Google Senior Vice President kent walker and joined Artificial Intelligence director general john shanahan. An excellent lunch. I enjoyed with two Close Friends of mine and im probably the only person who can say this in the entire world i work with and for both of them so i want to make sure i disclose my conflict of interest to start with. Enter at the service of the country in 1984 hes been promoted and was in charge of a wholthe whole bunch of intellige activities and operational activities and eventually we needed somebody operationally to implement ai in the entirety of the view was the perfect choice. Kent walker is a federal prosecutor law and order federal prosecutor who then chose to come to Silicon Valley and work that ebay for a while and maybe 15 years ago during that time not only did he set up the Legal Function but is now in charge of Global Policy and all those sort of things together. What but i thought we should dos simply start and have you make some comments about the world as you see it today. Sure. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be with you today. At the topic of todays Panel Private partnerships a commitment to getting this right and making sure the private sector, Defense Sector and universities can Work Together in the best possible way. Its been frustrating to hear concerns around the commitment to the National Security and so i want to set the record straight on two issues, first on. China in 2010 you may remember google was part of an attack on the infrastructure sophisticated cybersecurity attack we learned a lot from that experience and while a number of other companies have significant commercial operations weve chosen to scope our operations there carefully. Our focus is on advertising and appointing the platform. Second with regards to the general question of National Security and our engagement in the project is an area where it is right we decided to press the reset button until we had an opportunity to develop our own set of principles and work with regards to internal standards and review processes that was a decision focused on the contract and not a broad statement about the willing us or working with the department of defense as a National Security administration. We continue to do that. We are a coming to doing that ad adults on the tradition of work throughout the valley. Its important to remember in large measure it built upon Government Technology for radar to the internet to gps to some of the work on the congress vehicles and personal assistan assistance. Just in the last couple of weeks we had extraordinary accomplishment with the move forward for the frontier of science and technology. Y. But that was not an achievement by google alone. Its built on research that hadnt been done at the university. It benefiteuniversity. It benefited from extensive consultations with Research Scientists and it was carried out in many ways from the department of energy. Those kind of exchanges and collaborations are the key to what has made america technological innovation as successful as it has been and it just as we feel we are contributing to the defense and National Security community, a lot of that work is a part. We have a lot to work at google and we go above and beyond to make sure they can complete their military service while having a thriving careers and there are tools weve tried to take to make sure that is transitioning to civilian life and to make those best use of the military skills in the private sector. As we do that we are fully engagedwe in a wide variety of work with different agencies. We are working on a number of National Initiatives on cybersecurity to health care to business automation. We are working on a number of fundamental projects to make sure to identify deep takes and progress work on that and and progress the operation of hardware and use software or hardware interfaces and better ways. As we take on those kind of things, we are eager to do more and pursuing additional certifications that will allow us to engage across a range of different topic areas including its extremely important. There are ai principles which were i thought a lengthy document that continues to work the groundwork was laid by the department of defense in 2012 with directive 3,009 talked about the judgment in the application of the technologies, the work that the dod has done. And the private sector we have been trying to drive forward on this and not only put out a principles there is a lot in common in these areas, safety, human judgment, accountability, explain ability, fairness in our own critical areas for Different Actors in the state, each of Different Things to contribute and that is important. This is a shared responsibility to get this right. As the report notes we need a global framework and approach to these issues endorsing the oecd framework and something that we want to support and we are working together to figure out because at the end of the day we are a proud American Company committed to the defense of the United States, our allies and the safety and security of the world and we are here to continue the work and think about places we can Work Together to build on each others strengths. Thank you. Thank you. General, take us through what you are up to. First of all let me say thanks it is great to be here and i thank you for the opportunity to do this. I will say i am a poor substitute for the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the lower probability of any headline grabbing sound so i also confess this is the first and last time i will serve as a warmup act for doctor Henry Kissinger so hang on for the main event. I relish the opportunity to have a broader conversation about the publicprivate partnerships. When he asked me to reflect back on my two years as the director of the public project just about a year in the seat as the director, there is one overarching theme that continues to resonate strongly with me. Its the importance and necessity of strengthening bonds between government, industry and academia. This was said this morning you brought it up and others have mentioned it, this idea of the relationship should be detected as a triangle and actually it should be in the form of any collateral triangle. That is largely the form it did take beginning in the 1950s and lasting until the early part of the decade. It is what drove to Silicon Valley today. They are a little afraid in addition to being different lengths. The reason for that is multifold. A general mistrust between the government and industry. We started talking past each other instead of with each other. Its made more difficult today by the fact that industry is moving so much faster than the department of defense they see no compelling reason to work with the department of defense and even those who want to work with the dod which is far more than it is in that category we dont make it easy for them. So i would just reinforce the themes in the commissions report or interim report and that is the idea of a shared responsibility. It is the trust and transparen transparency. Our National Security depends on it. And even for those who for various reasons still view the dod for suspicion who are reluctant to accept we are in a strategic competition with china i hope would still agree that ai is a critical component of the nations prosperity, vitality, and selfsufficiency. So in other words, no matter where you stand with respect to the governments future use of ththe aie enabling technologiesi submit that we can never obtain the vision outlined in the commissions interim report without industry and academia with us together in an equal partnership. We are in this together, publicprivate partnerships are the very essence of americas success as a nation not only that the defense of the entire government for the message we want to send today we have to make the triangle back to what mait used to be. Thank you, general. I think im going to ask a couple of questions for both of you and we will start with the same. Talk about maven some more. [laughter] i think it is no secret that we came up as a Consumer Company evolved into becoming an enterprise company. I bring a wealth of resources to do but there are different protocols and ways of engaging in as we go along in that journey they have an identical view and a lot of hard issues but in some ways a i bit is a positive as well as a negative. You could argue it is americas first innovation also rethinking this we think out of that comes incredible strength if we Work Together well we can have a more robust resilient framework as well as one that works for the world it devotes a couple pages to the principles and for section of implementation because you quickly discover that it out of the hard problems are conflicted into challenging. We have had debates about whether to publish a paper you can imagine it could be misused for surveillance and other kinds of purposes after receiving a particular technology we determined that it was appropriate to publish because thats particular technology was used in only one setting but its an example of the kind of discussions we have around issues like facial recognition or other challenging questions where we have to come to terms with the reality and the tradeoffs we are making, very much the case in a lot of these issues as well but we think that there is a lot of room for collaboration and coordination of cybersecurity on the logistics and transportation on healthcare. Our intent was to go after commercial industry and this is where the solutions already exist, do not reinvent the wheel. Our approach was a simple one we wanted everybody in the market that was a small startup of 15 people and which is one of the companies we gotrt on contract o the biggest Internet Data and why did we go after, because we wanted to take the best in the world in these images it is an extraordinary difficult problem to go after and we did a very successful collaboration with the team. What was happening internal to the company and how that played out a little bit ofer different stories, but we thought all the way to the contract and become products we were very pleased with the. We got tremendous support. What we found at the end of this is a critique on both sides is the most definitive very quickly. Part of it is about the company made the decision not to be public about what they want to do. Our approach is willing to talk as much as the company wanted us to talk about. We do whatever the market being fair and we didnt want to get into the operational specifics. This was with Surveillance Reconnaissance and they had no weapons on it. It wasnt a Weapons Project and it is not a Weapons Project that would start as we started hearing these wild stories and assumptions about what it was and was not to the point where if you googled today, no pun intended, the adjective controversial has nowle been binserted permanently inside of project maven. It wasnt controversial to me or the dean. It wasnt controversial to anybody right now beyond people who just dont like what they are doing so. Fullstop oh, this is an interesting point i thought a lot and im not sure everybody up for appreciates that he idea what happened is a little bit of the canary in a coal mine. The fact that it happened when it did as opposed to on the verge of a conflict or crisis weve gotten some of that out of the way. You heard him talking about a little bit of a preset and how the Companies Want to work in the department of defense. I think that there is important and it happens. It would have happened to somebody else at some point, but the transparency and the willingness to talk about what each side is trying to achieve may be the biggest lesson of all that i took from it. Is a tragedy that we dont wear hats anymore because i could borrow three hats and figure oufigured out which one m wearing. I couldnt tell you when i mete general shanahan, the problem inside the military is that we take these trained soldiers, airmen, so forgive the salon and we put themha in front of mindnumbing observational tasks. They literally watch screens all day and its a terrible waste of the human assets that the military produces and so there is a huge opportunity to try to sort of get them to work at a higher level position and thats why they recommended procedure into the creation of the joint center that you both now have stood up lets talk about another question for those of you that have to do with ethics. Now come in the middle of what went on inside of google, kent had the good idea of having a formal ethics proposal and he drove inside of google the ethics process that produced a remarkable Public Document and now i have my cool hat on. It is quite definitive and i think maybe you could talk about that and then similarly, it produced a proposal to the military, and i believe you are the customer for the proposal that wey wrote on military ai ethics. I assume both of you are in favor since kent wrote the first one and all the other companies have now copied variances of your approach in one form or another and you said you are in favor of this. What are the consequences of these and does it really work, does for example, does google prevent or turn things off or stop doing things like in the last littleur while . Hell does actually work interesting question for you, general. There are people who claimed the military wont operate under these ethics principles. In our report we cited the many roles that its required to operate under and maybe you can report on that. What i think is the general noted having frameworks in place early on, both the sub visible but then also the review processes an escalation opportunities it is a critical part of the internal as well as external c transcript. Its quite amon right among thes we talk about surveillance being a concern, so we want to make sure some of the recognition tools and tracking software that we are developing are deployed in appropriate ways. We want to be a good part. We dont want to pull away support what we want to make sure the scope of the project we are t developing and what we are licensing it for commercial uses and have a sense of the direction of travel and that is valuable for both sides in making sure expectations are clear and in terms of building not only trust internally but across the society, so another example would be when it comes to the generalpurpose of the facial recognition, you dont know necessarily what use can be made of them until we develop more policy and technological safeguards we are going to be very cautious about that area. Another example is when it comes to weapons you said this is a Nascent Technology we want to be very careful about the application of ai in this area so that isnt an area that we are pursuing given our background. We recognize the limits of our experience in that area. Obviously the military is going to be deeper and have more understanding of the safety implications, so we will continue to work through these different areas. There is a remarkable degree of convergence that we see between the dod and now internationally we are starting to see the European Commission coming up with regulations for official intelligence of the next 100 days and this will be an interesting exercise as we offer some kind of a Common Mission of how we build acceptance for the nextgeneration technologies. Looking at it from the dod lens, this may be the best starting point when you talk, he mentioned the area of convergence between the commercial industry, academia and the government. The principle is as good as anything else to drive a stake in the ground and do we agree on all of these, some of these if we dont agree that the conversation going is a good starting point. The other is i need to state the obvious i can tell you with certainty that china and russia did not embark on a 15 month process and route involving public hearings into discussions about the use of Artificial Intelligence. They are not doing enough and i dont expect they ever will. As a people may question what the department is doing and why we are doing it but i tell you what, we just embarked on this long process just to make sure we took into account all the different voices on the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence and i would say the product that has been delivered is an excellent product shaped by a lot of people that spend time and attention against it. Ive sai said this in other sets 35 and a half years in uniform i have never spent as much time on this question of the ethical use the department of defense actually has a long and i would say commendable history despite its walls along the way of looking at the ethical use of technologies. There are differences in the Artificial Intelligence and what the report does verye well is start with what is similar to every other technology that has ever been in the department here are some areas that may be different. We are not quite sure yet and here are the differences like systems on their own. That is a pretty good framework for going after this. We have a way of looking a at te summit if it is Artificial Intelligence or any other technology our history and processes, the approach and training are in place to look at the technologies and how we bring you information prototype into production so now that this report has been presented to the secretary of defense, it is up to i get to questions no one is what you think about the report, the report provides the best possible starting point coming in at