Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the Lowy Institute for International Policy. I'm Michael Fully Love, the Institute's Executive Director, and it's my great honour today to be conducting a conversation with Malcolm Fraser. Mr Fraser was Australia's 22nd Prime Minister, residing in the lodge from 1975 until 1983, and when he retired from the Federal Parliament, he'd served as the member for one and for 28 years. Prior to that, he served as minister in the Holt, Gorton and McMahon governments. In office, Prime Minister Fraser opposed apartheid, campaigned against white minority rule in South Africa, supported multiculturalism. On the other hand, he was, I think it's fair to say, generally seen as a hawk on international affairs. His support for multiculturalism was evidenced by the establishment of the government-funded radio and television network, the special broadcasting service. And here, actually, my family has a connection with you, Malcolm, because my late father, Eric Fully Love, was one of the first creative consultants that was hired under Bruce Gingel to establish SPS and to send him to training. Thank you very much. We think so. Since leaving office, Mr Fraser has continued to play a role in international policy. He was, for example, co-chairman of the Commonwealth Committee of Eminent Persons in 1986 on South Africa. He served as chairman of Care Australia, president of Care International. He was a board member of ICG, and he's held various other important international posts. He is also, as many people here know, a keen exponent of Twitter. In fact, I asked Mr Fraser today how many followers he had on Twitter, and he said, oh, I'm not sure, about 32,000. So I think he follows it pretty closely, which is fair enough. We all follow our follower numbers closely. I asked him how he got on to Twitter, and he said, oh, well, it was serving my interest better than Facebook. So I gather he was on Facebook, and his family said, look, why don't you get out of the way off Facebook and get on Twitter? And his Twitter feed makes for extremely interesting reading. He curates a lot of very interesting articles and flicks them on to the rest of us. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Fraser is here today, of course, because he's published this book, Dangerous Allies, which is a provocative look at Australia's role in the world, and in particular, the U.S. Alliance. Well, it can be factual and provocative. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Malcolm Fraser. I'm going to ask Malcolm questions, I guess, for about 20 minutes or half an hour, and then I'll go to the audience. So please have a think about questions you'd like to ask. I want to ask you a lot of questions about the United States, about Japan, about China, but I'm going to start with a general question, if I can, Malcolm.  And I think that when you left the Liberal Party, you said something like, the party was no longer a Liberal Party, but a conservative party. I think if I'm not misquoting you that you make the argument that the political scene has changed, you haven't changed your positions. Is that, well, first of all, is that a correct characterization of your view? And if it is, is it really true that you haven't moderated at all since you were in politics? In terms of policy in relation to Australia, how Australia should operate, multicultural society and open society and all of that, I don't think my views have changed. But when you're talking about Australia in the wider world, when the strategic context in which we must live and operate as a nation changes, it's very foolish not also to change and take account of those other major international changes. Now, one of the problems I've got and tried to bring out in the book is that while the strategic context has changed, our government and their opposition and the political class in Canberra behave as though it hasn't. So how have you changed then when it comes to Australia's role in the world? Because I think it's true to say that you were seen as a bit of a hawk on defence, on conscription, on Vietnam. How have you changed, do you think, in the last? Yes, I would have been regarded. I made a speech in 1976 in which I said that Russia or the Soviet Union wants peace. It should work for that and demonstrate that. And then they invaded Afghanistan a few years later. And this was at a time when some people in Europe were talking about they taunt and thought it was a reality. I thought that was always wishful thinking and I thought it was inaccurate. But, you know, Australia was a small country with few resources. The Cold War was on. The Soviet Union was real. At one point they had enabled flotilla that circumnavigated Australia. And I regarded, and many people regarded, the Soviet Union as outward thrusting, aggressive. And there were problems in our own part of the world. It wasn't just Europe, it wasn't just Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The independence of Malaysia was delayed 10 years because of a communist insurgency. Then there was the PKIQ in Indonesia. So it wasn't just a question of Soviet actions far from our shores. Some things were quite close. And in those circumstances I believe that the policy Australia had adopted from its very birth, not federation, going back to the colonies. Our strategic dependence on a major power was still a valid policy. But after 1990, I thought we could have become a little more independent. Instead we become ever more closely entangled in America's web, if you like. Well, let me come on to an America in a sec, but let me just follow up. Are you really saying that you believe the Soviet Union was of a greater direct threat to Australia during the Cold War than China might be in the future? Without any doubt whatsoever. The Soviet Union was an imperial power as Britain had been, France, the European powers generally, Japan had been an imperial power and also the United States. And the United States has now developed a new kind of imperialism. You know, you don't have bases, you just rotate through. The language has changed, but the policy is not. China has never, I think, been, I mean people can argue about Tibet, I know, and some of the provinces and the edges of China. But China has not been, through its very ancient history, an imperial power in the way those European states, Japan and America, have been imperial powers. I do not believe with sensible diplomacy on the part of other countries, Hugh White has suggested that America should share power over the Pacific and says we should persuade America to do so. Well, it would be wonderful if we could, but America doesn't make policy that way. They make policy amongst themselves and then they consult with alleged special friends. And that consultation is really no more than persuading special friends that what they have already decided is the right policy. In other words, we have no influence in that. Thank you. Well, let me ask you, on that subject of China, I showed you before a review that Hugh White had published in the American Review on your book and he says that you're too soft on China, which for Hugh is actually saying quite a lot. I take your point about China not having an imperial history, but when you think about Chinese behaviour in the last year, when you think about, for example, the unilateral declaration of an air defence identification zone. Have you looked at the air defence zones around the United States? You have? Yeah, it's not unusual for countries to have air defence identification zones. And they don't consult with others in relation to them. No, but you know that the unilateral declaration of that zone over those disputed waters with those very intense rivalries, you must think that was a provocative act by China? I also think, well, yes, if you like, I'll concede you that. But have you read the protocols relating to air defence zones? Tell me about them. Well, the civil aircraft have to declare America told its civilian aircraft to abide by the rules. Japan and Korea both said they were not going to abide by the rules and very quietly they were forced to reverse. America flew a bomber through, and I'll bet most of its electronics were turned off because they wouldn't have wanted to provoke something. But under the protocols, military aircraft do not have to give any notice. And so an air defence zone, what it means, I'm not too damn sure, but it doesn't inhibit military aircraft activity. But if you want provocation, when you have USS Washington at the station in the Japanese harbor, an Australian frigate is part of its escort service for four months of last year. And again, I think it will be this year. Stoogeing up and down the eastern South China Seas in sight of the Chinese mainland, is that a provocative act? When the Chinese have an equivalent aircraft carrier, which they may do unless they decide they can sync them too easily and they're not worth having. But if they could and sailed a carry up and down the east coast of the United States, America would go paranoid. They wouldn't know how to control it or handle it. But let me ask you this. I wasn't really just asking you about the air defence identification zone. Most experts who followed China, including you, would say that in the last year or two, there has been a significant uptick in Chinese assertiveness. You can talk about the air defence identification zone. And in Japan. I'll ask you about Japan in a sec. I could ask you about whether it's appropriate or why you think China chose to station a state-owned oil rig in the South China Sea off the coast of Vietnam, for example. There's a lot of specific examples I could ask you about, but doesn't it really add up to a China that is changing and that a China that is becoming more assertive? And doesn't that contain some risks for Australia? I don't think it contains any risks for Australia. It might contain some risks for some of the countries on the periphery of China and what they think is theirs and what they think is not. But one of the problems with Americans, a lot of Europeans, very few are like Helmut Schmitt or Henry Kissinger and look at things from the perspective of history, tradition and culture. And China went through a period of maximum weakness around the time of the Boxer Rebellion and in the years before that and afterwards for reasons that we all know. And it was the unequal treaties then imposed on China by the European and Japanese and American powers at some point all going to be redressed. Well, most have been. The Sindaco Islands, as the Japanese called them, were taken from China in 1895 after a war with Japan. China and Japan incorporated by the act of the Japanese cabinet into Japan. Before that they were Chinese and this has been well reported in the New York Times. That of course has not been redressed. And before President Obama went to Japan last time he was saying he's got no position in relation to this but they shouldn't negotiate about it. Instead he gave a cast on guarantee that the nuclear defense guarantee will apply to those islands as well as to the mainland of Japan and the other islands. And I think that was a major mistake. He should have got Japan to accept that there is a dispute and accept that they should negotiate with China or subject to international arbitration. Now China might not accept it either of that. But at least it would have been a step in the right direction instead of a very significant step and from China's point of view a provocative step in the wrong direction. So Hugh White wrote in an article not so long ago that Chinese assertiveness could itself be the Chinese response to the American pivot. America is saying here we are, we're going to strengthen all our military, we're going to make you safe, you only have to rely on us. And Hugh was saying the China might well be just demonstrating to countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that America has some words of comfort but not much else. Now I don't know if that's right or if that's wrong but that was Hugh's view in that particular article. So let me come back to the pivot because I would take issue with the way you characterize it in your book but let me ask you about Japan. The Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in Australia at the moment. You've been critical of some aspects of the changing Japanese defence policy and the relationship I think between Australia and Japan. Let me ask you two questions. What did you think of his speech to the federal parliament yesterday? And secondly, why shouldn't Japan reinterpret its constitution so that it can act in collective self-defence? Well, it can act in its own self-defence, we know that. But it really means that Japan can also, if it wants to, send troops as allies of the United States to invade a country like Korea. The reinterpretation carries that connotation also and that is not collective self-defence. It's just an act of gross stupidity on America's part as it was on ours. The speech in the parliament, well, he's the second head of state, head of government who's made a speech that should have only been made from his own soil. The first was President Obama, when he made a speech that should only have been made from Australian, from American soil, or from soil which he thought, you know, there's a view in America that Australia is the best of allies because we'll do what America wants, when America wants it, and might even ask any questions. And that's pretty accurate. And the Obama speech in the parliament about the pivot was misguided and wrong. And when Abe... What sense, what did he say specifically that was misguided and wrong? Because it was a major announcement of American policy from Australian soil as though Australian soil was American soil. And, you know, if you can't understand that, well, then you can't understand what being Australian means. Well, I think I can understand what being Australian means. I would say to you that for decades, Australians have been... Australian leaders have been... I didn't finish the other part of your question. Well, what you've asked... Abe shouldn't have attacked China from Australian soil, and he did. How did he do that? Well, I haven't read the speech in full in detail. I've read the press reports of it, and he was criticising what he calls Chinese assertiveness and aggression. What about his nationalisation of the Sendaku Islands and cooperating them into Japan? What, 18 months ago? He knows quite well that China would regard that, and many others regard that as a totally aggressive act on the part of Japan. Let me ask you, because the United States is probably the preoccupation, I think it's fair to say, of the book. Let me... I told you I'd ask you some tough questions. Let me put one to you. I thought you were just being gentle. I haven't started yet. Let me put this to you. Your book, in its characterisation of the United States, feels very out of date. It feels like a book that should have been published in 2004, not in 2014. You talk a lot about the neo-conservatives, as though the neo-conservatives are running Washington these days, and we know they're not. We know that President Obama is not a muscular unilateralist. He's a cautious realist. In fact, there was a very funny article in The Washington Post yesterday by Dana Milbank, when he said, when it comes to imperial rulers, President Obama is more the Prince of Lichtenstein than he is Alexander the Great. Obama is much more, really, on the model, isn't he, of the sort of cautious realists that you like to cite. If anything, Obama is usually criticised for avoiding the use of force, not for using force. So it seems to me that a lot of the criticism of the United States is based on the United States of President George W. Bush, and I was the first to say at the time that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, but is it really right to, when we're trying to grapple with what the United States role in the world is now, as opposed to 10 or 15 years ago, is it right to dwell as much as you do on that period? I think the ideas of American exceptionalism have really spread and grown significantly since America has been the only superpower. When the Soviet Union existed, the two superpowers, in spite of being some quite sensitive moments, they acted as a restraint on each other. Now, since 1991, you had an America that has at times acted totally without restraint, and some would argue totally outside the law. I don't know if you've read the legal opinion which Obama used to justify drone killing of Americans in Yemen or in other places, but it's a very odd legal opinion and it's not quite as bad as Mr. Justice Yo about the definition of torture, but it would not be far behind. The question of legality in America, however, is a bit more important because people question it and ask for it and they force the publication of the documents. In Australia, there doesn't seem to be the same concern, we just let it go. All right, the Australians in Yemen, they were nasty people, they were in bad company, untrue, when somebody said so, it doesn't matter, they get killed, they're Australian. I think America, as the only superpower, wants to stay there, wants to... Hugh White says that they have got to give space to China. Now, if he says that, how is he going to achieve it? If he can't achieve it, he is really saying, I think, that a provocative Japan or maybe not a provocative Japan, if you like a provocative China, causes a conflict between China and Japan. From our point of view, it may not matter which one starts it, but America is then involved and Obama in his recent visit made that very clear. If America is involved, we have to be involved because we cannot say to the Chinese, with troops in Darwin, a powerful air ground task force, three service task force, which can demonstrate, use power anywhere throughout the region.  Of course, we're complicit and we are also complicit in what Pan Gap has done, which has changed from being a largely defensive facility very useful, very successful in collecting information, but with changed weapons technology has really become an extraordinarily important offensive part of the American military machine. And not just for drones, for other strategic and tactical weapons of a very sophisticated China. And therefore, Pan Gap would be integral to any American conflict. In the North West Pacific. If that's there, all right, the law might say, Australian law, but it's a subterfuge, as you well know, that it's an Australian base, but it's not. It's got an American in charge of it, we've got somebody number two, and it serves American purposes. And so it's a American base. I don't know how the numbers fall out between Americans and Australians at the base, but both are there. We are complicit in what it does. And when targeting information goes back to America, and within not quite real time, but within an hour or not much more, the bomb goes off or a drone goes off and people are killed or some other thing is damaged. You know, in Australian Prime Minister says, look, this time we're going to be like Canada. We're not going to join the Americans, as we did in Vietnam. We're not going to join the Americans, as we did in Iraq. We're going to stand aside. China just would not believe it. So we are involved. We have constitutional capacity to say no, but no practical capacity to say no in an effective sense. And it is that which I object to more than anything else. Now, whether America is good or America is not so good, as an Australian, I don't want anyone else ever again to have the capacity to take Australia to war, as Britain could take us to war in the First World War, and indeed almost certainly in the Second World War. That is an abdication of Australian sovereignty. And if you want that to be returned to Australia and put under Australia's control, and that's the number of my book, which a lot of the commentators, and I think Hugh White, people haven't talked about this question. How can we establish the circumstances in which only the Australian government can take us to war on a decision that we make based on our interests, not because some other greater power goes to war and we have to follow. Canada has never put itself in that position. But why are you so sure that Australia could never make that decision? For example, if there had been a Labor government in office during the Iraq War, I'm not at all convinced that Australia would have participated in the Iraq War. They didn't have the Marines in Darwin. Well, that would make no difference to whether we're deployed to the Middle East. Well, in the Middle East, no. Look, but now we're not talking about the Middle East. No, but you're making big claims, Mr. Fraser. You're saying we've abdicated our sovereignty, Australians have no say over whether they go to war but I can imagine plenty of circumstances where Australia would say no. Things have changed since the Iraq War. The Marines are in Darwin. The American, unfortunately, is paying less attention to the Middle East and more to the Western Pacific. And if their diplomacy exercises the same skill in the Western Pacific as they have exercised in the Middle East, well, you might say, who's going to help us? It's not going to be America because they'll make a mess of it. And we're now talking about our part of the world. And the facilities, pie and gap, you can't say it doesn't exist. You can't say those troops in Darwin don't exist. Apparently, the Prime Minister, when he was in Washington, gave an indication that if you want to increase the number, you can send, what, another task force. We don't know. Maybe a year or two later, they'll take over Leverick, Barracks, or Townsville, or whatever. A war on the far side of the world is one thing. But a war in our part of the world, and especially one involving China, if it's China and America, there is only one thing for Australia to do in such a contest, and that's to stay out of it. Because if you want to take it further and speculate further, the American technical superiority over the Vietnamese was massive, just as great, if not greater, than the technical superiority over China. Now, if America couldn't beat Vietnam, do you think they can beat China? Not one hope in a thousand. And Hugh White has recognized that, that America may well not win such a war. And if America loses such a war, it would take 10 or 12 years because of the air-sea warfare concept, which I'm sure you studied in detail, all 600 pages of it, published in Washington. The, after 10, 12, 14 years, the Americans wouldn't get tired of it. They'd go back to the Western Hemisphere. Their trade, their commerce, their investment wouldn't be really greatly affected because these things do not need protection of war. But they would do military bases throughout countries in the Western Pacific. That would be the price of peace in those circumstances. Then Australia's left here as a defeated ally of a defeated superpower. I think that's rather an uncomfortable position to be in. And we'll put Australia in greater danger than we've ever been in our history, except before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and saved us. If you think, if the alliance is so dangerous to Australia, why do you think every year the Lowy Institute publishes its Lowy Institute poll? About 80% of Australians say it's either very important or somewhat important to our security. Of course they say it's important because the political leaders the Lowy Institute says it's important. And when there is no debate between the political parties... I wish we were that influential, but go on. When there is no debate between the political parties, Habit takes over. Again, Hugh White, you used him against me. I'm now using him and supporting me. He said, one of the things is Habit. We just go on. We don't recognize that the strategic context in which Australia operates has changed dramatically since the destruction of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the Soviet Union. And we have gone on as though the world is comfortable. The same policies will still suit us well. We vaguely think that because of the rise of China they might be danger, but that doesn't matter because America is there, the ANZUS Treaty is there. Let me interrupt. I think it's quite the opposite, isn't it? I mean, isn't it that in circumstances where Chinese behavior is changing much more quickly than most experts would have predicted when there is a real risk of or at least significant uncertainty about China's future role in the world, doesn't it make perfect sense to balance against, to hedge against the chance of Chinese recklessness in the future by keeping the United States engaged in our region, by balancing, by providing a counterweight to China? Doesn't that make perfect sense to Australia? What's the alternative to? You sound like a minister in the Menzies government arguing, arguing to, we've got to put people into Vietnam to keep America involved. No, I'm not arguing about putting people in Vietnam. I'm arguing about keeping the United States involved in this region. You've sounded that because Australia is a relatively small country. I mean, for people, resources still, we should be much larger than we are. But that's another question, another subject. The, do we really think we can influence America? America is a major superpower and will do what is in America's interests regardless of what Australia does. They will have their pivot whether we allow Darwin to be, continue to be their major base and whether we allow Panjab to continue to operate as it now is as an offensive weapon in their armory. Even without those things, America is not going to go away because they're on top of the greasy pole and they want to stay there. But relatively, their power, not even in their own absolute terms, but relatively to the rest of the world, their power is declining to an extent. It'll be slow and gradual. But a declining superpower through history has always been a little more dangerous than a rising power. And you are making assumptions about China which run against Chinese history, against Chinese tradition, which you do need to take into account if you want to make a valid judgment about what will put Australia at least at risk. And that's the kind of judgment that I've tried to make in the book and people can argue and disagree as you clearly do and most people in the establishment do was the conclusions. But what puts Australia least at risk? There's always a risk about the future. There's no cast iron guarantee. We thought the British Empire could save us and the British Empire couldn't save us because they'd run out of power and we should have recognized that long before we did. You think the United States saved us against the Japanese in the Second World War? Well, there's still the unanswered question. And I was speaking to a senior Japanese, I'm sorry, American officials. I'm not going to mention his name because you'd recognize it. But very well respected. Without Pearl Harbor, would America have come into the war? You know, when you think of it, Britain was fighting. No, no, no. It is a valid question because to leave Britain totally beleaguered, fighting alone for two and a half years against Nazi Germany, knowing what Germany was doing to the Jewish population right throughout the whole of Europe, created very real questions about America's future intentions. Now, of course, Roosevelt was trying to persuade Portugal, I'm trying to get America into the war. I'm trying to do it. I'm trying to do it. But after Pearl Harbor, America declared war on Japan. America never declared war on Germany. Germany declared war on America first. And so there is a valid question, what will America regard in its own best interests? We lost, Dick Wolcott might disagree with this, but I'm not sure. I think we lost a foreign minister when he said that ANZIS would apply to our troops fighting in Borneo. And I've read the transcript of the discussions which involved Menzies, McKeown, Harriman, a couple of other Americans, Barwick. And McKeown was the one who towards the end of the discussions pressed a hard question. The troops in Borneo were top grade Indianese in troops, but they were posing as irregular because it was not a war, it was confrontation. And our army, I was army minister at the time, our army regarded the top 300,000 Indonesians as good as any. They had about a million and a half in their army and tailed off after that, but the top 300,000 very good, very effective. And Harriman had said, of course, if there's an invasion of Australia, we'd be with you. But McKeown said, it's not the way it's going to be, is it? It'll be infiltration, the sort of thing that's happening in Borneo in these circumstances. And Harriman, well, Mr. McKeown, you've come to the nub of the issue. But I find in the time remaining, it would not be possible to find words that would give you a sufficiently accurate answer to be able to answer your question at all.  And Barwick, three months later, wasn't foreign minister. But I know three times in my political lifetime, when America has chosen Indonesia over Australia, and there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to choose the largest Islamic country in the world over 23 million Australians, even in spite of Pongap and Barwick. I've had my go. I've asked some questions. I've got a few more. I might come back to them, but I also want to give the audience an opportunity. So can I ask who might be interested in asking Mr. Fraser a question? I'll ask this gentleman over here first. If you wait for the microphone and state your name and affiliation if there is one before you ask your question. Yeah, Mr. Fraser, my name is Paul Power, and I'm from the Refugee Council of Australia. And perhaps not surprisingly, I'm interested in your views on the implications for international affairs of current Australian policy in relation to refugees. And also, if you were advising the government, where you would suggest we take our policy in relation to refugees from here, particularly in relation to our partnerships or relationships in Southeast Asia and South Asia? Well, that's another question I'd sooner keep on the book. I'm not going to run away from it. There would be some dramatic changes in policy. We wouldn't practice piracy in the high seas and capture a boat in international waters and take everyone off it. There'd be many, many things that would be changed. If you want to see what the pattern of change might be, look to the way we handled very large exodus, very, very much larger than anything that's happened in recent times out of Indochina in the 70s and early 1980s. I mean, people were processed off shore because to try and stop boats coming through the Indonesian archipelago, which was dangerous, not only in unsea-worthy boats, but also from Indonesian parrots. So Malaysia was persuaded to allow a lot to be processed on Malaysian soil, but on condition that we were going to take very large numbers out of that center. And America and Canada also took very large numbers, so then Malaysia wasn't left with a problem that they would not be able to handle. They had initially started to push boats back out to sea we had to act quickly to try and stop that. But that will give you a pattern, but then you've got to take the issue way beyond our region because the numbers could get larger than we'd handle. So can America and Canada again be involved? Can New Zealand be more involved? We've been secretary on the Security Council. We could have tried to reinvigorate the world. We could have paid a bit more attention to the huge numbers hitting Greece, Italy, Spain, France. Anyway, I'd say anyone a different minister. I think I saw Rory Medkaf with his hand. Thanks very much. Mr Fraser, Rory Medkaf from the Lowy Institute, and I've read your book and I respect the fact that you've contributed your experience to the debate in this way. I have to say that I personally, I disagree quite strongly with not only your conclusions, but much of the analysis underlying the conclusions. And I think to me there are distortions and emissions in the analysis that damage the credibility of the conclusion that really we could do with a much reduced American strategic role in Asia. The key point I wanted to go to or the question that I wanted to go to, if I may, Mr Fraser, is about Southeast Asia. In your book you make I think a case that really the countries of Southeast Asia, of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, would rather get on with managing their problems with China by themselves without American support and involvement. My strong sense is that at least five substantial ASEAN countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and indeed Singapore, have become more worried about China in recent years, more comfortable with an American role. The fact that Singapore hosted Japanese Prime Minister Abe recently for the Shangri-La Dialogue, I think is a very strong signal of that. So it strikes me as a bit confusing that you would argue that somehow these countries would prefer to solve their problems over the South China Sea or other issues with China without a strong American presence in the region. I appreciate your view on that. The point I was making in relation to ASEAN that these were countries that had in many cases been former enemies. They had formed an association, was growing in strength and growing in usefulness. Certainly they still had some problems between them, but largely they were managing those problems or if you like putting them into deep freeze so that the association as such was not going to be damaged. And I think that they have done this over the years remarkably successfully and if you like in their own way. From the very beginning, Indonesia was saying to both superpowers, keep out. We're not aligned. We don't want to be dragged one way or another. And strangely enough, the superpowers at that time largely defended that. Now you took a view of Singapore and that's the traditional view of the Singapore government. It's very difficult for those in positions of authority who've adopted a habit of mind over the trades if you like and this includes Australia to change and recognize the strange strategic context. But I heard Gochuk Tong two years ago in Tianjin before a meeting representing 20 countries from not just Asia but around the world saying that containment will not work. It is dangerous and it cannot succeed. He didn't elaborate to a great extent but his words were in his way pretty emphatic and for a Singaporean and the Singaporean who had been Prime Minister, I think he might have got, well he hadn't repeated it. So maybe somebody said something to him when he got back to Singapore but that no doubt was what he felt. I think ASEAN left to itself would still be remarkably successful and better able to negotiate a coat of conduct in the South China Sea and that every time America says I hope China gets on with it as Vice President Biden did a while ago and repeated it and somebody else has repeated it. That would probably make it harder to negotiate with China in today's context. I haven't been to China for two years when I was there. The common question, which America do we believe? This economic and strategic dialogue led by Hillary Clinton or the pivot and the military buildup. America is trying to have it both ways. They're saying there wasn't cooperation, collaboration and then in case they don't get their own way and that they're bringing in more guns. Which America do we believe? I also had Chinese saying to me we don't want America to leave because we know China's strength makes countries in our periphery nervous but there's a difference to maintaining the status quo and very substantially increasing a military buildup and trying to contain China and the way the Soviet Union ultimately was contained. I want to come back to this question of containment because you do use the word a lot but let me just follow up on Rory's question. I mean you said these are habits of mind that people are finding it hard to shake and that's what you said in relation to Australian policymakers too but it's not a habit of mine for Vietnam which fought a war against the United States which you helped to prosecute of course that is turning Vietnam and making Vietnam worried about Southeast Asia. That's not a habit of mine. Isn't it the fact that at least these five countries that Rory mentioned are nervous? They are worried about changes that they detect in China's behavior. That's why they're moving closer to America not because of habits of mind. Well I'm not sure that Vietnam is really moving closer to America when Panetta tried to get use of Cameron Bay for the American Navy as some sort of rotating through or base again. The Vietnamese very politely said well anyone's welcome here but they weren't going to let it turn into an American rotating through or base and the Vietnamese have had a very long history of living alongside a larger and more powerful China and they've often found it very awkward. There's nothing to suggest that that is going to change and the Vietnamese have been very tough very resilient and well able to look out to themselves. I think they'll come to a time when they realize that American involvement and as China would see it American provocation throughout the region is itself creating uncertainty because there's a push back and again quite a few white against me again quite on my side he has said that these actions by the Chinese can well be in part a response to the American policy of containment or the pivotal rebalancing to try and demonstrate to the neighbors that America is not going to be able to do much and the Vietnamese above all I think will know that and understand that because they're well and truly on the main land and they're well and truly a neighbor but that's a concern they have had through history they've been with it all their lives. But on this question of the pivot I think it's true that when Obama gave the speech in November 2011 to the Australian parliament that you criticized I think it's true that there was and my former boss Paul Keating also criticized it there was uncertainty and perhaps even anxiety in Beijing about what the pivot meant but in the two and a half years since the truth is that the pivot has run out of puff the truth is that if you go to Beijing now if you mentioned you haven't been for two years but if you go now most Chinese analysts are not at all concerned about the rebalance in fact the weakness of the rebalance is making them think that America is vulnerable it's not the sort of the containment scenario that you describe in your book where this or powerful America is moving the guns into place I think when you look at the military elements of the rebalance are pretty underwhelming I would say on the grand historical scheme of things the political elements of the pivot are very unclear you have I often quote the fact that John Kerry visited the Middle East I think it was 14 times last year and he visited Asia three or four times the numbers are something like that the United States is clearly distracted by problems overseas and by problems at home the economic elements of the rebalance in particular the TPP are also unclear so one aspect of the book that I found a bit perplexing was that you set up this straw man of a ramp in America influenced by neo-conservatives and pivoting towards Asia but I think most analysts in the region would say that the pivot is running out of puff well I don't think Obama would say it's running out of puff or the Secretary of State would say it's running out of puff it was always going to be a long-term move it was never going to be something that you know like a hot knife running through butter and you know if you think it's running out of puff maybe my concerns will be reduced and America will not be so provocative in the future okay I'm anxious I don't agree with you I thought I had you for a second there I'll take this lady here and then this gentleman in the third row Thanks Deborah Snow Mr Fraser from VFX you're looking in very fine fatal might I say could I just ask you to talk a little bit more about your characterization of Australia's latest intervention on the high seas as an act of piracy could you spell out for us what you think the ramifications of that might be and whether others are also seeing it in that light the second question I'd just like you to quickly touch on as well is that you referred a moment ago to the US choosing Indonesia over Australian interests three times I think in your lifetime as a politician and an observer of foreign affairs could you go into that in a little more detail as well please well I thought that if a ship is sailing in the high seas freedom of the seas meant it was able to continue sailing if it's in international waters to be apprehended by an Australian customs vessel or naval vessel people taken off it and all the rest what do you call it kidnapping piracy it certainly is in breach of international law and it hasn't been much reported here but Reuters yesterday morning reported a police chief in Srinankar is saying that all the passengers who had been returned the 41 I think were going to be prosecuted for leaving the country illegally and it would probably be not very difficult to prove that and if found guilty he said they'd all be subject to enhanced imprisonment what's enhanced imprisonment is that a new name for torture sounded very like it on the other thing Australia had wanted a genuine act of self-determination for Westerion West Papua and especially ex-servicemen in the parliament were adamant about that the Australian government supported us and argued for it very strongly and we were way way out on the limb because the Dutch didn't want it the Portuguese didn't want it the British was not going to support us and they made that very plain and America was not going to support it and in the end we had to settle for an act of self-determination as did the people of West Papua for something that was symbolism only and meaning nothing well that was I've given the example over creeps fighting in Borneo during confrontation and there was a very when John Howard acted in relation to East Timor and partly because her BB short circled the time scale from 10 years to a few months which if you knew her BB he was bound to do met him several times over the years and continued to do so but then we had a job of sort of maintaining peace we needed a bit of heavy lift capacity it took a lot of pushing and several days before the United States would agree to supply that heavy lift capacity which we did not have and certainly should have had and we should have been spending more money on the fence but we didn't have and we couldn't have done it without their support now what were they doing in those few days when they did not say yes they were clearing their lines I have no doubt with Jakarta that's not unreasonable is it I mean I did say yes totally unreasonable women you're saying we're a special friend a special ally they knew quite well that what John Howard was doing would fail abysmally without that heavy lift capacity but they did provide that didn't they in the end after a great deal of pushing and very reluctantly as you know let me ask you before I go to this gentleman on the defense budget issue you mentioned Australia's defense budget if Australia were to follow your policy prescriptions if we were to give the United States I think you advocate five years to vacate a pine gap if we were to I'd pull Australians out of there and say they're going to be out by Christmas the Americans can fill them up but there's not going to be any further Australian involvement in drone killings or targeting American weapon systems if we took those steps the steps in relation to Darwin and others we would be signaling would be sending a very strong signal to the Americans about about the alliance and one way or another it would it would probably end in the dissolution of the alliance do you think what in those circumstances how much more would Australia and should Australia spend on defense do you agree that if we were not in alliance with the United States it would be incumbent upon us to spend a much larger portion of our GDP on defense well in the book I make it quite plain I think we should probably spend about double three percent of GNP I think a number of European states spend something around that figure countries that are not basically as well off as we are we have as the American strategists with we've ridden had a cheap ride because of the alliance but you know you ought to I don't know how many people ever read the answers treaty there is one firm an absolute commitment in it and that is a commitment to consult and then if there's agreement other things could follow but it could only follow in accordance with one's constitutional processes now if we're thinking there might be help from America that as I understand it would need a war pass resolution through congress now NATO doesn't need that because the treaty itself makes it quite plain and attack on one and attack on all it's a different kind of treaty but answers treaty is the commitment is a commitment to consult and material support may follow you cannot say more than that it's also worth noting that every war in which we've supported America has not been covered by answers has not been part of answers has been outside the geographic limits of answers and it's restricted to the forces or territories of was the three powers it's now both powers in the pacific theater and that's the limit of the geographic bounds of answers it does not apply beyond that so whatever we've done in Vietnam Iraq Afghanistan you've got nothing to do with answers and so answers is a very limited treaty a very limited cover certainly a network has grown up under it but that is a network that I question whether it serves Australia's interest I don't question whether it serves America's interests it might certainly does that's very obvious but would it at the end of the day serve Australia's interests and my you know you can say it may but the future is balancing risk what is the least risky course for Australia and I believe there is a greater risk in staying with current arrangements than in having a much greater degree of strategic independence and if America wanted to say well that ends the alliance as a whole you know it would depend on how well I don't know vengeful how annoyed how peaked the Americans were but you know if they were prepared to accept that we cannot have any facilities on Australian soil that imply we are complicit in their warlike actions if we don't want to join that for if they were prepared to accept that as a basic principle of the alliance and then we adjust things which would obviously mean adjusting Darwin-Pine gap and maybe the new purposes for which Northwest Cape is used the then an alliance could continue but I suspect that they would not do that that they would want us out in the cold but I don't you know I don't believe they're going to tell their corporation to just invest from Australia we might have some economic price to pay are they going to say we they won't sell us military equipment well their companies will want to sell the military equipment and if not there's good military equipment made in other places and even in Japan so presumably we could buy Japanese equipment now under the new arrangements that Japan's adopted we had we're almost out of time I did promise I'd go to this gentleman but I'm going to ask you to ask you a question very quickly if you don't mind the gentleman on the third row no I'm sorry this is the last question we have time for thank you not very loudly thank you you could use that microphone sir I'm going to have to ask you to ask a very quick question I'm sorry because we're almost out of time as I said um just come to your question if you would the question that I really want to get to is this as China emerges as a potential superpower can you envisage the time in the relatively short term where China's emergence as a superpower will contribute rather than detracting from peace and stability because of its countervailing force as a superpower which currently we only have one thank you very much we might have two thank you I I think that's problematic because unless there can be a change in America I would see um look the most likely spark for a conflict is Japan in my view I don't think China wants war they've got too much to do in their own land building up the standard of life of still too many people who live very close to the poverty line um and you know what one thing China has been totally consistent on in my memory anyway the opposition to her gemini whether a Soviet gemini American of gemini or anyone else's at gemini as they call it and there's no reason to believe that that is not an article of faith it demonstrates why they don't like military interventions in other countries and often vote against them in the united nations and whatever or in the security council but um look I'm not sure that I can see far enough ahead really to give uh an answer but if America were prepared to accept that or to treat China with respect to treat China as an equal if Japan were prepared to apologize for the rape of Nen King and maybe give some rational reason why Japanese school children are not taught of Japanese atrocities doing across China when every Chinese school child is taught of those atrocities um the you know a lot of things can change an apology a proper apology for the rape of Nen King one of my Japanese friends took me up on this and they sent me about 20 pages of gobbledygook and not one word of it could be said to be regarded as an honest decent apology for one of the most terrible atrocities that's occurred anywhere um that that would start to change the environment Japan has managed to put itself and make itself into the aggrieved party when it's got no right to be China was the aggrieved party and we have or America has sided unequivocally with the then aggressor against the then aggrieved party I don't think our current world leadership and pretty well any country that I can think of pays anything like enough attention to history to culture to tradition to things which are deep in the heart of you know a Kissinger Wood and he wrote recently about the Ukraine he wrote about earlier about the movement of NATO eastwards um and he always understood the importance of history and culture and um over countries past and um for China if you ask people about the early days in China they didn't go back to chairman Mao they say you know how far back do you want to go how many thousand years communism is just a blot on on whatever of China's continuum and if we really understood how to treat China with respect or if America did that would make a huge difference ladies and gentlemen I want to thank Malcolm Fraser for a number of things today first of all for coming to the Lowy Institute the Lowy Institute is happy to ventilate these kinds of issues and to be the forum for this kind of debate I'd like to thank him for contributing to these important debates not only on Twitter but by taking the time and the effort to to uh to author a book of this substance and something that is deserving of a lot of attention I think you can tell Malcolm the interest in your work from the the packed room and the TV cameras and the and the questions from the journalists and finally I want to thank you for characterizing me as being something like a minister in the Menzies government this will this will further this will I was trying to say something flattering no no no this this will further confuse my critics who usually characterize me as a dewey eyed Keatingite or or a a stooge of the CIA so thank you foreign policy was great thank you very much something we can agree on ladies and gentlemen thank you very much we have as a gift for Mr Fraser we have a couple of wonderful Lowy Institute publications that I'd also urge everybody here to buy we have the first in our beautiful new Lowy Institute papers this is called beyond the boom by John Edwards who is Paul Keating's economics advisor it's a positive optimistic take on the Australian economy and secondly this edited volume reports from a turbulent decade which contains a lot of very lively compelling fresh arguments from the Institute over our first 10 years ladies and gentlemen before you go can I invite you to consider attending an event on the 29th of July at which Anthony Bubello my colleague will be convening a discussion of foreign correspondents including Zoe Daniel from the ABC and Stan Grant from Sky ladies and gentlemen thank you again for coming and thank you Malcolm Fraser thank you very much thank you there you go thank you


Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon action item. Once again, we're broadcasting from the Cube Studios in beautiful Palo Alto. Here in the studio with me are George Gilbert and David Floyer and remote. We have Neil Raden and Jim Cabilis. Welcome everybody. Thank you. So this is kind of an interesting topic that we're going to talk about this week. And it really is, how are we going to find new ways to generate derivative use out of many of the applications, especially web-based applications that have been built over the last 20 years. A basic premise of digital business is that the difference between business and digital business is the data and how you craft data as an asset. Well as we all know in any universal turning machine, data is the basis for representing both the things that you're acting upon but also the algorithms, the software itself. Software is data. And the basic principles of how we capture software-oriented data assets or software assets and then turn them into derivative sources of value and then reapply them to new types of problems is going to become an increasingly important issue as we think about the role the digital business is going to play over the course of the next few years. Now there are a lot of different domains where there's might work but one in particular that's especially as important is in the web application world where we've had a lot of application developers and a lot of tools be a little bit more focused on how we use web-based services to manipulate things and get software to do the things we want to do and also it's a source of a lot of the data that's been streaming into big data applications and so it's a natural place to think about how we're going to be able to create derivative use or derivative value out of crucial software assets. How are we going to capture those assets, turn them into something that has a different role for the business, performs different types of work and then reapply them. So to start the conversation, Jim Kobielus, why don't you take us through what some of these tools start to look like? Hello Peter, yes. So really what we're looking at here in order to capture these assets, the web applications, we first have to generate those applications and the bulk of that work of course is and remains manual. And in fact, there is a proliferation of web application development frameworks on the market and the range of them continues to grow, everything from React to Angular to Ember to Node.js and so forth. So one of the core issues that we're seeing out there in the development world is are there too many of these? Is there any prospect for simplification and consolidation and convergence of web application development framework to make the front end choices for developers a bit easier and straightforward in terms of the front end development of JavaScript and HTML as well as the backend development of the logic to handle the interactions not only with the front end on the UI side but also with the infrastructure, web services and so forth. Once you've developed the applications, you are a professional programmer, then and only then can we consider the derivative uses you're describing such as incorporation or orchestration of web apps through robotic process automation and so forth. So the issue is how can we simplify or is there a trend towards simplification or will there soon be a trend towards simplification of the front end manual development? And right now I'm not seeing a whole lot of action in this direction of simplification on the front end development, it's just a fact. So we're not seeing a lot of simplification convergence on the actual frameworks for creating software or creating these types of applications but we're starting to see some interesting trends in for stuff that's already been created how can we generate derivative use out of it and also per some of our augmented programming research new ways of envisioning the role that artificial intelligence, machine learning, et cetera can play in identifying patterns of utilization so that we are better able to target those types of things that could be used for derivative or could be applied to derivative use. I got that right Jim? Yeah, exactly. AI within robotic process automation to anything that has already been built can be captured through natural language processing through computer image recognition, OCR and so forth and then trends in that way it's an asset that can be repurposed in countless ways and that's the beauty of RPA or where it's going. So the issue is then, not so much capture of existing assets but how can we speed up and really automate the original development of all that UI logic? I think RPA is part of the solution but not the entire solution meaning RPA provides visual front end tools for the rest of us to orchestrate more of the front end development of the application UI and interaction logic. And it's part of a broader loco phenomenon. Yeah, it's also popping up in a lot of the interviews that we're doing with CIOs about related types of things but I want to scope this appropriately. So we're not talking about how we're going to take those transaction processing applications David Floyer and envelope them and containerize them and segment them and apply new software. That's not what we're talking about nor are we talking about the machine to machine world. Robot process automation really is a tool for creating robots out of human time interfaces that can scale the amount of work and recombine it in different ways. But we're not really talking about the two extremes the hardcore IoT or the hardcore systems of record, right? Absolutely, one question I have for Jim and yourself is the philosophy for most people developing these days is mobile first. The days of having an HTML layout on the screen of gone if you aren't mobile first that's going to be in pretty well a disaster for any particular development. So Jim, how does the RPA and how does your discussion fit in with mobile and all of the complexity that mobile brings all of the alternative ways that you can do things with mobile? Yeah, well David, of course, low code tools and there are many, there are dozens out there there are many of those that are geared towards primarily supporting fast automated development of mobile applications to run on a variety of devices and mobile UIs and so forth. That's part of the solution as it were. But also in the standard web application development world is these frameworks that I've described everything from React to Angular to View to Ember everything else are moving towards a concept more the concept that's a framework or a paradigm called progressive web apps. And what progressive web apps are all about that's really the mainstream of web application development now is blurring the distinction between mobile and web and desktop applications because you build applications JavaScript applications for browsers the apps look and behave as if they were real-time interactive in-memory mobile apps. What that means is that they download fresh content throughout a browsing session progressively I'm putting the term in air quotes because that's where the progressive web app comes in and they don't require the end user to visit an app store or download software they don't require anything in terms of any special capabilities in terms of synchronizing data from servers to run in memory natively inside of web accessible containers that are local to the browser. They just feel mobile, even though excuse me they may be running on a standard desktop with narrow band connectivity and so forth. So they scream and they scream in the context of their standard JavaScript Ajax browser session. So when we think about this, it got, geez Jim it almost sounds like client side Java but I think we're talking about something as you said that evolves as the customer uses it and there's a lot of techniques and approaches that we've been using to do some of those things but George Gilbert, the reason I bring up the notion of client side Java is because we've seen other initiatives over the years try to do this. Now partly they failed because they focused on too much and tried to standardize or presume that everything required a common approach and we know that that's always going to fail. But what are some of the other things we need to think about as we think about ways of creating derivative use out of software oriented digital assets. Okay, so I come at it from two angles and as Jim pointed out there's been just a Cambrian explosion of creativity and innovation on frankly on client side development and server side development. But if you look at how we're going to recombine our application assets, we tried 20 years ago with EAI but that was sort of like MuleSoft but only was for on-prem apps and it didn't work because every app was bespoke. It worked for point-to-point classes of applications. Yeah, but it required bespoke development for every instance because the apps were so customized. And the interfaces were so customized. Yes. At the same time, we were trying to build higher level application development capabilities on desktop productivity tools with macros and then scripting languages, cross application and visual development or using applications as visual development and building blocks. Now you put those two things together and you have the ability to work with user interfaces by building on, I'm sorry, to work with applications that have user interfaces and you have the functionality that's in the richer enterprise applications and now we have the technology to say, let's program by example on essentially a concrete use case and a concrete workflow and then you go back in and you progressively generalize it so it can handle more exception conditions and edge conditions. In other words, you start with, it's like you start with the concrete and you get progressively more abstract. You start with the work that the application performs and not knowledge of the application itself. Yes, but the key thing is, as you said, recombining assets because we're sort of marrying the best of the EAI world with the best of the visual client side development world where as Jim points out, machine learning is making it easier for the tools to stay up to date as the user interfaces change across releases. This means that I wouldn't say this is easy as spreadsheet development, it's just not. It's not like building spreadsheet macros but it's more along those lines. Yeah, but it's not as low level as just building raw JavaScript because and Jim's great example of JavaScript client side frameworks. Look at our Gmail inbox application that millions of people use. That just downloads a new version whenever they want to drop it and they're just shipping JavaScript over to us. But the key thing and this is Peter, your point about digital business by combining user interfaces we can bridge applications that were silos then we can automate the work that humans were doing to bridge those silos and then we can reconstitute workflows in much more efficient and automated. Around the digital assets which is kind of how business ultimately evolves and that's a crucial element of this whole thing. So let's change direction a little bit because we're talking about, as Jim said, we've been talking about the fact that there are all these frameworks out there. There may be some consolidation on the horizon. We're researching that right now although there's not a lot of evidence that's happening but there clearly is an enormous number of digital assets that are in place inside these web-based applications where they'd be relative to mobile or something else. We want to create derivative views out of them and there's some new tools that allow us to do that in a relatively simple straightforward way like RPA and there are certainly others but that's not where this ends up. We know that this is increasingly going to be a target for AI, what we've been calling augmented programming and the ability to use machine learning and related types of technologies to be able to reveal, make transparent, gain visibility into patterns within applications and within the use of data and then have that become a crucial feature of the development process and increasingly even potentially to start actually creating code automatically based on very clear guidance about what work needs to be performed. Jim, what's happening in that world right now? Oh, let's see. So basically, I think what's going to happen over time is that more of the development cycle for web applications will incorporate not just the derivative assets, the AI to be able to decompose existing UI elements and recombine them, enable flexible and automated recombination in various ways, but also will enable greater tuning of the UI in an automated fashion through A-B testing that's in line to the development cycle based on metrics that AI is able to sift through in terms of different UI designs can be put out into production applications in real time and then really tested with different categories of users and then the best suited or best fit design based on reducing user abandonment rates and speeding up access to commonly required capabilities and so forth. The metrics can be rolled in line to the automation process to automatically select the best fit UI design that had been developed through automated means. In other words, this real world experimentation of the UI has been going on for quite some time in many enterprises and it's often increasingly involves data scientists who are managing the predictive models to very much drive the whole promotion process of promoting the best fit design to production status. I think this will accelerate, we'll take more of these in-line metrics on UI and they'll be brought I believe into more RPA style environments so that the rest of us building out these front ends or automating more of our transactions and we're animating more of the UIs can't take advantage of the fact that we'll let the infrastructure choose the best fit of the designs for us without us having to worry about doing A, B testing and all that stuff that the cloud will handle it. So it's a big vision, this notion of even eventually through more concrete standard well-understood processes to apply some of these AI ML technologies to being able to choose options for the developer and even automate some elements of those options based on policy and rules. Neil Raiden, again, we've been looking at similar types of things for years. How has that worked in the past and let's talk a little bit about what needs to happen now to make sure that if it's going to work, it's going to work this time? Well, it really hasn't worked very well and the reason it hasn't worked very well is because no one has figured out a representational framework to really capture all the important information about these objects. It's just too hard to find them, isn't it? Everybody knows that when you develop software 80% of it is grunt work. It's just junk, it's taking out the trash and it's setting things up and whatever and the real creative stuff is a very small part of it. So if you could alleviate the developer from having to do all that junk by just picking up pieces of code that have already been written and tested, that would be big, but the idea of this has been overwhelmed by the scale and the complexity and people have tried to create libraries like Java beans and object-oriented programming and that sort of thing. They've tried to create catalogs of these things. They've used relational databases, it doesn't work.  Hold on, Neal, I'm feeling that. Yeah. Well, I mean, what good is it? I mean, go to Git, right? You can find a thousand things but you don't know which one is really gonna work for you because it's not rich enough. It doesn't have enough information. It needs to have quality metrics. It needs to have reviews by people who have used converging and whatever. So that's where I think we run into trouble. As far as robots, yeah. Go ahead. As far as robots writing code, we're going to have the same problem. No, well, here's where I think it's different this time and I want to throw it out to you guys and see if it's accurate and we'll get to the actual items. Here's where I think it's different. In the past, partly perhaps because it's where developers were most fascinated, we try to create object-oriented database and object-oriented representations of data using object-oriented models as we were thinking about it and object-oriented code and object-oriented this and a lot of it was relatively low in the stack and we tried to create everything from scratch and it turned out that whenever we did that, it was almost like case from many years ago. You create it in the tool and then you maintain it out of the tool and you lose all organization of how it worked. What we're talking about here and the reason why I think this is different, or I think Neil's absolutely right, is because we're focusing our attention on the assets within an application that create the actual business value. What does the application do and try to encapsulate those and render those as things that are reusable without necessarily doing an enormous amount of work on the backend. Now, we have to be worried about the backend. It's not going to do you any good to do a whole bunch of RPA or related types of stuff on the front end that kicks off an enormous number of transactions goes after a little server that's 15 years old that's historically only handled a few transactions a minute. So we have to be very careful about how we do this. But nonetheless, by focusing more attention on what is generating value in the business, namely the actions that the application delivers as opposed to knowledge of the application itself, namely how it does it, then I think that we're constraining the problem pretty dramatically subject to the realities of what it means to actually be able to maintain and scale applications that maybe ask to do more work. What do you guys think about that? Now, Peter, let me say one more thing about this now about robots. I think you're all a lot more sanguine about AI and robots doing these kinds of things, I'm not. Let me read to you three pickup lines that a deep neural network developed after being trained to do pickup lines. You must be a tringle because you're the only thing here. Hey, baby, you're to be a key because I can bear your toot. Now, what kind of code would? Well, look, the problem is, look, we go back, we go back 50 years and Eliza and the whole notion of whatever it was, the interactive psychology. Look, let's be honest about this. Neil, you're making a great point. I don't know if any of us are more or less sanguine and that probably is a good topic for a future action item. What are the practical limits of AI and how is that going to change over time? But let's be relatively simple here. The good news about applying AI inside IT problems is that you're starting with engineered systems with engineered data forms and engineered data types and you're working with engineers and a lot of that stuff is relatively well structured, certainly more structured than the outside world and it starts with digital assets. That's why AI for IT operations management is more likely. That's why AI for application programming is more likely to work as opposed to AI to, do pickup lines, which is, as you said, semantically, it's all over the place. There's very, very few people that are going to conform to a set of conventions for, well, I want to move away from the concept of pickup lines and set of conventions for other social interactions that are very, very complex. We don't look at a face and get excited or not in a way that corresponds to an obvious, well-understood semantic problem. Exactly, the value that these applications deliver is in their engagement with the real world of experience and that's not, you can't encode the real world of human lived experience in any crisp, clear way. It simply has to be proven out in the applications or engagement through people or not through people with the real world outcome. And then some outcomes like the ones that Neil read off there in terms of those ridiculous pick lines, most of those kinds of automated solutions won't make a fricking bit of sense because you need humans with their... Leave human engagement. So coming back to this, so coming back to this key point, the constraint that we're putting on this right now and the reason why certainly, perhaps I'm a little bit more abolient than you might be, Neil, but I want to be careful about this because I have some pretty, also have some pretty strong feelings about what the limits of AI are, regardless of what Elon Musk says, that at the end of the day, we're talking about digital objects, not real objects that are engineered, not have evolved over a few billion years to deliver certain outputs and data that's been tested and relatively well verified as opposed to have an unlimited, at least from a human experience standpoint, potential set of outcomes. So in that small world, and certainly the infrastructure universe is part of that, and what we're saying is increasingly the application development universe is going to be part of that as part of the digital business transformation. I think it's fair to say that we're going to start seeing AI and machine learning and some of these other things being applied to that realm with some degree of success, but something to watch for. All right, so let's do the action item. David Fore, why don't we start with you, action item. In addressing this, I think that the keys in terms of business focus is first of all, mobiles, you have to design things for mobile. So any use of any particular platform or particular set of tools has to lead to mobile being first. And the mobiles are changing rapidly with the amount of data that's being generated on the mobile itself or around the mobile. So that's the first point I would make from a business perspective. And the second is that from a business perspective, one of the key things is that you can reduce costs. Automation must be a key element of this. And therefore designing things that will take out tasks, and remove tasks, make things more efficient is going to be an incredibly important part of- And reduce errors. And reduce errors, absolutely. Probably most important is reduce errors is to take those out of the chain and where you can speed things up by removing human intervention and human tasks and raising what humans are doing to a higher level. Other things. George Gilbert, action on him. Okay, so really quickly on David's point that we have many more application forms and expressions that we have to present like mobile first. And going back to using RPA as an example, the UI path product that we've been working with, the core of its capability is to be able to identify specific UI elements in a very complex presentation, whether it's on a web browser, whether it's on a native app on your desktop, or whether it's mobile. I don't know how complete they are on mobile because I'm not sure if they did that first. But that core capability to identify in a complex, essentially collection and hierarchy of UI elements, that's what makes it powerful. Now on the AI part, I don't think it's as easy as pointing it at one app and then another and say, go make them talk. It's more like helping you on the parts that where they might be a little ambiguous, like if pieces move around from release to release, things like that. So my action item is to say, start prototyping with the RPA tools because that's probably, they're probably robust enough to start integrating your enterprise apps. The only big new wrinkle that's come out in the last several weeks that is now in everyone's consciousness is the MuleSoft acquisition by Salesforce because that's going back to the EAI model. And we will see more app to app integration at the cloud level that's now possible. Neil Raiden, action item. Well, you know, Mark Twain said there's only two kinds of people in the world. The kinds who think there are only two kinds of people in the world and the ones who know better. I'm going to deviate from that a little and say that there's really two kinds of software developers in the world. They're the true computer scientists who want to write great code. It's elegant, it's maintainable, it adheres to all the rules it's creative. And then there's an army of people who are just trying to get something done. So the boss comes to you and says, we've got to get a new website up, apologizing for selling the data of 50 million of our customers and you need to do it in three days. Now those are the kind of people who need access to things that can be reduced. And I think there's a huge market for that as well as all these other software development robots so to speak. Jim Cabela's action item. Yeah, for simplifying web application development, I think that developers need to distinguish between back end and front end framework. There's a lot of convergence around the back end framework specifically Node.js. So you can basically decouple the decision in terms of front end frameworks from that and you need to write up front. Make sure that you have a back end that supports many front ends because there are many front ends in the world. Secondly, the front ends themselves seem to be moving towards React and Angular and Vue as being the predominant ones. You'll find more programmers who are familiar with those. And then thirdly, as you move towards consolidation onto fewer frameworks on the front end, move towards local tools that allow you just with the push of a button of visual development, be able to deploy the built out UI to a full range of mobile devices and web applications. And I'll close my action item or my second what David said, move toward a mobile first development approach for web applications with a focus on progressive web applications that can run on mobiles and others. Where they give a mobile experience, though with intermittent connectivity with push notifications, but with a real time in memory, fast experience. Move towards a mobile first development paradigm for all of your browser facing applications. And that really is the simplification strategy you can and should pursue right now on the development side, because web apps are so important, you need a strategy. Yeah, so mobile irrespective of the underlying biology or what have you of the user. All right, so here's our action item. Our view on digital business is that a digital business uses data differently than a normal business. And a digital business transformation ultimately is about how do we increase our visibility into our data assets and find new ways of creating new types of value so that we can better compete in markets. Now that includes data, but it also includes application elements, which also are data. And we think increasingly enterprises must take a more planful and purposeful approach to identifying new ways of deriving additional streams of value out of application assets, especially web application assets. Now this is a dream that's been put forward for a number of years, and sometimes it's worked better than others. But in today's world, we see a number of technologies emerging that are likely, at least in this more constrained world, to present a significant new set of avenues for creating new types of digital value. Specifically tools like RPA, Remote Process Automation, that are looking at the outcomes of an application and allow programmers to use a by example approach to start identifying what are the UI elements, what those UI elements do, how they could be combined so that they can be composed into new things and thereby provide a new application approach, a new application integration approach, which is not at the data and not at the code, but more at the work that a human being would naturally do. These allow for greater scaling, greater automation, and a number of other benefits. The reality, though, is that you also have to be very cognizant as you do this, even though you can find these assets, find new derivative uses for them and apply them very quickly to new potential business opportunities, that you have to know what's happening at the back end as well. Whether it's how you go about creating the assets of some of the front end tooling or and being very cognizant of which front ends are going to be better or not better or better able at creating these more reusable assets or whether you're talking about still how relatively mundane things like how a database serializes access to data and will fall over because you've created an automated front end that's just throwing a lot of transactions at it. The reality is there's always going to be complexity. We're not going to see all the problems being solved, but some of the new tools allow us to focus more attention on where the real business values created by apps, find ways to reuse that and apply it and bring it into a digital business transformation approach. All right, once again, George Gilbert, David Foyer here in the studio, Neil Raden, Jim Kobielus, remote. You've been watching Wikibon's Action Item. Until next time, thanks for joining us.


Okay, yes. Well, I have no control over that. So it's before the physics exam. We're going to do two review sessions. I'll do one Sunday afternoon. And Professor Bonifat will do one Tuesday evening. We're sort of constrained by many who can get rooms large enough to hold more than 100 people. So the review session that we're going to do on the Tuesday before, I think it's at, what is the class slot that ends at 8 something? 650. 650, right? Yeah. So this is at 650. And I still need to get in time for this one, but Sunday afternoon. Yeah. Yes, there are, well, no, there are classes. There are no other exams. If you have a class at that time, you need to make arrangements not to go. So this time was announced when you, this time, and the time of the other one, was scheduled last January. So even before I knew I was teaching this class, we had no control over that. The registrar can't say no. Yeah. Can you say no? Oh, the review. I could review the Sunday, I could do the Sunday one. I'm not so sure about the Tuesday one. I will, I will try to review, I have to review. Video for the Sunday one. It probably won't be up until Tuesday or so. Maybe Monday. Did people watch the videos? Yeah. Okay. Once in a while, it's like, geez, it's him again. All right, we're done. Okay. So for those of you that are using laptops or phones or clickers, I know that networking in this room is a little problematic. They broke WolfiNet Secure, and then they tried to fix it. I'm sure you've got messages about it. It kind of sort of works if you enforce it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You could also try to WolfiNet Guest. I don't think WolfiNet opening system is there. Supposed to. So, okay. So let's go on from where we were. So what we were talking about was this idea of these proper integrals, which is if we have either an unbounded domain. So, for example, so we can define, so I said this last time, the integral from anything to infinity of some function to just be the limit as the upper bound goes to infinity. This is just saying if I want to integrate some function that stretches off that way, I just cut it off further and further out, and I send the cutoff off to infinity. And so if this limit exists, and then we say it converges. And if not, we say it diverges. Okay, so I did an example of that last time at the end of the class. I integrated e to the minus x from zero to infinity. The answer is one. Everybody okay with this idea? It's relatively straightforward. So, in fact, I'm going to make this even clearer for the question. 0 to infinity of 1 over 1 plus s squared is... You've got it right. Well, half of you. So, I think this is the right answer. You know, 17% think this is the right answer. Whatever this number is, this left over, 50% think this is the right answer. And this must be something small. So, this is supposed to be relatively easy because what we do is we just... We can do this integral. I hope you all know this integral. This is the arc tangent. This is the arc tangent, the value of x, evaluated from zero to m, which is the arc tangent of m. Take the limit as n gets 8 minus the arc tangent of zero. So, the inverse tangent of zero is zero. The inverse tangent... You can think of the graph of the inverse tangent with the limit here on pi over 2. Because the tangent of pi over 2 is infinite. So, this is pi over 2 minus zero. So, the answer is pi over 2. So, this is... I thought fairly easy, but I guess not so much for you. It took a long time. I don't know why it took a long time. So, I have to do the right answer. I thought it was divergent. Okay. Let's try another one. So, let's try the integral for 1 to infinity of 1 over x dx. And so, I'm going to ask you again. So, a, this is divergent. b, this is 1. d, this is log 2. d, very few people said this one. Less than 5 percent between these two. So, how do we do this? We do this just the same way. What's the integral of 1 over... Alright, the log. So, it's the log minus the log of 1. So, the log of 1 is still zero. This is zero. And now we need to know what's the limit as m goes to infinity of the log. So, what's the graph of the log look like? Like that. It doesn't have a limit. It grows forever. The log is just what exponent you need to raise e to to get some big number.  So, this is infinity minus zero. So, this campus does not exist. So, this time... 47 percent of you thought... No, sorry. 41 percent of you thought it diverged. And 47 percent of you thought it converged. So, these two aren't the two of my distractions. I think I handled these right now. Some people came in at the last moment and got it wrong. Before it was like 85 percent right answer. And now it went down to 60 because of the log that got it wrong. So, anyway, let's just do this problem. So, the integral of 1 over x squared is minus 1 over x, right? Because this is x to the minus 2. We add 1 to the power. We get x to the minus 1. And we have to divide it by the power. So, this is... this guy evaluated from 1 to n. We make the limit to infinity. So, this is the same as minus 1 over n minus a minus 1 limit. It goes to infinity. 1 over n goes to zero. Minus minus 1 is plus 1. This is the right answer. And 63 percent of you thought it was the right answer. And the second prize goes to this. So, it's good that you know it converged, but it would be better if you know it. Okay. So, these things, I think, are relatively straightforward. It's just a matter of doing an integral as before. But one of the limits is just let go to infinity. It's a little... So, it's a little... So, now if we have something like... let's just do this. If we have something like this where we're going on both sides, so this is saying the graph of 1 over 1 plus x squared looks kind of like V bell curve, but it sort of looks like that. And here we're saying both sides. We can do this in two ways. One way we can notice that this is an even function. And so, this is the same thing as twice the integral from zero to infinity to 1 over 1 plus squared. We can do that because it's even. That is, the area over here, the same as the area over here. But even if it weren't an even function, we could still do this by splitting it up, by splitting it up, saying the integral from minus infinity to hit any place, about zero, plus the integral from zero to infinity. And now we can do this in the same way we take the limit as, let's say, L goes to minus infinity on this side and N goes to plus infinity on this side. So this is the r tan of zero minus the r tan of L. That's the first integral, plus M goes to infinity of the r tan of M minus infinity to zero. So, anyway, this is high over 2 plus 5 over 2. Okay, so I'm saying I can do it in two ways. One way, I can notice that the function is even. Half of the integral started zero, go to infinity. I just did it, so right here, I got 5 over 2, so it's twice what I got before. If this function, even if this function is not even, so I can't use this trick, I can still always split it in half. I split it at zero, I do one side, and I do the other side. Yeah, so even means symmetrical with respect to the y-axis. Odd means symmetrical with respect to zero or it's even but flipped on the other side. There are certainly plenty of functions that are either even nor odd, such as even the x, log, most polynomial, but not all things like that. Most functions are neither even nor odd. Just like most numbers are neither even nor odd because you're a fraction. If it's odd, you can play the same trick and just change the sum. If the function is odd, then I can still split it, but I only have to do one half of the integral because I know the other one, but it doesn't make it. And it would be zero. Okay, so again, there's not a whole lot to these other than wrapping your head around the idea that something with an infinite domain can have a finite area, but we see we have several to do and several to don't. Now, another thing that can go on is we might have an integral like it has a little bit of an issue at zero. It's okay at one, but it has a problem at zero. But it's the same trick. The graph of one over the square root of x looks like this. Now to one, the area that we're looking at here could be infinite because it blows up here. So what we can do the exact same trick, we just take this to be the limit as, I don't know, a goes to zero from above of a to one. Let me write it this way. This is the x to the minus one half, dx. And then we can just do this as before. The integral of x to the minus one half is x to the plus one half, but I have to divide by minus by two. Like, divide by a half. So this is limit a goes to zero from above of x to the plus one half but then I divide by the value of two from a to one. Everyone okay with this? So then this is, I take the limit of two times the square root of one minus two times the square root of a as a goes to zero, so this is two goes to zero and we say two is what the answer is. Once in a while things can be hiding. Keep this saying, suppose I have something like the integral from zero to two of one over one minus x. Suppose I have something like that. Now this looks like it's okay. So here's the wrong answer. You just do the integral. The integral of one over x minus one makes substitution u equals x minus one to the x is what we use. So this is the log. So this is the log of three minus the log of the, that's the number. But this is wrong. This is wrong. So this is just the number and this is wrong because when x is one we have trouble. Since the graph here is from one half to three so one over a half is two and it blows up at one because x minus one. The graph looks like so one. Yes, I've got this. So the graph looks like this. It has a problem here at x equals one. So we can't do it this way. Yeah. No matter if it's still wrong. Well it's especially wrong now we can give the log a negative half if it's even messier. So anyway it's all wrong because this is completely wrong. But the point that I'm trying to get at is that we can't just jump over. And in fact notice that the integral for one to three one over x minus one dx so this must equal if it exists at all the integral from one half to one x minus one plus the integral from one to three and here this diverges because so this guy we can do this is the limit as I don't know a equals to one from below of the natural log x minus one evaluated from one half to k plus the limit as b goes to one half of the natural log to minus one evaluated from and so this is the natural log one half minus one is one half when you take the absolute value minus the natural log to the limit a equals to one minus the natural log x minus one and this blows up and so does this and so this diverges be a little bit careful you have to make sure that when you're integrating your function is defined on the whole domain and as it blows up somewhere within the domain you have to split it there and do it improperly as you approach that now sometimes so for example suppose that you're going to do something numerically it's probably a good idea to see if the integral makes sense or not even if you can't do the integral in this way so one of the questions that you might ask is does the integral exist or not so if I have something like the integral from zero to infinity of e to the minus x squared dx you might want to know does this converge or does it not converge before we try and do it numerically this we cannot do by any means except numerically we already know this this is the bell curve but we know that this makes sense how do we know that this makes sense even though we can't calculate because I told you so what's the biggest this could possibly be why? one is good why one because it's not seven and I just keep writing one on the board nobody said one two people said one just because you know oh there you are well this is not quite the bell curve you have to divide by pi over two so the real one for the statistic bell curve it's over two here and then there's either pi over two so how do we so people know this is true but why? okay that's true but if I add up a lot of things less than one they can add up to b so I can add up for example one is no bigger than one plus a half plus a fourth plus an eighth and so on 52 or I can add one plus a half plus a third plus a fourth so just because everything under here is less than one doesn't mean this is less than one but you have the right idea even though maybe you don't know that we have it so do you need a hint? someone else have an idea yet? but it's a number how can I take the derivative? take the derivative open what the critical point is I can tell you right now the critical point is at zero the graph of this function that's inside here looks like this okay so this is not completely obvious so it's actually bigger than one right? maybe it's equal to x is one and we already know what the integral of this is integral from one to infinity of e to the minus x it's one we already did that so maybe one is not quite big enough maybe I need two so the idea here is we know that this graph e to the minus x squared eventually slips underneath e to the minus x they cross at one and this guy my scale is going off the shaded area that we want sits underneath the area of e to the minus x so that means that whatever this area is it has to be less than this piece this problem a little bit so this has to be less than or maybe equal to not equal to the integral from one to infinity of e to the minus x dx and we did this yesterday not yesterday last week this is the limit as m goes to infinity of minus e to the minus x by one m which is the one minus one of m limit one so because the function here is always smaller than the function here the integral here has to be smaller than the integral here even if you can't calculate and write it down like that so the function here is always smaller than the function here so the integral here has to be smaller than the integral here right if I have a room that's higher than a smaller room I can fill up the taller room with more stuff than the smaller room so if I were to fill this room half way full I would have less stuff than if I filled this room all the way full so we know that if I fill this room half way full of those little balls that you play around in you fill this with those little red yellow and green balls the volume of the balls is less than the entire volume of this room so we can say that a little more formally we call this a comparison theorem so if I have one function that's bigger than another function and the big function I don't care where it starts converges so it's the little function and converges to something less bad if we have an upper bound that we know with some number we're trying to grow the infinity we can't get bigger than the top function I can't put that up there is another part to this which says that if the little function doesn't converge so so again I still have an X bigger than G of X the integral diverges and so does the we've got X is going to the moon and you're sitting on top of G of X guess where you're going this guy is bigger than that one this guy goes to infinity area and you're at that and that's the infinity


This paper describes the development of a novel cadaveric perfusion model which allows for the simulation of clinically relevant conditions such as intra-individual comparison studies, training of interventional procedures, and pre-clinical testing of endovascular devices. The perfusion model was successfully established in five fresh frozen cadavers and 10 upper legs, allowing for the visualization of the entire peripheral artery system using computed tomography angiography, CTA, digital subtraction angiography, DSA, and intrabascular ultrasound, IVUS. Additionally, the perfusion model allowed for the introduction and testing of previously inused devices. This article was authored by Philip Greshwitz, Victor Hartung, Florian Kleefelt, and others.