unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. next, a discussion about the national security risks connected to international technology transfer. the panel discusses whether limits should be imposed on what can be sold overseas and how security concerns can be balanced with free trade and investment. this is two hours. ladies and gentlemen, good morning. welcome to brookings. i'm john allen. this morning's panel is about economic, political and security aspects of technology transfer. i want to welcome c-span to this panel. they will be covering us, and that will -- our panel will be broadcast later today.

at the very conclusion of this panel, we will be followed immediately by the next panel. there's no -- there's no break in the process. i just wanted to make sure you're aware of that. also i wanted to announce if you are unaware, and if you haven't muted your cellphone, i would ask you to do that because sometime between 10:00 and 11:00 washington, d.c. is going to test its cellphone and remote device emergency broadcasting system, which means at some point everyone will look down at their phones. that happens to me frequently in meetings, but let's today 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 vinci, richard antliff and nicole turner lee. anthony vinci is currently the chief technology officer at the national geo spatial intelligence agency, and i never miss the opportunity to thank

your agency for the terrific support they've provided to us in plays like afghanistan, iraq and other places. thank you for that. anthony has a long track record of success as nga, serving as associate director of capabilities and director of plan ns and perhaps prior to his current roll and has been central to developing the agency's vital public/private partnership efforts. i think he will talk about that as we go on. rich antcliff is special assistant to the associate administrator of space technology at the national aeronautics and space administration or nasa. prior to his current role, rich served in a variety of top positions at nasa. most recently was nasa langley research centers office of strategic analysis, communications and business development leader as well as a chief technologist at the entire center. nicole turner lee is a fellow here at brookings in the center

for technology innovation within the governance studies research program. nicole's research at brookings focuses on public policy designed to enable equitable access across the united states. she is an expert at the intersection of race, wealth and technology and comes to brookings after most recently serving as vice president and chief research and policy officer of the multicultural media telecom, internet. and vice president at the joint center for political and economic studies. we have three terrific panelists here this morning. i'm honored to into dues them and guide this discussion. we will be here for about an hour. for the first 30-minute i will offer some questions to the panelists and for the second 30 minutes we will go out to you. i don't normally ask our panelists to do introductory remarks, but, of course, in the first question i will ask which will go to all three of the panelists if they choose to make

an introductory remark, they are most welcome to do so. with that, let me go to the first question, which is about technology transfer. starting first with 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 enormously -- this has enormous potential ramifications when thinking of the growing tech race we see as nations compete against each other in areas of big data and artificial intelligence, and in particular which comes to mind is the united states and china for example. let's go down the line of our panelists this morning and present the opportunity to get some opening thoughts about do we need a new definition of public, good technologies? what's the u.s. government's obligations here? this is an important topic and i think it is a good way to begin this overall conversation.

with that, anthony, would you like to offer comments? >> yes. thank you. thank you for having me. thank you for having the panel, which i think is extremely important at this particular moment in time for the country. i think looking at technology transfer, i'd put it in the larger context of what is the appropriate role of government working with commercial industry and nonprofits in the wider economic and civil society. and within that, for my role at nga i think about national security and strategic kind of consequences. over history, and in particular since world war ii, we have kind of gone through phases of working differently with industry and working with the public, and we've invented new approaches to doing that. the entire idea of tech transfer as a -- as an approach, uses of ffrdcs, uses of contracts, approaches like cratas and otas

and things like this, and i think as right now we're watching a kind of geo political shift. and if you look at the national security strategy, national defense strategy, we're seeing the shift from kind of the post 9/11 world into a new era of near pure competition with china and russia. so i think what that demands is a new approach to public/private partnerships, and within that to tech transfer. and seeing tech transfer as a means of strategic competition. within that i would include not just transferring technology, but more broadly transferring, sharing, investing, data and other intellectual property. i see -- you know, i look at the last sort of 40 or 50 or

60 years of government activity, and i've noticed we have built up a massive asset and resource really. whereas we used to think of natural resources as something maybe the government owned and leased out, you know, say the energy industry, now we have created this ip and data and technology kind of national asset, and i think we need to come up with new ways to invest that asset and use it for strategic national security and economic purposes. one of the things i have been working on at nga is to do that, which is strange for an intelligence agency to think that way. normally we are consumers of data and information, not providers to industry, but i think that's what we're going to have to do to strategically compete and start looking at it not necessarily just as something we open source, we brought up as sort of a public

good. i think there's still definitely a role for that and open sourcing things. for example, the corona imagery was open sourced for kind of historical and archival reasons, but i think there are other aspects we might not want to open source it, but still provide it and maybe treat it more like proprietary information we could -- unclassified, of course -- that we could provide to partners out there, to universities, to companies, to create technology. you brought up ai, i think that's the major technology to sort of consider in this aspect, where you need historical data to train some of these algorithms. so all of a sudden this asset that we've developed over the last 50 years of historical data is extremely important in that economy. so we have to find ways to share it, you know, strategically with certain companies, not with everyone. i would suggest primarily with american companies or potentially allied. i start to think about five is, for example, and that's what i

think we are developing at nga and department much defense and other intelligence communities are working on. again, perfect timing on the topic matter and very important to what we're all trying to do. >> thank you, anthony. let me turn to rich. from your position at nasa, what are your thoughts on this? >> so one thing i want to just mention is that we need to make sure we think about tech transfer in both directions. as an agency that has a mission to do something technologically pretty difficult, it is important for us to tap into the technological activities that are going on outside of our own development. so, you know, we have traditionally used tools like sbir to tap into small companies, to get their technologies, to take advantage of those within the -- within the nasa mission, but recently we were also doing a lot more with prizes and challenges. with those we actually now can reach into a much broader

community outside of just the u.s., and tap into technology that may be in a garage somewhere across the globe. this is really important as we look at technologies that now 70% of the research is done off-shore, right? outside of the u.s. for us not to tap into that is a big mistake. we have got to tap into that, and we've got to develop the partnerships in order to get that kind of technology, in order to accomplish the kinds of things we're working on. i think we need to make sure we have a balanced discussion with regard to tech transfer. the other side of that, with regard to the tech transfer itself, it is something that is in our original mission statement. it is something that we do a lot of. it is something -- we have a spin-off magazine that goes out people look at all the time for amount of that have come out of the space program. it is part of our culture to do tech transfer. i think the thing we're recognizing however is that this broad dissemination of the technologies is not as effective as perhaps doing it in a more

focused way. so we've recently begun some perhaps around working with individual companies, with individual organizations, and particularly looking at start-up organizations to try to see how they can take advantage of some of the technologies that have been developed within nasa, not only the technologies but take advantage of some of the expertise, some of the subject matter experts within nasa, to help their companies actually move forward. so we find that we can actually leverage then those technologies a lot quicker and a lot faster, and try to help that economic ecosystem be more robust, actually transfers the technologies in a way that's much more effective to help businesses grow, to create jobs, et cetera. that's something we're experimenting with and we think will be important as we go into the future. i will leave it there for now. >> that's great. thank you very much. that's a particularly important point about helping the start-ups to accelerate a process that might have otherwise taken quite a long time. nicole, please.

>> thank you, john. i feel so honored. i'm sitting next to two scientists from the federal agencies here. i'm actually going to talk about tech transfer from the perspective of civil society. what we're seeing to a certain extent is sort of creating i think some difficulties and challenges with tech transfer because the internet and the way it has been commercialized has accelerated the private sectors engagement, right, and taxed the government sector when it comes to r & d. we all know that 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 that i think is a lot different today, if we were to look back, where the internet's growth is outpacing what governments can do. i think that's what we're referencing. how do you create different types of models and partnerships? i want to address the question of what do we look at when we see public good technology, and just sort of reflect on that for

a minute. obviously this competition has created, i think, a good -- a firewall where companies that have newly been created in this disruptive age are essentially out -- not necessarily doing things for the public good. so we have that first challenge, right? where we're seeing the marketplace develop products in the commercial market that may not translate back into the public sector, which is something that i work on here at brookings, or vice versa we're seeing the government not able to keep pace with the private sector is actually doing. i think that's somewhat problematic when we start to look at government funding towards r & d, something that traditionally supported public technology. i also think that public good technologies require some level of architecture that protects citizens. i think the second panel will talk a little bit more about that in terms of civil society, but there's a challenge, right? if public good technology that is designed for health care, that's designed for

transportation, environmental systems, et cetera, military, do not have those protections in place, which i think john goes back to your question, it creates a different type of definition of what we should be looking at when we look at public good technology. i also think, and many of us in this room have been watching the news. when you have private sector companies that are sort of etching into the public domain and suggesting in many respects they're doing public good, there are problems and challenges associated with that. most recently with the breach that i think all of us are very familiar with that has now toppled about over 80 million people. with respect to that, i think what we're seeing in terms of pun good technology, where we're seeing private companies like google, twitter, facebook, et cetera, doing public purpose things that do not necessarily translate with what federal agencies have in terms of strict scrutiny around design, intent and the benefits of that product outward. i am always reminded of having work and interfaced with federal

agencies, things like precision medicine, things we are seeing advance through r & d, the question becomes when you actually negotiate that or universities -- i've had the opportunity to go to m.i.t. to read their tech day where students are essentially putting out patents for new products. it is a little different, you have seeing the two screen television and thinking that's an interesting patent coming out of a university. but when you talk about drone technology or interference with national security system or health care precision medicine that sort of find itself in content with the private sector and public sector goals, think it is problematic. to your question, john, i think we need to revisit a public technology definition, particularly in the u.s. from the framework when we started making the internet commercial, it has implications on how it affects civil society. >> so your thoughts are then there has to be some semblance of transference?

>> yes, yes. >> in the context of public good being of use to the broader civil society? >> exactly, exactly. or the private sector will sort of drive that and we'll have to sort of catch up. >> terrific. anthony, back to you. in the world you have lived in and currently do at nga, in thinking about the american use every day -- america's use every day of gps and entities like google maps and what uber is currently doing in terms of using big data collection, significantly enhancing these technologies, but as we watch that unfold we don't necessarily always know that it is for the public good. so 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 even disseminate it to third or fourth parties in that context? >> yeah, i mean this is a

particularly important question. when i -- going back to thinking about this as a strategic issue, international security issue for the country, but i would say even in terms of economic competitiveness outside of the national security realm it is important. clearly there should be some limit on technology transfer abroad, and i think we're all fairly comfortable with that, and nuclear weapons for example come to mind as something that very clearly should be limited in how it goes. so i think there's really a spectrum here of what we're willing to transfer and should transfer, and some things do best when they are fully open sourced and available to everyone. so gps, for example, i think revolutionized not just one industry, multiple industries globally, and definitely helped the united states economy, the government, and everything we do essentially and every day. you can't necessarily always

predict when you're looking at a particular technology what the ramifications will be when you to open it up. so my personal bias as somebody 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 that there are some competitive advantages that we want to keep within the country to support some of the industries here and then to support the national security community. i think that it is creeping from, again, if we have nuclear weapons all the way at the extreme, think it is creeping left as more and more issues do become particularly important for national security. and, you know, you've brought up algorithms and data and hardware, i think we're creeping towards the algorithm side and where intellectual property should be protected. i think the primary issue there

is as you kind of creep left and get from hardware into software and into algorithms, the shelf-life, the half-life of these technologies becomes shorter and shorter. the shelf life of an algorithm might be months and sometimes even weeks, so how do you even protect something like that? and is it worth -- is the juice worth the squeeze in even trying to protect it? we have to kind of factor that in as well. in particular, where much of that happens in open source and academic realm anyway. so those are the kinds of point we have to kind of start considering, and i would suggest 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 then figuring out where in that spectrum of transference we should allow it to exist.

>> let me make a comment. i would ask for your thoughts on this. obviously the speed of government is woefully behind, whether it is collection of data, emergence of algorithms. to your point about public/private partnerships, is there some hope that that concept of public/private partnerships can create a regulatory process 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 on that. >> it is an excellent question, and something i'm intimately involved with at the agency. we do have a discrepancy and asymmetry between the speed at which technology is developed and commercial companies move and then the speed at which the

government develops technology or, really importantly here, adopts it and integrates it into our operations, and how do we -- how do we kind of shrink that asymmetry. i think there will have to be some new regulatory policy statutory approaches to this. as kind of where i started, i think in our history we have adopted those new approaches when we have determined that we need them, and so incutel is an example. you know, we realized in the late '90s and early 2000s we needed to be able to communicate with silicon valley and early startups better, and so that required new authorities. and more recently changes in how otas are able to be used within the department of defense. so i do think we're going to need some approaches to kind of take this speed issue -- and i would call it the speed of adoption. it is not really the invention, because i think that we're

actually reasonably good at r & d and inventing new technologies, and commercial industry is great at inventing it and we're great at buying it. it is how do we adopt it faster. that's what i'm sort of seeing in the government now. if you look at things like project maven, that's what they're focused on and i'm involved in that project for that reason. so i think that we right now can muddle through, but i think that it is incumbent upon congress to come up with new approaches that are going to support faster adoption. >> and i think we're going to find that -- i believe it is the 12th or the 11th, the testimony on the hill of the three tech giants, we will see some of that worried out into the public domain where we'll have excellent commentary on that. nicole, would you like to add? >> can i add to that too. i think we're going to see some of the public/private sector cooperation when it comes to big data analytics, et cetera. but i think we're in a stage

where much of the u.s. regulatory framework has been focused on consumer privacy, right? i think the area where we talk about privacy in terms of tech transfer has been more limited to the ip space, and i think those conversations do need to happen, right. but i think what is scarier about this particular area and the rate of technology's pace is the algorithm piece. some of the research at brookings is on algorithm basis. there are not many on staff that understand how to unpack that and not many companies want to give away the algorithm which is why we talk about bias because you can't see what is under the hood, particularly when it disproportionately is affecting people. i was going to say, john, we have made progress. it was privacy week here in d.c. we will see data protection policies come through the pipe. i think the u.s., and i wrote this after april 11th, probably

in the afternoon when he leaves the capitol hill testimony room, we'll probably see privacy legislation begin to be debated. the question becomes with tech transfer, what we've seen in the last few months is the manipulation of what is available to sort of innovate new types of practices and procedures. for example, with the algorithm has manipulated democratic institutions, that's 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 silicon valley. i would say companies experiences these breaches every day don't even understand what that means. i believe going forward we 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 then the government transfer of

data as three different verticals that at some point have to be reconciled to create a safer and more resilient system. >> can i just? >> please, rick. >> let me just add, maybe it is a little bit of balancing. in the preconversation we talked about a balance issue between these issues. you know, there may be ramifications of some of the new technologies, but there's also opportunities of the new technologies. we've got to be careful not to over restrict to miss the opportunity, right? that's the balance, we have to find the right place in the middle. i think as was stated, this idea of public/private partnership is a really good one. we have done it with the airline industry before to try to move composites out into the industry, and that serves -- they have the speed that we don't have in order to move those technologies forward, and taking advantage of that speed is very, very important. you know, nasa is a bureaucracy like the rest of the government. us trying to move things forward is difficult, but when we can

have the public/private partnerships, they bring the speed in. they make it happen a lot quicker, and that's important for us to move it forward, and within the opportunity space that's important for the future. >> rich, thanks for that contribution. let me shift over with respect to your nasa background. we have seen growing success of companies like spacex combined with a resurgence of interest of human travel into outer space, and in particular towards mars. what are your thoughts on the private sectors role in that? are there risks associated with the technologies obviously being developed in the private sector in the context of technology transfer? >> so let me make sure we got the right perspective on this opportunity frankly, with regard to organizations like spacex, blue origin, et cetera. let's take us back a few years back. nasa was formed out of an organization called naca, the aeronautics committee.

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

we're good at the technological stuff. we're not good at figuring out how to do it cheaply. spacex and those can figure out how to do it cheaply so we can have a commercial market that's very valuable. we think it is very positive and the way it should go, and we're working to support those industries. they're using a lot of our facilities and capabilities, subject matter experts. you know, we are trying to become a customer of theirs to try to get, obviously, provisions up to the space station and eventually humans into space. so we see it as a very positive benefit. it is the public/private partnership we have been talking about in kind of a big, mega economic way. >> sure, please. >> if i can come back, actually. you bring up a great point, which is relative advantage and relative competitive advantage, and what is private industry good at and what is the government good at. that really gets to the heart of why you would even have public/private partnerships. when i look at the government,

and in particular i look at agencies like nasa or nga or the department of defense, is very good at doing certain sort of more or less impossible tasks. i mean putting people on the moon, i think of the corona program, putting satellites in the air, literally dropping film canisters over an ocean, sending an airplane to pick it up in midair and getting it back to the u.s. to be processed and analyzed. it is a nearly impossible fete and it is incredible they did it with the technology they had. whereas when you start to look at private industry that is good at something very, very different. being inexpensive is a big part of it, but also being creative in a way that the government isn't. an example i like to use is wayz. i feel like the government approach, for example, to global traffic monitoring, if we had come up with it 10 or 15 years ago would have been to go out and buy helicopters because we

looked at how do you monitor traffic. well, the local news stations use helicopters and they film the traffic and they radio it down. so we should just buy a lot of helicopters and be doing ee lips around every city in the nation and sort of radio it down and let's go global with that. whereas, waze with almost no money -- and without even that in mind, created a community of people to kind of -- well, for mapping purposes actually to start, but then for monitoring traffic and sharing that, and they use cellphones and they use gps. now they give it away for free. so that is just a very, very different approach to problem solving that lends itself to solving very, very different problems. so when we start to think about these public/private partnerships, we should look at it from that lens of, you know, what is the relative competitive advantage of each side and where should they play. i think even within that example

we see an example of that is gps, right. waze couldn't have been possible without gps, and gps would not have been possible from a commercial perspective. it is a money loser i suspect and 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. so that is a clear role for government, but then there's a clear role with something like waze for creative new uses for it. so, again, it is that relative advantage, and it is a any waugh to think about how government partners with private industry. >> and, john, just so i don't sound like debbie downer, i agree with the panelists there are positive ways to deploy technologies. space x is looked at as a way to provide broad ban to rural communities. i think what the panel is, it is a responsible -- not necessarily

standards-driven, but some type of input/output where the commercial and public sector is defined by what the output is so it doesn't become something where you have geo location and then later the government is kicking themselves because the geo location had an unintended consequence not thought of by the commercial sector. i want to make sure everybody knows i support it. >> it is a balance issue. >> it is a balance. >> it is. i think the common thread, and 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 deleterious or negative effects. waze has the capacity, as anthony says, of producing enormous amounts of useful data with respect to metropolitan planning, infrastructure planning and that kind much thing, but it will tells members of my family if i stopped off at

the dubliner and i worry about that. with respect to involvement in the space program, i agree with rich. this has been an accelerant. it is cost effective, a quit integrator of technologies. the one tesla i had my eye on is on its way to mars now, so i'm out of the business for a while. but i think it is a real opportunity for us in terms of technology transfer, both in context of national security, but even more so towards internally the goods of civil society and the transference to civil society that is the real opportunity. rich, you have touched that a number of times in terms much opportunities. let me go to the audience now. we have a rich array of attendees this morning from a number of different organizations and from many different countries. so we welcome you here today. we'll go for about half an hour. i'm busted to another five minutes and i will end straight on the hour at 11:00. i apologize for taking up five

minutes of your time. when you stand, if you could give us your name, please, 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 in what you are saying. so, please, yes, sir. right third roback aw back and come to the second row after that. >> gentlemen, thank you for a very good presentation. my name is elliott horowitz, from rockville, maryland. i used to work for the world bank in the intelligence community. could people please define the public/private partnership a little bit more clearly? >> why don't we start with you, anthony. >> yeah. it is a loose term and it is used in a lot of different ways historically, everything from, you know, building toll highways together to, you know, nih investments in health care and

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

mutually beneficial way to come up with technologies that they both want, and so therefore thi chipping in different things at different times. i see it as a partnership in the sense it is not a one-way street. so it is separate from contracting, for example, where the government provides money and in return gets a service or a product. so that's really more of a one-way street. this is a partnership in the sense that they're both sides need to chip something in, whether that's money or time or effort, capability, and both sides should receive something in return. again, whether that's technology or data or some competitive advantage. >> anyone else? >> i just want to add, i absolutely agree. a lot of our public/private partnerships are in that vein, where we both contribute to the mick. i think the other kind is -- what we do a lot is

precompetitive work, where we'll have several companies that will come together that we partner with as a team to work on technology, the maturation of technology to a certain level that's competitive, and those companies can take it off and do something with it competitively. think both of those are model also that are used. >> i would say with public/private partnerships, an area i deal a lot with in the telecom space, you have to have common goals between the private sector and public sector in what you want to accomplish. a fundamental industry in protecting public interest, honestly. public/private partnership is not one if the civil society is not at the core of what that partnership looks like. i with agree with rich on the sense that the public/private partnership has to be done in a way where it does not stifle innovation. so we've seen different arrangements where you kind of go into the public sector, private sector partnership and

there's concerns on whether you can have the ideation and innovation happen because of constraints of the public sector or the private sectors unwillingness to invest the resources. i was going to say a good example are electronic health records. over the years we have seen electronic health records become more resilient because of public interest guided by hipaa and other regulatory prescribed rules have helped the private sector innovate in a way that that's more readily available. i would just end by saying it is the scale ability of that partnership that has to generate the output. we often deal with that as we're -- in my particular work where we're asked to see, is it a benefit to civil society? if it is only benefitting one part or a block and not reeling scaling and you are taking all of this r & d money for a competitive advantage, it hasn't met the criteria. >> thank you for that question, mr. horowitz. a question in the second row, please. and i'll come to you in a moment.

the left side of the room seems kpreerld extraordinarily inquisitive this morning. we invite anyone from the right side. >> thank you very much. i'm an african-american journalist. it is exciting to be at the digital era and watch all of the differences it will bring for our societies. could you please make -- put into context how this relates to future of government up until this morning really the societies worked on a global system of opening economies and coordinating the economies and governments. right now we're in the midst of such populist movements, and with technology being at its earlier stages, although werre seei -- we're seeing some of its fruits, we are seeing it being

used and you all described processes where it is going to take time to introduce regulations and perfect techniques to ensure that they still serve the public good and government can have its jobs. could you please put it in context? this is going to take a lock time, and yet we are on the brink of whats li looks like a cold war, with so many conflicts brewing both in the private sector and global. thank you. >> who would like to take a crack at that? >> so i think your question is spot on. i kind of describe this as the myopic tendencies of creators who want to see a product go to market quickly. a lot of tensions that we've discussed and the broader goals of what that technology's impact is on society, and you're correct that we're so much more global. i would actually argue that tech transfer become much more protected by people in terms much what they want to share because the vulnerabilities that it sort of created by having the

technology be so much more widespread is not generating the outcomes that we all thought it would generate. you know, it is different from a government or a smart city, you know, leveraging technology and practices to do -- be more efficient, et cetera, to actually cutting into your democratic institutions. i really do think we'll go into an age where those -- those regulations actually happen before the innovation catches up, which will be a flip-flop model of what we've actually seen where the innovation out paced government. i think government is going to come in and sort of put a plug in some of the stuff before the innovation comes out, which might also create its own set of problems. but i think generally your question is correct, that we have to figure outweig ways to harmonize these systems. since we are moving into a more of a digital economy, the bureau of labor statistics put out a report on the pearlsage of gdp

driven by digital. this has taken up a huge portion of our attention not only in terms of the innovative side but economical. this will be a problem. it is a good problem to have but it also has consequences. >> let me also add a couple of points. in terms of afghanistan, 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 of it. here is where i think the community of entities, which is bigger than the community of nations when we talk about entities, i'm talking about facebook and google, some of the most significant sovereign entities when you think about sovereignty, have the capacity to help to sling shot many countries that are in the developing world that would not otherwise be able to do it on their own through

public/private/international partnerships, have the capacity to be quite helpful in that regard. you also mentioned the potentially emerging cold war. quite apart from the dust-up we are having right now with the chinese, i think there are enormous opportunities, again, for us to share and to cooperate, the u.s. and china, on a number of issues. the cold war, you might have mentioned this with respect to russia and i have great concerns about where all of that is headed frankly, but i see china in a very different mode. i think if we beyond the reflex for protectionism, which can chill this, can chill the opportunity to cooperate in these very important areas, the capacity for the united states and china in this regard to find common ground in the digital future i think is extraordinarily important to both countries and to the community. i would hope that we don't confuse the activities right now that appear to be protectionist

that could lead us down the road towards a trade war as being helpful over the long-term towards the u.s./china relationship. >> if i can add in there, i completely agree with your point and the point that's come up here on the value for developing countries. i'm a technology optimist. i used to work for alvin toffler who wrote quite a bit about this subject and talked about how you can skip a generation of technology and this can have a profound effect on countries. if you skip from land line to cellphones, for example, much more resilient, much less expensive technology, that i've done a lot of my ph.d. field work was in after rrica and i wd what mobile phones did to an entire continent. that's the problem with the use of technologies, and we all know there are also negative

consequences for lots of technologies, but the net gain to me is massive. i think when we talk about the public/private partnerships, there's an unsaid assumption which is really important which i see in my government role more and more, which is an acceptance by government at the working level that commercial industry, commercial technology has a lot to contribute to governance and government in general and that we should adopt it. it doesn't -- this is a really -- a very real factor within government, the not-invented-here mentality, within any large organization. i think we're starting to get over that and realize that there are a lot of these technologies that we can use that allow us to govern and to enact our government duties and responsibilities significantly better, cheaper, with a wider scale. what came up before, for example, broadband, whereas government again in the ways of

example maybe we don't buy helicopters but we dig a hole in the ground to every house in the country no matter how far off. i think that is valid and everyone in the nation should have broadband. but all of a sudden maybe there's a game-changing technology if we can do broadband from space because of a company like spacex and even some others one than that have come up with a new, much cheaper solution. that's really the promise here, and we need to be open minded as a government and government employees in thinking about that. >> we're not cycling very quickly through these questions. the gentleman i think just next to the camera, please. yes, sir. >> i'm bobbie pasteron. i would be interested in your thoughts about the wealth that has been created through digital technology. that wealth is unequally distributed currently, and the

digital industry is becoming increasingly sophisticated at the creation of rules, as other industries have in the past once wealth has been created. do you think we have the right balance in the public/private partnership with the financial wealth that's returned to government for public purposes, that public governance can make decisions about? >> no. just leave it at that. no, i think -- no, i completely agree with you. i mean if we go historically and we look at the evolution of technology in general and something that i always have to remind myself, you know, we really started with, you know, i.t. and very basic principles of what tech meant, you know, even going back with government. that's morphed into an economy that has not been a static economy.

the internet is no longer this that creates its own wealth. with the digital sharing of economy that is ruled by the internet of things and other types of really cool technology that you can touch, cloud computing, you know, each of those layers actually generate its own sense of -- of economic output that does create this unequal distribution of wealth and access. all of us in this room, if we don't own a patent or technology company, what we all should be -- i don't know if we should be proud to say this, but wire 'all passive consumers in the digital economy right now. startups and other incubators, government is trying the break through -- and this is a case where i think government is behind on that, too. vcs that were government driven or supporting government technology applications are coming around to see, hey, we have to fulfill this role. i tell people facebook wasn't

designed for what it is used for today, it was designed to be a social network and now it is in the middle of a conversation around algorithms. i mean it was an ad-supported model that morphed into something el. uber found a spot in there and the creating its own generation of wealth, own generation of workers, which is why we're sort of wrapped into this conversation which is so much more sophisticated. who are the people on the end that will become the fatalities of this digital economy? it is the 11% of americans that are not online. they're poor, they're disproportionately people of color, they're disabled, their in rural communities. they will always be involved because their big data is what drives the new economy, even if they're not online. they're lacking of access to data drives companies to know where they need to deliver food or what kind of investments they need to make in smart grilled systems. they're still part of it, but they run the risk of becoming deeper and deeper in poverty and

eventually becoming digitally invisible. to your point, i think -- the lesser point i think was the latest case to sort of debug and unpack what the digital economy looks like, but i think your question is really critical, particularly when government invests resources in r & d and don't get a return on investment or the technology designed to solve a social problem actually creates the problem. that's where i think, again, a lot of us are stuck in the middle. i know the next panel will talk about security. you know, how do you resolve and reconcile and create regulations that allows one part of the technology sector again to focus on civil society while another part of it continues to do what they do but perhaps in a regulated context because, again, the communications act of 1934 wasn't designed for the telegraph, later picked up isps and broadband and didn't anticipate the companies we see today. i think your question is spot on

that the wealth equity index will continue to widen based on where you are in the topology of the digital economy. >> that's a great question. let me just offer a couple of thoughts. sovereignty throughout much of modern history has been shaped by the concept of wesfeleyan sovereignty, which is a line on the ground that circum describes terrain and some number of people, often with a homogeneous identification, who provide their loyalty to the sovereign. that's a modern, relatively modern view of the concept of sovereignty. it is really about the capacity of a sovereign to influence. that's the traditional sense, all the way back to aristotle. i think we need to think differently. i believe that the public/private partnership concept may be some of the nascent thinking about how in a

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

of algorithm and the outcomes that will flow from that, which will be prosperity and wealth. it is a different way of thinking, and i think we need to expand our view about -- i used the term a moment ago about the community of entity. we often talk about the community much nations. it is bigger now than the community much nations. if the community of entities joined forces in a public/private partnership or an international partnership, we have real capacity. i'm not sure we're thinking about it properly. i will leave it at that. >> do you mind if i build upon that? >> yes, please. >> i think what you have done is placed this concept of public/private partnership within the wider spectrum of how we understand geopolitics and how we understand history. i think we can go further with the thinking in terms of how divinations have different government systems, and that difference will apply to how they use public/private partnerships and the nature of those relationship also. i think china will have --

already does have a very, very different approach to public/private partnership. when the chinese government deals with a company than we do and how our government, the u.s. government deems wials with a c like google. those relationship also will shift over time and that's what we're kind of seeing now and what we're talking about here. what makes it more complicated is these companies, as has been brought up here, are not necessarily just within a single governance system. google may have a very different relationship with the eu than it may have with the u.s., than it may have with china. it makes it very complicated to think about how all of the relationships are going to interact and evolve over time. that will be the sophistication for us on the government side, is what do we actually want from these public/private partnerships and partnerships with these other entities, and

then how will we get it. that's what we're all starting to think about right now. >> well, this is an important outcome for this panel. i think very importantly, my digital network capable device tells me we have four minutes left in this panel. i've been very disappointed in the right side of the room to this point. anyone, anyone? yes, sir, please. we have just a couple of minutes. i would like to get quickly to a question and quickly to an answer. this gentleman in the third row. >> thank you so much. i'm from china daily. i have two question also. first one is in terms of the cooperation between china and the u.s. could you elaborate on more areas specifically where china and u.s. can improve their cooperation to improve the well-being of all countries? the second one, you just talked about the areas where the government on the one hand needs to set the regulations of the different industries, but in the meantime it needs to provide

sufficient for different industries to develop. how does government strike a balance in terms of the u.s.? thank you. >> it is a very long question. a very short question, a very long answer. there comes to mind immediately where the u.s. and china in the context of the digital environment can cooperate would be in medical diagnoses, the capacity to harvest enormous amounts of information on medical research, and using the right kinds of algorithms help us to get more quickly to diagnoses now that we're beginning to see can be harvested and rendered with high levels of confidence relatively quickly. the other is in the area of security, of course, and the whole business of countering terror. there are lots of reasons why china and the united states need to cooperate in this regard and there's real capacity in that regard as well. i would simply say we haven't seen it play out yet, but we're

all very interested in seeing how president xi's objectives with respect to the outcome also of the 19th party congress and china's intent ultimately to surpass the united states in 2030 in materials of ee moerging technologies, how that will play out. china has in some cases advantages, some people would say disadvantages in that it has at its core the capacity to create great cohesion between the objectives of governance -- government and the objectives of chinese companies. there is much more capacity there than perhaps in our system, and i don't call that a strength or a weakness. it is just different and we need to acknowledge that will be different for us. anyone else? >> i just also want to say in the area of ai. clearly the artificial intelligence side of what we're seeing the chinese do is really interesting and outpacing some of the things we have here in the u.s. but when it comes to global decisionmaking or problem solving, i think some of the applications there should warrant some cooperation

because -- particularly when the u.s. takes on big issues like a couple of years ago when the white house was trying to solve the ebola crisis, for example. some of the new applications and emerging technologies could have been more helpful if there was more cooperation. we are starting to see the u.n. do more of that kind of cooperation as an international entity when it comes to digital and civil rights. i think they should move into the conversation around that. i was going to say to your second question around who funds that. i think the interesting conversation we had at the table that has enlightened me is how do you incentivize, you regulate but incentivize this type of digital investment, hopefully we will begin to see more models. where are there cases where we can incentivize that fit the vertical also around the public interest. unfortunately i don't think any government has enough money to support the local gdp of a

company that's, you know, surpassed the gdp of a small country. i think having more of that, i also understand like for example in africa with mobile there were lessons there we didn't pick up with in terms of the wireless that you were talking about. you have to incentivize those type of experimentation or projects to balance the regulatory framework. >> nicole, rich and anthony, i want to thank you for participating. ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us at brookings and would you help me to thank the panelists. er david

cameron testifies about global security. unfoldsn, where history

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