People here are dying of overdoses that could be reversed if someone had this on the scene, we need to be doing everything in our power to make it more widely accessible. Host here is john from seattle, washington. Caller good morning, gentlemen. This is an interesting conversation. This the second time i have called the spin in about 30 years. I just came from rhode island, and i find this conversation from theng, especially Law Enforcement aspect with the tillman said police basically when it comes to heroin, they the lawfish enforcement aspect where the gentleman said police are kind of standoffish. My son graduated from st. Johns university and told me the only time he was stopped and frist, the only time someone put their hands on him was when he was going up there in new york. The first conversation we had was with this heroin epidemic of their, why are they not doing it there its coming to the Law Enforcement aspect, like they pick and choose what they want. O attack if it was crack in the inner cities, you would see every Police Presence pulling everybody over. But now that you have this serious epidemic of heroin in rural and suburban america, its, you know, totally this is beinghow handled. I wish this could be handled in an even way, and i wish there were treatment for everyone, but this kind of connects us with the i started losing my train of thought here, so forgive me. It was the correction, private prisons, all of this stuff is connected in a sense. Thats why we see the disparagement in treatment, in response to this epidemic. Really feel for the families going through this. For me, its like im facing the crack epidemic again but in rural america. This is not the first time we have seen drug issues hit rural america. We certainly saw that and continue seeing this in some parts of the country with methamphetamine or crystal meth. The challenges that a lot of these communities have issues with unemployment, issues with poverty, issues with poor access to health care and when they are vulnerable to a broader societal crisis like addiction, if its methamphetamine, alcohol, heroin , there are not a lot of resources, and its easy for in a issues to take hold lot of these communities. I think in many parts of the country, its not so much that the police have then hands in terms of heroin, it that they have their hands full and own sure what else they can be doing. Thats why this Public Health peace comes into the picture. Weve heard the police chief saying we need Public Health to step it up because we got our hands full. Where you guys are dealing with the treatment side and the prevention site, we see in many places in new england in particular, the police reaching out, reaching across the silos to their Public Health counterparts in saying we got to work on this together, and Public Health has not always been part of these conversations, including this new white house funding. I think we are seeing that shift so we are treating the whole spectrum of the problem, not just handcuffs over here and health care over here. Talk about Needle Exchanges in this heroin issue we are talking about. Does the White House Program address any of that, or has the white house addressed the topic of Needle Exchanges . Guest the white house recently updated their National Aids hiv strategy, which is the federal plan to address the hiv epidemic. One of the things they reiterated when they release a strategy last month is that Needle Exchange is still an evidencebased effective way to prevent the spread of hiv amongst people who are injecting drugs. It has become more relevant than ever because we saw a few months outbreake indiana hiv linked to the injection of prescription painkillers. We are seeing hepatitis see spreading due to the heroin epidemic in many parts of the country, including many of the state that are covered by this new white house initiative, so while the initiative is health does not directly address syringe exchange, were seeing Law Enforcement officers and Public Health officials in places like west virginia, kentucky, indiana, ohio, pennsylvania saying, we got to take a look at this as part of the strategy. It makes sense as Early Intervention and as a way to hook people up with health care and drug treatment. We cannot just say if you got needles, we have a right to lock you up because we know thats not going to solve the Public Health or the criminal justice side of the problem, so there has been a groundswell of support and a lot of these communities that are really hard ,it or Needle Exchange recognizing theres a history of controversy over these programs, but the evidence points in the direction that they can be an important part of the solution. Our guest is the policy director with the Harm Reduction coalition. Daniel raymond joining us from new york. Harmreduction. Org is the website if you want to learn more. Were talking about heroin abuse in the United States and a new white house effort to counteract that. Sarah from florida, hello, you are on. I have been struggling with opiate and heroin addiction for a little over seven years now, and i have then through rehab. I have then through jail. I do want to say one thing, though there is, you know, the jail since of it, but an i knowis an addict, and ive looked at as a criminal as ,ell just because i use drugs and i obtain them, but i do not, commit crimes to obtain, and i know the crime rate is completely up right now , and im int central florida. In order to not be sick thats another thing. Die from, and you can coming off these drugs, and. Hats the worst part once you abstain and dont use anything for about 10 of months, you start feeling normal again, and it is insanity because we go right back to it. I have then put in treatment facilities, and it does not work unless you want it. Host can i ask how it started for you . Was it painkillers or other means . Caller painkillers. And theres gateway pills, too. Muscle relaxers. The doctors definitely pounded were allowed to, before they cracked down on all of them. Up fromike im washed , and i still obtained to feel normal. Its not even a high anymore. Its just to feel normal. Host stay on the line. We will let our guest talk to you. Caller thank you for calling. I wish you the best of luck. Please dont give up and continue to hold out. I think that another life as possible for you, but everything you said resonates so much for me. I think people ask why you just dont going to drug treatment. Drug treatment doesnt work the first time for everybody. People ask what you keep using even when you know what it is doing to your life, and that description you have of the withdrawal process, when you become physically dependent, its agonizing. Its the most horrible feeling. You feel like you are going to die. Its so painful, and that is what propels people forward, even when their rational mind knows that this is potentially harming them. But i know that you are not alone. Many other people are struggling. I hope you get the support and help you need, and please do not give up. Know that people listening today will be rooting for you. Phyllis next, and hes also from florida. Go ahead. Phil is next. Caller i was certified back in 1971, and i was put into the rockefeller program, it was called, and it was voluntary. I was not put there by the law. I spent six months there. I got out of there for six months. You went to school. They had woodworking classes. They had electrician classes. They had a program, and they had therapy. I dont even know if it is still in existence, but im down here in florida, and i did not know what to do. It cost me 350 just to get on the clinic. 340 a month. Was on the wages they pay in florida, how the hell is anyone going to organize their lives or . Y to get themselves together medicaid pays for your methadone in new york. In florida, uhuh. Every penny you make goes to the clinic. Host lets get the perspective of our guest. Guest you are talking about an issue that we in florida and many parts of the country here that people are seeking help, trying a methadone program, and theyve learned what they need to know and are ready to make a change, and a lot of these programs, some of them are cash only. Some of the states, the programs are not paying for the methadone, and we have this fantastic treatment. Nothing is one size fits all. Nothing is the perfect treatment for absolutely everybody, but the people it works for, it really works for. If you have to fight to get access to methadone, fight to pay for methadone, then we are doing something wrong, and we need to look at how our state Medicaid Program policies are looking at covering methadone as well as look at how private Insurance Markets are covering it because far too many places were seeing will only cover for six months or will cover this treatment but not this treatment or will only cover it up to a certain dose, and these are not waste on medical expertise. These are not based on scientific guidelines. These are restrictions that are payers to save these money, and they are hurting our efforts to end the heroin and opium crisis. I think the stories im hearing from you and many other people around the country need to become a Ground Spring of change and reform and how we are financing and paying for effective medication assisted treatment for heroin use. Host how do we know if the white house effort they are going to make is going to be a successful one . I asked howest they will be measuring success, and they are negotiating it with states they fun right now, but in my opinion, part of it is a shift from saying traditionally, the measure of success for law is around arrests, around Drug Trafficking organizations disrupted. When you bring Public Health into the picture, you are looking at a different set of indicators. How many lives are we saving because we prevented people run dying of overdose . Those are the questions we need to be asking the administration and the states that are funded to implement this. How are you measuring success, and can we use these Public Health measures of preventing fatal overdose, connecting people to drug treatment programs, as the measures we want to see advanced here . Host Daniel Raymond with the Harm Reduction coalition. If you want to find out more, you can find a link on our cspan website on the next washington for the jobector market for College Grads talks about hyping jobs hyping jobs and effects on soontobe college graduates. A discussion on opposition to the iranian deal. War ahor of ashleys tale of women soldiers on the special ops battlefield talk about the role that women have on battlefield. As always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook or twitter. Washington journal on cspan. Virtual reality pioneers and Sebastian Thrun recently discussed the work of douglas engelbert, who invented the computer mouse, developed hypertext, and the networked computers. From stanford university, this is one hour and 15 minutes. [applause] welcome to our conversation about a digital future. I will start a fight introducing our speakers, jared and Sebastian Jaron and sebastian. I will start with the first question. There will be plenty of time and budget microphones for your questions, so be paired for that. Lets move on to our speakers, jaron, who is next to me. A computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on a numerous topics including High Technology business, the social impact of technology, consciousness information, internet politics, and the future of humanism. Jaron has been on because but technological innovation for some time as a pioneer in Virtual Reality, a term coined by the First Company to sell vr products. He is currently an Interdisciplinary Science at microsoft research. Remain acclaimed Books International bestsellers. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by time magazine. Sebastian thrun is c. E. O. Of udacity, a google fellow. And a Research Professor at stanford university. He has published over 370 scientific papers and 11 books, and he is a member of the u. S. National academy of engineering. That Company Named thrun the fifth most creative business, and one touted him global thinker number four. [laughter] thrun works on revolutionizing transportation, education and mobile devices. In 2011, he was the first recipient of the first prize given for the advancement of Artificial Intelligence. At google, he founded google x, which is home to projects like the selfdriving car and google glass. We hope this will get you in the mood for this evenings performance. You may be wondering what is this demo . What demo are we talking about . Well, the performance work, the demo was inspired by a 1968 demonstration at the fall joint computer conference of a system that his group had developed at the Stanford Research institute. The announcement described it as apresentiatoin on a computerbased interactive multiconsole display system in which interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capacity. The demo introduced to us the computer mouse, hyper text, computer conferencing network , collaboration and much more. Again, all of this was in 1968. The demo was spectacular, surprising and influential. It is often called the mother of all demos. The project reoriented thinking about how human beings might benefit from computer technology. He changed the conversation about improving computers as calculate machines to ways to use computers to improve things and work collaboratively with other human beings. I want to start with a quotation from an oral history interview, one of several that i did with doug in 1986. I was talking to doug about his work at s. R. I. And asked him why he had called his laboratory the augmentation research center. The question was why did you use the word augmentation to describe his research . I am going to get it and ask for thoughts. Heres what doug said. You are just augmenting basic human capability. There already is a fantastic system. We have to augment basic human capability. But the computer was just another artifact. So that really jolted me. Then i began to realize the unusual characteristics that computer and communication things were offering in speed and quantity. I had done enough work on scaling effects to realize that the whole qualitative nature of some phenomenon can change if you start changing the scale of some part of it. I began to realize how directly the computer could interact with the capabilities we already got. It began to dawn on me that the accumulation of all those changes would make a big impact. A very large thing that came out of that, probably the thing that made the biggest difference in my perspective was the , realization to go after the value that was there, you needed to look at all the candidate changes in the existing human system. Sebastian, i am going to start with you and ask what do you think about work on technology is about augmenting human capabilities . Stien i would say we have been in the human augmentation for hundreds if thought thousands of years. If not thousands of years. Digital and works incredibly well to carry one information to another person. Take augmentation machine on farms. Now we have machines that make us very strong. We have planes that carry us across the ocean. We can it faster, fly higher, and go further. The computer is a step in that journey. It is a massive step. It will have enormous ramifications on our lives. But yes, in the center of it all are we the people. I have never believed in the vision of replacing people. I believe in the vision of empowering people. Henry so you are in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and it is receiving the rap of replacing people . Sebastien some of my colleagues would like to get rid of people. I actually like people. [laughter] there is a reason i am not eager to replicate people pause it is easy. It takes 15 minutes and a lot of passion. We do this all the time. Henry 15 minutes and 21 years. Sebastien lets leave it at that. Not the point i want to make. If we look at successful technology, and i love the idea of looking at it from a historical perspective, because when we zoom out from the iphones and the google glasses and look at hundreds of years, we can understand whats happening today much better. That successful technologies are completely comes lamentably completely complement 32 people. Complementary to people. If we build a machine that looks behaves like us. I dont want my dish washer to say, not today. I wanted to work. If you make it look like us and behave like us, what is the point . It is not about replacement. It is entirely about augmenting us. If you dont believe it, look at the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the heat you have, all these things around you. Transportation to move around. All of these are human augmentation. Henry jaron, what are your thoughts about this augmentation pentagon . Jaron i knew engelbert for many years. He was important to me in my early career. I kept up with him for a long time. The first group started just south of campus here on a stream, now there are condos and not knows what. And god knows what. Used to pick flowers by the cottages in the fields. He was such a lovely guy. I just have to say that. When i was a kid and a teenager, my most important mentor was one of the founders in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He and doug used to have these arguments all the time. If i can characte