Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm James Milan, and I am here for a one-on-one conversation with our current state rep, Dave Rogers. He's the rep for the 24th Middlesex District, which includes portions of Arlington and Cambridge and all of Belmont. Dave, we've spoken many times before, but thanks for being here once again. Absolutely, James. Good to see you. I wanted to ask, first and foremost, in my recollection, and I could well be wrong, is this the first time that you've had a primary opponent in one of your elections or not? Well, actually, in the first election was an open seat, so Will Brownsberger had been elected to the state senate, and that created an open seat, and those are often the most contested elections. And sure enough, there were initially five candidates in the Democratic primary. Eventually, two of them didn't move all the way forward. They started a campaign, but stopped. Three of us continued on, and then with a lot of help from a lot of people in the community and a lot of folks really in Arlington, I was able to be successful with that. And then I did have both an independent and a Republican in the general election that year, and again, was able to do okay there. Those open seats will draw attention from all over the place, right? Yeah, that's right. And even the independent guy named Jim Gamble from Belmont, who had worked actually in the Carter White House, he told me, sorry, we're pretty friendly now actually, and our campaign was not overly contentious, but Jim told me the story that he went in 1975 to Georgia to work for an obscure Southern governor who not many people had ever heard of, Jimmy Carter, to work on his campaign, and he, Carter, kind of caught lightning in a bottle and won, and only in his 20s said Jim had a pretty big job in the Carter White House, but at any rate, yeah, so he was the independent. And that certainly was a singular instance in American history, as well, our lived history, that's for sure, Jimmy Carter's victory. I should have clarified that I think this is your first opponent, your first election as an incumbent in which you've got a primary opponent. That is correct. And so I'm wondering whether you would share with us candidly, like what are the pluses as far as you're concerned, what are the pluses and minuses for having a challenger in the primary? Well, I believe in democracy. I believe deeply in our system, and no one has a claim or a right to an office. This is the way it works, and I have to go out and explain my record and my accomplishments and how I've been able to help our community, and that's only fitting and proper. And fortunately, the feedback I'm getting in a pretty substantial way is remarkable, I have to say. I think I pour a lot of myself into this work. I give it my all, and I've gotten a lot of important results, both at state-level policymaking, but also tending to the community, always showing up at community events, making sure to look out for our local interests in the state budget, kind of. So, and then almost sort of being a super volunteer, I mean, through this pandemic, for instance, delivering meals en masse to homebound residents, personal protective equipment, Belmont men are had a tragic outbreak of the virus, and we've all been learning and hearing about the shortages of PPE, personal protective equipment, and I was able to really lobby the governor. It took a lot of work, there's shortages, so a lot went into that. We got them deliveries of critically needed personal protective equipment. That's reflective of how I do the job. And so, I think four out of five members of the Arlington Select Board have endorsed me, school committee members, and town meeting members, and I think that's a reflection of the level of dedication I bring to this work. So, I'm very hopeful to move on and continue on. I'm sorry, don't mean to interrupt. No, it's fine. At the recent, the debate we held the other night and in our conversations previously, it's clear that you are happy to and with reason stand by your record and the work that you have done. I am curious, I've been learning something through these interviews recently about the kind of formation of your district, but also peculiar, something peculiar about Cambridge. So, as I mentioned earlier, your district encompasses a portion of Arlington and Cambridge and then all of Belmont. In Arlington, you share that with Sean Garberly. Okay, Arlington divided into two different, or divided by two different districts, but Cambridge turns out five different districts, five different house districts take portions of Cambridge. So, I'm wondering how, if at all, does that affect the fact that you are representing only a small portion, relatively small portion of Cambridge versus all of Belmont and a decent portion of Arlington, what does that mean for your time? And again, what you can get done on behalf of Cambridge, given the fact that you've got four other reps who also are speaking for other communities in Cambridge. Sure, well, I think it's important for a representative to attend to all needs of every corner of the district. And I've always done so and did my level best to accomplish important goals for everyone. I take seriously my representation of really of every person I represent and every community I represent. You know, it's done by population. Each of us represents roughly 39,000 up to on the high, it's a range up to in the 43, 44,000, 45,000 and it varies with population moving in and out. There are some representatives in Western Massachusetts who have 30 towns in their district. So, but you know, I have the three and you know, I really have done a lot for Cambridge. Most recently in the Ringe Towers there and Fresh Pond, what we learned through surveys and study and talking to staff and residents is that about 20% of the people in the Ringe Towers have food insecurity. And so what we set to work, you know, what can we do about this? What can be done? And we were able to work with a local not-for-profit Food for Free, a wonderful Cambridge not-for-profit and we started a food bank right in the Ringe Towers and that was initiated by me. In other words, they didn't come to me and say, hey Dave, what can you do? I came up with the idea and not single-handedly and I came up with the idea but then I worked with my staff, I worked with their outstanding staff, I worked with the residents, it's a team effort. But the idea came from me in my office and we were able to success, took some work but we've been able to successfully set up a food bank in a place that had 20% of food insecurity. So... Was that done previous to the pandemic? Yes, it was, it was done prior to the coronavirus pandemic. And how if, you know, I would assume that the pandemic has increased both the urgent need for that service and perhaps the demands on that service. What have you found in terms of that? Well, that's right. And so there are rising levels of needs not only with food insecurity but housing stability. That's why we pass an eviction moratorium in the house so that people are safe and secure in their homes. It's why we've taken all sorts of extraordinary measures right now because like never before I found my constituent work as opposed to high level policy work or working on the state budget or working on a big legislative initiatives just being in the district and tending to human needs has never been like this before. The truth is on balance my district though not Wellesley or Dover or Beacon Hill it's not the wealthiest district. It is on balance pretty comfortably middle class. And in normal times while I always get some requests hey Dave, can you help me with DUA the division of unemployment assistance? Can you help me with food stamps or can you help me in a variety of different ways? And the demands now have been intense like never before. So and despite all the higher level policy stuff I've been working on like police reform and climate change both me and my staff I've direct I have a small staff that helps me at the state house. I've said any kind of requests for help with unemployment help with food stamps, human needs that rockets to the top of the list and we put everything else aside to help those in need and it's been a lot of it. I mean dozens and dozens and dozens of people, hey Dave, I've been on hold for three hours with DUA, the division of unemployment assistance because there's a huge backlog of cases you know. What can you do? Unfortunately I have contacts, a legislative liaison for the DUA and I can cut through the red tape sometimes just calling myself and saying you know, it's representative Dave Rogers I'm having some problems with some of my constituents getting their claims filed and we were able to get a lot of matter of fact I just got an email today. Thank you. I was very frustrated and significant need. Thank you so much for getting my claim resolved and that person will begin to receive a check I think next week. So you know I have a background in economics and law and I work diligently on a lot of pretty high level policy issues but during this time, really all times but during this time particularly human needs come first and so and you know as I always say this is a time if you're in public service to step up this is a time to take care of the people who've entrusted you to be of service and that's why I do this work and so it's while it's a terribly disruptive and difficult time and the time of great uncertainty for people in my job it also in a way is an opportunity to earn our stripes so to speak and to help people and I'm glad we've been able to do that. Yeah and I do think and I imagine we probably have touched on this before in previous conversations especially in the last few conversations that have taken place under the conditions of the pandemic but I would think again it's might be odd to phrase it in this way but it might be refreshing in a sense for you to have to emphasize the constituent services part of what it is that you do because I would think that the payback for you or at least the feedback for you is just more direct probably more appreciative if you are able to effectively provide the services that they're asking for that you're getting you're part of a feedback loop this way which is different just fundamentally different from the work that you're doing in the halls when you get to be in the halls of the state house which people don't see on the whole and they only are going to be paying attention to the fruits of that and that only happens every once in a while right? Right and I think that's well said this is choose your adjective a period of upheaval, a period of uncertainty a period of enormous difficulty for many families and individuals and it is just if someone sat down with any of us four months ago or four and a half months ago and said let me tell you what's about to happen it would sound like a dystopian novel I think most of us wouldn't even believe it right? It's a bizarre basically unprecedented or at least unprecedented I know there was the flu of 1918 but unprecedented for anyone alive today in living memory and it is you know change society in innumerable ways and so to your point it is gratifying and to be able to help people because again that's why it's called public service and so I've been never busier in this job never more demands but you know we're all busy we're all disruption and having to adapt and to adjust so I'm happy to just do my part you know but speaking of doing your part I think people are always gonna be curious and again we've spoken touched on this before but it's worth finding out again how are you doing your work? How has your work been fundamentally affected? And how do you see and also you know lessons learned what do you plan to bring as we return to normal? What do you plan to bring with you that was part of this experience and that you learned through it and are gonna find helpful for doing your job in the future? Sure well I'll take the first part of that which is you know how has my work changed essentially and like most other jobs and workplaces right now the state house has undergone a significant transformation in the way we are doing the people's business and that is to say we are not physically present and meeting inside the state house. Staff are basically encouraged not to come in at all members are allowed to come in and I have gone in periodically to the state house but we passed a special set of rules so that we can vote from home just like we passed a law so that town meeting in Arlington and Belmont can vote remotely. Belmont took advantage of that and actually did the remote voting. I think Arlington just chose to have the town meeting at the high school on the field there but just like we allow local legislative bodies and town meeting to do that we're voting from home. Now legislating is very much an in-person kind of business because I might have an amendment and I want support from my colleagues and so I literally walk around the floor of the house. I've built a number of very good relationships with my colleagues and it's just, it'd be almost fully hard to fully articulate but in countless ways being in-person where we can share information where I can talk to the clerk of the house about procedural things where I can talk to the floor manager about things and it's challenging to legislate from home but we've been able to do it. We've moved a pretty big agenda. We just did, as I'm sure you've been, you know from our conversations significant police reform to address the systemic racism and the horrific killing of George Floyd and countless other cases. We passed major police reform. We just passed a really a sweeping climate bill to get us to net zero by 2050. Increases the renewable portfolio standard and makes municipal light plants have to meet the same rigorous requirements as other utilities and includes an environmental justice piece. We passed, as I said, the eviction moratorium so people are safe and secure in their homes. We passed protections for frontline healthcare workers. So, and I won't go through the whole litany. Many other things to help the Commonwealth weather the storm.  As to the second part of what you said, what can I take from this? And that's such a great question because I've been talking about this a lot and all through my time of public service and even prior to serving, I talk a lot about income inequality, the growing gap, the concentration of wealth in our country, which is really, it's not an exaggeration to say, statistically it's reached essentially the same level as the Gilded Age, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilt and the Roosevelt's. I think the data is published by the Commerce Department but if you look at the data on national income we are really reaching that point and people have talked about income inequality for a long time but this pandemic has revealed it glaringly, I think in ways that has not been revealed before. So what animates me going forward and should I be fortunate to be reelected? What will drive me on a policy basis is addressing the inequities in our society. I've always worked on that. It's always been the centerpiece of the fight for 15. We have the highest minimum wage in this country. We're gonna have paid family and medical leave. You know, at the federal level, as I said the other day, you have FMLA, that's Family Medical Leave Act, but that's job protected. So if you go out to care for yourself or a loved one, your job is safe, but you're not paid. Here in Massachusetts, we're one of the few states that has passed paid leave. And so I've already filed bills that address this. For instance, we learned that Big Gig, Uber and Lyft, the big gig, so-called gig companies, they don't pay into the Unemployment Trust Fund. So when the pandemic hit, all of these gig workers don't have adequate protection. I've worked with Mike Firestone, he was the chief of staff for Mora Healy. I think he helped run Elizabeth Warren's campaign then ran Mora Healy's campaign, became our chief of staff. He's since left, but we collaborated to draft legislation that would make Big Gig pay into the Unemployment Trust system, as they well should, because we believe they're misclassifying these workers as independent contractors, as a way to skirt their obligations. And I filed several other bills on protecting workers, proud to have been endorsed by the AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Mass Teachers Association. Every major progressive statewide labor organization has endorsed me in the race I'm in now because I've made protecting working people and fighting income inequality a centerpiece of my work. But again, to your question, it has to be, I believe, what drives me and the rest of legislators, other senators and representatives too. Let's take this moment and learn from it and build from it. After the Great Depression came the new deal. After the Gilded Age came the progressive era of reform. We, I can't really state this strong enough how I feel about this. We have to take this moment and learn from it and try to rectify these glaring inequities. And that's what's gonna be driving me. In addition to, of course, always tending to my district and our local interests, but in terms of higher level policy, that's my focus. And one of the things, and there was a question about this in the debate, but I'd love to have you elaborate a little bit more. One of those areas that you're talking about of existing inequity, I think, and then as we move forward where there are real vulnerable populations is going to be around jobs, going to be around the jobs that have disappeared during this pandemic and that have been held by people who work very, very hard but may not be able to see where their own future lies in some other kind of work. What kind of either message or ideas or potential even programs do you have in mind for those very vulnerable sectors of our population? Yes, well, I mentioned that I filed a kind of a portfolio of legislation to protect workers. I filed another bill that I think is getting significant interest that would create a presumption. If you acquire COVID, you acquired it on the job and therefore qualify for workers compensation, meaning the insurance company can't say, well, how do we know whether you acquired it on the job as a nurse or a doctor or another grocery? Maybe you got it somewhere else. No, there will be a presumption under the bill I drafted that you are entitled to your workers comp. So I think now I've been filing legislation to protect workers now to your, I think the larger point you're making, which is a good point, I still believe we have one of the strongest regional economies, as I've said, not just in America but really around the world. I mean, if you look at the Boston regional economy between our great university system, our amazing hospitals where people come from all over the world to be treated at our hospitals. If you look at the technology in Kendall Square, Kendall Square really now rivals Silicon Valley in a lot of ways, it's the second leading tech sector. And in some areas has surpassed Silicon Valley, particularly in biopharma. So we have- David, are you saying, I'm sorry, Dave, but does that mean that you're saying that those sectors will be able somehow to, and they are very vibrant and robust, you're right. Of course, are they going to be able to expand in order to, I mean, we're talking about people who are gonna lose their jobs in kitchens and servers and restaurants and things like that. How, again, how is the work of our vibrant sectors going to be able to offer opportunity to folks like that? Sure. Well, I guess, look, I don't wanna downplay this incredible shock to our economy and the suffering and dislocation that's happened. And as I said at the beginning of our conversation, I see that in my work as a representative and the people I've been able to help. But the key is, here's the truth, in my opinion at least. Bio-pharmaceutical companies all around the world are working furiously on kind of two pieces to this. One is antivirals. That is to say, obviously when AIDS HIV came along, another virus, at first it was lethal, many people lost their lives tragically. But now, if you unfortunately are diagnosed, there is a cocktail of drugs that you take and people are living basically full lives. A virus. Well, similarly, companies all over the world are working on antiviral treatments for coronavirus so that if you get it, you will survive and you won't end up on a ventilator. So that's one thing. And then ultimately a vaccine. And that has to go through human trials. It has to be scaled and manufactured and distributed, as I say, at scale. And that's gonna happen. No one can predict with certainty when, but it will happen. And the truth is, until we have good antivirals and a vaccine, there's gonna be continuing disruption. And for workers, families now, that's why I'm fighting so hard for social safety net programs. At the state house, we're doing everything we can in the budget to fully fund social services. That's why I'm filing legislation to protect workers so they can get workers comp. And then we just passed an economic development bill with various incentives to try to keep the economy strong. But the key, and I think some folks have been talking about this here, is what is gonna happen with the federal government? And we cannot run a deficit at the state level. State governments aren't allowed to do that. And we have to have a balanced budget. As you probably have been reading about, at the federal level, the US House passed a bailout package for state and local government. But the Senate stymied it. Mitch McConnell, who I hope will be defeated this year in his race, and I hope we take back the Senate and has held it up. But a lot of people think, and I've talked to some members of Congress that eventually the pressure from the red states, remember red state governors and red state mayors, they're facing the same budget shortfalls that will get a bailout package from the federal government. And we need it because we can't run a deficit. So in terms of jobs, the economy, that's gonna be key because without it, we have about a $6 billion hole we believe in the state budget. You know, I wanted to give you earlier warning than this, but we've got only 30 seconds left at this point. The economy has flown by as always. Anything that you wanted to add in here for the audience before we go? Well, it's just, it's an honor to represent Arlington and the rest of the district. As James, I always, as always enjoy our conversations and I will continue to stay motivated and focused on helping the people I represent and being fully engaged in this work. Well, we really do. I mean, understand how busy you are. We do appreciate you taking so much time with us in this last week and in general. I've been talking one-on-one with our current state representative, Dave Rogers, who is seeking reelection to the 24th Middlesex District or for the 24th Middlesex District. Once again, Dave, thanks for joining us. And thank you in the audience. We hope that you have gotten something from the conversation as we have. I'm James Milan. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.


So I love technology that makes life easier obviously and you know some technologies do some technologies don't The issue comes in when people Don't know how to use technology and it makes life more difficult for all of us So something I love is self-checkout lanes when you go to the grocery store or Walmart or wherever and I am very good Especially Sam's Club is a place if you're unfamiliar Sam's Club. It's part of the Walmart company It's a huge warehouse store where you buy stuff in bulk and I love buying stuff in bulk and not having to go to the store as often and They have self-checkout lanes and unlike a lot of places where they have self-checkout lanes are like 10 items or less 20 I'm so they don't have any limits here, but they have a whole bunch of these check out lanes and I am very very good when I put stuff in my cart at Sam's Club I put it so the barcode is facing up and all every item has barcode facing up and ready to go So when I get there, I just go I don't take anything out of the car go beep beep beep beep beep beep and I can usually check out quicker than it takes it For the process my credit card. I can scan all my items. Well Today I go to Sam's Club and again, there's there's at least 10 of these self-checkout lanes and Each one has you know two people lined up most time there There's so many of them I guess walk up to one But they're all being used just a busy time of day two people are saying except for one lane only has one guy He's got four things in his car I don't think he started yet, but he's only got four things card He's an older guy, so I'm a little concerned getting behind him So I get behind him and you can tell he's a little confused and then his wife comes over, you know And she's got some sort of bath soap stuff So now they got five items and you can tell that they're very confused trying to check out their groceries It takes them a while obviously if I got any of the other lanes I would have gotten through so finally, you know they check out they walk away I walk up and it's a membership club So the first thing I do is stick in your card so that it it recognizes your membership Well I stick my card in Grab the little scanner start scanning and I hear and it says approved and it spits out a receipt for $35 They walked away without paying for their groceries and I ended up paying for them so I call over and associate and I'm like, yeah, I just paid for the people in front of me. I you know, I they just walked away I look up and I live in Collier County where 80% of the population is over 80 And all I see is a bunch of old people and I wasn't really paying attention. They were just some generic old white people I couldn't tell I don't I'm like they're probably still here and You know the the customer service associate was a little, you know Okay, we'll figure this out and then I see this old lady walking back And she's looking at each of the checkout lanes at the register and I'm like, this is her She's realizing she didn't get a receipt But she can't even remember what what check out lanes she used so she goes I she gets comes up close to us and I go you lay it was in front of me. She goes Yeah, I go I just paid for your groceries. She's like what we put our card in, you know so it ended up taking like 20 minutes and I Very rarely do I go there and not get frozen foods and stuff like at this time I didn't get anything cold luckily because it took at least 20 minutes for this to all get situated out Which was super annoying But hey, you know, at least I didn't have anywhere to be and I didn't have cold groceries. So it's life So yeah, I love checkout lanes self-checkout lanes. I can go there I can check out and I can be out, you know in 30 seconds where getting in a regular lane takes longer than that because usually the cashiers very So I love checkout lanes except for when you get stuck behind people like this That's why I do like Walmart's Walmart now has You know, they'll have like 10 checkout lanes and one line for it Which is the way to do it The whole concept of having individual lines for each lane makes us feel Like like it's going faster because you're not in this long line but most efficient way to have lines is to have One long line with lots of registers and that way if something happens at one of them It doesn't hold up the whole line the line keeps moving But mentally we see this big long line like all this is going to take forever So most stores have those individual lanes anyway But talking about Sam's Club versus Walmart, which are technically the same company one second buddy one second buddy The scanners at Sam's Club are way way better Because I can sit there. I go beep beep beep beep beep and scan all my arms We're at Sam's or Walmart you scan wine item You have to wait two or three seconds before you can scan the next item if you try to scan two in a row It's gonna goes blah blah blah blah, and then you got to wait. So it's gotta be scan wait Scan wait, but I still prefer that besides going through especially at someplace We're Walmart where the employees just don't care and and the lines are just backed up and slow when they got a hundred lines but but only two of them are open and Connor, what do you think about the self-checkout lanes today when we were there?  Yeah, look at the camera Say thank you for watching Say visit films by chris.com Say visit the website And say have a great day


The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well good afternoon and welcome to our first issues in national security lecture for this calendar year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. I'd like to note that some of us are here in person. Others are gathered via Zoom and we hope you all enjoy the presentation. Brewerable Chatfield is on travel and is unable to join us this evening but I welcome you on her behalf. Over the 2022-2023 academic year we will be offering 16 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world from our resident faculty. This is intended to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. We also welcome participation by the entire Naval War College extended family including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and members of the military spouses of Newport. The college will be pleased to offer a certificate of completion for all participants who attend at least 70 percent of the offered lectures that's 11 of the 16. You can participate here in the audience via Zoom or even by watching the lectures when they're posted on YouTube. We'll ask you to keep track of how and when you participate and we will ask you to self-certify your completion towards the end of the series. Looking ahead on 24 January Dr. Hank Breitman will speak on humanitarian assistance. Okay on with the main event during the presentation it follows our virtual participants should feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we will welcome questions from our local audience and we ask that you use your microphone if we call upon you so everyone can hear the questions. Today's presentation will provide some perspective on the evolving relationship between human and machine. Dr. Schultz will use historical and modern concepts to examine how human machine fusion advances our creativity how we can deal with fears associated with robotic overlords and Orwellian concept coincidences and he will touch upon what it means to be human in the age of technology. Tim Schultz is the college's associate dean of academics. Prior to joining the Newport faculty in 2012 he served as the dean of the US Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Tim earned his PhD in the history of science and technology from Duke University in 2007. He is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, Colorado State University, the Air Command and Staff College, and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Formerly a US Air Force colonel he spent much of his aviation career as a U2 pilot enjoying the view over some interesting regions of the globe. I'm pleased to pass the microphone to one of the smartest guys I know, Professor Tim Schultz. Thank you, sir. That's right. Okay, thank you, John Jackson, and welcome everybody here in person and out there in the virtual world. It's a pleasure to engage with you this evening about a topic that I'm really interested in personally and professionally. This sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative and always fascinating relationship between humans and machines and this evolving human and machine relationship. I'm going to give you a perspective tonight as a historian of technology which means we'll be looking backward into the past, seeing what lessons we can draw from there as we evaluate our current circumstance and together we can kind of peer over the horizon into the more distant future and see where those pathways might be leading us. I see this evolving human machine relationship as sort of a frontier, an unknown unexplored country. It's always evolving and always changing before our eyes, and they were college graduates. They're comfortable with working and operating and thinking and leading and fighting on the frontier, the frontier of sea and air and land and space and cyber and this human and machine relationship which informs all of those. Before I really get into the details about humans and machines, though, in fine naval work college tradition, I want to start out by coming at things from a different angle and not talking about the subject at hand because I want to come at and we teach our students to do this, come at things orthogonally at a right angle, differently. Don't just think outside the box but stand on the top of the box to get a better view and just try to re-examine the problem sets or the situation. So with that in mind, I'm not going to talk about technology right up front. Instead, we're going to talk about basketball. I know there are some basketball fans with us. Who would you say is the greatest basketball player of all time? I hear Michael Jordan. Do I hear anybody else? I hear Jordan again. Some fervent Michael Jordan supporters. Larry Bird, maybe. There are others out there. The correct answer is Wilt Chamberlain, and I think this gentleman was thinking, somebody was thinking about Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain was the greatest basketball player ever. He was a big man, 7-1, ranged between 245 and 275 pounds, a dominant force on the courts. In the 1961-62 season when he played for the Philadelphia Warriors, he averaged over 50 points a game. Nobody's ever come close to that. It's news if somebody scores 50 points in a single game. That was his average for a whole season. He really is the greatest player, though, because he had the greatest game ever. In the winter of 1961, excuse me, 62, Wilt Chamberlain, and by the way, the area's there. You can see the dominant force. He was playing, the Philadelphia Warriors playing New York Knicks, and Wilt scored 100 points in regulation. Didn't go over time, 100 points. Nobody's come close to that. I think somebody scored, Kobe Bryant scored, I think, 81 points in a game, and that was a big deal. Wilt scored 100 points. In that game, he shot 32 free throws. So he went to the line 16 times, 32 free throw attempts, and he set another record and made 28 of those. So it was 87.5%, which is a wonderful, exceptional percentage rate for making free throws, and that put him right at that century mark, that 100-point game. But that season, he was doing something a little different. In the season before, he was a terrible free throw shooter. He shot about 50%. And we see that with big guys in the NBA, like Wilt, like Shaquille O'Neal, Shaquille O'Neal, good player, dominant player, but terrible at the free throw line. Such was the case with Wilt. So he wants to fix that. And in that season, he dramatically improved his percentage from 50% to 60%, which is a noticeable improvement. And he did it by approaching the game differently, in a way that is a little surprising. There's Wilt Chamberlain shooting a free throw in 1962. Granny style, underhand. Do you ever see anybody shoot underhand nowadays? Probably never. Do you ever see anybody in a college team, men's or women's, or even in the WNBA, do any of them shoot underhand? Nobody shoots underhand, but it's a much better way to shoot biomechanically. It is much more efficient. It's much more accurate. And when you have a wingspan like Wilt Chamberlain with these really long arms, you can just plop the ball into the basket. It's almost like a layup. And in that game, that epic hundred-point game, he made almost every free throw that he attempted. And he got that hundred-point mark.  And his percentage plummets to 50%. A couple years later, he's shooting 38% from the line. That's terrible. Any one of us in this room, including John Jackson, could shoot 38% from the free throw line. Maybe 40%, John. Why did he stop this far superior technique? The answer actually is pretty simple. It's pretty human. Here's what he said in his autobiography. I felt silly like a sissy shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I just couldn't do it. So he stopped this winning technique.   But players don't do that. They don't deny the opponent that strategy. Why? Because of image. Because they prefer vanity over victory. They would rather conform than command and take charge and change the nature of the game. They are so compelled by how they look and by tradition. That's what they value even more than winning. Players and coaches, they always talk about win, win, win, but something else is more important. And that's vital for us to understand as we think about our own institutions, our own organizations, our war fighting organizations. What are we doing that appeals to our vanity more than victory, that appeals to the way we conform rather than the way we might command or lead? I'm going to come back to this idea a couple of times when we talk about the relationship between humans and machines because it is relevant in terms of this ongoing adaptation between the two. So I'll put the basketball away for a few minutes at least and we'll pivot now a little bit to the real subject informed by this different way of looking at things and understanding what made me really motivate humans some of the time. I'm going to go over some frameworks, the general ways to look at this evolving relationship with technology and what it means to be human in the age of technology. I'll give you some examples of the fusion of humans and machines, some of the fears associated with machines out of control, machines taking over, machine subjugation of humans. And then we'll look at some of the frontiers, these over the horizon promises or possibilities perhaps. But I first want to talk about this unique image, this fist bump, something's going on here that's a little bit different. It's not just any fist bump, as you can tell, and also because of the personalities involved. You recognize the person on the left there as President Barack Obama. This is from 2016. He is fist bumping with a gentleman named Nathan Copeland who's sitting there in his wheelchair. Nathan is paralyzed from the neck down, but he's controlling this prosthetic arm, not with blinking his eyes or moving his lips or anything. He's controlling it just by thinking about it. He has this neural interface and it's this new technology that's being demonstrated here. Nathan is at the frontier of technological change and it's changed even in the last seven years since this image was taken and we'll get a little bit more into that. But this is a pretty epic fist bump, I think. And Nathan Copeland, he's a fascinating guy. Think of what he and others like him could do as this technology advances, what they could become. He could be a surgeon. He could be a pilot, a drone pilot. He could be any number of things rendered possible by advances in technology. But to understand this, I want to talk about a few frameworks or ways to think about humans and technology. And I like to say that the first rule of the future is to look into the past. We have been there before. And one of the key underlying assumptions that I make, one key tenet to my argument, is that human nature doesn't change. We recognize ourselves in the past. Don't we recognize this young man? We've all felt that imaginative. We know people, children who feel that imagination just take over them. It's a wonderful human image. We've all been there before. A mentor of mine likes to say that even though technology changes over history, humans do not change over history. Human nature doesn't change over history. He argues that humans change throughout history only in their costume, only in what they wear. And that's all. There is something to that argument, I think. Here's some evidence. This is an image from 1839. Photography was invented in the 1830s. And shortly after it was invented, what do we do? What do photographers do? They turn the camera on themselves. This is the first known selfie by a guy named Robert Cornelius in 1839. I'm told that millennials now will take an average of about 26,000 selfies in their lifetime. This was selfie number one. Human nature changes not. Another example. A couple of decades after photography, we get into the development of motion pictures, movie cameras. What's the first movies that are made? Movies of cats. Cat videos are the first movies that are made. This is a film called Boxing Cats filmed by Thomas Edison himself in 1894. Human nature does not change. Here's an image from 1906 from a British magazine. And it's making a forecast for 1907. It has a woman on the left and a man on the right. They have this wireless telegraph, each of them in their laps.  They have this aerial antenna each sticking out of their hats so they can get better reception. And the caption says, these two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message and the gentleman some racing results. You see this at your dinner table and at restaurants all of the time when a man and a woman or family members seated together and they're doing this and they're ignoring each other. Human nature doesn't change. Only in their costume, as you can see. Let me give you some military examples of sort of a natural human impulse or reaction. The British Admiralty, they were very fearful of the advent of steam power because it would change the status quo and potentially disrupt their dominance. Steam vessels will strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the empire or so the thinking was in 1826. You can't blame them for thinking this. A few decades later, you see a similar thought with regard to the advent of submarines. Here's what one Admiral said, submarines are underhand, unfair, and damned unenglish.  See what I did there with underhand? Submarines, it's like shooting underhand. It's almost like cheating, but it's kind of, I guess, within the rules, but it upsets the nature of the game that everybody's used to. Organizations resist that type of change until it is used against you. And then maybe your attitude changes as we see with this type of technology. So the future, yes, we've been there before, human nature tends to be pretty consistent. Another lesson about the past and that we've been there before is we've been through times of tumultuous change before. Right now we all feel like we're in one and indeed we are. I held up an iPhone a minute ago that was invented or presented in 2007, just 15, 16 years ago. It seems like so much has happened in just that short amount of time as we all walk around with much more advanced versions of that iPhone that can do so many more things than even Steve Jobs visualized. But let's look at a period of time where there was a lot of rapid change. I just want to give you evidence that we have been there before. This is from 1947 to 1957, just a 10-year span. In that 10-year span, we break the sound barrier with the Bell X-1 jet aircraft. We develop thermonuclear weapons. And by the way, I love this image from the early 1950s. All these people enjoying a poolside vacation at some hotel in Las Vegas. But look up on the horizon. It's a mushroom cloud boiling up into the atmosphere. When you see that poolside in Vegas, you know the status quo has changed. Imagine what's going through their minds when they see that. The ICBM was developed in that same timeframe. The first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, came online. Children were practicing duck and cover drills at school. The transistor was invented. They've gotten much smaller in the subsequent years. Sputnik in October of 1957, jolted the status quo, caused an enormous shock in the West. The discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, Rosalind Naut pictured, unfortunately, it ushered in or it enabled the genomics revolution, which we're experiencing today. The pill. This is a technology, a revolutionary technology. It opened the door to vast societal change, which we're still experiencing now and will continue for an untold number of years. Ten years, a lot of things going on. So we've been through rapid times of change before. We feel though that something might be a little bit different now. There's a book called by Friedman from the New York Times. It's, thank you for being late. He talks about technological change. He likes it when people are late, so he can think about thoughts that have been intriguing him. And he comes to mind or to this notion that we've had a lot of change going on recently. And it's taken on a different kind of character because of combination of these things, computation and interconnection and innovation, all coming together, especially that computation piece. And it's increasing the rate of change, and it makes it seem almost like it's out of control. So we have still our human imaginations, but now they're captured differently. The same type of young boy, just as imaginative, but now he's seen the world differently. He's perceiving it differently. Maybe he's thinking about ways to manipulate it differently due to all of this rapid advent of new enabling technologies. I like to portray it in graphical form as technology's capability, having a sort of an exponential growth or an exponential increase over time. Thanks to this combination that Friedman talks about of computation, interconnection, and innovation, this curve represents a nonlinear growth. It would be an example of, say, the number of people who have smartphones or the number of drones in the sky, small drones up to airliner type drones, the number of nanotechnology patents, the number of cyber attacks, the number of people who have had their DNA sequenced by 23andMe or some other firm, things where the more you get or the more you change, the more you even change after that, this nonlinear growth. We are in that period. This is a challenge for Naval War College graduates. It has strategic implications. How do we keep up with this technology? We walk backward into the future. We don't know where this curve is going and how we're going to keep up. Thomas Friedman also likes to note that this curve is shaped like a hockey stick, and it comes to mind for him. Wayne Gretzky's famous quote, the great Gretzky, famous hockey player, his quote, I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. How do we educate our Naval War College graduates so they skate to where the puck is going to be? How do we discern where this technology is going and where it's taking us, especially as technology's capability seems to be rapidly increasing, but human capability, it doesn't increase like that. I very generously gave it a slightly upward slope here, but those of you familiar with teenagers and TikTok and Twitter would probably argue that it's actually a downward slope over time. Questions makes me question our confidence in the future, but it's up to humans, it's up to strategic thinkers, it's up to inventors, it's up to Naval War College graduates to figure out how do we bend this curve so humans can keep up with technological change and maybe utilize it, exploit it for the better. Bending the curve, as we call it, and one way to do that is with human and machine teaming, fusing humans and machines together in novel ways to make them both better and to amplify human capability. So let me talk about fusions now for a little bit, which includes this human and machine teaming. Here's one example from the late 1940s of poor human machine teaming. The Air Force was interested in pilots being able to withstand more Gs. If you're flying an aircraft in the seated position, you can withstand up to a 9G acceleration force, but if you're laying down, you can almost double it. You can withstand about 18 Gs. Turns out though, this is a very impractical way to fly and engineer the aircraft around a pilot laying flat. It just didn't work. It was a poor fusion, so it was abandoned. What really took off though was human machine fusion, human machine teaming that involved information, and it came from the mind largely of this gentleman here. His name is Norbert Wiener. He developed the term cybernetics in 1947. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word for steersmen, and a steersman is one who says steers a boat but is compensating for changes in the environment, and there's this information feedback loop to keep the boat on a straight course. Cybernetics is really just a fancy term for information feedback. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician. We think this is a simple concept, but mathematically it's very challenging, and he did the math on it. He posited that if you have adequate computers and adequate sensing power, you can do just about anything and have almost any degree of elaborateness of performance, and humans can be integrated into that cybernetic system. Cybernetics has really defined the second half of the 20th century, and Norbert Wiener was one of the three great titans of the information age, along with John Von Neumann, who was involved with the fundamental improvements in the digital computer, and another gentleman named Alan Turing. I'll talk about Alan Turing here in a little bit, but cybernetics matters. I'll apply it here in a minute. Who are the best pilots, I sometimes ask? Here are some famous ones, Lindberg, Charles Lindberg, this gentleman in the middle is William Hopson, a famous airmail pilot from the 1920s. This is Jacqueline Cochran on the right, a test pilot in the 1930s and 40s, first woman to break the sound barrier. Excellent pilots, but really the best pilots are ones who learn how to integrate themselves with a complex system and find out what machines do better and what humans do worse and compensate for both. This was a fundamental change that started to take place in the 1930s and 1940s. Here's an excerpt as an example from 1943. This is the flight manual for a B-17. It instructs the pilots.  You're controlling the aircraft with your physical skills, your senses, your cognitive skills, but above 10,000 feet, you become something different.  You are a component, a node in this cybernetics system where you are exchanging and processing information and the heart of this cybernetics system of the B-17 is not a human. It is a machine. It's the Norden bombsite. This is the heart of the B-17, the most important part for its mission because it is linked up to the autopilot. It controls the aircraft and its bomb run far better than any pilot can. The machine is better. We can see here the bombardier operating a bomb site. He links it up to the autopilot. The pilots remove their hands and feet from the controls and let the automation fly the aircraft in that cybernetics system. Those are pilots doing what they need to be doing. In that same era, we took all of the humans out of some B-17s, completely roboticized them and turned them into remote control bombers. There's this pretty sophisticated approach. Even in the 1940s, in 1937, the future five-star general in charge of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Hap Arnold, he said, we need to relegate the human flyer and elevate the mechanical flyer. He saw this coming, this changing human-machine relationship. After the war, he said, I think the time is coming when we won't have any men in a bomber. That has come to fruition today. Just after the war, we see an image of this change in the nature of the human-machine relationship. This electronification of the pilot, this processing of information now is becoming more important than anything else in terms of controlling these aircraft. In 1947, a transport aircraft took off from Canada, flew all the way to Britain, and it did so with a full crew on board, but the crew never touched the controls from standing still on the runway in Canada to coming to a full stop on the runway in Britain. They never touched anything. It was entirely electronic and automatically controlled. Very sophisticated for 1947, and things have only taken off since then, and now we see a modern pilot, a modern aviator operating a remotely piloted aircraft like a Predator or Reaper drone. This is a more modern manifestation of that cybernetic human-machine fusion. Here's an image of an unmanned F-16, a QFF-16. You can see there's no pilot there. A recent chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force said this notion of one pilot and flying or operating just one aircraft, that's in the Andrathal way of doing business, because now pilots can control multiple aircraft from their one aircraft using automation. Arguably a better way to do business, and I really like this image, by the way, we talked about selfies earlier. This is what it looks like when a robot takes a selfie, when a robotic F-16 wants a selfie, there it is. Come a long way from Robert Cornelius in 1839. Here's another modern cybernetic system, a fusion of humans and machines to the point where it's so sophisticated it may be the last man-strike fighter that the Navy will ever buy or fly. And similarly, the chief of staff of the Air Force about the F-35 says it's like a computer that happens to fly. This is a result of human machine fusion in the modern age. Here's something Elon Musk said recently, which angered some of my fellow Air Force aviators, but there you have it. Fighter jet era has passed. It's drones. That may or may not be the case, but a case can be made for it. But there are other fusions. My research focuses on aviation oftentimes, but I want to give you some other examples. For ground warfare, you've seen images of these robotic mules or dogs, things that can help out our ground forces. They're getting to the point now where you can command them with voice. They can sense you. They can sense if you're getting fatigued. They can sense your motion, how you comport yourself, and they're exchanging information that way. And they're altering what they do because of that in a cybernetic system. This notion of cyborgs has been around for a while. And there are a lot of cyborgs walking among us. Some of you know people with pacemakers or insulin pumps or cochlear implants. They're cyborgs, technically. They're a cybernetic organism. That's where the term cyborg comes from. Cybernetic organism, an organism that has machines fused with it that are used to exchange information and operationalize that information. Soon, maybe we will all be natural-born cyborgs. Nathan Copeland, who I showed you earlier, he's a cyborg now. And a pretty cool one at that. And there he is, again, at that cybernetic frontier. What's interesting about Nathan, though, is you can see, if you look at the top of his head, he has these things literally drilled into the top of his skull. And they're heavy cables. It's this big apparatus, a bit clumsy. Well, there are improvements being made to that to make it just something the size of a little bit bigger than a quarter and implantable underneath the skull wireless.  And it can establish that neural interface with some type of machinery. And that's sort of what it would look like here. To implant that, by the way, human surgeons can't do it. They don't have the skill. A robotic surgeon is used because it has much finer motor skills to do the delicate implantation of this into the human brain. Welcome to the modern age. Welcome to modern cybernetics. There's actually, like everything else, there's an app for that. Or soon will be where the Neuralink app, you instead of using your keyboard and mouse, you could control it with the activity of your brain just by thinking about it. Maybe your children or grandchildren will be using that sort of thing. Maybe you will be. This is one of the out there ideas with human and machine fusion. It's called the singularity. Some of you may have heard of this before. It's this point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But along the way, we learn or we're taught how we can download our own brains, our connectome, our neural network into a machine and become immortal. This small print here on Time Magazine, it says, if you believe humans and machines will become one, welcome to the singularity movement. This is a myth of the future. This is somebody looking at where that curve might be going, where the technological trajectory may possibly take us. I would think of it as kind of a technomistical ideation. This may never come to pass, but the current state of technology has people thinking about this sort of human-machine interface. I want to get now, though, into some of the fears involved in this evolving relationship between humans and machines. My favorite examples are here on the screen. You all know this entity on the right, the Terminator. Oddly enough, the Terminator is the only character to make Hollywood's list of top 100 villains and Hollywood's list of top 100 heroes. And we all love the Terminator, right? This image on the left, this is from the Stanley Kubrick Arthur C. Clark production from 1968, 2001, A Space Odyssey. This is the HAL 9000 murderous computer. And if you think about it, you look at it, look at the Terminator's eyeball. It is a nod to Stanley Kubrick and the HAL 9000 computer. It is a small version of the HAL 9000 computer. HAL, HAL 9000. Some think it was a play on words for IBM. If you add one letter to the alphabet to HAL, you get IBM, because this is where Stanley Kubrick imagined IBM might go in terms of creating computers that may want to murder us someday for their own reasons. Speaking of IBM, it struck fear into some people when an IBM computer defeated the greatest human chess player ever, Gary Kasparov, back in 1997. People thought, oh, this is the end of human dominance. Shocked Gary Kasparov. He thought he was going to utterly vanquish this computer, and he didn't. He was clearly defeated. It helped generate some fears of the modern age, but I want to get into some renditions of those, this notion of Big Brother and Big Other, and also loss of control. What do I mean by Big Brother? We all are familiar with this novel from 1948 by Orwell. This notion that a highly technologized society can completely control its citizens, that's a modern fear of technological growth and its subjugation of humans as it unemploys us, or enslaves us, or eradicates us. We see in this Orwellian world, or an element of this Orwellian idea, this thing called the panopticon. Panopticon just means something that can see everything. Pan means all, like pandemic. Panopticon is the ability to see everything. This is an old idea from 1798. It's this notion if you put a guard in a guard tower and tint the windows, the inmates have to assume they're being watched all of the time, and it exerts control over them. They'll change their behavior because of that. It's called the panopticon effect. We see it in the modern world all over the place. If you think you are being observed, or that you might be observed, it changes your behavior. China figured it out. This is Tiananmen Square on the left. The people there are being very subtly subjugated to control because they know they're under constant surveillance. The chairman sees all, and therefore the chairman perhaps knows all as well. We see this panopticon effect in the West as well. Here's a modern panopticon, keeping honest people honest in London and in Washington, D.C., and in New York City. This is a portable police panopticon. You don't know if a police officer is in there looking out at you. You have to assume that is the case, and it shapes people's behavior, especially if this is recorded and exploited. It can become even more powerful. And we see that with these two Chinese police officers. They are sporting the latest in panopticon fashion with their sunglasses because integrated into their sunglasses are these tiny little cameras. And you can see that they're wired to their handheld device, so they have the immediate ability to do facial recognition and look for people of interest out in the public to see constantly and recognize immediately that's real power over people. This is a digital stop and frisk. And there's not much that a citizen walking by can do about that. And there's some facial recognition imagery there. Here's another powerful panopticon, and each of you has one on you right now. I know it. A smartphone. It is recording or gathering information about you that might be of interest to the state or to others. Here in China, they have a social credit system, and these young women are displaying their social credit scores. They're proud of them. This is to help the government ensure that everybody's happy and safe and secure and monitored and controlled with their social credit system. So the panopticon in your pocket can be rather powerful, which makes me do this notion getting away from big brother to big other. This is a term used by Shoshana Zuboff in this book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where she talks about how private firms exploit information that can be used to kind of shape and control your behavior. And it happens to all of us. Here's what she says about the Internet of Things, the TV that hears you, the house that knows you, the book that reads you. This is the Internet of Things, and all of us are things in the Internet of Things. We are all interconnected, and there is information being shared about us. Does anybody in here have a Nest thermostat at home? John, you do have one. I'm thinking about getting one. I mean, they're really cool. They can link up to other smart devices in your home, whatever those might be. They can kind of discern and establish a pattern of life for you, kind of like a predator drone orbiting over a village establishes a pattern of life of the citizens in that village. Well, your Nest thermostat can establish your pattern of life to help you, to help you live a better life, right? But it's kind of creepy. It's kind of a big other thing that you're putting on the wall in your house. I think they should redesign this just a little bit. They're almost there, but they should redesign it so it looks like what it really is, the murderous computer from the 1968 movie, The Howl 9000. The Nest thermostat hasn't become Howl 9000 yet, but you never know. You also, some of you may have a ring doorbell. It's not monitoring necessarily the inside of your house, but it's monitoring the outside in your neighborhood. That could be super useful. It's very secure. That's a societal good to a point, but it's also a panopticon looking outward as well. This is something the CEO of Google said, Eric Schmidt, and it's kind of creepy, I think. You give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type it all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about. And look when he wrote this, 2010, 13 years ago. That's an eon in terms of this rapid nonlinear increase in technological change. So think what those systems can do now and can discern about you and about me. That's a big other. There's also in terms of fears of technological change and how it relates to humans in the real world, this notion of loss of control. And the issue at hand here is this loss of cognitive control. Some systems are so automated, you don't understand how they're working. And when you lose cognitive control, you lose physical control. This contributed to the disaster of the USS McCain, where there was a loss of cognitive control, loss of cognitive awareness. There was confusion about what the steering system was doing, about how to change what the steering system was doing and how to manipulate the ship and where the ship was. And it resulted in a physical disaster. The airline captain, Soli Sollenberger, who landed that airbus on the Hudson River a few decades ago, he famously said that with modern technology, it changes the nature of errors that are made. Losing cognitive control is a new type of error in our relationship with technology. So if there's a change in the nature of errors that are made, it suggests there's a change in the nature of our relationship with technology. We see here another image of the USS McCain and the result of that loss of control. There was also a loss of cognitive control in the two airbus, excuse me, the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. The autopilot, the automatic system was doing things that the pilots didn't understand why it was doing it, and they couldn't regain physical control over those aircraft and they crashed and killed everyone on board.  A very poorly engineered system in the 737 MAX aggravated by a lack of training for those pilots in how to turn off that system. Another element of this loss of control is this fear that humans will just be out of the loop completely, and humans and machines will be making decisions entirely independent of humans and not no longer subject to human control. This is the thesis of the campaign to stop killer robots, this notion that predator and reaper drones, they're fully automated and out of control. That's factually incorrect. They are under actually exquisite levels of human control. In the future though, they will probably be more automated and what will that mean for the ability of humans to exert proper control. We see this depicted in various different forms of art here as well. This brings me to the final section here on the notion of frontiers. A key aspect of this frontier of the human machine relationship, human versus machine, is this notion of a cognition. I've already talked about cognitive control. The former editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, he compares cognition to electrification. Electrification, we all know about that. You plug something in and it gives you the ability to do new stuff or things you couldn't do without it, like eat your food and make ice and watch TV and all of those things. In cognition, you're not plugging into an electrical network. You're plugging into the cloud and the cloud can do things for you that you could not have done yourself. Here are some examples of cognition, things that you have done for you or help augment your awareness or make life more convenient for you because it does a lot of the thinking for you. When you drove here to Newport, Rhode Island for the first time, most of you probably did not use a paper map. Most of you probably used your iPhone and a program called Waze, and Waze can know where the traffic jams are and reroute you in real time. That's not something humans cognitively can do, but with cognition plugging into the cloud, we can do that. That's part of the frontier that we're already operating in. What about cognifying warfare? To what degree is warfare and will it be cognified by intelligent machines and should it be? Is that a good idea because warfare, after all, is political in nature, fundamentally political. It's a dual. It's a human scourge. It's a human event. It's a human phenomenon. Here's some examples, though, of cognition of modern war. This is an unmanned system, which John Jackson talks a lot about in his Unmanned Systems Elective, putting a plug in for your elective, John, which is outstanding. Here's what the CNO said a few years ago, we're in a new age of cognitive computing, machine assistance to help us all make sense of that data. Last year, the Navy conducted Project Overmatch. You see the USS Fitzgerald here up in the top operating with this vessel here in the bottom, which is either unmanned or optionally manned, and the Navy is trying to figure out how to integrate these types of manned and unmanned systems for greater lethality and greater resilience. Here's what the CNO had to say about that. He's talking about man and unmanned teaming. We've already talked about a little bit on man and man teaming today. The man loop is going to be an important piece for a while before we get to a point where it's hand off with a high degree of autonomy. This is what many people fear, but this seems to be where the trajectory we are letting the trajectory take us at this point, the cognification of war. We see this on land as well. This is a Russian device from 2021. It's equipped with a machine gun, an artillery tube, and a flamethrower. So now we have the Russians are developing an unmanned flamethrower. What could go wrong in that scenario? Although I think the Russian project here has been somewhat derailed by our friends in the Ukrainian armed forces who have sent the Russians back a bit. A former Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, talked about the cognification of warfare, this new frontier of algorithmic warfare, where due to these cybernetic systems with increasingly high elaborateness of performance, they can do a lot of our thinking for us. They can take terabytes of data and make sense of it and use his words, these types of systems in this new frontier of combat, they can provide actionable intelligence and insight at speed. And when he says at speed, it doesn't mean the speed of human thought. He means the speed of machine thoughts. That is how we compete in the modern battlefield. Another notion of cognifying combat, I'll go back to aviation. Here's an image from World War II of Colonel Benjamin Davis. Colonel Davis had sharp eyes, very fast reflexes, and a killer instinct. And he had a pretty good mustache as well. Here's a pilot from the Vietnam War, Colonel Robin Olds. Colonel Robin Olds also had sharp eyes and fast reflexes and a killer instinct and a rocking good mustache, an iconically good mustache. These two gentlemen, excuse me, they operated primarily based on their own physical and cognitive abilities. The seat of the pants flying and their awareness of the battle space through their own human senses. That has changed. Here's a modern F-35 pilot. This F-35 pilot no doubt has a very sharp eye sight. Fast reflexes and a killer instinct, mustache is probably optional. But the sharp eyes are also aided by machine vision. In his visor, this is a $400,000 helmet that he's wearing. It was $400,000 five years ago, so who knows what it is now. On the visor is projected information by the computerized system to give him situational awareness about the battle space. So he doesn't really have to look around himself. It's projected there for him by computers. He has fast reflexes, but things are already also happening at machine speed form. The decision making is happening at machine speed and just presenting him with information about big picture decisions. He has a killer instinct, but if he executes a kill, it's going to be different than the two gentlemen on the left because the modern F-35 pilot is going to kill BVR beyond visual range. He'll never see his opponent, his foe more than likely. The computers will see it and the human pilot will authorize the decision to fire that missile and shoot down another aircraft and he'll never even see it in the typical battle scenario. I wonder if these two older pilots who flew and fought very differently, if they would look at a modern pilot and think, is that fair? Is he cheating somehow? That's kind of not the rules of the game. It's not the traditional fighter pilot ethic, but the modern fighter pilot, the way he or she fights is by commanding the information battle space. That's what makes the most effective pilot. That's where the killer instinct is that might be doing things in a non-traditional way, but it is by far the most effective way. As this F-35 pilot says, you can see, you can look through the jet's eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the world. That's more important than how you see the world in this high tech, high, fast-paced battle space. Another frontier looking backward is robot warfare. Here's an image of robot warfare from 1944, late 1944. On the right is a German V1 robotic cruise missile somewhere over the English channel and it's being destroyed by the Spitfire aircraft just on the left and the Spitfire aircraft is destroying it by flying right up next to it putting its wingtip under the V1's wingtip and doing what it's called V1 tipping. It flips the wingtip up and it knocks the V1 out of equilibrium and it spirals down in the English channel. The V1 was a robot that could not react, it could not think. But what happens in the modern era when we have robots that can think and that can react, you can't just tip them out of the sky like this. As a matter of fact, this was demonstrated by a trial put on by DARPA and a couple of other organizations where they pitted in the simulator and experienced fighter pilot against an artificial intelligence that was controlling the other aircraft in the simulation and it was this this alpha dogfight trial and it turns out the software was much better than the human wetware and in a series of five contests the artificial intelligence won every time. Now it was a little bit unfair because this was a simulation and the artificial intelligence knew the exact parameters of the human controlled opponent which wouldn't be the case in the real world but as machines become more sophisticated you kind of get the idea that this artificial intelligence will be a real adversary of note. You may not know in the future if you are in a battle in combat or a battle of wits with a human or a machine. They've passed the Turing test. They've surpassed our ability to distinguish whether or not they might be human or machine and this is what Alan Turing was getting at in 1950 and here he is on the 50 pound note which was recently released in Britain. He came up with this notion of the imitation game or the Turing test as it became called is when computer intelligence gets to a point where it can mimic human behavior and you can't tell the difference that really is kind of a tipping point in terms of the advance of that computer type of intelligence. I like his quote here at the bottom and this is on that 50 pound note he says this is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be and that kind of summarizes a lot of what I've been talking about a foretaste of what is to come in the shadow of what is going to be or what it what may be because we don't know what's going to happen we try to think of what may happen. Some of you have heard the term sea change I think we're in the midst of a sea change possibly it was coined by Shakespeare in his play The Tempest and it's just this fundamental change in this case a sea change into something rich and strange machines may seem like they're becoming something rich and strange humans integrated with machines cyborg type of humans maybe humans are becoming something rich and strange or the human machine system that integration is becoming something rich and strange somebody with a neural implant a modern-day cyborg may seem rather rich and strange to us think about what this might mean in the future for your children and grandchildren will they become something rich and strange will they be augmented in ways that we don't imagine right now will these augmentations be good for humans or will these augmentations become something more like amputations and make us feel a little bit less human in some ways what trade-offs might we be talking about this brings me to this question of will ethics keep pace what do we really want for humans in society and for our virtue and our for our character it's a pacing problem that neighborhood college graduates have to think about ethics and norms and laws always trail behind technological change so in the interest of asking of answering this question in true neighborhood college fashion you answer a question by asking three other questions these are questions from Immanuel Kant what can we know what should we do what may we hope well for us if machines learn humans can unlearn we can we can start thinking outside of the status quo we can reject we can challenge our resumptions challenge presumptions that have set themselves up as truth as humans operate humans need to orchestrates have a higher level of reasoning and control as machines imitates that's where human creativity comes in humans create as machines are artificial humans it is up to us to be ethical Gary Kasparov came to understand this after he was his stinging defeat in 1997 he actually came around and thought this was a good thing for me it learned me how to it learned I learned Gary Kasparov learned how to be more creative after that it kind of expanded the the whole perimeter of his mind and it felt he actually felt more human after that he learned how to think anew so we can act anew and that's an old line from Lincoln in 1862 I share with all of the incoming students we must think anew and act anew and that means for now in the current age and in the future as well will we think anew and act anew will Chamberlain tried it for a time but vanity was too powerful big guy huge man powerful man but he was felled or inhibited by one small thing his ego he would rather conform than command and that's a lesson for us it's not a criticism of him necessarily necessarily but it's a lesson for us in terms of what we humans deem as important what do we think is important about our identity and what we're willing to do and to not do and how might that change over time so what may we hope probably the message we should take out of this is machines are learning how to think but what's more importantly will men and women think so we've covered a lot of ground here and it's a it's a complex story but the story of technology it's a story about the future it's a story about peace it's a story about war but it's a story that humans are going to write and not machines and it's a story that naval war college graduates are going to writes and I'm confident they'll write a good one so thank you for your attention here and out there in zoomland and I'm going to turn it over to John Jackson thank you Tim that was terrific and I'm going to go home and shoot a bullet into my toaster I just don't trust these machines are there any questions here in the auditory Gary do we have any in zoom now we've gone right to the 531 point so the right at the hour point so I think we've exhausted the time for questions but that's okay the good questions will come later as we all continue to ponder this this future all right good thank you very much thank you all