services secretary sylvia berwell. this is 2 1/2 hours. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. i'm the director of the aspen strategy group and pleased to welcome you here to the aspen institute. sponsored by the aspen strategy group and i want to welcome the distinguished ambassadors here, we have a number of ambassadors from our allies and partners from the countries and members of the press corps, welcome to all of you. thank you to c-span for curing this proceedings life and because it is like we have to have a brief panel and it will flow one into the other. there will be no breaks. because it is i've we ask you to silence your cell phones. politics imposes here if you'd like to purchase a copy of the book that we are launching today. this book is technology and national security, maintaining america's edge. it's a book that represents our study in the aspen strategy group. you can buy it at politics and prose right here and it's a very romantic presence for valentine's day. [laughter] technology and national security. they are launching this book today one of america's greatest challenges. how to maintain american superiority at a time of revolutionary technological change. artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, that was the subject that 65 of us addressed last august in aspen colorado in the annual meeting of our resolutely nonpartisan group. the aspen strategy group we are a collection of people who have served in government any former cabinet secretaries who are active journalists and business leaders and who are academic leaders. we are founded 35 years ago by professor joe nye, my friend who seated right before you by bill perry and by art great friend, someone we admire very much the admiral. for 35 years we believe republicans and democrats can come together to talk, debate to plan forward the most important issues confronting the united states. that's what we have done of technology. the book that hopefully all of you have or shall have includes chapters by leading thinkers from the technology field from silicon valley in the tech world and from government and academia and the business and we investigate how these new challenges to america's military dominance in parts need to be dealt with by a better, more productive conversation between the pentagon and america's tech community. we also examine two additional factors china exceedingly ambitious strategy to dominate artificial intelligence in the next decade and of course, built lagging american government funding for basic science research to our universities. the breakdown of that virtuous innovation triangle that walter isaacson talks about in the book that made america great in terms of our technological superiority over the last seven, eight decades. we have seen warnings from the us military leadership about the consequences of the united states when they fall behind. in the development of these new technologies and their applications to the united states military. general joe dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said last year he said in just a few years if we do not change our trajectory we will lose our qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage. we are hearing similar warnings from the american scientific community, doctor eric landor, director of the rose institute in cambridge, massachusetts and he is referred to our american research university as engines of discovery that attracted the best talent to our shores in the most innovative companies. his big question is whether america will now yield its position as the world leader in science and technology and he said for the first time since world war ii our -- is in jeopardy. many of us believe and i think you'll hear from all three of our panelists about this this calls for a major us government effort to work with a private sector, tech world, and work with our research universe to revive our level of competitiveness and make sure the united states is putting its best foot forward as we make these technologies to our military, military technology in superiority going forward. three panels today. first panel is with professor and i will share the china challenge and us tech. panelists are director of open ai and who spoke at a conference and authored one of the chapters in the book. tom who is chairman of the blackrock investment institute. you have known tom a long time, public servant, national security advisor for president obama. michelle, co of west advisors, us undersecretary of defense, tom, michelle and members of the aspen strategy group. the second panel which follows at 4:00 p.m. will investigate this innovation triangle that is now lagging behind and that will include vice president of the apple corporation, head of strategy for industries and former director of the senate armed service committee. president of the meaning american university the former national budget and former secretary for health and human services and the now senior advisor of johns hopkins applied physics lab, former secretary of the navy. third panel which begins just before 5:00 o'clock will feature an interview i will do with our good friend, fellow harvard professor ash carter, former secretary of defense. ash has lived on all points of this innovation triangle. secretary of defense, professor at a major research university and someone who knows and understands and is now involved with the private sector in the tech committee. will be our final act to speak about the subject today. without further ado, welcome to everybody and joe, thank you for your leadership of our group. over the last three and half decades so i thank you for your leadership. >> thank you. welcome everybody. as nick said we will talk about china rising in the challenge to us technological privacy. when you think about china rising it is something that has been rainy and i've written about recently is american attitudes, part policy attitudes it's like a pendulum. they sing too far in one direction or too far in another and there is a great danger that because that we weren't tough on the china chinese in the past that we will be overly tough now that people are talking about a new cold war. keeping that sense of balance on that pendulum is difficult. somewhere in between complacency and hysteria washington often is said one end or the other of that. i was struck people who say that china is passing the us and they will create a great wart like jeremy's passing britain did in world war i and disrupted the last century and china has already passed us so forth. it's been exaggerated because germany had already passed britain by 1900s. the war was not until 14 years later and what is more if you look at china today while some people say purchasing power parity china is bigger than the us purchasing power parity is measured by wealthy are not power and you don't need port oil or engines with parity but you do with exchange rates and china is 60% if you measure it in that manner. but people say with time growth rate of 6.5% china will be bigger. that the gas is a might be in the 2030s or so but we have to be careful about chinese -- growth rates. i was in china beginning of this month and met with a number of businessmen and what struck me was having chinese businessmen say that they thought the chinese growth rate which is officially 6.5% at best was half of that and probably even less. they said as they make business plans they use physical measures, they don't take the official numbers. we don't know the answer based on the data that people have in the official reports. but there is another argument that even -- for example, if there is too much height and hysteria which goes policy fashions in washington there's an argument that this time is different and this time in fact, because of ai that china has a chance to leapfrog the normal direction you would see would be much faster in the case of ai. a good illustration of this is the recent book by -- who knows a lot about ai and who has argued that china will indeed, be able to catch up and to reach president xi's goal of being number one in ai by 2030. people have always said in the past because china will have a lot more data than the machines learned from data still have less restrictions on the data, no concerns about privacy. china's machines and algorithms will learn more quickly and that is how china will pass us. others have said no, there is now it's not just raw data but you can have synthetic data so this pushes the race or problem back into the area of compute and of the areas that are not just determined by data. even that is questionable so thy interesting argument which is china will be able to leapfrog them that the view their technology is up to ours is looking at the cutting-edge of science but maybe operations and engineering which will be the edge china will beat us. these are the questions that we need to wrestle with as he tried to put this new challenge of ai into a broader perspective about what does it mean to have china as a challenger to american technologically privacy. to answer, i will first ask jack clark about the ai arms race and what it is and where it is going but i will ask michelle if she will tell us what the effects will be on the military balance or the americans still way ahead but if you believe this argument, could be transformed more rapidly. then i will turn to tom and ask him to tell us about an overall strategy without relationship and where the technology goes into it. jack, let me start by asking y you, is presidency going to make his goal of being number one by 2030 as if there is an ai arm race what should we be doing about it connect. >> like all nerds let me answer with a series of confusing numbers. hopefully they will be useful. big ai conference going on in hawaii right now and one of the things they do is group nations about the research papers and that this is the thing you track if you want to look at where the outcome of stem investment has ended up for a given nation. two nations that led triple ai and one of them got 382 papers accepted to the conference and the other got 264 and every other nation was somewhere under 100. china got 382 pages of accepted in the us got 264. so there appears competitive already. i think it's also worth saying that one other criticism we hear of china is that they may not have or invent as much or copy more but a metrics of this is numbers of papers you submit personal numbers papers to get accepted china submitted way more than the us but if you look at the stats china's acceptance rate is something around 15, 60% in the us is 20 or 21%. it tells us two things. it tells us one, china is competitive in ai research and it's not an upstart that is truly here and two, yes, it looks like the us scientific and researcher could be slightly better caliber of paper right now. to your question about whether they are winning here i think it's worth thinking about where that technology is developing these are not economic papers for military organizations and based on my experience many military organizations are not leading in ai but consumer companies and in china in these apps, not emissions. the question for us is to what extent do we see the tightening links between military organizations and ai developments as being inevitable and to what extent can we choose how those relationships are structured so that you can have some level of collaboration. the third point i believe us is ai technology and the things you've heard about them being somewhat unpredictable and uninterpretable and somewhat expendable these are basically true and i think for no one who served in the military would like an on expendable weapon which is sort of over talking about when we talk about the arms race dynamic here. that leads us to have the chance to collaborate with competitors on certain norms on safety and security so that things don't go thing when things get interesting. >> great, michelle, that the natural for you to follow up on. how will ai affect the military balance connect. >> thank you all for coming to the discussion. i do think it's important to put the military peace and context which is that the primary lines of competition between us and china in the next decade will be economic and geopolitical. neither country would choose to go to work together. both -- any imagination will try to avoid conflict but there are so many unresolved territorial issues with sovereignty claims and things that could become triggers particularly in the context of lack of agreement between us and china on the rules of the road internationally and norms of behavior. the name of the game in my view is deterrence. how do we ensure that the chinese are understanding that if there ever was a conflict they would not actually have a chance of prevailing. that is where the impact of ai comes in. i do think there is a serious element of competition here and a risk that if china gets farther not only in ai in general but in the application of ai to various military functions whether intelligence, analysis, targeting, strike, autonomous systems robotics et cetera they could have a perception of potential advantage and that perception could drive them to miscalculate and to try to adopt an asymmetric approach that would strike early and quickly and to try to basically have a very strong first move in the hopes of stopping the us in its tracks and so forth. i think the real issue is how do we ensure that that perception does not take hold. i do think it's important for us to figure out how to ensure the us military can leverage ai for defense and deterrence and, if necessary, were fighting. chinese have several structural advantages. they have a plan. they are executing on a multi- decade plan and putting state resources much higher levels with money, talent, focus. in this area. two, they have a doctrine of solitary so any advance in the academia and in private sector that is meaningful to the military and shared. we obviously don't have that. third, they don't -- lots more access to data. they don't have the same privacy concerns and a system that the government can dictate. and i don't think they will have the same ethical and policy constraints. the same guardrails that the us will almost certainly put upon the use of ai for military purposes. we have a number of structural disadvantages and i'm sure we can list more. but i do think this is an important area where the us needs to deepen the dialogue between the military in the technical community we need to make sure policy catches up with and keeps pace with the development of ai applications and we need to figure out the problem of integration. this will be essential to deterring public with china in the future. >> michelle, let me ask you a follow up. about legacy systems. sometimes people will say in some chinese have written about this that the americans may be good at ai but the pentagon is not going to be as good at integrating it because we are prisoner of legacy systems. if you own carriers you will invest in swarms of unmanned drones which are undersea and oversee which could destroy your legacies and it will be like the calvary and if there are a problem here the china is only two carriers or one and half and some people counted that it will be better in moving ahead in the military balance by integrating ai than we are because of bureaucratic inertia. >> we are very invested in legacy systems in the existing core structure and programs of record that is all true. the hard thing for the united states is the trading off capacity for capability when it is required. i will give you an example. in an anti- access area of denial environment one of the chinese have created a ring or certain range where anything in that zone whether that a group or aircraft or what have you, it will be vulnerable to being struck down. we have to figure out how to operate either outside that ring and extend in a project of power with range or inside that ring and be able to defend ourselves. and maybe that at some point x plus one, the additional carrier battle group that we might be if you took the money and invested it in all the capabilities that would make the existing fleet survivable and make it effective again. it's electronic warfare, it's cyber, autonomy, leveraging ai for all of that and that capability trade-offs and that in capability and trading off capacity may be important. i don't mean to pick on the navy because it is true for every single service where is that -- where does it make more sense for me to modernize the legacy of the capabilities that will keep them survivable and relevant and not have quite as workforce spectrum, even thinking about us china relationship in the overall strategy for the relationship and been in charge of it. you all also been very active and important member of the aspen strategy group and participated in the summer study which we talked about the locations of ai technological advances so how do you put these pieces together connect. >> michelle, jack, nice to be here with you today. first of all, to try to draw a picture for the current strategic were much more competitive base. much more competitive base than the us, china relationship and when we look back on 2018 as a year when it became clear that the states strategy had moved substantially. really from a strategy of cooperative engagement and you could contend that in november 1972 that was richard nixon visit but certainly since the end of the cold war where the united states has engaged in a cooperative engagement strategy with china trying to seek a win-win set of outcomes and integrate china into the various institutions and systems in the world. it is moved in 2018 and reflecting a fundamental rethink of the us china relations and a fair to say that we moved to a strategic competition model at this point. it's a new era and finding the contours what are the rules of the road and where we compete and where will we cooperate it's a work in progress and i don't believe engaged in a conference away about that so as a strategic complex. what has been front and center the president has focused quite tightly on the bilateral trade and i think [inaudible] >> since they met in buenos aires in december to work through these economic issues there seems to be a number of things that can be done in a positive way but that is not the main game. the main game is what were talking about and as part of the competition with a technological competition, it's to seize commanding heights of the key technologies and industries of the future. i want to -- not to have a decoupling [inaudible] but in the technology sector we are moving to a decoupling if you look at the steps in the last six months we are more tightly regulating where were about to more tightly relate the export of technology from the united states in china and we are restricting the pretty significantly resurgence in students entrance into the night states and we are moving to identify entities that we think our security trends in undertaking global efforts to ensure build the fire gmp structure and global and based on security and i want to ask you on the decoupling thing which is not as broadly recognized or appreciated as it should be. the couple points we should do, michelle touched on this and [inaudible] and can you do play the role you played for half a century is providing security platform on east asia which asian development [inaudible] there's an ideological aspect which we have not discussed and china has a full alternative model and in the technology piece there's a number of things we can and should do. the discussion to date has been almost all about things in terms of chinese behavior. chinese behavior in terms of purchasing the us goods and services and chinese behavior in terms of not undertaking steps which are unfair and economic mobile is all to the good. we've had almost no discussion about what people do. on the side in order to meet the challenge is coming from in many ways appear scientific competitor and that the discussion [inaudible] [inaudible] it does involve artificial intelligence because the obama image vision for two report in december of 2015 i have not seen follow-up but the follow-up i did see is in the summer and spring of they issued a similar strategy that it is acting on. we also talk about research and element fundamental development by the research institutes and research institutes a couple decades ago we were number one in terms of in terms of r&d we are now number 12 and it's not going the right direction. it's been picked up by the private sector and i do think science back to the center needs to be brought of our thinking and policy making and we just have not directed the office of science took two years to get someone in the job and they're really is not a focus on science. one of the greatest regrets is a national supervisor is not to establish an assistant to the president for tardy policy inside the tennessee because as you know, these problems we face had technological aspects of increasingly and and with issues and coveted issues that we really need to address and policymaking. why the united states that history will look back and ask why it does not have a major impact of program we borrow money at a cheap rate and invest a certain return and we have not done any of that. we spent $2 trillion on the tax cuts last year. the last is two things that are important. one is that a national effort to meet what we know will be the labor market in the technologies we are developing, artificial intelligence robotics are coming down the line and if you spend as much time with ceos and business conferences as i do this is where businesses are going. to get additional technological efficiencies and we have not had it all about who is responsible for the work impact of these technologies. the companies, government and blast may seem like a small one but it's important. the congress needs to take a leadership position. in 1995 the congress disarmed itself in terms of technological advice and disestablished a small institution and it did not save much money and was part of the gingrich revolution and congressional mid 1990s but we really need good advice. it was on display during the facebook hearings. if you saw that, where congress really needs to have objective, high-quality advice they can go to when things like that with much deeper issues. >> that make sense believe me to a follow-up for jack. i thank you are alluding to the strategy, tom. what people say were in the new cold war return of the trouble is it is a bad analogy with the soviet union because we had almost no trade and almost no scientific or social exchange. with china we have more trade that we want and also have something like 300,000 tiny students in american universities in the lot of back-and-forth among the elites. how as tom pointed out on investments and economic -- with companies we have upgraded to vs and taking that much more seriously but a technology transfer occurs human minds and you don't have to steal this but you work in a lab in caltech and go back to -- and take another job and look at -- own background. back-and-forth of chinese companies and what we do about that. if ai is as fluid as you say should we try to restrict transfer of intellectual property by who can work in american companies or have access to caltech or carnegie? >> tonight answer quick? how many languages are spoken at ai and none of them ever get it right is the answer to come up with a reasonable answer the language includes russian. why is that? it's because nerds will go to the nursing of a nationalism like if you have the greatest opportunity to develop the most significant technology for real aim but gets to change the nature of science i thank you may pick a particular nationalistic mindset. their goal is to make sure ai technology benefits and that having some aspect of all humanity working on that is essential to it. i also think it provides a motivating method if you have enough of a progressive policy with regard to science contract people from all over and i don't believe we suffer from it in terms of technology transfer, point of view. i do want to make a point about what tom said and jack oversupplied witches that what you're talking about bullies versus nerds. they beat up the nerds and others went home and all of the nerds did pretty well later in life and all the bullies headed terrible summer. most of what the us is doing now is mostly bullying and not being dirty enough. except there needs to be some robust behavior but in the absence of the us going home and hitting the books in the evening it has no chance here. >> that was the purpose of the list at the end. it's a fair point. on this issue, joe, of personnel, people, back and forth. we have this tremendous amount of back and forth in terms of shared knowledge from the united states and china and technology. but there are legitimate counterintelligence issues. and this prevents real challenges for research universities. we have to get this right because cutting ourselves off completely is a mistake. but there are legitimate counterintelligence issues and really serious challenge. one statistic i saw last week was that last year the number of foreign students studying in the united disgraced decreased by 6.5 which is the biggest discrete decreases 911. >> and by contrast, we are failing to invest in the people we need. in the technical fields, that is. not only sort of even absent any national security operation we are not focused on stem education and investing in access to stem education the way we should. where we do have talent we are not making it easy for that talent to go between the commercial sector and the government or national security sector. and so, i think one of the things we need to be doing back to tom think about what do we do and what is right for us is to be thinking much more out-of-the-box about creating pathways. maybe we need a civilian version of rotc and we will pay for your college or graduate school in a technical field if you come and spend time with the government first. then you can go off into the commercial sector and we will create a pathway for midcareer people want to work on the mission that matters and to come to another level in government. we will figure out -- i was at a dinner last night with the general head of cyber command we are talking about the talent channel and challenges cyber command and nsa have in one of the ideas is that creative ways of leveraging talent outside the government. should we have different reserves we don't have to wear military uniform or test physical fitness or cut your hair or remove your tattoo but you can hack for your country on the weekends. if you can't get a security clearance, use a different set of data you still use the talent to develop the tactics and procedures and problem-solving you need. we are not being innovative and at our best in terms of how we use the talent we have and how we develop more. >> there is also the point that if we become too restrictive the cutoff new sources of that talent. i saw a figure recently that more than one third of silicon valley startups in the last decade were started by -- from asia. in that sense, to be too restrictive on that, would be to basically cut off talent. it's getting a strategy right and i started out the pendulum becoming too hysterical or too complacent forgetting that point in the middle will not be easy. >> will not get it right and this missing piece is what we are going to do to meet that challenge. >> well, we will throw it open to the audience. we are 15 minutes left in this panel. that was time allocated for audience q&a. over to you. who would like to ask a question, anyone? back. >> thank you. i'm policy analyst and we talked about determined ai race long between the us and china and how do we measure winning direct what does it mean to win in an arms race and long-term competition between us and china? >> tom, will you start? quick answers go down the line. >> there would be different definitions in each sector. i think with respect to -- michelle to give more depth but with respect to our military side having the ability to maintain the role we have in the western pacific to provide basically the platform which you can have peaceful economic and social development. that's the first piece to it. second, it's important for the united states to maintain its technological leadership. in the last 35 years we've gone to tremendous prosperity and security and strength from our leadership. maintaining that leadership is an important thing for us and we should measure ourselves against that. how you do that laterally but not to take the steps to maintain leadership would put the united states at a disadvantage. unnecessarily, in my view. [inaudible] if it makes policy decisions and maintains you would have to take them piece by piece. it's also important to focus on our ideological competition. we have a situation where democracy in the united states and the west generally is under the most severe -- since the 1930s from a variety of sectors. in continuing to do that to things like civic education critical thinking is also another important part. >> very briefly, i think it is a win to know what the race course look like. we don't have an ability to make good judgments about the health of your assigned instructor. like i'm pulling anecdotes for conference data from aaa i about competition and that's wildly insufficient. i agree with tom's point that we need better decision-making capacity to measure the stuff because otherwise you will pick something arbitrary that's when dangerous things can happen. >> winning in the military sphere is beyond the geopolitical point that tommy. in the ai sphere it will come down to speed and quality situational awareness, speed of execution and decision. if a competitor becomes much better at all of those things then we are deterrence will break down. that is when you risk aggression or conflict. >> i have to ask you, michelle, about the application of that for the third offset which was the argument that in the defense department near the end of the obama ministration that we have always been able to offset our opponents military capabilities by having the technological hedge, a nuclear edge, and that was the precision and stealth in the 70s, 80s and then the idea that we would be trying to keep ahead with a third offset. does this speed of ai in this high degree of integration with the idea of a third offset? >> not at all. it reinforces the importance. although it is not being called a third offset strategy because every administration is to rename the old strategy and put it their own brand but what the department is doing and secretary mattis in particular has tried to do in moving money particularly in will come out of the 2020 budget toward much more robust investment in these key technologies it is key to for the technological investment is still a very important for the united states to offset but what will be quantitative advantages and home theater advantages for our country like china if we ever had to deal with the conflict in asia in their backyard. >> can i make quickly one point? i feel i should represent the view from silicon valley on one aspect which is there are two types of winning here. there is winning for you have a sick. her exquisite military capability and that is fine except the way you probably get to that is by having stuff that can operate [inaudible] the issue of ai stuff is you need to tested empirically against real data to see what happens. it is worth bearing in mind that if you have a race dynamic which leads you fielding [inaudible] that need to be empirically tested because you don't have theoretically guarantees if you win something dangerous might happen while you win and the really don't want that to happen. there is another path here which should the us invest more on the actual technology in for doctor and substrate which it sits on it could create the technologies that will allow more robust expandability and guarantees they could have competition which doesn't seem to risk most human life in the process. >> tom, would you like to add onto that? okay, another shot. yes. >> hello, i'm from the wilson center print out a question -- something that tom mentioned at the top, the rules of let's say, can you actually come up with any viable way of creating any rules of competition when you have countries that do not look at right or civil societies, government, the way the united states does. >> it's incumbent on us to do that. we have two very different systems. we are in as i set a new phase of competition. some of it matters a lot as joe said at the beginning whether you win and a sound check to set i think who gets in the lead in some of these technologies will make a big difference on standard setting and ethics and risks we face. we have to set the rules. one of the principal management challenges for leadership in the united states and china when you name the number of decades half-century into the 21st century will be to manage the relationship and not have it on a path toward inevitable conflict. there will be areas where we will compete in areas where we will engage and try to force behavior changes on either side like were trying to do now quickly on the economic side in areas where we will need to work together. the number of obvious issues that can only be solved through international cooperation and incumbent on leadership in the united states and china defined as areas of cooperation. it in all great power relationships that become this complex and we have not base one until this complex is a strict strictly. you have to find a mix and that is the principle strategic challenge of us leadership in the coming century. >> i might add to that ideological differences don't prevent the rules of the road. we have deeper ideological differences of the soviet union and the cold war then we have with the chinese today. yet we were able to sign a number of arms control agreements not proliferation treaty and even things like this the agreement which restrict the way we behave in terms of instances at sea. it is quite plausible negotiating out of self-interest rules of the road even with their deep ideological differences. >> on the bilateral rules we can negotiate even when you competitor on except certain arms is still very valuable to build international as much international consensus around ai norms and cyber norms as possible because if there is a violation you have the international community responding imposing cost and punishment for that. there is still value even when you can't reach agreement. >> you come to these situations and they use to call them build situation strength and so the lysate has strength and one of the principal ones is alliances and the leadership of the last 75 years to try to build the large group of the countries pursuing certain norms to be a bulwark against threats and to be a forcing mechanism and change behaviors. we won't be able to do that though unless we build out our strength and in particular, if we don't get our act together economically. >> [inaudible] more than you would expect with the chinese scientist with the hiv babies and a sledgehammer came down on him in china and there aren't any good norms around gene editing but i was positively surprised by that but my question to all of you on the panel is on the technical decoupling it feels like we've done the low hanging fruit and we clearly had a storm turn one and tighten up export controls but now what? now it gets hard because when i talk to folks out silicon valley they don't want to shut down their ai labs in china and getting good value out of that and that is your point to the nerds who want to cooperate. if were not allowed to do that or not a debt of gratitude gratitude grad students in china doing this in big companies that dominate will cooperate with chinese in labs in your. where do you go from here? where's the next step with the decoupling? >> jack, do you want to start? >> i don't think decoupling is a particularly wise idea from what we've done. i think china is already making significant overtures to come set up well-funded labs. if we continue to decouple than the world's talent goes in the scientific breakthroughs in china and the us is restricted to an increasingly small base of students which he chooses to let in because of -- think there is not a truck. that seems intrinsically risky. >> tom, would you like to add? >> i do think i met made the point of decoupling is a state of fact. i do think we have to think through and along term basis what it means but the amount of money coming in from china and the united states in technological data or any sense of investment is dropping down to zero. we will put in place export controls much tighter technolo technology. bob gates gave good advice in the past which is to have a small guard in a high fence around the things that really matter. we are engaged in a global effort on the buildout to protect the us economic and security interests around the world. we are at the front end of it. you raise a good point and i don't know if plug through all the indications but as a fact it is what has happened. >> i would just say we need a very passionate systematic and two and approach looking at where is cooperation fine and a good thing in our interests in advancing the good of humanity and where do we need to be clarified and say this will pose a national security risk to the united states into our allies if we are not careful. i am hopeful that this is the kind of topic the new commission that is set up that will get after and definitely getting after tom's agenda and what should we be doing to better compete but i hope we will als also -- will bring nuanced discussion of where his collaboration and where we need to be much more careful than we have been. yet people, everyone from like eric schmidt to my colleague and former deputy of defense whose clear on this issues, working on that commission. my hope is they can provide some better answers to questions. >> we are waiting for the next panel but very quick question. >> [inaudible] >> greg allen, you talk about the need for a massive scale of change. you were talking specifically about the preferences of this percentages of gdp spent on research and develop it for your calling for a major transformation and that the line with what china is talking about and what the major technologies refer to the transformation required for ai. we also have heard the panel about the need to not panic and the need to not panic specifically with regard to our relationship with china. the question is, what our credible path to the transformation of the us government and transformation of the a society that in all percentage points of gdp skill changes that are not induced by slightly lament or other cause of national panic -- how do you induce the amount you want without calling forth a national panic? >> leadership. we do need the sputnik moment is in the context of the late 1950s of the cold war and induced by fear of falling behind the competitor. we have a different competitor here. i do think we do need a sputnik moment. i do think the things i laid out respect what we would you in order to advance our technological prowess and future are pretty urgent, frankly. jack knows more about this than i do but at the pace at which these technologies develop now are extraordinary and so the distance in terms of technological development in the course of a single administration, four, five year period is extraordinary that might've been relevant four years ago are irrelevant now. i don't think we should be -- we should address the chinese relationship with strategic perspective but i do feel a very deep sense of urgency on the missing piece here which is the piece of what we will do to make technological balance. it is odd to me that we have not felt this is a sputnik moment in odd that we talk about china, it's the most important strategic thing were doing in the world that we have not had this is a more urgent priority. >> alas, we will have to end there. i noticed several other questions but i can't indulge him because we are on to our next panel. nick runs a tight shot. coming right up on stage is our next group. please thank our first panel. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you, everyone. by the way, the last question is a non- gentleman named greg allen was now at the center for new american security, greg was a student of professor and i and spoke at our conference. he's one of the leading young thinkers about ai and our military features. i think greg for being here. this is the second panel. first panel focused on the china challenge and you heard from them. this panel focuses on a different challenge. the last chapter of the book is written by our friend walter isaacson who is a great biographer and student and an expert on science and technology. walter says what made america great technologically from the manhattan project all the way through this decade was the combination, an innovation triangle, a virtuous trial, the federal government believing the part of its obligation was to fund science research. long-term science research. that the federal government to be working with our research universities and ought to be working with the third point in the jungle, private technology companies to innovate and to encourage companies to develop in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s and into this century. walter says that is now broken down. arresting data points from walter's argument to get the conversation started, federal r&d spending has shrunk significantly over the last two decades. once the world leader, tom mentioned this, the united states now ranks 12th in government-funded r&d as a percentage of gross domestic product. federal r&d spending has declined over 40 years from 1.2% of gdp to 0.8% of gdp, one point to in 1976, 0.8 in 2016. another way to look at this problem. in the 1960s around 70% of our and he was federally funded with 30% coming from the private sector and now those figures are reversed. finally, this is a little tricky of walter but i had to. he said the president trumps 5000 tweets over the last two years barely a mention of the world word science and technology. just to military the problem we are in. we have an all-star hybrid panel here. people who have participated at each end of the triangle and the federal government and the university's and private sector. led by our good friend sylvia burwell was a member of the aspen strategy group of long-standing president now of american university, former director of the office of management and budget, former secretary of health and human services, former senior official at the gates foundation, former senior corporate official. direct experience at all points. sylvia will speak first. our good friend doug, he is vice president of the american northeast asia for apple in cupertino, california. he reports bradley to tim cook but doug is hybrid. he's a naval reserve officer and combat veterans of iraq and afghanistan is someone who is a deep appreciation for our university system. doublespeak second and our good friend a new member and valued member of the aspen strategy group, you know him from staff director for the senate armed services committee for chairman john mccain. chris sells problem as a congress thought about our national security and he's now had a strategy. he is in the tech world having been in the government world. ... i will add my name to the list and i just want to make three points in answering that question. one, how we get to a better place in terms of solving this problem in those three entities working together in a little point on context the context the pointed at the university is thinking about the history of how we thought about the role in a slightly different way. in terms of how we get to a different place, i think it is about the priority is a shame that conversation just ended with that we need to make this issue of how we think about research and technology and the national interest in national security it needs to be a priority and one way to do that but that i think makes a differe is actually being clear about what is that we are trying to achieve, and which of the entities the private sector, universities and government, what does each going to play and how much. think about it any articulated way making this a core part of the national defense strategy and a quarter part of the national security strategy. anthen also when one thinks abot making this happen through government and the office of science and technology policy putting together its overarching strategy this is a core element so by articulating all the different parts and strategies and then a little bit more clarity of what the actual rules are of the different pieces including how much funding do you want from the federal government the second thing i would say it's context is important in terms of budget issues it is important to reflect on them. it's the declining spending on the non- defense discretionary and as a percentage of gdp. as we think about solving the problem one needs to consider that context shrinking non- defense that's where their researcresearch with the stringa percentage of gdp in a context where debt payments continue to rise and that has to do with the deficit in the context where a cause that we have in older generation coming through the pipeline, both social security and medicare through an entitlement continue to grow. as we think about the relationship, the strategy is important because it is also about signaling to the universities. i would be the first to say that the economic i hear ed is troubling in terms of inflation that is higher than cork insulation on the basis that the difficulty if universities are looking for those fun is in the research state they are being pressed more and more the signaling will be an important part. as we think about universities thinking about the role in three different ways one is the research that we produce what is it that the society needs in terms of how much basic research into second we are producing the people that are going to implement the policy. with the school of international service or college of computer science. we are producing the students that are going to do this. so understanding but that strategy is important to how we are educating the students and the third area, i don't think this is traditionally thought about, but as we talk about these other things, the role the university has come up things like ethics and the role that needs to be done. i quot quoted at the beginning e session he said because of what you just talked about, we are risking our primacy in the science and technology we are risking our military superiority. but he is essentially saying is the development of the technology is so rapid it might be obsolete ten years from now. in other words we are now protecting the core if you think about it that way. what would constitute a national strategy do you agree that president trump's successor the china conversation got into how the chinese think about it in terms of how they define where they are going with questions into superiority and the question of the investment that they are willing to make against us and similarly, i think as a nation we need that kind of leadership in terms of the objective and where we are goi going. how should they become more nimble and how should we supply the private sector which doug is going to talk about in working through the percentage of what role the government and privatee sector bring to the problem and i think we all need to step back and stand how do we help do what we do best and that the nation as a whole saying this is a priority and i think i know whatever you do in your life, you know if you make it a priority, that's ho that is howt things to happen. >> doug spoke in august at the conference and has been a big part of this. first, i guess going back to the point that was made in the book, without any argument it is the most innovative around the world and silicon valley was built on the shoulders of today it completely rests on that. our new beautiful campus was built on a site that used to be a campus long ago that was directly part of the history so we lived right on top of that and of the innovation they are barely scratching the surface of that for the topic of national security. back in 2014 when i was involved in some conversations that ultimately led to the creation of the unit out in california and then austin and boston one of the points i've made is that you could argue the relationship between silicon valley and china not the chinese government that the companies were tighter than the relationship and if the relationship the department had with other militaries around the world was tighter than with silicon valley. a lot has happened since then and he put out that they've done a lot on that. we have an embassy and that is still an issue. there are structural and cultural issues also may be thinking about culture first. i am the only person some of my friend is in the valley though who served in uniform, much less in combat and i am also the only one changing that many of my friends and the military are in a full-time basis. i am constantly struck by the misunderstanding that exists between the two groups and the misinterpretation for each. if you drill into that a little bit it even gets down to things so simple as how you dress. i'm wearing one of my uniforms today that i never wear except when in washington or at a funeral. some people wear jeans or even flip-flops, i don't but others do and that way of dressing doesn't say sloppy or disrespectful which is what it would say to my friends from the pentagon. it says authentic, focused on what matters, innovative, open. and by the way, wearing a suit says the opposite. when the groups come together, before they even start there are the cultural differences that are pretty profound and that gets in the way of the kind of collaboration that we need. there are some misinterpretations first of all somehow the people in the valley don't care about serving the public good and that couldn't be further from the truth in fact one of the reasons i ended up working for apple is because i found a group of people who woke up every day and believe what they were doing is trying to make the world a better place and that is what motivated people more than you would think would. second, they are not patriotic. that couldn't be further from the truth. my friends are in support of my service and we bring people from the military out to visit. people care deeply so i think maybe that is a misinterpretation. i also think that it is partial understatement to say that people are -- what about be interested in working on these incredibly important problems related to national security. in thelot of people valley care about most is working on the hardest problems. with jackson may cared on working on the hardest problems that may not be as tied to nationalism. if you can give somebody something that is one of the hardest problems and connected to something greater than themselves like the greater good of the nation a lot of people would find that incredibly and profoundly attractive. also a -- would be wrong to think that the most global companies are as global as some might think they are. ethos.r apple is a global company but our hardware services, the vast amount of i tease in the u.s.. apple would not exist about the u.s. and we feel that profoundly. point i maybe on that think it is a mistake to think the valley or tech sector in general is monolithic. boston,valley is in everywhere else. we have a broad range of companies from different models. some of them are product companies like the one i work come of the most fundamental point is the individual institutions need to trust that device with their most private data. others are fundamentally billed with different models -- built with different models around and tailoring of experience based on that data and advertising based on that data. they create very different perspectives. that is why apple has a different point of view on privacy than facebook does. it's not monolithic. there is a lot there that is still an opportunity for us to build on. trying to do a couple of thoughts on what we can do about that. >> we will come back to that. i want to get chris and richard in the conversation. i will come back to your action plan. chris, you met a transition from the government to the tech sector. based on what sylvia and doug have said how do you see this challenge? i would say the two months i have spent in the american technology has deepened the opinions i have formed working in the united states senate. when i think about a healthy in a duration -- healthy innovation base the outlook is less how much money is going into federally funded research and i look more at how much money is the government spending to take great research development science and technology and turned it into large-scale technology products, companies and operational capabilities. that is where we fall down. that is what i'm concerned about. when i think about the triangle, i don't know if it is a square, i would divide the private piece up into people who build technology and investors in technology. we basically have all of our incentives misaligned. the government since the end of the cold war has not had a clear idea of what it wants to do, what the strategy is. coming out of that, what actual technology doesn't care about more than others? -- does it care about more than others? you get risk-averse capital that will go where the money is. the money has more often than in ad optimization or facial recognition software not next-generation hypersonic's or the opera station -- operable -- the best minds in american technology are doing ad optimization relevant working with the department of defense. there are huge financial incentives that explain with a good degree of clarity why that is. on the back end of that in terms of the technology that you get we should not be surprised that the divide has grown up the way it is. it thinks about investment in technology as making large amounts of very small bets, if you are doing something exciting in r&d we will give you a couple thousand dollars to do more but it never goes anywhere. you have a situation where we have today worsened the end of the cold war there are two companies that began at startups and focused on national security work that propelled multibillion-dollar companies, .alantir and spacex if you look at biotechnology or consumer electronics there are dozens in these different areas. both of them were founded by billionaires. intohad to fight their way the federal marketplace than ultimately sue their customers to get a fair hearing. to me that is the bad news. we have news is that all of the material to do this and be successful. when he to think about realigning our incentives. the u.s. government needs to the fund with a high degree of clarity what it cares about more than other things and it needs to be willing to put big bets on those things. this is not rocket science, this is what we did before. at the beginning of the cold war the united states said i want to put a nuclear weapon on the other side of the planet in a matter of minutes. we bet on people. we bet on industry partners to deliver that. we put lots of money into it. when he to do that thing again if we say we are going to do the things we want to do and prioritize the technologies that we say are more important than others. stop making large amounts of little bats not go anywhere and start concentrating our bets on the things we say we care about more than other things. which is something the national act was it -- national security acquisition community has been reluctant to do. if you start doing that it should not come as a surprise that some of those things are going to fail, many of them will. some are going to succeed and when they do they will succeed. when they succeed big the risk-averse capital will start saying there is money to be made in that massive 700 billion dollars entity called the national defense market. to fund more these companies. the kids that are sitting around doing interesting work for facebook or google will say i'm going to live my dream of becoming a next generation national security contractor. i'm going to put together autonomous systems in my garage because that is what i want to do. i can make billions of dollars doing it. the government needs to be the prime mover. --needs to know what once what it wants and what it views as important. putting real money into them not necessarily the r&d stage. done in thebeing private sector and private community store's the federal government is spending. but compared advantage of the government is buying at scale and picking winners and being able to say, doug has developed something that will change the way american national security exists. we're going to put money into that. crazy idea that this is i'm pretty sure how it works in the world that i now inhabit. i want to gok said to mars and i'm to develop , twots and rocket engines people probably walked in and said i want to reinvent national security space. he got the investment. he became a billionaire because they that on people. we as the government need to start betting on people which is what we have done when we have been successful in the past. it is what private industry does every day. they bet on jeff bezos or elon musk. amazing people do amazing things and solve amazing problems. we need to figure out from a u.s. government standpoint where our area of maximum impact is and start putting real money towards that rather than chasing things that i would argue are less important in areas where we are less able to influence. >> thank you, helpful in drawings connection up where we need to go. when we think about this subject and plan our conference and think about the book joe and i danzig whorichard has thought deeply about these issues. foreign-policy intellectual but has been in the government and had to plan for the future of the u.s. navy. what is your sense of this big problem? doug began by saying what a great honor it was to be on this panel and i want to reinforce that by saying i felt very nicely. greg allen was a young student of his. i say this in praise of my co-panelists. i want to spend one of my minutes reinforcing their description of the problem i want to argue that you should , the real to them problem is distracting from a much more fundamental problem. the reason i want to reinforce is right, it is the right description of the world on paper, the basic perception that we shifted from a whennment dominated seen photographers wanted to invent new technologies or have new technologies they went out and invented them themselves. they made new film and thought of new ways of designing lenses. they came up with new systems of developing film. they made their own world. he goes on to say nobody thinks that actors invented television. in my view those of us that worked in the pentagon in the last quarter of the 20th century we were all photographers. the coming of gps, the internet, the semiconductor industry at f, these were driven by smart people in the pentagon. now the world is quite different. now we are all television actors, we have to respond to technologies. the basic point is right. the reason i say it is distracting is these definitely insightful comments truly distract us from the fundamental problem. not the my opinion is only relationship between industry and government. the national security establishment. it is one of assimilation. what theym is not describe as the membrane or permeable membrane between industry and government, it is the audio immune response of governments and these new technologies. this was touched on in the last panel when we said about the legacy systems that so dominate. one example we can talk more the artificial intelligence discussion that dominated the previous panel. is the problem of artificial intelligence that the system or the systems of machine learning etc. are not available to the pentagon or accessible? they are widely so. we had a brouhaha about object and in -- project maven google withdrawing. the ability to assimilate this -- on the personal side i don't see substantial members of people in the uniformed military service capable of understanding this in a way that private companies would especially value. the number of people who were good at artificial intelligence in a serious way within the military service in uniform and the younger ranks which is the only place they are is probably countable on the fingers of both hands. in each service. if you in fact -- if those people are extraordinarily good we push out the services because the private sector says we have real responsibility. it is much easier for the armed services to respond to this by there is this external problem we need to establish. everyone says about artificial intelligence, jack clark said in the previous panel . the armed service generates huge amounts of data. what they do with it is essentially throw away. they do not invest in storage capacity, they don't retain it or label it. this is not a problem of the external relationship it is dealing with internal resources. it is easy to take technology like artificial intelligence and use it to do old things in new ways, as for example project maven image recognition. it is still a challenge. it is much harder to rethink what you are doing and why and as the previous panel discussed you want to have carriers. my bottom-line message is this is unattractive proposition because it is true, meaningful and relevant. from a core military perspective it is externalizing the problem. it is ignoring the core issues. i would encourage not just a panel like this which is very useful but a panel that talks about the core issues. >> richard asked to speak last the now we know why. he has been able to take the subject of this book and project this forward and ask tough questions inside government itself. you have identified a key question. we will take questions. doug, you have an action list. then we'll go to the audience. >> i want to go to his permeable membrane that my friend and mentor richard danzig just mentioned. while i agree completely with everything you just said about what the core issue is i think the permeable membrane to ideas and talent is not only the short-term solution to getting things better but is actually a major part of the long-term solution to that problem. we simply have to make it easier conceptsest ideas and to float from the private sector into the national security world. company you are a large all the work you have to do, the risk you potentially take on and it paperwork you have to do roi is-- the difficult to examine. company ita small may be something that is almost impossible to take on. defensetions like the of the nation unit were created to help make that easier and are doing a great job. we still have this issue of what i call a catcher's mitt which is when you take the great ideas that are in the 100 projects the defense is working on right now and have to get them to scale. that is where they hit all of the antibody that you talked about. and where we lose a lot of momentum. these defense innovation units were established by secretary ash carter in the obama administration, here he is right here. right up your alley. just so everyone has that information. is, it goes back to the culture and how do we become a more permeable membrane for talent that ultimately creates an environment in which we have a much better catchers mitt for those ideas. a couple of concrete things i think we ought to do. somethingeed to make like the defense innovation union far more desirable. just like how you had a hard making something desirable until we force it we need to make this much more desirable. today while we get the best talents there it is hard. those people are taking a risk for their careers. they have to leave the real work to go off and do this weird thing their community in the core military does not understand. it is not necessarily clear what is going to happen over time. that has implications for how we think about other kinds of requirements. we have to do a much better job of leveraging the people that we already have with native fluency in both of these environments. int is a birthright we have this country because it is such a strong reserve force. in the same way that we have such a strength in this country because we have people grow up speaking native languages from other countries, a huge strength. we are not leveraging that well enough. to find the ones we have an leverage them effectively and make them more. making more of them by catching more of the ones who want to leave active duty to go into the making more ofor them by sending people from active duty to programs like the sector of defense program that exists. sending people out into the private sector for the experience. this is potentially very risky for an officer's career. we need to think about how we make that not risky. we also need to think about flowing in the other direction. things like the defenses service. how do we scale back and leverage it even more effectively. how we make sure the right companies know about it so it is not just the same usual suspects sending people to go help with that. that is something i think a lot of people in places like silicon valley would love to be a part of. if we figure out a way to work with industry to make it more effective. this is a list of things. we need to do more to make that ferocity of the system to make a permeable membrane talent to ultimately deal with antibodies to talk about. audienceons from this for this panel? everything is crystal clear, right? right clicks to do questions for people that haven't been our students. >> i am a professor i will just ask more questions. >> as we move forward give us a sense of how the administration is doing a train to achieve clarity of national purpose, reach out and form the research universities as well as the private sector both recognizing the problem to tighten it so we can move forward. the last panel said we are in a major competition right now with china and we may not be leading in that competition. who would like to assess the administration and give some thoughts on what they should do. >> i would say talking to teachers and students i'm reminded of a great lesson answer the question you want to answer rather than the one that you are given. [laughter] spinnaker but please answer my question. [laughter] i would say one thing the administration has done well in sight of the national security space i think that the defense strategy has gone a long way to sharpening and clarifying what our strategies should be and being willing to say these are more important than those things, these are priorities that we need to identify and particularly building off a lot of the work that the secretary did this needs to be a national priority and then building down from that what are the problems we need to solve that works more has to be done on and it's only then that you begin to understand can you solve this problem the same way and the answer is no but how would you employ these technologies to create comparative advantage and that his work had is yet to be done and when you define those problems you can say these are the areas that will be important for us. in that strategy report until that time, the government said three administrations, bush 43 3 and first-tier donald trump of combating terrorism was the number one national priority. the secretary said that's an important priority that competition from russia and china is now the focal point of the efforts. it's a big shift key declared. >> i think there is much to criticize about particular technology initiatives that the general proposition to be we have to ask ourselves what can we do within the context of what exists before the end of the the example that i gave about ai, the system isn't something that the white house issues of strategy declarations about. it's up to the military itself to deal with that. the collection of the data and labeling of it isn't something the national strategy will speak to and yes it is relevant what is happening with regards to self driving cars and the like but no amount of data is going to inform the military equation. i disagree when some talk about the commercial accumulation of data would affect the military worth. military data is rather different sort of have to try to get through with a tendency to talk about the bigger policy issues which are important but come to grips with what we can do ourselves. >> i want to bring you back in because you have had these diverse experiences. if you were in government today advising the cabinet what would you think about where we should go? >> i think richard's point is very important, increasing the number one in i think he's talking about the ability to embrace the use an youth and bet of a future without her sector you're in is extremely important, so if i were in government today, i would think about the tools and how to use digital services. we created it i was at omb to bring in people from the sectors to change that. they are a part of the change internally so it is important to just go ahead if you are in government, what can i change at the national security council, what can i change at the defense department, what can i change at the state department, how can i change the pieces that connect and at the same time i think the way that you get some of that changes through the strategic prioritization and saying this is important and will be reported and it is a priority for what we are trying to achieve, so it is the combination of the two things together and the one thing that type of question in the analysis that i very much appreciate his who is going to make the contribution of basic research? in the world you describe, i agree with you wholeheartedly there are two things that scale in the world m by experience in philanthropy and the government. one is the market and one is the government. i agree the market should be a scale but it would be less where did the basic research get down if you take research out of the equation. >> we now have people with their hands up i would ask you to hold your questions. i need to thank sylvia and chris and doug. [applause] [inaudible conversations] we are going to begin the next panel with my friend and colleague as you all know secretary of defense for president obama and like the members of the last panel he had a phd in physics and then a long career at harvard as an academic, long career in government we served together in the clinton administration. >> i'm embarrassed to say i first worked for caspar weinberger. long career in government. we now sit about 20 feet from each other. as a member of the group he came to the conference and gave the first foundational lecture. he was a professor at harvard, historian of american diplomacy, international politics and used to come to the meetings when i first joined and would always give us the comprehensive framework lecture as we started how should we think about this problem from a historical perspective he gave the lecture of the first chapter of the book you are about to buy. i want to start by asking you to maybe explain the points you are trying to make which is how have we negotiated the transition. >> it's good to see everyone here. i'm not in washington very often. i commend you for making technology the theme for the summer and that's not only because i'm a physicist and that's what i'm doing now, but because it is the subject of the day. when i walked out of the pentagon from 37 years almost literally today that i walked in i said to myself i care very much about defending the country and making a better world for our children. i've done that. what's the next crusade for me personally, and to me it is dealing with the dilemma that technological change continues to throw up for human life. you see that in the digital world in spade spades in a numbf ways which i'm sure we will discuss and i'm sure god has talked about and others as well. if you think that is a mixed bag, and it is coming and one of the things i wanted to say is how we can do better in dealing with these digital dilemma is a social media or artificial intelligence if you think that is a mixed bag, think about the buyers revolution which is to come. then there's the issue of jobs and training and if too many of our citizens feel that technology is something that is zipping by with disregard for their own welfare, we are not going to pass a good society is so these areas of jobs and training i got dave to try to go back in time a little bit let me tell you a little bit of that and a little bit of that first of all which touches me personally. i am a physicist and the people who brought me up in physics for the manhattan project generation they were my mentors and tutors and they have done something and invented disruptive technology and they were proud of that because it had ended world war ii and kept the peace for 50 dark years of the dangerous cold war but they also realized that with it came in a substantial danger to humanity. these were the people in the various ways of politics and so forth, they devoted themselves to arms control, nonproliferation, civil defense, missile defense to use their inventive monuments to soften the impact and what they were telling people like me is with knowledge comes responsibility. i gave a little try to defense as a part-time thing and very iy much the way doug was talking about, and that's one of the things i try to replicate as the secretary of defense, let people give it a try because i found that in my own life, the combination of having a little bit of expertise so that what you knew actually mattered to something the other part of consequence was a magical combination for a young person and i think that is true today. i see it every day and if they feel that spark and ultimately that weight they can do a lot better. there was a generation that came after mine, which very much informed the digital revolution which was different, it was much more libertarian and i respect that it was a different generation and different time and a belief was that good things would come through, openness and freedom and liberty and that was the spirit in which the internet grew up, that i think we underestimated and now it enables hate. there is a strategy on one hand i think there's a lot we can do about those things. can i get you one example that comes from watching the hearings my impression is that they were a huge missed opportunity. the industry leaders for their part the way that i put it is they got through the news cycle but are not going to get through the art history. the subtext of the whole thing is a mixture of self-regulation by companies informed regulation by either antitrust or some other kind wasn't needed. everybody was kind of saying that there was no architecture out there. there wasn't even anything on the table and the example i want to give you of the time when it was better and something i saw long ago that can be rebuilt the same people said you have to go to washington for one year for this that was what to do with the mx missile at the peak of the cold war soviets were building and we felt we needed to match we built this missile and then the question is what do you do with a big missile. nick is a participant. you don't want to have vulnerable weapons because it's a danger to both sides and the beholder knows that they better go first and it isn't a good thing so it's an important problem. the process was interesting it was the office of information at the time nevermind that place that had a mechanism that had a bipartisan bicameral board decided what it would work on. second, it appointed a bunch of senior military officers of the congressmen, people from the states that would pay to d do wt we were going to do at the time, which is the first option. then we went out and looked at all the options moving them around on planes, trucks, trains, burying them. i even, one of the options i looked up as a 14,000,005 ship. imagine that crowdpleaser. the point was we gave a respectful hearing even to things that were fringing like that and the last thing is that we talk to every stakeholder in the industry is, the states, every member so people could see those were pretty good ingredients. i would like to see something start and then we could climb onto these things. it was maybe digital or ap biology jobs and training. we've got to get to the solutions or we are going to be in trouble. >> he said bring back that office. part of what we have been talking about today in the lecture that you gave last august that relationship sometimes it's quite troubled between the federal government, the pentagon, the congress and tech. you've thought about this a lot as the secretary of defense i'm going to send people out, established dod offices in silicon valley, in our hometown come boston, cambridge, massachusetts -- stanek and more also overtime. >> i think it's worked out well and it's not sufficient. we think of it as experimental. and jim mattis is known for 25 years, jim, to his credit or maybe to the credit of the idea we were trying to meet the valleys of boston or austin pathway and these were people who like me i wanted to stay doing what i was doing which was physics. i was happy to give it a try but i didn't want to live in washington it turns out it stuck more to me but that's okay. .. there earrings and it was difficult for those of us who look like this or have a uniform on. so we had to be flexible in the interest of building this bridge. it takes a little flexibility on both sides. but the digital service, at the same time, we spent $80 billion a year. it's more then all the big tech companies combined. at the same time, we need to do that. making that transition, that great transition that we still barked on from the era of counterterrorism and pattern contingency. which we so focused on and i'm as guilty as anyone. when i was under secretary, 2010 and we were serving in afghanistan. you bet your life that i was a preoccupation. we got people fighting, you're all for it. i was all in for. in rats and dogs, sniffing dogs as i was stuff like that. yes, now we got to get back to the main game which is china and russia. we spent too long back on that. when i was doing it myself and would have continued. i'm glad to see it on to madison. >> you're going to open up the question but before we do, one of the questions today but also throughout this book, two big questions. eric, someone else you know well has both said for me military and scientific.of view, we risk losing our privacy. as the leading technology country in the world because of the breakdown of that, the speed with which machine learning, quantum computing, pursuing, the current platforms systems could be obsolete in a generation ahead. we could lose the race of military superiority. that is everything to us. for those of us who think about american foreign defense a policy. you agree? >> i agree. look, we're great, inventive, we've got a great race. nobody has a birthright. these guys, our enemies are congress. they are focused on us. we may say we have russia, china, russia, and we do. but they all have just us. it's not a birthright. that preoccupation i talked about, was a distraction and some ice. pay a price. we got to get that back. i'm not pessimistic about this but i think it's something we have to work at. you can't take it for granted. >> when you sat with president obama in the national security team, was this something that drove him? does he recognize it and want to mobilize it? >> it did. obama was somebody who was not a technologist himself but both generationally and inclination. the evidence of that, he followed the stuff. sometimes the dismay of his department closely, some technology, he was interested in it and i think he was also making that transition -- i'm glad to see it go. the people who believe the whole world changes. the whole world changes even in the current circumstances. usual as this could be. he started then, i'm glad to see it continue but we put our heads down. here's the thing we didn't have back in the soviet union. you know that because with you as ambassador and so forth, nato and that part of the world, we had a long standing competitive relationship with another major power, which was technologically potent. soviet union was no joke. they were serious. competitive. but we did not have an economic relationship with them. so we have never had a sustained economic relationship with a communist dictatorship. and controlled economy. that's what china is. there's no nice way to say that. in case of the soviet union, we had an impermeable variable. the control system and so forth. it was a different kind of relationship. now we are inextricably inclined china. that makes it harder to create an enclave and then on top of that, there's so much technology which is outside of government. in those days, anything that happened that mattered happened in america. most of that happened under governor bucks. it's no longer true. put those together and the government for technology doesn't run as widely as it once did. that, and the fact that china has access in real-time to the same body of innovation as we have put some extra burden on us to be better at incorporating that better into public protection. >> thank you. this year, we focus on one big issue a year. democrats, republics, independence. we focus on the u.s. china relationship and nasa has been talking about that. i think a lot of it -- almost everybody feels is the most important challenge we face in the next half center. we are competing ideas. the race for the next generation of military technology. we are also going to have this year for the first time, we will be sponsoring and running the security form which is the public. the program in the middle of july, before -- four days we will have a national debate on many of these issues, technology battles, the ideological battl battles. it's going to be center stage. i can't think of anything more important than americans should be doing. it's went to be a big part. so questions for that, then the fight yourself. a mike will come to you right now. >> thank you for your discussion. we cannot outstanding russia and china. i'd like to ask, what can we do to create the right level capabilities that is also economically. >> the key is technology. first of all, so it is -- i do think we even as clumsy as we can be, i'm embarrassed to say that, an institution, the defense department is still pretty good technology out there. our tech sector is extremely vibrant. i'm not pessimistic at all about our ability to over batch that. also, you know, what you say in china will be the big docs. we are not the only dogs out. if you look at asia, rather than china, china is kind of half of the asian population and economics. i have always said, we don't have a china policy, we have an asian policy. we always have. for 80 years now. it is the little american, that is appreciated by the other half. in addition to being technologically excellent, in addition to's spending still quite a lot of money on defensive, i'm always grateful for and in addition to having spent that much more money than everybody else, in addition to being the most experienced military in the world because we've been at war for 15 years. we have all the friends and allies. they have none. that's a pretty powerful weight on our side. >> we have both spent a lot of time in government working on our relationship with india. india in science and technology in the country, big talent in the population, commitment to have air force and navy, it's our security partner. help build that relationship japan has really treating decline. you can't just compare china and the united states. it's held a balance of power. >> mixture secretary, i think you might get a kick out of knowing while you are working on that, a lot of us were advocates be time too not profits. we are cutting our teeth in the full. until we met some of your folks to ensure we have these things called submarines that we are going to be okay. >> does a pretty good, too. >> one of the things that has been -- any american policy discussion since 2016, literally an elephant, whether or not russia successfully invaded changed the election. as you are one of our most distinguished diplomats and you are one of the best defense secretaries we have, i wonder what you both think about proposition and what you think we should do about it. >> sure that it. the evidence is overwhelming. it's also obvious, i'll say this, not enough has been done. i don't believe enough has been done by the obama administrati administration. we haven't done enough. in a more serious way, i'll just say one thing. in attack is an attack. it deserves a response. the in between russian hybrid warfare, little green men kind of version. it's aggression. so they certainly tried to influence our politics. not just the electoral sense. sometimes just stirring up division. they are doing to this day. so that's what i would say. >> putin cannot, the russian confederation cannot match the united states and our canadian european allies in central and western europe. they are contained so what has he done? he developed the hybrid strategy. intelligence operations, the use of means to infiltrate so social media. he attacked our electoral syst system. got into 23 of the data bases. he continues to do it. there is ample evidence that he tried to insulate himself and his country and the dutch, french and german election 2017. a lot of brits think they might be in june 2017. it's concerning i would say present jump has been blind to admit it. he has not let on this issue, congress has had the lead. we need presidential leadership to raid -- raise defensive response. that's the language that putin understands. >> you have been talking about russia. i presume from a larger picture in terms of america's interest, you don't want to pursue a plan in which russia and china are driven together. a sort of reverse nixon. yet, that's enough what is happening. even if trump were president, given what you have been talking about, justifiable about russia's interference in america. is going to be antagonism towards russia and understandable terrorism from trump. china and russia getting closer and closer together. how would you prevent that from happening or at least listen that that relationship, if you were in charge? >> i think he probably has a better perspective on that. they have a common interest and antagonistic towards the united states. after that, don't have much in the way of common interest. we spent 56 years worried about a soviet chinese soviet and never happened. i would say they share interest and antagonizing united states. they were complementary, we have to divide our assets. and our attentions between the two they have so much that is not going in the same direction. i'll even go through the checklist but time has come that way, russia has come that way and so many ways. they share an uneasy far east, order and so forth. they share us as a antagonist. i would go much further than that. >> i to say, the central question right now, there's no question that they are tactical allies. not strategic. chinese want to limit the power of japan and india. the russians want to limit the power of germany, nato, the eu and north americans. they try to put roadblocks in front of us and security council. they both are using hybrid warfare to weaken democratic societies. i think it's a considerable problem. strategically ashes, if you think about russia, i think they're only something like silly and 6 million russians, there's 300 million chinese just below. china will dominate the far east. you flipped out there, you've written about india, the commerce and strategy of the far east. i think he said something very important, we have always seen ourselves since roosevelt and truman's time, the stability there. the military and american foreign service together. in japan, green and peninsula, in australia, southeast asia, we've been out power. if we hold the position, the chinese have to deal with us. the russians will be declining power by 2050. given demographics and their unreformed carbon in front of me. i think this is tactical problem now but the strategical problem for our kids, secretary of defense is, how do you both compete with the chinese and hold your position and that's going to be really competitive technologically but how do you also partner with china because we need to work with the chinese on climate change. it's a huge failing of the trump administration. i thought he was very wised today when he let off his panel today by saying we need to be in balance both political parties right now, hours, have turned toward competition with china. yes, we have to compete. but this whole thing has been about, working with the chinese, too. the chinese will see us in a very different way. yes yes as a potential. i don't think the russians have figured that. >> to further on relief the balloon, i worked with the chinese for a long time. they made many friends in the pla and so forth. we cannot have a purely antagonistic relationship. it is not turned out the way we had hoped 20 years ago. but chinese evolution has not gone away. we hoped starting with that and we thought there were be more -- >> haven't. we have to be wide-awake to that. the wishes we all had in the 90s for the future have not gone. we have to pick ourselves up and go on. that means you do have to have that with them. we do share the world economy and we share the world ecosystem and even cold wars or even dark future. even -- my job was to prepare those. you can't say that your first choice and there's nothing inevitable about that. so i think what joe said, from recounting from it, it sounds sensible. we make it much more value out of. amy be hard to see that because i always say his objective is purely to frustrate us. imagine trying to build a bridge to him. it's hard. >> i think we have time for -- five minutes. maybe we will get to questions in. >> as the man who wrote the last artificial intelligence policies and the use of a.i., around the next set of policies will be, what has changed since you wrote that last policy and what do you think will be taken into account as we set new barriers. >> for those of you don't know, he's the deputy secretary in 2013. no one was paying any attention to a.i. but we were. what it says, i think it's still basically right. i think it's basically right. it's actually a lesson for a.i. in general. what i said was that as always, we take our values to the battlefield. i make no apologies about that. in the matter of a.i., there would not be an autonomous use of lethal force that is literally autonomous. there were always be a human being involved in the decision to use lethal force on behalf of the united states. that's not the same as the man in the loop. it's not like somebody inside the commuter trying to keep up with the computer. it is an ethical and accountable decision. the reason i said that was, i imagined myself with the secretary that i was working for, the morning after something happened, like an airstrike which has gone wrong people are not part of that, intended targets were injured. i imagine myself going before the press and saying they did it. crucified. and i should be. you're not going to take that -- by the way, the same thing through self driving car, the judge is going to want to know whether somebody is responsible for this. means something has to be blamed over everything. there is such a thing as a mistake. we all accept that. but there has to be -- in order for these to be deployed in a way that makes consequential decisions, that affect people, has to be enough transparency and enough accountability in the systems and that will be designed criteria for us in the department. i have to say it has to be designed criteria. you can build and there are some of these algorithms which are very difficult to retrace in the path of decision. it is something engineers have to building but that's what i do, engineering programs and technology. that something that will be done. that's what it says. i think we can elaborate but i think it's basically a right thing. six years later, it is still rate to me. >> we want to have to close this session. where is the leadership come from? these are big challenges. how do you compete with china? how do we maintain the military superiority of our technological base? i interviewed our friends, the year end half ago, 2017. she is our cochair. i member think something like, what -- what you worry about the most? that she would say around, north korea, she said we lost our self-confidence. i interviewed someone who is the foreign minister, at the school where we work. i said, you got a lot on your plate. iran, russia, china. what are you worried about? she said europeans. i took these two statements and women, world leaders to be that we don't really have someone in western leadership. who is saying that the democratic way as opposed to the authoritarian way, chinese, russian, five democrat ways. i think what you just said, you've got confidence that the united states and tech community our universities can actually meet the test of this technological revolution. his self-confidence part of our problems? his leadership part of our problem? >> it is. i'm not pessimistic. i think we do have the best system in the world. i think our values are -- there are things i believe in. i want to let my children live in a world like that. i think most of the world wants to live that way. no matter what the leaders are. no sense, we are claiming a winning moral hand. leaders like the ones you named and all the technological change that goes on. it will take and i was impressed with this earlier but from what i talked about earlier, this cooperation between, i think you talked about operation between the world of business, the world of government and thought. the ideas. it does take that coming together. a lot of issues i talked about earlier, the biotech revolution, a.i., social media, these are with people. they hadn't taken on the political toxicity of other settled issues. sensitive part. people are bewildered by it. they haven't figured out how to find up with it. that is the one couple sitting in this. in this technological picture to me is if we can make doing something sensible available in front and center, people may come together behind it. that is true for your ship in the world as well. i think there is a demand for that. i'm not pessimistic. i don't think you are by nature either. people in this room on either. >> we were in danger of depressing this group earlier. with a big threat. it's nice to leave on hope that we americans have faith in ourselves. and faith in our society. thank you. [applause] thank you all for being with us. thank you very much. [applause] >> c-span's "washington journal" live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up this morning, the washington monthly's paul glastris discusses how democrats can regain support from the climbing role areas in the united states. and then the daily caller's stephanie hamill discusses the future of the president trump administration. and the u.s. ambassador to venezuela, patrick duddy, on the political unrest in that country. live "washington journal" at 7:00 this morning. join the discussion. >> virginia governor ralph northam held a news conference in richmond to deny he is one of the men in this racially charged photo that was on his 1984 medical school year book page. the governor also vowed to remain in office despite calls from virginia democrats and others around the country for him to resign. this is 45 minutes. this is 45 minutes. gov. northam: good afternoon. thank you all for being here. i am pleased to be joined by my wife, pam. pam, thank you for being here as well. there has been much public discussion about racist and offensive materials that appeared on my page of the 1984 eastern virginia medical school yearbook. i bee

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