes left in this panel. i've been very disappointed in the right side of the room. is there, yes sir, we are just

a couple of minutes, i would like to get to a question. we will get quickly to an answer.>> thank you so much. i am from china. i have two questions. in terms of the cooperation between china and the u.s., can you elaborate on more areas, specifically where china and u.s. can improve their cooperation to improve the wealth and all countries. you just talked about the areas where the government, on one hand it needs to set regulations for different industries, but in the meantime, needs to provide funds for different industries to develop. how does the government strike a balance in terms of that? >> that's a long question. there comes to mind immediately, where the u.s. and

china, in the context of the digital environment can cooperate with medical diagnoses , and the capacity to harvest enormous amounts of information on medical research. we can help to get more quickly to diagnoses that we are starting to see. it can be harvested and rendered with high levels of confidence relatively quickly. the others in the area of security, and the whole business of countering terror. there are many reasons why china and the united states need to cooperate in this regard. is real capacity in that regard as well. i would simply say, we have not seen this play out. we are all very interested in seeing how the president objects with regard to the ninth party congress. china's planning to surpass the united states by 2030. china has advantages in some cases and disadvantages and others.

at its core, it has the capacity to create great cohesion between the objectives of governance, the government, and chinese companies. there's much more capacity there than in our system. i don't call that a strength or weakness, just different. we do need to acknowledge that it will be different for us. >> in the area of ai, the artificial intelligence side of what we are seeing the chinese do is very interesting. we are just like they are outpacing what we are doing in the u.s. when it comes to global decision-making, and problem solving, i think some of the applications should warrant cooperation. when the u.s. takes on big issues like when the white house was trying to solve the ebola crisis. some of the new applications of urban technology could have been more helpful, if there was more cooperation. we are starting to see the un do more of that type of

cooperation as an international entity when it comes to human rights. they should move into that conversation around that. i was in your second question around, who funds that? the interesting conversation that we've had at the table is, how do you incentivize? you regulate, but you need to incentivize digital development. hopefully, we will begin to see more models like that. where the cases were we can incentivize governments to have more cooperation around products and services that fit the core of the public interest? it will help with the applications. i do not think any government has enough money to support the local gdp of a company that surpasses the gdp of a small country. having more of that, i would like to say, in africa with mobile. there were lessons there that we did not pick up on in terms of wireless. you have to incentivize this type of experiment --

experimentations and products to balance the regulatory framework. >> nicol turner-lee a richard antcliff, thank you for participating. thank you for joining us. will you help me to think the panelists? [ applause ] while mike does housekeeping appear, he's a generalist -- generous host.

i will introduced our panelist. i'm darrell west here at brookings institution. i'm the director of technology innovation. we will continue the discussion started by john and his panelists on technology transfer. i do have to say, the first panel set a very high bar in terms of substance and humor. i don't know if we will be competitive on the latter part of that. they also were able to work in references to aristotle and west malayan systems. we may not meet that threshold as well. we will try to get to some equally important issues. i do want to remind the audience, both the audience in the auditorium and on c-span, we have set up a twitter hashtag that is tech transfer. if you want to make any comments or questions, please feel free to do so.

our panel will focus on the security angle, regarding technology transfer. we will get into question such as, when should technology be transferred? why do some sort of products need to be protected? where should we draw the line between national security issues versus free trade and free exchange of information? to help us understand these issues, we are joined by a set of distinguished experts. it to my immediate right is heather roth. she works on the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence. she is the author of a book entitled, global justice, the responsibility to protect. if they have aristotle, we have her. michael hanlon is -- he is the

author of numerous books and works on defense strategy and american national security policy. he serves as director of research in the foreign-policy program. paul is they had of geo technology at the eurasia group. he works on global technology policy, cyber security, and emerging areas such as ai in big data. prior to joining that firm, he served in several senior policy positions within the u.s. government over more than 25 years. chris meza rall is a fellow in the center for middle east policy at brookings. he is an expert in religious and sectarian conflict and the impact of technology on foreign- policy. he is using machine learning to study violent extremism. why don't i start with heather. you have argued that many emerging technologies are what you call dual use in nature. that means they can be used for good or bad purposes. how should we think about

technology transfer, and expert control, with dual use technologies? >> thank you darrell. thank you for having me here today. i think, to answer your question, there are 2 ways to think about this. one is to talk about hobbs. we will throw down. we will throw down on philosophers. the primary job from a security purpose is to secure the rights and lives and protections of citizens. the leviathans whole job is to protect the body of politics. when we want to talk about technology and dual technology, were talking about civil applications of a technology for peaceful purposes, and something that is used for military purposes. that the flipside of that. the same technology can be militarized and used for security purposes or for

weaponization. we have to be very careful about how we draw lines around these technologies. one way to think about this is through a series of arrangements that we already have in place. we have international treaties in place. we have missile control regime. we also things like a voluntary arrangement of like-minded states that want to ensure that the technology developed and exported when it starts to become so precise in what it can do, it becomes more conducive to military applications. if you think about harden systems about magnetic poles, or systems that can withstand a nuclear attack. you have systems that might be able to withstand extreme temperatures. when those things start to happen, those become what we consider dual use and in need

of expert control. the good and the bad purpose is one way to think about the hook. the other side is its military useful. it depends on what side you think it's good or bad. what i would say about technology and tech transfer, and expert control, the new technologies are not very amenable to the current structures that we have. if you look at something like the bass in our arrangement, you have within 190 pages, all sorts of discussions about what needs to be regulate, at what rate, and if it's at this type of technology, if it's nuclear or software. if it's an enabler, if it's a sensor, or frequency hopper, there are many type of technologies that are enumerated through that 198 page document. within three lines of the document, i found something very anomalous and interesting. there is voice encoding.

if you can voice in code, you can take continuous speech, and make it into ones and zeros. you can put it into a digital frame. you can compress it. you can compress it and transfer it at a slow rate. that is a very slow transfer rate. for some reason, they find this a dual use a good that needs to be regulated for expert control. i do not know when they decided this was the case. i don't know why. what i do know is that six months ago, and academic decided that he figured out how to do voice encoding at 700 kbs. he dropped an open source on the internet. that type of move, really pushes us to think about how we do our regulations, and how we can be more forthright when it

comes to military applications for security purposes. another thing that i would briefly draw attention to is, not only do we need new governing structures and new ways of thinking about these types of security and military technologies, technologies where you want regulate the algorithm. by the way, that's the same algorithm on your phone running seery. then you will stifle innovation. you will stifle the ability of other states, particularly developing countries, to gain technology and boost their civil society's well-being and their economy. you be careful where you draw those lines. there is another question that is equally in play. you have, where do we draw the lines? how do we have forward thinking on hard questions on dual use technology goods? another one comes one the public and private partnerships come in the security realm. i think, one thing we can look at now, that's been in the news recently, is the ability for a

cloud computing contract for a single company to take all of the dod's data and hosted on the cloud for the next 10 years. that's a single company contract. that the 10 year span. that's a lot of money. right now, the news, what we've been seeing is amazon is up to the contract. we don't know if they will get it. there's been lots of discussion about amazon cloud and its own web services hosting that. that we have questions about the public and private partnership, and what it does from the civilian side and security side when a public, global company makes bats that it will host a defensive military data. what that does to where amazon operates in other countries where they say, maybe i don't want amazon to have my data a will feed it to the u.s. government. how will we partition that? how do we keep that export? how do we keep that in dual use goods?

how do we make sure that the public and private partnership is good for everybody? there are hard questions, when we think about technology, civil, military, and security of all of this when they are running together and difficult, and complicated ways. thank you heather. so, mike, you work on power competition with regard to russia and china. what are your thoughts on when products need to be protected? >> thank you darrell comment good morning everyone. i will not try to rival brookings institution on humor. i will try to rival him on saying something surprising from a brookings podium. much of what the president is trying to do toward china is justifiable. it not necessarily in every detail, but the general thrust of pushing back on china in particular. let me have a historical perspective on this as well. i'm not going all the way back to aristotle. if we think about the last 500 years, and paul kennedy, the

yale historian wrote about this. we seen european powers rise and fall fairly fast. that's partly because they could not protect vantages, because they were living in an economy that did not have barriers to technology transfer, or theft of intellectual property. that is an age-old phenomenon that we have seen long before the internet. in the last 100 years, or 150 years, britain lost its advantage in industry, and advanced technology to japan, germany, and the united states, among others. those three in particular, luckily one of the three was us. we therefore were in a position to help dale out the rest of the western world in world war i and world war ii. that resulted partly because of this technology transfer happening pretty quickly. germany caught up faster than it might have otherwise. i will put all this in perspective. a more recent historical

reference point is the cold war. we have very little economic interaction with the soviet union during the cold war. we put up many barriers pick some of those are the ones that heather talked about. some of them were done for nonproliferation high technology, conventional weaponry, out of soviet hands. now we are living in a world in which are most likely competitor over the medium is china. that so fully integrated into the world economy. we made a gamble, not just in economics, but in strategic terms 10-30 years ago to try to bring china into the western economic world as fast as we could. that included membership in the wto. the gamble was, on economic and security fronts, this would help china liberalize fast enough. it would outweigh the liberalization of china. it would become a more rules orient the spec oriented participation. i'm not a china basher.

jim stein wrote a book about a strategic vision for how we could get along better with china, and do things on the usi that would promote that process . we are recognizing china's impressive historical ride. in some ways, has become too fast for comfort. because of the means that china has been using, darrell, you and i talked about the idea for this panel. i want to thank you for the concept of this event. we talked about this originally a few months ago when we met with michael brown. there from the di you, x unit in silicon valley. they wrote a paper that's very compelling called china's technology transfer strategy. how chinese investments in emerging technology enable a strategic competitor to access the crown jewels of american technology. they went so far as actually suggest that we rethink how many visas we give to chinese students studying in the united states. that drastic ideas in their paper. i'm not sure that i support all

of them. their analysis is pretty compelling. it's recommended reading for all of you. i will begin to wrap up here by saying, at least some of the ideas that were put forth to try to force china to comply with the rules-based order for technology transfer are appropriate. specifically, trying to make sure that until china will allow equal access to their economy and their country for western firms, we should slow down their ability to acquire and access american high tech giants and jewels. that's not enough of a strategy, but it is a viable beginning. that is why i support much of what the president is doing. what i will say, i'm throwing this out as a fire hose methodology for presentation. i want to talk about more than just ai, big data, cyber world. michael panels are stronger there. we have to keep our eye on trends. this will be the areas where

much of the other parts of key military competition occur over the next 1-3 decades. anything having to do with nuclear proliferation remains important. is not so much for china, but other countries. advanced metals and machineries, precision machinery, advanced timing devices, the time of things needed to make centrifuges and make bombs, we have to keep a close eye on these things. week cannot lose sight of that as we try to hasten technology transfer in other domains for good and positive reasons. within the areas that i do think are important, regarding china, in particular, we have to keep our eye on a few things such as submarine quieting technology. that's been a traditional american strength that we need to keep your gestalt technology for aircraft, same thing. many aerodynamic and aerospace capabilities and advanced engines in hypersonic swear china is getting ahead of us in some ways. we have other advantages that we can reinforce and preserve. directed energy, including a's

it does make lasers, and nano materials. and microscopic materials that are very important for everything from batteries to composite material that we build systems out of. these are among the areas where i want to interject a note of caution. this conversation is appropriately thinking how do we share more? how do we promote economic growth through technology transfer between government and private sector? i want to remind some of the areas where we have to be particularly cautious, in my judgment. thank you mike. i think we have the headline on the event now. michael hanlon endorses a donald trump on some topics. a [ laughter ] it's not on every topic. paul, i want to come to you. mike mentioned the china connection. one issue involves forced tech transfer, were companies claim they have to share their core intellectual property.

i know you work with many companies. can you provide a perspective from the commercial world on how companies view the intellectual property issue? >> this is a huge question. and the other panelists have outlined many of the themes that i would like to touch on briefly. i agree with michael on the thrust of some of the actions that have been taken recently. it's very important to understand that the 301 action that we are in the middle of now is not about trade as much as it is about tech transfer. i recommend reading the ustr report. is 215 pages, but the section on tech transfer is very important. tech transfer is mentioned at 227 times in that room work. really, we are in the midst of a reassessment in the u.s. on how we do export controls and how we handle things like technology transfer. china has become the poster boy of industrial policy, and

overreach in the view of many including the u.s. government. things like forced tech transfer has become a key issue . it's really driving this trade action. there are 2 important parts that. the first is the issue of how do you deal with a country that has a very elaborate set of measures that are designed to compel and have legally involved tech transfer? there are many gray areas, and things that are unwritten rules , or documents, and controlling of companies that do tech transfer. they also have cyber espionage. that's been a long term issue in terms of gaining access to technology. in part, the process that we embark on now is an effort to

try to roll back some of china's policies. it's a very complex edifice that the 301 report calls that china's technology transfer regime. it will be a very difficult thing to do. some of these issues are structural. things like the national integrated circuit fund. that's a huge fund. it was once described by u.s. government official to help with the global supply chain. there are many critical structural issues. the u.s. companies are in the middle of this issue. u.s. companies are trying to do business in china. they are trying to negotiate a varied difficult regulatory environment to do business. many of our clients, for example, are involved with multinational companies in china. some of them include china global operations.

that be very careful that they operate in china. the companies we work with, by and large, view the situation that they can can control the amount of tech transfer in china. they can protect the secret sauce, if you will, the company. as you read in the ustr report, you realize how complicated the issue is. each company will have a different type of problem to deal with. they will have a different pressure to do tech transfer. it becomes very difficult for companies to figure out how to navigate in the market. in part, there is a mixed feeling about the action that the 301 investigation has started. some companies have been very successful at navigating and protecting their core intellectual property. others have not. the business community is very split on this. the other piece of this process it will be very important is the investment restriction. there is a major effort in the u.s. to revamp legislation.

that is the process it's happening now. another piece of this action against china will be some type of proposal of investment. as bigger implications than the terror of peace. this would restrict chinese investment in key sectors in the u.s. that would be and cloud services. that would be a big issue of reaper custody. microsoft and google, and amazon, i'll have to have a joint measure partner. that usually has some level tech transfer as part of the deal. we are embarking on a very difficult period in u.s. and china relations. it encapsulates all these issues. at this group, we have a third top risk of global tech cold war.

what we call the u.s. and china cold war is a big piece of that. as we look forward to things like fifth-generation mobile, china will be a big player in that. countries and developing markets will be looking for technology leaders for 5g. the u.s. is looking at how to build an entire 5g network that is china free or minimize. that's another topic we can talk about. with advanced technology with ai and 5g, there are a lot of senses that we are moving into a world where there will be more competition in these areas then collaboration. i'm a technology optimist. but i am worried that rhetoric in the media has tended to focus on the competition and not on collaboration. in ai, there is a tremendous amount of collaboration between china and u.s. that can be jeopardized by some of the actions coming up.

in any case, the bottom line is, the regulatory system is behind on this. wto has not worked. that's one reason why we are embarked on the government actions that are focused on 301. we are in for a rough.. hopefully, at the end of the tunnel, there will be a better sense of how the system can deal with u.s. system, chinese systems, and the global system can deal with tech transfer. i will stop there. thank you paul. chris, i know you work on social media usage by extremist groups. until recently, people did not think of social media as this kind of technology. you've shown how terrorists have used it to recruit members. there's a similar issue in terms of off-the-shelf drones. they can be used by hobbyists or terrorists. do we need to broaden our definition of sensitive technology? if so, how? >> thank you. thank you for the question. thank you for including me on the panel. i think tech transfer debates

assume that is between states. one thing we discovered over the last decade is that a lot of the big geopolitical conflicts that we have seen have been driven by tech transfer to nonstate actors. so you have extremist and terrorist groups, and their ability to use new technologies for ways that the authors and originators never considered. i want to situate. off-the- shelf drones are uses of commercial technologies. i will mention briefly in a bit, i will get back to the use of dual use technologies. i want to situate a little bit, how to tech transfer happens to nonstate actors and terrorist in the first place. they do not have the resources to have a big research and development budget. they don't have the resources to acquire cutting-edge technology. they are left with three options for getting decent technology.

one, the open source movement. they can go on a hub just like the rest of us and download information. they can build out their own sophisticated models. another option is leaked code. one thing i'm worried about is, what happens when some of the leaks of cyber weapons that the nsa build get into the hands of bad actors? the third is commercial applications. in particular, is a cost curve on many technologies decreases, more and more of them become accessible to nonstate actors. the challenge for nonstate actor is, even though some of them do have advanced technical capabilities, still very hard for them to incorporate new technologies, in the same way estate would. they don't have the same level of technical expertise or resources.

i was just presenting at the un a few weeks ago at a terrorism conference. the question was, are terrorist groups going to go down and to download info to build their own models for ai? will they target u.s. soldiers in syria? i would be very skeptical of that, because of the way ai works. yet to get the algorithm and data. if you don't have access to massive data and massive computing, it will be hard to build your own model. what they can do is take the posted train models and algorithms that google and others are releasing. they could incorporate it into an off-the-shelf drone. that's where we will see this over the next couple of years. i think, this is something that we will have to pay more attention to. the advantage that commercial products has is that they tend to distract the underlying technology. if you think about, the big

app. and social media we know about twitter and facebook and the use of social media. currently, most of it is happening on apps like telegram that are encrypted. what the real breakthrough is, we have had the encryption for a while now. what is new is you can have access to it through your smart phone app store. i think people forget the what the app store is really doing is obstructing a lot of the complexity of the underlying technology. it's just two tabs on your phone, and suddenly you have access to secure, encrypted devices that previously only the pentagon or other places would have had a decade ago. when we talk about the use by nonstate actors on technologies, the sensitive technology question, i'm not a lawyer, so i don't want to get into the details, i think we need to

start thinking very hard about the use of communications technologies and robotics. they are commercially available, and very cheap. they are easy to use. inc. about the dual use nature of them in advance of product release. i think him if he talked with developers and facebook or google, they would admit that they made a mistake a five or 10 years ago when they set up the platforms. they did not architect them in a way that would make it difficult for abuse. i would say, going forward, for many of the commercial technologies like off-the-shelf drones, there is a lot we can do to make sure that they are not abused in the same way that isis and other groups have abused twitter and other social media. i will leave it there. we've gone over our half hour. thank you chris. i never thought about the app store as a means of technology transfer.

you are right. that is an important point. i have a question for all of you. after this question, we will open the floor to questions from the audience. some of you have suggested the need for additional limits on technology transfer. on the first panel, richard mentioned that 70% of nasa research is taking place outside of the united states. the question i want to pose is, if we put new limits on technology transfer, will this encourage other countries to do exactly the same thing? with a lot of the research and development taking place outside of the united states, won't this harm our ability to innovate? whoever wants to jump in, feel free to do so.>> i will start and create the down the road dynamic. i think that's a valid concern. that's why i want to target the technology areas that we are the most concerned about into the kinds of groups that i mentioned earlier. we could have a couple of others as well. i don't want to generalize more than we have to. i want to recognize that if we

were to try to do so, we would not be successful. we would slow down economic development and growth. ultimately, it's not realistic. if you try to limit everything, you will limit nothing. china's two interwoven with the world economy. will try to slow china down, it will have to be in specific areas. even then, i don't want to slow them down as a matter a permanent policy, i just want them to play by the rules a bit. it will bias little more time until the political system matures until they reach our level of being a superpower.>> i think that's a good question. again, ai provides a good example. we are just grappling with it. for example, microsoft and google both have hundreds of engineers in china developing ai algorithms. is that a u.s. company? is it a chinese company? how do we look at these type of arrangements? of course, chinese companies like of i do have research

institutes in the u.s. they are hiring u.s. engineers and software developers. ai is inherently dual use as well. i think we are just coming to grips with that. michael mentioned, there's a particular focus on ai. automation robotics are all becoming part of the national security innovation base. in part, that is what things like this legislation is designed to better protect. it will get complicated because of these issues of the interactions between communities. i've done a lot of work on ai. i've worked on the collaborations between china and the valley. it goes very deep. most of china's ai engineers and software developers at the leading companies came through microsoft and beijing.

they are very plugged in. there is a lot of chinese investment in startups in the valley. their driving innovation. we have to be very careful in developing new ways to protect real national security concerns and assets. we can't stifle innovation inadvertently. us specifically in an area like ai that is still very new. the idea of the u.s. government jumping in and to determining what investments a chinese company can and cannot do, in accompanying the valley, gives a lot of people heartburn. these are valid issues to be grappling with. the danger in extending, and revamping u.s., legal measures

to control technology, we will stifle innovation. >> i will be the debbie downer.>> [ laughter ] >> it's a good role, i play it often. there are a couple things to think about. most of my concerns are about artificial intelligence and enabling technologies. one, went to think clearly, not just about ai as a data compute and algorithms, but the backbone in which ai runs. if we are thinking about gpu's, and various other types of glitches. if you think about specter and meltdown as indicative of ways of siphoning off technology, and other secrets and encryptions, or whatever you want. these will affect worldwide,

and the way in which we can keep secrets. just thinking about this, thinking about the chip and the instruction base, to the software, to the firmware, to the hardware, and everything. that something that we need to take into consideration. when we think about artificial intelligence, the sensitive technologies, i'm looking at this from an application based and not an investment base. thinking about applications that are not really good ideas. for instance, we have the ability right now to generate fake audio. going back to my voice and coding example, i can take any persons voice in this room and get 20 hours of data have you talking and i can create an artificial intelligence agent. i can make it say anything. no one can tell the difference

between your voice and the computers. those ai agents can say anything. i can make it say anything. nobody can tell if it's really you or if it's a computer. not only do we have artificial audio generation, we have artificial video generation. when we start seeing the coupling of things like fake video and fake audio of somebody, anywhere in the world, saying things, it could be ask latorre. it could be inflammatory. nobody can tell the difference of if it's actually the person saying it. that's an application, in my view, that's a weaponization of information. if we want to talk information operations as an area of armed conflict, that one thing that we have engaged in for decades. it's more than that actually comments like a millennium. we call it information.

we have to be very careful about that type of technology. it enables that type of military campaign. they are based slowly on information. information in the new era is really the heart of it. when you can weapon nice information, and you can use information to get ahead of your peers. when you can think about ways of using information communication technologies to do this, we have to be very clear about what we are regulating and how we are regulating it. we have to decide when it crossed the line it weaponization to where it needs to be regulated. i would walk back a little bit from questions of the structural things of where do you go to school? where can you invest? think about the application base, and where you would use that application for any good reason. and might be a fancy little toggle on my android phone.

is it really necessary? what are the risks associated without proliferating to non- state actors and state actors. thank you. >> okay, let's open the floor to questions from the audience. if you have a question, raise your hand. we have microphones. give us your name and organization.>> my name is jessica lehman, i was working on us if he is with the department of defense. my question is protecting u.s. government investments, especially startups with emerging ai. if there's foreign acquisitions , particularly from china for startups that receive government funding initially. how do we address issues of u.s. taxpayers from foreign companies taking over these technologies? >> who would like to answer

that? >> done everybody speak it once. >> i will take a first stab at it. on any of these issues, the devil will be in the details. for example, what sort of government oversight would be adequate in looking at something as complex as a 10 vc companies having minority investments in the startup that may not have developed the technology that's viable yet. it looks promising. i think, part of the challenge, one of the challenges of this report and recommendation is converting that into useful legislation. for there, yeah to enable the process to make intelligent decisions on this without

bouncing security and commercial concerns. my concern is, syphilis -- were heavily on the security side. we may not have the right resources or personnel to evaluate some of the complex challenges that involve early- stage investments in companies that are doing cutting-edge technology. there has to be a lot of thought given to how the process works. we will know when we have an example of that. the first time that we hear of them reviewing early-stage investments in and ai company that has a chinese minority investor, we will have a better sense. the reality is, it's mentioned in the ox report, just raising this issue has already served as a determent. it's discouraged people from investing or having

a chinese partner. that has probably happened. it could happen going forward. these are difficult questions. part of the problem is resourcing properly to help deal with it.>> i would also say, the devil is in the details. it depends on how far back you want to go. if we're talking about early- stage technologies and early- stage companies, companies formed out of university. if you look at engineering labs , they will come up with new great options. they will patent it. then they will form a company. much of the money that they got to do the research on the widget came from the u.s. government. we look back at google. when you look at the founders of google, they took money from the u.s. government through various types of grants. if you're talking about sbir's and getting money from darpa,

asr l, army research labs, there's so much money from these labs going into university labs, that prop up the kernels of these ideas. they get to a patentable technology. they form a really small start up with a lab manager and the guy that invented it. then they go out and seek support to do startups. then they had to think about this. if you go all the way from the generation of the idea that's funded by the united states government, all the way down to investing in a series a. you have to say, maybe they have a series a, b, c, but by the time you get there, you have external investors that you did not plan on having in your portfolio to prop up your technology. you don't want to have these issues.

you start to have open ideas for investors. that entire patchwork of how an idea gets funded and generated, all the way to where it gets done here to an ipo. now there, and you need to market. i need to go to a space has more market like china or asia. and i have to have forced tech transfer. this is such a bees nest, or beehive, or hornets nest, whatever it is. it's a bad situation! it's so complex. the incentive structure is that if you are phd student in a lab, you need grants. the grant that you will get that will fund you for serious technologies like a reactor, i will not get that from the national endowment of humanities. i'm going to get that from darpa. i will get that from on are.>> okay.

>> the one thing i would add to that, building on heather's point, it's fundamental if it's for a product versus the talent. if you look at ai in particular, what you can map out as a function of compute resources and talent. the algorithms are awash. they're usually open sourced. china and the u.s., neither of us will have an advantage. china probably has an advantage in data for a whole host of reasons that i won't get into. they also are pulling ahead in terms of their compute resources. the only advantage they did the u.s. has in the game right now is talent. to the extent that they are funding the companies to acquire talent is something we need to think really hard about. one example that immediately comes to mind is engineering. to go from google 2 x 2. i

imagine they got a large amount of funding while he was a stanford. the complicated further, we needed not just focus on technology, but the talent itself. >> on the talent side, with the current interest on cracking down on immigration, could drive the talent further abroad. it will make the problem worse. other questions? we have another question from the gentleman in the aisle. again, if you can give us your name and organization.>> i'm from china daily. you may know, [ indiscernible - heavy accent ]. this company will be responsible for the operations from february this year. i'm quite curious about your thoughts and opinions on the

risk behind it. what's the consideration on a deal, thank you? >> that's a complicated set of business decisions on the part of apple. there are two pieces to this. the first is, the jb requirements in china. apple is operating a cloud service there with icloud. they were forced to enhance their local partnership arrangement. in this case, they chose this company that's associated with the municipal government. also, apple is anticipating some of the provisions under the new cyber security line china. they are still not finalized, but may require certain companies involved with critical information infrastructure divisions to localize the data. that would include his --

foreign companies. i don't know if apple would fall under that definition. from the commercial point of view, apple made the decision, because it made sense in terms of customer service, and other issues. it was a complicated decision to do that. i think the media has portrayed this as a security issue. apple will keep control of the encryption keys for users there. they have said that it will be very judicious in response to legal requests. there's a general sense that this is a problem. we have not seen an example of the chinese government requesting data from apple. i think the broader issue of law enforcement access to data as part of the whole picture. the cloud act was just passed in the u.s. it's an attempt to

provide a mechanism for law enforcement to gain access to data in the cloud goble judgment globally. it will be tricky for different countries to be approved by congress. despite the cloud act and have a bilateral executive relationship, will be hard. we talked about data localization. we've taken issue globally. in the apple specific case, there's a number of considerations that led to that decision. >> i'm curious how other countries are handling this. >> you guys can get back to me in a few minutes if you would

like. if you want to pass, we can do that as well. >> i want to get to the topic of one minute ago, how are we standing in the world competitively? to add a broader perspective, according to the points of artie been made, chris made a very important point. we have over other countries is talent. this is the entrepreneurial spirit, these are people that are designing new concepts and applications. they have new software. i agree. is not just the people. they live in the richest country on earth, which is the center of western community. by the way, other people who speak english on this planet include another billion indians who are increasingly wealthy. much of africa, and the rest of the world speaks english as a second language.

the chinese are a long way away to be able to compete in these terms. he had the idea to make $10 billion, you prefer to make it in the united states, rather than a china. you have more confidence to lunch your own money. that gets to nicole's point. maybe they can hold onto their money too much in the united dates. maybe we are concentrating wealth too much. that is an advantage, we have a strong legal environment. the competitive advantages are pretty profound here. even as we try to erode them through huge deficits and dysfunctional washington, their strong foundations in place. this is not to encourage complacency, but to build on the points to put them in a broader context.>> just to get away from the consistent discussion of u.s. and china doing this. we should also think about this. think about the global talent.

when you are looking at where you have major sources of talent there will be a giant sucking noise going to france. they have a new ai initiative. france will be giving a lot of incentives for companies to go. you are looking at deep mines opening an office there. you're looking at london as well. the mayor of london has said things like he wants to make london the center of artificial intelligence. you are looking at silicon valley. that does not necessarily have to be the place. canada is putting so much investment in artificial intelligence. you're looking at montrial. waterloo is one of the best universities for engineering. rim initiated there was blackberry. we can talk about that later. we also have toronto being a major hub. we want to say, let's get out

of the western world, no one in this room has talked about israel. if you want to talk about major types of investment in artificial intelligence, cloud and robotics, we should look at israel. they have massive advantages in autonomy and ai. if you want to talk about security applications in particular, again, we need to expand our view outwards from this a very narrow western conception. have a very narrow western conception of it will be a power play between russia and china. all you have done is that the frame. you will get blindsided. people will be like, what, i run has very good computer scientist? yes, they do. this is something that we need to take into consideration. is >> that's a good point that we need to broaden the discussion. we are about out of time.

will give nicole the last question. a >> nicol turner-lee, i want to bring the conversation and get your feedback on the cambridge analytical facebook scandal. i'm listening to all of you. chris is talking about isis not developing algorithms. i'm not sure about that. the question i have is, universities have typically been under strict scrutiny when it comes to the development of products and services. many of them are governed. there certain stipulations when it comes to taking government money. the cambridge analytical's camp does make scandal was done with the intention of research. even though it got past alexander, it went to cambridge analytical. it was repurposed along the way. at then was put up the conversation on guardrails. when it comes to the commercial sector engaging in research. they may not have access. they

do have access to concealed algorithms. that was demonstrated with cambridge analytical. i'm curious. should we look at tech transfer, putting in stricter scrutiny for the commercial sector? it is engaging in more r&d on its own terms. we are sorry this happened. will come back and try to revisit this. again, i think it places universities and other actors outside of this realm of being much more innovative in the things they do. it puts additional security risks on as well.:that's a great closing question. any thoughts from the panel?>> we need another panel for this one. this is such a great question. the way that i think about it is, i think we do need to push the tech sector and to think harder about the negative externalities about what it's doing. i think the risk with facebook,

let me back up and say, when we are in dc, we think of policy and policymaking as a higher thing that happens. it happens in rooms like this. we are oriented to view governance in regard to political us to the institutions. the policy is bacon at the level of code. it's baked into the architecture of how these technologies work. facebook made the decision 10 years ago to grow its platform. that's how their apis used. they allowed your friends to have consent over whether or not your data would be shared with a third party. they did that because they knew they would grow faster. they were afraid that if they did not do that, somebody would come along and do it. what we need to be able to do

in conversations like this is to communicate to the tech companies, as they are building the products, not 10 years down the road when they already have massive network effects and 2 billion people, but early on, they need to think about what could go wrong here? obviously, we can come up with legislation to target things like what cambridge analytical did. my fear is, the technology move so fast, we will always end up a couple of years behind. the bigger issue, we need to go out to silicon valley and have conversations early in the product velma cycle. i think we would have flagged that the api choice was a bad idea. doesn't seem like it was flagged internally. anything, if we don't legislate, the europeans will. i think, with gdp are coming up, many people were of the opinion that if it happens

after may 25, facebook might face some action under gdp are. it will set the standard for data privacy. may or may not become a global standard. it will certainly drive a regulatory change in the europe and will influence regulatory change elsewhere. >> to follow up on that, as a fellow at the university of cambridge, have to make the disclaimer. the university of cambridge was not involved in this whatsoever. just because they co-opted the dame cambridge, does not mean there involved. my people at cambridge are like no, no, we didn't do that. cambridge analytic a new what they were doing. they knowingly broke the law. there's one side of the equation , if you want to think of it, they were shady enough, that they knew they were breaking the law. facebook on the other hand was

so negligent in thinking, oh, whatever, i don't know what you're doing, fine, have some data. there was a confluence of gross negligence. there was some gross misconduct from the platform. and then, knowingly breaking the law. that something that we really have to keep in mind. the other thing, i would like to flag the work of a friend of mine who is a professor at washington. he said, look, maybe we do need an fda for algorithms. maybe we need to set up a an institutional structure the when commercial sectors, and if we need to think about whether or not it has a dual use. we need to have some sort of federal institution. i think ryan's work is really amazing on this. finally, to put my hat on as debbie downer, gdp are in the eu is already making everybody

crazy about how they will comply with all the stuff. cambridge analytic a side. even in the case of, we may be able to prosecute them under gdp are. we will not be able to do is actually have any sort of arbitration institutions for the average person. gdp are says things like, you go right your data and you have a right to look at these things. you have a right to arbitrate as things become wrong. they've not set up any institutions for right of recourse. you say, it's great on paper. but it's like you broke the law, i will go to the judge, who's the judge? we don't have that. we don't have a court on this. we don't have the expertise on this. unless institutions are created alongside gdp are, and you don't have contradictory things being said. section 1 here in section 2 here, they contradict each other in some ways. gdp are is a good start. i would not hang my hat on this being the regulatory system.>> we have mike having the last work -- word.

>> i would simply observe that the last few years, the private giants are becoming more scrutinized. for 20 years, they were the superheroes of the modern economy. you cannot walk in the street without seeing a book celebrating bill gates or steve jobs. they could do no wrong. they created a new economy. they are amazing people. the edward snowden's and the government debate about wikileaks, that took all the scrutiny and hit on what big data was doing to our lives in a nefarious way. that was the extent of the debate to the early part of the 20th century. the.com world was getting credit for the arab spring. facebook and twitter help people mobilize. that was a dynamic for a long time. now we are entering into a world where the big ones will ever receive quite that much of a by on just being good and

being for the betterment of humanity without any questions being asked. the very last thing i will say, if you want a general overview of ai. darrell's new book which is called the future of work. is partly about the future of work. it's a very nice summary of a lot of these other issues we're talking about today. it's an early plug for your early book my friend. >> all right mike, lunch is on me. i want to think our panel. thank you very much. [ laughter ] this week, facebook ceo will testify before the senate and house committees on facebook's handling on user information and data privacy. on tuesday at 2:15 on c-span three, that he will answer questions on a joint senate judiciary and commerce hearing.

on wednesday at 10:00 a.m. on see sam -- c-span. watch live coverage on c-span three and online at c- span.work. listen live with the radio app. thursday morning, we are in carson city, nevada for the next stop on the 50 capitals tour. nevada governor brian sandoval will be our guest on the bus thursday morning. c-span 3, where history enfolds daily. in 1979, c-span 3 was created as a public service by america's a cable television companies. today, we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington dc, and run the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. thursday, confirmation

hearing for mom -- mike pompeo serving as the cia director. he will speak before the senate foreign relations committee on thursday. you can see it live at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span 3. >> me please the court, quite often and many of the decisions, the decisions are quite unpopular.