He was not the best student in high school, he was a c and d student but he loved to rock climb. He was already, as a teenager, a worldfamous rock climber. He had been on some rockclimbing magazines of the young prodigy and all he did in class was think about rockclimbing and one day he went hiking in Mount WashingtonNew Hampshire with his friend in the ice climbed and they got the top of the mountain, the wind shifted and they were in the middle of a blizzard and they went down the runway. They descended into the wilderness. They wandered and they got lost and they almost died and they were rescued on the brink of death and he had severe frostbite in both his legs were imitated below the knee. The doctors told him he would never walk or run or climb again and every night he would go to sleep and he would dream that he was running through the cornfields behind his parents house with hair, the wind running through his hair and he would wake up and see his legs were gone and was devastating care. Soon he was tired of being in bed so he scooted out of bed and started climbing around. He realized he could pull himself up on the refrigerator. He had all this arm strength. He convinced his brothers to take him rockclimbing, and on the rock wall, he was able, he was even lighter than he was before so he began tinkering with his pas prosthetics. He made them long and stomps with blade so he could climb these areas that he can climb before and soon he was an even better climber than had been before and he was on 60 minutes and kind of worldfamous again it was this inspirational story of this boy wonder, but when he got down, his prosthetics were no better than the peg leg that had been designed for civil war soldiers or parrots a couple hundred years ago. So he began tinkering with them and he began enrolling in engineering and math classes and he became a straight a student and he was a accepted into mit and today is one of the leading bionic engineers in the world. What he has done is, he has taken these technologies that im talking about that are driving this revolution which are computing and sensing technologies and he has used them to make bionic limbs that are so similar to the real thing that when i went to go visit him at mit i couldnt even tell he was wearing them. We were walking across and i was slipping and he was wearing fancy italian leather shoes and what he did, this is sort of what we will see more of a greater resolution, but when you think about it, i wrote down this number. We have 206 bones and joints at about 4000 tendons. Small portion of those are on our leg. What he did is he took ablebodied individuals, use the same kind of motion capture technologies that you see for any of those movies, and he had them show how parts of the legs move in relation to each other. You can tell when your ankles at this angle in your knee is here and youre moving down at this and what happens to your foot. He was able to take these variables and put them into a computer algorithm and put them on a computer chip and then he built robotic parts that can emulate the real thing. Its a manageable number when you think about it, 206 bones, 306 joins, however many different parts, but its still beyond our capacity to figure out by hand. When you think about the advances in Computing Power and sensing power just in recent years is set only becomes a manageable problem and so he built robotic parts out of silicone and various things in this device that he has made a just 100 times. Second. Hes done tests on treadmills with oxygen and co2 and it really does emulate the real thing. It feels so realistic that disabled people, often when they tried out to begin to cry because it feels so real. Theres a long way to go. You have to hook it up to the nervous system if you want to do the real thing, but thats just an example of what we can do. When you take that further, thats what i wanted to look at in my book, all the different areas we hear about have to do with reverse engineering and doing the same thing except on a much greater level. How many neurons do we have . We have 300 billion i guess i may be 3 billion nucleotides in our gino, we dont have computational power to reverse engineer that, but its amazing, people are trying to do that to a certain extent and its amazing how far we have come in some of these areas. When you think about genetic engineering, there are some mutations that are caused by a single, some mutations are caused by a single mutation. I look at one of them, theres a negative regulator muscle growth and its a protein and if you knock out that gene you get bigger muscles. Theres somebody who was at the university of pennsylvania named lee sweeney and he made these things called Arnold Schwarzenegger mice. They got really big when he knocked out miles staten. Hes been using this as a potential therapy for people with muscular dystrophy and then of course dopers got a hold of this and meatheads are getting ripped. So lee sweeney, in addition to pushing this and trying to push this is also a member of the world anti doping society. When you look at something called intelligence, some people, theres thousands of genes that can be involved in combination with environment we dont necessarily have the computational power. Theres a company in china called bgi and they have sequenced about a thousand people with high intelligence that have been trying to get to the bottom of it, but they are using supercomputers and its only going to get easier as these technologies improve. Thats one example of where we are and in terms of the brain, i looked at the most extreme example which is China Understanding and decoding and imagining speech. Theres people, it seems like the ultimate challenge theres people who have what are locked in and have lou gehrigs disease and have lost their ability to speak. Theres a project that was funded by the u. S. Military, there was a guy at the Army Research office was a scienc Science Fiction fan and he had always dreamed of a thought helmet. He actually funded people under some here from Washington University, i wrote about him, hes in the Mit Technology review this month and i watched him do brain surgery but him and a collaborator, they actually, they have discovered an actual neuro signature of imagined speech and what they found is that when we talk our mind sends a signal to the motor cortex to tell the muscles of our articulators how to talk but it also sends a copy to the auditory cortex as a correction mechanism so we know when something is wrong. Amazingly enough when we just imagine speaking, it still sends the signal there and you can actually pick up that signal. So eric from Washington University and another researcher can tell if they are imagining or reciting the gettysburg address or the mlk i have a dream speech, but they cant, you know, listen in on your thoughts and decode it yet altogether. But you can imagine that once we have computational power to monitor 100 million or 300 million neurons, maybe Something Like that would be possible. Anyway, as you can imagine theres all sorts of areas where there is potential growth in the future and thats what i explored and theres all sorts of ethical issues as well. I asked somebody at the beijing economic institute, what you think about should we really be able to tweak intelligence and he said well, i think every parent should be able to have their child be as intelligent as they want and i thought well is there anything that would alarm you. He said why can imagine very aggressive tiger mom who wants to engineer her child with perfect combination of intelligence and ruthlessness and she gives him anti social lack of empathy and so that was a little alarming to think about. So i dont know. We have to grapple with these issues and theres no easy answer. I asked military scientists of if these were Good Technologies are Bad Technology and they said it depends. As a baseball bat a good thing or bad thing. Its good if we play baseball and its bad if we beat someone over the head with it. These are issues we have to deal with. In terms of commercialization, it depends on, its just going to increase our level, what we rely on now we rely on small molecule drugs and we systemically alter the molecules in all of our body will be able to get more specific as these technologies improve. I also wrote about a Technology Weather actually trying to stimulate neurons with electricity which is much more robust. We are a long ways away from us. Anyway, that is my talk. Im happy to answer questions. Thank you. Did anyone want to ask a question . In your lifetime do you think we will be able too. In your lifetime do you think we will have solved the most complex dangerous brain cancers . I dont know, but i have seen many encouraging things. One thing thats going on youve probably heard of is immunotherapy and somebody was just telling me last night there was a National Laboratory whether using supercomputers to look at cancer and look at some of the data sets from veterans and as we have big data, we can discover some of these things. I did, i have been down to a place in houston where theyve set up this platform where they are looking at sort of, theres an interesting battle that goes on between different cancerous tumors and the immune system. I dont know if anyone has heard of these things called Checkpoint Inhibitors but they saved jimmy carters life and basically there are the switches in the immune system that can be turned on and off and some cancers are able to flip a switch that turns off different components of the immune system and at m. D. Anderson they are learning to flip it back on. In glioblastoma, im not sure what goes on in that, it seems a very effective way to fight cancer would be to harness the bodys own immune system, but i do not know specifically where they are on that. Thinking about how you suggested that a mother might choose particular traits for her child, sort of raises the nature versus nurture argument from a different perspective, but presumably, the child would still be limited by the genetic material they had to work with. Right. Well i guess the idea that bgi is going by her that people are talking about is if you understand the genetic code and what combination of nucleotides would predispose someone to intelligence then you could use Something Like the various Gene Editing Technologies that people are developing to rewrite the genome and give them that combination of genes, that genetic code that would allow them to be the most intelligent, but you know i guess what im saying is there are so many variables involved and its so complicated that its such a complex combination between different nucleotides and an environment where i think we are a long way from decoding exactly what will allow us to control intelligence. If we can just add a little complexity to that, we thought, as biologists in the human genome project when it was complete that we would understand this. Turns out as we, as most of you know, each gene codes for a peptide or protein. So if you know how many jeans you have, you should be able to match those to the number of peptides. It turns out theres several multiplication and the diversity from the genome. So just by gene editing, it wont get you that. The other complexity here, is if you take two identical twins, humans, some of you may be aware, their fingerprints are actually different. Even though they have exactly the same genome their phenotype has been modified in their Embryonic Development let alone the nurture once are born. Simply thinking that if we can identify the gene, slice it, put something in and result in a final human being that will have those traits is far from the reality. Nature has levels of complexity. Im just giving you some examples. Its not just one gene, one trait even when we think thats the case. On the other hand, there are some, genetics is some weight revolutionar revolutionizing certain companies. Regeneron is a company that has partnered with all sorts of academics who are studying populations that have rare mutations with powerful affect theres also this company in iceland called the code, because the population is so homogenous, theyve collected a lot of the dna from a lot of the individuals and its easier to spot very powerful mutations that are associated with different diseases that could predispose you. Usually at the combination of a lot of things. For instance, they had found in elderly patients a mutation that seem to make it harder for them to get alzheimers disease and it didnt explain alzheimers disease, but apparently it made it harder for them to form the tangles that actually cause it. If you could replicate that with a small molecule drug, you could presumably combat alzheimers, but you couldnt give somebody intelligence, necessarily. Adam, as you went around the world and talk to people, did you notice a difference from an ethical perspective in intellectual augmentation versus physical augmentation . I dont know. It seems like there are some studies from scientific journals that many people in academic already try to intellectually augment themselves with ritalin or all sorts of stuff, and i dont know what its like in college nowadays, but, i have actually, you can see the same thing that happened was steroids is happening with some of these genes and things like miles staten. As soon as they get discovered in the scientific literature and are used to help the weakest among us, steroids were originally used for muscle disease in people who were survivors of the holocaust, athletes started using them. Recently i wrote about somebody for businessweek, a guy at uc san diego named james evans and hes actually found a mutation that has found these receptors, but if you tweak them they can make, they can allow a mouse to run twice as far as he normally would. Its like this fat burning switch so if you administer this drugs, the body starts to burn more glucose and you delay the point at which it hits the wall and they call these mice marathon mice. When he First Published the paper about a drug that did this in 2008, he gave a copy of, a reference sample to the Anti Doping Authority and i think theyve seen them on the Tour De France within two weeks. But the Anti Doping Authority was so alarmed that they put out a notice warning that the trials has been stopped because they had found it caused cancerous tumors in mice so that helps a little bit, but i think there has been evidence that the soviet, or thes former soviet union doping society have used this in some places but recently they came out with a new drug that supposedly doesnt have these tumor causing effects. You can be sure its already being made in china and bought on the black market. Its hard to control. [applause] think you. Our next session is a series of fireside chats and ted style talks featuring speakers representing a Broad Spectrum of the private sector who will highlight Disruptive Technologies and their impact on the u. S. Economy. To moderate this session, please welcome the executive Vice President for the council on competitiveness, mr. Chad evans. [applause] Economic Growth drivers of all overtime. In the pre18th century, the main driver of Economic Growth was cultivation. It was extraction. In the 19th and 20th century, the main economic drivers are really manufacturing and industry. As we look forward into the 21st century, building on a manufacturing renaissance and new energy strength, what we see is that compute power driven innovation coupled with Human Potential will be the core drivers for future growth. This afternoon, conversations over the next 90 minutes will reflect some of this revolution, some of this transformation. As we explore the implications and the impact of big data and data analytics. Americas future workforce, the challenges and the opportunities they face. The rise of robotics, Autonomous Systems and an increasingly ondemand economy. An increasingly touchless society. New frontiers of medicine and healthcare and Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience in an increasingly fragile world. This afternoons First Insight will come from the doctor jackson, the Vice President and chief Technology Officer of Lockheed Martin. He will share some of his thoughts on how the physical and digital word ol world are colliding and converging every day through sensors, networks and the tsunami of data. Big data is a game changer for generating value and enhancing competitiveness. As a society, we produce today , actually every two days, as much data that was generated from the beginning of time until the beginning of the 21st century. And then, in just two years the amount of the available Digital Information in the world will rise from 5 50 zettabytes. Within this turbulent data rich, image driven intensive world, companies and organizations are finding ways to seize opportunities, expand the horizon and create new businesses, new markets. I would like to welcome doctor jackson who will share his insight and perspective from space and defense sector. [applause] i am finding the clicker here. Thank you. Let me maybe that with the question. How many people got to the form via commercial airlines . So first of all, im glad you all made it here safely. Im hardly surprised. The reason is, the likelihood of anyone being involved in an accident, any accident, not a fatal accident is about 3 million. Our Airline Industry commercial aviation has an amazing Safety Record and the reason is the industry has been laser focused