I did get to know to students who had been adopted by American Families as well and their stories are in the book and i probably dont have time to share with you the whole journey, but theres some very moving moments about adoption and an American Family welcoming them into their home here as well. Maybe thats a good note to end on. Youre actually a very expert guide. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Im going to be signing books. [applause] what is your next project . I wish i knew. Inaudible conversations yeah, i can do that. Im glad you guys told me. And now we are live from savanna, georgia for the citys annual book festival. But a full day of authors ahead including ryan curtis, 1942 rose bowl was moved from california to North Carolina after pearl harbor, Scott Shapiro and the peace pact of 1928 that outlawed war around the world. Celeste headley on the importance of communication in the install in on the relationship between hitting bull and buffalo bill. Follow along throughout the day in all of our social media sites facebook, twitter and instagram beef for behindthescenes photos and videos. booktv is herv handle. We kick off this year with retired air force Major GeneralRobert Latiff on the future of technology and war. Live coverage on booktv on cspan2. Good morning. My name is nancy lee and im delighted to welcome you to the 11th annual savanna book festival. It is presented by georgia power, david and Nancy Cintron coming the Sheehan Family and mark and pat shuman. Many thanks to jack and mary romanos, our sponsors for this glorious venue. The Trinity United Methodist church. We would like to extend special thanks to our literati members and individual donors who have made and continue to make Saturdays Free festival events possible. 90 of our revenues come from donors just like you. Thank you. We are very excited to have savanna book festival app this year for your phone. Please look in your program for information on downloading it. It takes a few seconds and it would be very helpful to you today. Before we get started, i have a couple of housekeeping notes. Immediately following this presentation, Robert Latiff will be signing purchase copies of his book just across the way. If you are planning to stay in this venue for the next presentation, please move a word as it empties the lashes can accurately count available seats. Please take a moment to turn off your cell phones. And we also ask that you do not use flash photography. During the questionandanswer portion, please raise your hand and i will call on you and one of the ushers will bring a microphone to you. In the interest of time and to be fair to all of the other attendees, please limit yourself to one question and please dont tell a story. Robert latiff is with us today courtesy of hugh and for in comments. Dr. Robert h. Latiff as an adjunct faculty member at the university of notre dame and he is the director of Intelligence Community programs at george masonda University School of engineering. He is a member of the air force bettys ford and the Intelligent Community studies board of the National Academy of sciences, engineering and medicine. Please give a warm welcome to Robert Latiff. [applause] well, let me think he and his savanna book festival for having me here. This is really an awesome event. First of all, i appreciate your interest in my work. Also, i dont know if any of you saw the savanna morning news, they did a really nice review an interview she had with me. As a retired military person, ive probably done a thousand speeches. Standing up in front of a group talking about a book is a little bit like talking about your kids. A little bit harder. But this is a really important topic. Now, probably more so than itta everer been. I know if you read the news you would hear all of this talk. I actually saw an article yesterday or the day before in one of the publications talking about drifting towards work, very much like we did for world war i. I think it is a frightening time, but probably a very timely time to talk about my book. I will talk a little bit about whyt i wrote it and how i cameo write it, which i think is really a cool story. I always like to tell it. And then comes some of the teams that are in it. If it isnt immediately obvious to you, i grew up in rural southeastern kentucky. Never did get rid of the accen. I was a product of the sputnik era, so i was all about science and technology, was interested in space and strangely enough coming Nuclear Weapons. And somehow or the other i got into the university of notre dame. Never figured that one out, but they let me end and it became immediately obvious to me that i had no means to pay for it. Thus entered the army, rotc, was going to serve my four years, get out and become the nobel prizewinning physicist. That didnt work so i stayed 32 years in the military. Fixed in the army, 24 years in the air force. Trained foreign century to go to vietnam. Turns out i didnt go to vietnam. After my phd in notre dame i went to germany, where he stood astride the full account facing 100 divisions of soviet infantry who were going to nuke when they came across the border. And to that, i actually commanded an Army TacticalNuclear Weapons unit that was going to hand out nukes to the firing battalions. Switch to the air force, and became very involved in research, development, reconnaissance, space, intelligence coming Nuclear Weapons, all very, very high tech stuff. My career was about hightech weaponsee systems. So, why did i write the book . Well, as a young 26yearold army captain, having to give Nuclear Weapons to people really caused me to think about my role fastforward 20 so years i again have the opportunity opportunity if you call it that, opportunity to be involved in released Nuclear Weapons should that ever happen. And many, many other things. Or really at the fall of the berlin wall, the fall of communism, right about the time, kick Saddam Hussein out of the way. Then you would have thought both were sad in the fall of communism, you would have thought we wouldve gone world war iii, the way we were acting. So after that, we sort of became bullies. We were the strongest nation on earth, the only remaining superpower and we let everybody know what appeared and that kind of bothered me. Fastforward again 2003. That was the crux of what bothered me was the invasion of iraq and its Public Knowledge that i was very concerned about that. So i retired to the air force, went to work withh the industry and begin immediately thinking about all of this stuff and then called my friends at notre dame and said ive got some issues here, can we talk about it . Of course come you can develop a course for us, which we al did. Now would you teach it . So still today, eight years later, 10 years later and traveling back and forth to notre dame to teach Young Students about war and technology. I dont know if anybody watches notre dame football, but if you do, during halftime dailies highlight the student faculty member and is so popular they highlighted me on national television, which is kind of cool. Tetwo minutes of fame and that t the attention of the New York Times. So sam freedman, a wonderful editor at the New York Times interviewed me. Great article and not caught the attention of random house. If you know anything about the publishing business, jonathan siegel, whose authors have semiposters to their credit. Probably going to disappoint him john was a wonderful editor, just as marvelous things, was very nice to me and very patient. So the themes of the book. Number one, the war as we knew it, as i knew it growing up really is changing. Thats sort of obvious. War in technology have always gone together. Ethics is critical to soldiers and there is a big chasm between the American Military and the American People. Not only that, our leaders, political leaders, some of the themes are unfettered Technology Innovation has some down side. This coming from a a lifelong gk we are often as i said sort of militarist take, eric and technologies. I think arms control is moving. So we are mesmerized by war. We are mesmerized by technology. Steel, gunpowder, submarines, Nuclear Weapons. The computer, the internet. It was not al gore who invented the internet. It was defensive ends internet agency. So all off these things are military encourages technology and technology encourages the military were seduced by it. One of my favorite pictures is a picture of the apple store in new york city when a new apple phone comes out there are lines a mile long. You ask people that are there because theres a new iphone, just because we are seduced by it. Robert oppenheim are, father of the atomic arms basically said we were seduced by a peer be worried about it afterwards. And, marine general james mattis, who used to be one of my heroes often said to his soldiers come youve got to forget about technology. You have to deal to operate on your own. Hes not saying that anymore. We have the largest Defense Budget in the world. Larger than the next eight countries combined. We are the largest proliferator in the world. Twice as much as russia. So war is different. You all know that. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare, cyberwarfare, intrusion in our elections comes and advanced technologies like fiber and other things are available to more people all over the world. People worry about cyberattacks on our electric grid. We saw what happened with sony. If anyones read about the virus , war is going to be closer to home as weve seen. We are making it obvious that countries like china are really beating us badly in some technology areas. So, the machines will watch it for us. I worked in an organization so they are going to be watching that here thats not it. Not only it. Pretty much everything in the world now i disconnect it to the internet. So all you have to do is go on the internet and look at the data. Machines are going to think for us. In the military and the intelligence business, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are going to sort of give us the answers and you will be to us to say yes or no. Theyre going to fight for a. Even today, we see robots on battlefields. Fortunately the robots of the battlefields and drums are all controlled by humans now, but thats not always going to be the case. Soldiers are going to be different and ill talk a little bit abouts that. War is going to be fast, and may be subtle. We may not even know its happening or it may happen and its going to be global. So some of the technologies. Ive actually heard the military being described as a giant armed nervous system. So everything is connected to everything else. Its like information technology. We are now at a point where we can put literally billions of transistors on a ship. Advance data mining, Artificial Intelligence. Have you seen the news, the dod just asked for another 18 billion to put into things like things like Artificial Intelligence. Weapons will have Decision Making capability. They are defensive in nature. The antimissile system, but more and more offensive weapons sort of sneak up on the Decision Making capability. They are at least watching the loop, but war will bewa so fast that humans will become irrelevant and we may actually slide into the case of decisions being made, not even really knowing. Weapons will go to a targeted area. They might seek permission first and they might not if theres no communication. The drones in all these technologies to make our soldiers that are and keep them out of harms way, that they need to, the little bit of thinking. I talk in the book about soldier enhancements. Exoskeletons to help soldiers listening for pharmaceuticals. Right now airplane pilots drugs to keep them awake here theyre talking about giving drugs to soldiers to make a more courageous, less fearful, less pain. We need to think about that. And then theres this whole area of narrow science. This one is really interesting. I was able to talk to the agency about some of the work they are doing, mostly for treatment of soldiers with dramaticc brain injuries, good stuff to restore functions to soldiers and theyve also learned they can enhance normal soldiers. They can make soldiers more and faster. They can actually treat things. Its gotten to the point where they can identify the structure of the brain of what some thoughts are. Think about that. If you can read about, you can write a thought. This is very scary stuff. Then there is an increasing concern about biological enhancement or biology, synthetic virology of anyone whos read about crisper, theyll probably win a nobel prize, crisper virus entity. The worry is in the director of National Intelligence actually said chris perry is a defense threat, and intelligence threat. The worry is that people will create viruses that are amenable to treatment, so we worry about that. Cyberwar, ive talked about power grid. There is actually a case in which a man is sitting in the back of an airplane was able to hack into the cockpit. The weapons is of huge concern and this is another area the dod will be spending 12 billion on cyber, electromagnetic pulse. If anybody read the book one second after, the electromagnetic pulse, pretty bad. And you can do it without a nuclear bomb. The technology is out there being developed. Weapons that go 15 to 20 times the speed of sound. So, Technology Moving really, really fast. Ifif you look at Technology Adoption curves, they are coming more frequently in getting into the public much, much faster. Even i coveted phd in engineering cant even keep up. So what do you expect of the normal American Public . They basically look at the technology and say okay, got it. Thee problem is the u. S. Is technologically pretty illiterate when it comes to the rest of the world. And this is okay in civilian life. I get it. If we dont understand how netflix gives us the recommendation for a next movie, it doesntvi matter. But it does matter in the military. When we are going to kill people, it matters a lot. We have to understand the consequences. I dedicated this book to a friend of mine, retired former navy was in Vietnam Delta was exposed multiple times to agent orange and died from agent orange. We have to really think before we employ the thing thats what the consequences are. We knew what the consequencesef were. Man, is he against technology or what. The technology is good. Obviously health care, everything that weve done is just wonderful things like antibiotics. The problem with antibiotics as we got really used it and an hour having having a hard time trying to find ones that work. We have more food than we know what to do with, but a lot of drugs in our food. A. I. Is the technology that is eating the government. Everyone is getting a. I. We need to understand because we dont actually know how it works, even the specialist will really know. So i moved on to talk about technology. I thought it was really fun and i talk about technology again. I was actually teaching a course at George Mason University to a bunch of master students, one of whom was a chaplain. An Army Chaplain had just come back from iraq, where 16 of the soldiers in his unit were killed and hundreds were wounded. And he talked to me about how difficult it was to treat the wounded souls of soldiers. Believe it or not, they are people and when they go out and kill others, maybe even civilians, it bothers them a lot. And so, he talked how important it was for soldiers to understand what is correct and what is not correct in warfare. I talk about theory and the laws of our conflict and he was very interested in that. And in that chapter, i try to take those technologies, all those really Cool Technologies we are talking about and bounds them up against the laws of our conflict and say are these thingsnd right . Do they satisfy the proportionality in the distinction and discrimination of combatants and so on and so forth. You might say well, that is just so much talk, but its actually important. Leadership is important. I talk about some of the things that yes we the United States didd in bombing a civilian targt in massacres in vietnam and in other places. And then we talk about the leadership. For instance, robots. The example i used is a robot. There is this idea that humans and robots are actually going to fight together on the battlefield. Im sitting in a foxhole with my robot and somebody throws a grenade in. Is my robot going to jump on the grenade . Am itop . Going to jump on the grenade to save the robot . The courage and loyalty income moderate in august and is come into question when we are talking about machines. Enhancements, drugs, neuroscience, is that soldier operating with free will . Can you make a moral decision . I dont know. We are trying to make machines more like people, somewhere in the middle is going to be a mass. The editor asked me, besides you, who cares about this stuff . Well, that sent me on a rant and chop or for. And my answer was unfortunately rtmost nobody. A few writers like myself and others, but not very many people. So i call into this d