Intelligence and the role it played in the world. [applause] can everyone can meet . First of all you will have to use our imagination because there is no fireplace you but we are thinking its a fireside chat. And im so grateful to have this opportunity today. Dr. Kissinger and i met several years ago now. He has been a key person where he can go to for advice about both professional and career things as well as geopolitical events. Very few friends can do both. But dr. Kissinger really needs no introduction. As all of you know hes one of the worlds most renowned geopolitical practitioner as well as anchor and he did all of that well before i came into being. He has that rare combination also of true intellect and a really admire him for taking on something relatively new like ai after the height of his career. Ai is pretty daunting estimate also relatively new to it coming to it, dr. Kissinger decided he wanted to do a deep dive about the technology and about the implications of Artificial Intelligence for our political systems and for geopolitics writ large. As many of you know he is written to make articles both published in the atlantic, 2018 and 2019. I would encourage you all to read both of them. He also wrote the book in 2014 preceding that called world order. [inaudible] sorry, its going in another one of the last chapters of the book talks about the application of technology. It is a real interesting insight. He talks about the ordering system sort of for the world. So during the age of enlightenment it was a reason. The medieval period and was religion. His era is technology and science that helps us sort out events. I think thats a useful way to think about what were going to talk about. He called them the governing concepts [inaudible] articles that are relevant to the commission as well and i will trot out some of these can use them as questions to start out with [inaudible] firstcome he described ai as inherently unstable. Ai systems are constantly in flux as they acquire and analyze new data. To those of you in the audience for National Security professionals, stability is a key concept that we like to ask you have in the system. Theres an inherent contradiction stability of ai and National Security concept. That something i would like dr. Kissinger to talk about a little bit. But even preceding that, we are here really ultimately as we talk about this competition and about the tension that the interim report also talks about it because hopefully this is a contest between two political systems and we shouldnt forget that essentially. Its fun to middle between two political systems and the impact that Artificial Intelligence will have on those systems. Its about whether not Artificial Intelligence will advantage open and democratic countries like ours, or authoritarian states. That something id like to start off with what has conducted his journey to talk a little bit his views about that, if then we will move onto a couple of the questions. Thanks, dr. Kissinger. Thank you very much, noddy. I had the pleasure of working with nadia on several projects and ive seen her from the advisor to the president job, also ended. We were on the Advisory Board, defense Advisory Board together so its a great pleasure to be here. So you can calibrate what im saying, let me give you a few words how i got into this field. I became a great friend of eric schmidt who is today one of my best friends. He invited me to give the speech at google, and before that they showed me some of their extraordinary achievements. And i had barely met eric before then, and i begin my speech by saying, im tremendously impressed by what i have seen, i want you all to understand that i consider google a threat to civilization, as i understand it. [laughing] this was the beginning of our friendship. [laughing] and the next step in my being here was, i was at the national conference, which, in europe, which on its schedule had a provision for Artificial Intelligence. And i thought this was a great opportunity for me to catch up on my jet lag, and i was heading out of the door when eric, who was standing there, said, this might interest you, and you will ought to hear it. Except for that, you might have been spared. [laughing] so i went there and somebody from deep think was explaining that he was designing a computer that would be able to play the game of go, and he was confident that he could design it so that it would be the champion of china and north korea. And as you know, google go has 180 pieces for each side, beginning on an open strategic gain, again, all of the game is to constrict the ability of the opponent until they cant move at all. But when you put your first piece down, its not like chess that you have outlined up. Put your first piece down, you dont know how its going to develop, and it takes a long time to develop. So the idea that you could design a computer that could match this as a creative game seemed extraordinary to me. And i went up to the speaker afterwards and said, how long will it be that we become [inaudible] to the spanish computers . That they will achieve intellectual dominance, and he said he was working on that. [laughing] and he is. So over the years, eric was kind enough to introduce me to a lot of Artificial Intelligence researchers. And i look at it not as a technical person, and i dont challenge or debate the technical side of it. I am concerned with the historical, philosophical, strategic aspect of it. And i have become convinced that Artificial Intelligence and the surrounding disciplines is going to bring a change in human consciousness, exceeding that of the enlightenment. Because the inherent scope of the investigations it imposes. So thats why im here. And i gave a speech at stanford a few weeks ago. At the opening of the Artificial Intelligence center, and as i said its sort of absurd idea. You people who sit in the audience, i said to them, have written thousands of articles. I have written two, and one was a joint authorship with eric and one other person. And i said the only significance of my presence and of what ideal, i said, you people work on the implications, on the applications. I work on the implications, and i dont challenge the applications. I think they are important, they are crucial, but frankly, i think you dont do enough. You dont go the next step, those of you who know something about the field, of what that means if mankind is surrounded by automatic actions that it sometimes cannot explain. Explains what happens. But as i understand it, not always why it happens. So this is why i am here, and its in that context that you ought to assess what im saying. But i have put aside some other work for the last three years to work on this and to educate myself. Because i think in the conceptual field that its the next big step for mankind. Hopefully, theyll listen to, dr. Kissinger. Did they listen to you at the stanford audience . I think the technicians are too modest in the sense that they are doing spectacular things, but they dont ask enough of what it means. I would just say the same for strategists. This is bound to change the nature of strategy. Because several of you can say how much better it is taken [inaudible] i dont think on the global field it is yet understood what this will do. Its still handled as a new technical department. Its not yet understood that it must bring a change in philosophical perception of the world. Much of human effort has been to explain the reality around it. The enlightenment brought a way of looking at it on a mathematical basis and on a rational basis. That was a huge departure already that changed history fundamentally. But the idea that you can explore reality in partnership of what is out there, and that you explore it by means of algorithms that you know what they will produce, but you do not yet know why. That is when people start thinking about it, and i say, well, that will fundamentally affect human perceptions. And this way of thinking up to now, historically, has been largely western think. Of the regions have adopted it from the west other regions have adopted it from the western think. Assets spread around the world, now unpredicted consequences are going to follow. In the end are you optimistic in terms of ai and the direction with democracy in ai changing human cognition, as you pointed out, in ai having explanatory powers or not humans having explanatory powers, ai not necessarily. Theres an interesting point jamaican some of your articles about how ai by its very nature is going to change human cognition and ration it because we will not have the experiences that i will get to. And i will get the first before us. The point i make is ai has consequences that we elicit, but we dont always know why. Now, am i optimistic . First, i would have to say the future of democracy itself, putting ai aside, its something that should concern us, because for a society to be great, it has to have a vision of the future. That is to say, it has to go from where it is to where it has never been, and have enough confidence in itself to do it. When you look at too many democracies, the political contests is so bitter, and the rivalries are so great, that to get an objective view of their future, its getting more and more difficult. Who would have thought that the house of commons could break down into a collection of treasure groups operating like the house of representatives but the house of representatives is part of the system of checks and balances. But britain is based on a unitary system that requires consensus for its operation. What ai does is to inject a new level of reality of a new level of conceiving reality. Most people dont understand that yet. Most people dont know what it is, but i think that those of you who work on it are pioneers in an inevitable future. And when we think, the Defense Department about the future, this is a huge problem because increasingly ai will help shape the approach to problems. For example, i was in office in the period of started with massive retaliation and then develop into various applications, but the key problem we faced in actual [inaudible] as security advisor, how do you threaten with Nuclear Weapons without triggering a preemptive strike on the other side . And actually weapons themselves became more esoteric, even in terms of the 70s, when we moved to fixed landbased missiles, they had a high potential for retaliation. But next to no potential for being used diplomatically. Its often been history of that period is written, there are debates about the trigger happiness of an administration [inaudible] from level four to level c c wh isnt a high level of alert but nobody, no newspaper reader knows that. But one reason we went on alert was because we could generate a lot of traffic, and you could see things that were being done, planes were being put in the air and troops were called. But not yet threatening here. With ai you cant well, even with mobile missile threats and much of what goes on with ai. We believed that armscontrol was an important aspect. And what you know of ai, it makes it infinitely more important, but much of what you can do in ai, you dont want to put on the table as a capability to be affected because its safe to say, you could tell part of its strength. In the field of strategy we are moving into an area where you can imagine i capability, extraordinary capability and even permitting tremendous discrimination. And one of your problems is that the nab may not come if you choose, may not know where the threat came from that the enemy may not know what elements of armscontrol you have to rethink even how the concept of armscontrol, if at all, applies to that world. You have a nice light in one of the articles about how ai essentially up in all of the strategic verities that we have taken, weve had as part of our way of thinking over the past 30 years, including arms control, including deterrence, including as a talker in the beginning, stability. But i wanted to ask you one for a specific question and then open it up. Are there situations in which, going backwards, you at the white house again taking decisions. Are there situations in which today and i come to a trust in ai algorithm to make a decision at that level, at the National Security space if your face with a tough decision . Other areas where you could see and i algorithms helping National Security decisionmakers . I think it will be, become standard that ai algorithms will be part of the decisionmaking process. But before that happens, or as that happens, the decisionmakers have to think through the limits of it. And what might be wrong with it, and i have to test themselves in wargames and even in some actual situations to make sure that what the degree of reliability they can to the algorithms. And also they have to think through of the consequences. When i talk about these things, i think i studied a lot about the outbreak of world war i, because the disparity between the intentional leaders in what they produced is so shocking, not one of the leaders who started the war in 1914 would have undertaken it if they had had any conception of what the world would look like in 1918 or even 1917. None wanted an act of such scope. They thought they were dealing with a local problem and they were facing each other down, but they did know how to turn it off. That once the mobilization process started, it had to go to an end in which a crisis over serbia ended with a german attack on belgium, which neither of which it anything to do with the original crysis. But the attack on belgium was an absolutely logical consequence of a system that had been set up and that required a quick victory, and a quick victory could only be achieved in northern france. So never mind that theres a crisis in the balkans, and that germany and france are not directly involved. In the outcome. The only way to get an advantage in time over the possible mobilization of russia was to defeat france, no matter how the war started. And it was a masterpiece of planning, then what is really interesting things is that they had to knock out, the germans had to knock out france within six to eight weeks. And the man to design this plan allegedly said on his deathbed, make sure my right flank is strong. So when the attack developed and then russia began to move in the east, the germans lost their nerve and pulled two army cores out of the right flank, which is exactly where they stopped, these two army corps were in transit while the important [inaudible] on both sides were taking place but i mentioned that only that if you dont see through the implications of the technology, to which [inaudible] and included your emotional capacity to handle the predictable consequences, then youre going to fail. Thats on the strategic side. And how you conduct diplomacy when even the testing of new weapons can be shielded so you really dont know what the other side is thinking. Its not even clear how you could reassure somebody if you wanted to. Thats the topic very important to think about. And so, as you develop weapons of great capacity, and even great discrimination, how do you talk about and how do you build a [inaudible] and how do you convince them. I mean, the weapons in a way become your partner. And it they are assigned certain tasks, how you can modify that under certain conditions. These are all key questions that have to be answered, and will be, im sure, answered in some way. And so thats why i think you are only in the foothills of the real issues that you will be facing as you go down that road. As you must, im not arguing against ai. We are ai will exist and will save us. Before he opened it up to the audience, just a quick comment because you are at a geopolitical thick and youve talked about diplomacy and restraint. Could you comment on how you see the evolution of the u. S. China and russia relationship . Just in brief, then i will open it up to the audience but i think it is a missed opportunity to have dr. Kissinger here and not ask a question that is a little bit broader. Asking me for brief answers. [laughing] i signed of great faith. [laughing] a sign of great faith. You are getting set to go to china, so youve been talking a little bit about your goals for that trip. I look at this primarily as a strategic issue that has impact of the societies on each other over an extended period of time when the have such huge capabilities. Now, the conventional way, the historic way has been handled, it said, settled military conflict, settled of the sides, and sometimes at huge cost, but hugely, but historically, its survivable, survivable costs. The key question is, do we define our enemy and then conduct our policy from a confrontational point of view and with confrontational language at every stage . At the end, my preference of looking at it as a strategic issue in which at every moment you try to shape the environment to get, on the one hand, a relative advantage, but on the other hand, if your opponent of opportunity to move towards a less threatening position. And so if your basic strategy is confrontation, then the other side loses nothing by being confrontational because its there anyway. And, therefore, i believe one should put an element of potential cooperation into the strategic relationships. I studied at one point, i was in office in the 73 war, and there was a little booklet by somebody who served on the politburo as a notetaker. And if you go through that book you would see that, on the one hand, they have arguments and leading towards involvement and arms supply. But on the other theres always somebody arguing about what we call so they didnt ever go all out and so we could outmatched them when we went in there. I favor a strategy and a complexity, and so i would like containment to evolve out of a diplomacy that doesnt put it into a confrontational style. What that means is that we on our side have to know what our limits are, and we have to understand what we are trying to avoid in addition to what we want to achieve. So we have to have strategies in high office which is not the way we should elect people. But we have to come to im talking about what we have to come to. When you look at strategic designs of the 19th century, the europeans had one direct lines of both sides. The british on the road to india had a lot of alliances and friendships but not such a precise system. But when you got on the road to india, before you got very far, you would meet a lot of resistance organized by the british, even though it was not proclaimed and nobody ever quite made it. Im talking about 19th century. So thats what we have to develop an it in some parts of the world. And now, i dont put a rush in quite the same category because russia is a weak country. Its a weak country with Nuclear Weapons