Computer scientist, composer artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including hightechnology business and social impact of take the logic the philosophy of conversation and the future of humanism. He has been on the cusp of technological innovation for some time as a pioneer in Virtual Reality, a term he coined. Leading teams creating applications from sebastian at the end is c. E. O. Of udasity, a google fellow. He has published over 370 scientific papers and 11 books, and he is a member of the u. S. National academy of engineering. Company is the fifth most creative business, and one touted him global thinker number four. He works on revolutionizing transportation education and mobile devices. 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 . 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 a presentation on a computerbased interactive mullinity console display multiconsole display system in which they can augment intellectual capacity. The demo introduced to us the computer mouse hyper text, Network Collaboration and much more. Again, all of this was in 1968. It 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 thinking about computers as calculating 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. Hero what doug said. You are augments basic human capability. There already is a fantastic system. We have to augment basic human capability. 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 quantityity. 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 have. The 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 this work on deck knowledge is about changing human beings and augmenting human capabilities . I would say we have been in the human augmentation for hundreds if thought thousands of years. The book is digital, works well to carry information from one generation to another. Take augmentation machine on farms. We have machines that make us strong. Take planes that run across the oceans. We can are not faster, fly higher and go further. The computer is a step in that journey. It is a massive step. It has changed Society Faster than any other invention ever before. But yes, in the center of it all are we the people. I have believed as i have never believed in the vision of replacing people. I believe in the vision of empowering people. So you are in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and it is receiving the rap of replacing people . Some of my colleagues would like to get rid of people. I like people. There is a reason i am not eager to replicate people pause it is easy. It takes 15 minutes and a lot of passion. 15 minutes and 21 years. 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 hisally portfolio, when we zoom out beyond the iphones, selfdriving cars and google glasses, we can look out hundreds of years. I found that the successful technologies are completely complementary to people. We generallyly have lousy memories, so a book is a good ention. We dont run very fast so a car is a good invention. If we build a machine that looks and act like us. I dont want my dish washer to say not today. I want it 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. Look at the clothes you wear, the food you eat the electricity, the transportation heat, all these things are human augments. What are your thoughts about this augmentation paradigm . I knew doug for many years. He was important to me in my early career, and i kept up with neil a long time. On many different levels. He wander. The First Virtual reality thing i did was here off campus. Now there are condos. He used to wander by and pick flowers in the fields by the cottages. He was such a lovely guy. I have to say that. When i was a teenager, probably my most important mentor was one of the founders in the field of Artificial Intelligence named marvin minsky. They used to have arguments. Marvin would say we are going to do this this and this for machines, and then doug would say but what are you going to do for the people. What i really think it boils down to was that for doug, the idea of progress meant expecting more and more from people not creating conveniences for people, not creating superpowers for people or Science Fiction scenarios. He expected people to be able to take more responsibility, to be more ethical, to be more considered in their actions. He expected them to gain virtuoso capabilities with technology. But what i think went wrong i am not sure. It is hard to get a real over view of this. But since we have been living with this regime of moores law, where everything is getting more plentiful we never get the chance to become a virtuoso with technology. It changes so fast. That speed of change has caused us to become a little lazy in a way because there is always this new thing. Now there is a button to replace your toilet paper apparently. I think doug would have hated that kind of thing. Doug would have wanted to know more math and more engineering. He wanted people to expect more and more of ourselves ohio state each passing with each passing year. People are very good at things at trying to manipulate their reputation on line or trying to detect catfishing, to avoid being manipulated by algorithms. There is a strange new skill that maybe we are becoming virtuosos of. But in terms of a direct lit skill, i think we are maybe not doing that as much as doug would have wanted. I am sure all of you who are seeing the performance tonight, there is a moment in the demo itself when dog wants to talk about the responsiveness of the machine to the human. He has a little bit of a glitch while talking. Instead of saying responsiveness he said responsibility in that moment. That has struck mow about doug, the responsibility of the machine to the machine but conversely, the human being back to the system. Could you talk more about these ideas of responsibility . Either one of you, whoever feels compelled to go . Well, at the time if we go back to the late 70 and the 80s a lot of the concept of responsibility for people who had Technical Skills related to the nuclear arms race, and there was a strong feeling that people who were technical had to be able to step up and act as ethical and moral agents in the world to prevent our inventions from destroying everything. That was a very present idea. We have backed away from that a little bit because a lot of things have actually turned out pretty well. I try to imagine if doug was withs today. It is very hard to try to imagine what he would make of some things. I will give you an example of the sort of thing i think he would be skeptical. There was this tremendous outworrying of pride in Silicon Valley. They were in the square and arab spring, and they were using mobile devices. But then when it starts to go wrong, we dont take responsibility for that. There is a way in which we are being selective in talleying our victories. I think he would be pretty upset by that. No if you are going to be an engineer you have to really measure what effect you are having on the world. If you are creating a freer society, measure it, if you are creating a society with more opportunities, measure it. If you are saying at the same time the middle classy is declining and more people are living on the edge, then you are failing. But i think he would demand much more to close the empirical loop. I think he would tend to resist the way of talking we tend to have. At the same time we have had some tremendous successes. I think he would demand hero realism, more balance and selfassessment. Maybe a related question to you. This idea of collaboration and using Computer Systems to help human beings work with other human beings. Is that an inspiration for you, or something you would like to talk with google on . Absolutely. Doug is credited with the idea of computer supported collaborative work. As a student, i thought it would never work. Today we do email, google docs and shared separate sheets. Some of my employees are in singapore or in lebanon, to Work Together beyond belief. I always foltynewicz felt this world is about people. The answer is they are very smart. I felt the technology was a way to get people together. Even today traps takes is perhaps the biggest invention the car in trick of the 20th century. Maybe television. I dont know. But cars changed the infrastructure or reaction patterns. Making them saver i thought was a good idea. Google glass was something about being in a space and having interaction at the same time. What i generally find in this day and age of heavy texting, facebooking and things, the ability to interact with many people digitally has been so much enhanced. So many people and opinions i can see. I can go to seddon. Com and find feedback amazon. Com and find feedback. It took 40 or 45 years to get to this point, but it is now really unfolding. Do you want to continue with that . I was thinking about how Virtual Reality could be seen in terms of helping people collaborate. The first display was not made by me. It was made by southerland, who might be the one rival to dougs demo. It is called sketchpad if you are not aware of it. It was actually a little earlier. The term Virtual Reality originally meant having a social version of Virtual Worlds where people would see each other as avatars. But the term became popularly used for the generally field. To me it is jarring to keep up with the way people use terms. But that was the original meaning of it. It was very much in the spirit of dougs work. In fact, i remember having to go over when we got the first versions working. It was very exciting. It was an amazing team, electrifying. It is fun for me now when i can put my 8yearold daughter in a Virtual World at home now that it is becoming available. It is charming. I think during the period when i was working in the 80s, and before and since there is a tendency sometimes to maybe expect too much from these innovations. I used to talk about it as a thing that would totally transform human culture, and there would be less violence. I remember giving talks about the notion that if you could have more instant awareness of what is going on around the world, you would realize how horrible war really is and it would become more peaceful. The opposite is heating. Media has been used to recruit people for ever more horrific cultures of violence. That is reversing a trend and not what we anticipated. It is very hard to predict how these tools will have an effect on the world, and it is very easy to soderling use yourself of seeing only the benefits. It is something i struggle with still. If you are inventing things, and you are not struggling with assessing their impact, then you are not doing your job. You should feel a little tortured trying to understand it because the effects are complex. For me, there is this moment of anticipation now where the world is about to be flooded with Virtual Reality stuff. Some of it is really good and some of it is not. I dont know what impact it will have on the world. It is a grand experiment. I am thrilled, charmed and worried i am going to be embarrassed. I dont know what will happen in the next year or two. It will be amazing to watch. It often happens with somebody who has invented something, as the story unfolds, they are sometimes not very happy with the way their work is interpreted. Do you see the Virtual Reality we are seeing accelerated in its development as being the Virtual Reality that you started . Yeah, kind of. If you look at the current occulus Development Kit and the worlds people are building on it. Aside from that, the stuff looks and feels so much like what we were doing in the 80s. I can compare some of the old videos for the downloads for occulus, it is very similar, and it is very strange actually. 2 billion. 2, too. A lot of money. Yeah. It was less than 19 billion. [laughter] well on that note let me change the subject. Third period is a different ship. This is going to be a bit more personal. You have you may post both know. It was a lifes work the way he saw what he was doing. There were specific moments in his life kinds of epiphanies. He ran a book that inspired him. Then there was a later one less well known, as i was driving down 101 from working in mount view and living up north somewhere. I am going to quote from the oral history and ask you about similar things in your own lives. He told me in the oral history i soon realized that if i wanted to contribute in some maximum way, i would need to provide some real driving force. So i had better first pick a field that is really something. And if i find a set of goals so there is some way i could use the engineering training, then that would be very valuable. But somehow had the feeling that more engineering was not what the worlds dominant need was then. It is a complex world. Somewhere along the way i had this flash that the complexity of the problems and the means for solving them is getting to be too much. The Time Available for solving a lot of the problems is getting shorter and shorter. So the urgency goes up. The product of these two factors, complexity and urgency are the measure for organizations and institutions. The complexity and urgency factor transcended what we were able to cope with. If you transcend human capability to deal with that, then you would have something. That resonated. I think in an hour i had the image of sitting ack at big c. R. T. Screen. Sebastian, can you relate to this intense personal motivational moment . Yes. Several times in my life i had these moments where i recognized something of importance. I would tell my students dont worry about what job you are going to get. Your job finds you. Recently i had a job that was important to take. In history, the first time was about four years ago roughly, or five years ago when i realized i was really good on paper writing. I wrote a lot of books and academic papers. I ran into this guy who had dropped out of grad school and started a Startup Company in a space ant didnt care about paper writing, but influenced about a billion people. So i had dinner with larry paige, and we started comparing notes. It dawned on me that all this competition on paper writing they had to draw the arc to what i really cared about which was changing peoples lives. It required people to read my papers and like them and implement them. But the papers werent very good, so not enough people read them. So i went to google to learn how to influence the world. I started as a middle manager and worked my way up. More recently i was building up google x, and we did all kinds of things like balloons in the stratosphere, to contact lenses to detect plug sugar, learning smart things. And then we put this palace out on Artificial Intelligence at stanford a few years ago. I happened to teach on the side still. We put this email out saying you could take this class for free. We had a 160,000 students sign up. With all these machines that eventually replace people, who really cares about the people as opposed to the machines . I felt education is the thing. You can make machines smarter and they are going to take over the jobs of people, but no one is going to be making people smarter. To the present day i have been influenced by a moment. It may not be as obvious to anybody in the audience, but it was a moment where i was an Artificial Intelligence guy, making machines smart. But i care about people and not machines. Why not go back and do something for the many people who need jobs . Excellent. Have you had a moment like that . Gosh, i have had a lot of moments like that. The most satisfying moment has been building a surgical simulator. There became a critical point where there was too much simulation in teaching surgery. Back in the 80s it was commithing exciting and there were several people involved. That was the moment when i felt that Virtual Reality was actually good for something. It was beautiful electrifying and it was clear. Being of use was not as clear. We are here actually making a difference. But earlier than that, wow i mean you know i will tell you the moment that really got to me was when i was a little kid. E. U. Grew up in new mexico, and one of our neighbors is the one who discovered pluto. He was the head of optics at White Sands Missile range. He showed me how to make telescopes and fwrained mirrors. This was the prototypical experience that led me into Virtual Re