I am Ravi. Namaskara. With me, I have a bill joining from California, David from UK, Diego from Berlin, Manoj from Chennai, Pooja Shah from Hyderabad, Pooja Jagani from Mumbai, Sri Yadav Shah from Hyderabad and Titus from Houston. We have our Australian people here. I'm giving it over to Pooja Shah to take it from here. Thanks Ravi. Hi everyone and thanks a lot for joining. For some of us it is good evening, good morning and probably I would stick to good day because we have people from probably 35 countries and like different time zones. You can see from Bill like he's joining 5 AM. So thanks a lot for joining on Saturday. I appreciate a lot of your time coming here. With me in this session, I know most of you have been waiting for this to ask your interesting questions. Interesting, I mean like really hard questions you have for them. I know and you would be wanting to be addressed. So we will jump into it with all of them in a bit. But before that, you had been also waiting for one interesting announcement like they will contest from our sponsors and let's see who is the lucky winner. So I'll just go and pull out the information of the lucky winners. But any guesses like this is like I almost end of the conference. Any guesses on who probably would be winning this, like being some energy in the chat section like what do you think that who would be the winners of those contests? Some energy in the chat. That's tight as dog. So I'm thinking everybody is quite like guessing a lot. I'll begin with announcing the winners starting with A4 aptly tools winners. This is for the Oculus Quest 2. The prize goes to Chetan Pandey, vice president, Northern Trust. And another is the iPad contest for which the winner is Ashwini Lalit, manager, test, QA automation digit. And the third prize goes to Pooja Shah, iPhone Pro 13 Max. I'm just kidding. That's not a prize though. Apply tools team is like, when did we announce iPhone 13 Pro? Okay, so the next prize goes to brother stack winners. This prize is for Columbia Grand Wall Jacket. This goes to Zafar Siddiqui, lead estate, FRB NY, Pip Corina Adina, head of QA Bloom, Shreya Agrawal, QA into New York Queen Street. Thank you. I am not able to read the chat at this moment, but yeah, like appreciate them all for so for sportively attending the conference, talking to each other, learning a lot, networking and also winning in return and bringing a smile on some faces. And last but not least, we have lambda test winners as well. One lucky winner for fix a bug in winner goodie that again goes to Chapman Pandey. It looks like he's about to hit a hat trick. Another prize for lucky winner interest in conversation. This goes to Gauravardwaj. See there, I take quality assurance, especially same emcee. And the our biggest supporters horse labs winner goes to, okay, so this winner has yet to come. It's still a surprise. And you will see the males coming from them. So watch out for the males in a few days. And you never know, you are the one of the winners. So all right. Thank you everyone again. And now we go to the section where you all have been waiting for really, really long. And for that, this will be a teamwork. Okay, so for all of us, we need to go into Q and A section. And all of us have to have to put the questions, which you would generally in a physical setting, you would ask directly. So so go ahead, use your creative minds, use your unanswered questions or creative questions or fun questions or hard questions, put them all there. And I will start I promise like pinky promise to pick as many as possible from them. Cool. And the interesting part about this composition would be, you can ask hard questions like, like, like, why, when is Selenium supporting capture automation? And probably why did Thanos snap his fingers?  Yeah, they can totally answer it.  I have, I have like, one small question before the audience asked. So all the panel members, thank you for coming in. And thank you for all the contributions you have been doing in different formats, and especially keeping these projects running up and running, and that energy going on. So I would come to each one of you. But for me to begin with, I have a lot of got to do. So thank you for doing that. So before audience asked, I have one question for all of you. And it's going to be fastest finger fast. First, so let's see who knows who the best among you all. So you had been coding sometimes together, something separate on different books on different binding. But let's see if you know, if you all know each other's well, so I will put one question and the first one to answer. Basically, let's see who wins. Okay, the question is a person who runs long and long and long marathons so much interested in it that you can do marathons. This person can do marathons like eating ice creams. Manoj. Oh my God. Yes, we have the answer. Titus. Titus. It's Titus. It's Titus? Yeah, it's Titus. Oh, okay. So we have competition Titus versus Manoj. And I like you can help us. It seems it seems someone has scrolled down my Instagram feed. Yes, so you can you both can help probably, probably an alternative alternate career in Olympics, probably. Yeah, cool to know. So with that, since we started with like most people voted for Manoj, I start with Manoj. And the way we are going to do is Manoj. I would request you to introduce somebody in this panel and talk three pointers one about them about their current role in the project and one interesting fact about them. And then Manoj will go on whoever Manoj names that person will go on to introduce somebody else. Cool, go ahead Manoj. Sure. My favorite pick is Titus always because I picked him already on one of the previous conferences so I still remember. Titus is a very good friend. He's been around for quite some time in the Selenium project. Before picking up his laptop, I know for sure he spent a lot of time in army blowing some ballistic missiles if I'm not wrong. And then for some reasons, yeah, now he's coding on Ruby and becoming a polyglot programmer and picking up all the languages that he could, proving to be a true rock star in the Selenium team and bringing in some new initiatives. And fun fact I know, I think everyone misses conferences. I know Titus will miss a lot because he would miss getting the mangoes from you Pooja. So the fun fact is Titus likes mango a lot. Is it? Okay. Nice. Okay. How do you Titus? Thank you. And it's the Navy, not the army. It's a very important difference in the United States. So, but yes, and the last India conference I participated in it was my birthday and someone gifted me very kindly with some delicious mangoes from India. Thank you. That was a great event. Okay. So I am going to introduce Bill next because Bill is the brand new member on our team and he's just been fantastic so far. So Bill came from Sauce Labs as one of the marketing gurus at Sauce Labs and he left Sauce Labs and decided he wanted to keep helping out the community. And so he's joined Selenium as a project leadership committee member. And so far he's jumped in and gotten a bunch done that we've been in need of moving things forward for a while and he's just been fantastic at that. Fun facts about Bill. I'm trying to think which of the various is one of my one of the first people that I met at Sauce Labs when I joined. See, I'm like, oh, I'll jump in. I'll just throw it out. I'll just throw it out. Anyway, I won't go. I won't keep going on other than next time we see each other. We've got a bottle of wine. We've got it down together. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm not a whole lot of fun at 5.30 in the morning so that's okay. You get a pass. So my name is Bill McGee. I have been working alongside this Selenium project since I first joined Sauce which was about 10 years ago and that was getting to know some folks on this panel as we were putting together the conference in Portland and then followed that one up in Austin and then had a chance to bring the conference to the continent to Europe working with White October events. So I'm very excited to be back with the band and looking forward to continuing to push this community ahead and to provide the tools and the resources and the education that folks need to be successful and to continue to spread the gospel as it were for Selenium. So being the new kid on the block, there are a couple of computers on this panel I don't know yet so I'm going to take the easy route and introduce my former colleague Diego. Diego, I believe at the first or second Sauce Con we did in San Francisco. I think that's true. My superpower, Pooja asked us to remember or to talk about our superpowers and mine is my ability to forget things instantly. So whatever I'm saying right now may or may not be true but anyway I've had the pleasure of working with Diego, getting to know him. He's done a fantastic job for the project, for the open source community and for the meet-ups that he runs out of the Berlin office. The fun fact is that I think it's fun but Diego has two children who keep him very very busy and I can imagine that the reason that they're celebrating his wife's birthday in a park is because there's a playground and that gives them all something to do while he's sitting here on the Zoom panel with all of you. Anyway, very nice to to meet you and I look forward to hopefully seeing many of you in person as we move ahead and with that I will turn it over to Mr. Senor Molina. Thank you, Bill. That was very kind and we're very happy to have you in the team again. Yeah, I don't have much to say about me just that I'm sitting on a parking lot right now because the family is celebrating so I'm very happy here to join you all and what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna introduce someone who I admire a lot and it's David Burns. So one interesting thing is that even so David works in browser stack and I work in sales lab so out there people see us as competitors. Every single day we work together we have a friend relationship and this is one of the cool things about Selenium that even though we may work in different companies and people see us as competitors but we actually are very good collaborators and we work together almost every single day to move the project forward and probably one of a fun thing that David does is that he's a really good manager but he says that he's not or that he doesn't like to be a manager I don't know like he and he likes to he wants to be a product person so so maybe that will be his next role in Selenium and his superpower is to create really good meanings and tweets them and makes ironic ones about projects through decent and subtle British humor. So over to you, David. Thank you for that, Diego. I don't know how I can follow that on. Just when it was getting good. So yeah, I've lost track of what I was supposed to be doing. So I think I'll just kind of move on to kind of introducing the next person who I think needs introducing and it's the person who has the new I'm probably getting this wrong but it's the person who I think is the newest committed to this Selenium project is the person who kind of has taken some of the hardest problems that we've thrown at them and just run with them and so I'm going to introduce you to Pooja. Pooja is kind of the it works with me. She was the second person in the browser stack open source program office after me and so there's that and Pooja's superpower I think is one thing that I really wish I had is that if you ever need something documented in a meaningful way that can kind of get people feeling good about themselves, Pooja will be able to do that and then share it and then kind of teach you everything that you need to do with it. Pooja's been fantastic and I've been kind of very thankful to have her on my team. So over to you, Pooja. Thank you so much, David. I think everyone understands that I think in spite of the understanding that you may not like being a manager, I don't know but I think you're proving to be a good manager this side of the body but apart from leaving our manager and like that relationship I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, David and for the excellent opportunities I have received with the Selenium project along with all the health guidance and mentoring I get from the rest of the folks. I know that David and Titus they're constantly putting on a lot of roles, wearing a lot of hats and helping a lot of us, helping me answer a lot of difficult questions and I really appreciate that. I think the next person I would like to introduce again I don't think this is last but not the least sort of a thing. I don't think Manoj has been introduced yet. I know we did a trivia but I don't think anyone introduced him so I think Manoj is her shadow. I would like to introduce Manoj. My interaction with Manoj was I think when I made the first contribution in Selenium, he wanted to celebrate it and that was actually a very good feeling. He asked me to create a Twitter account so we can celebrate it and that was my first interaction. That's how I remember him. Over the last few weeks me and Manoj have interacted a lot and it's been really good to know him. He has worn a consultant hat. He's worn a developer hat.  He enjoys that human connection is what I have learned in the last few weeks and I really admire that about him. He's currently working as the VP for DevRelations in Lambda Desk and again to resonate with what David and Diego said. Yes I think on the outside world we work for competitor companies but I don't think that gets in the middle of what we do. We function as a team for the greater good that is Selenium and I think me and Manoj have the same bandwidth on that and thank you Manoj for all the opportunities you've thrown to me across this and guided me along. Really appreciate that. Thank you so much. For a moment I was like David is talking about me and then another quitter. I'm on the one left in here. Hi this is Harsha. I'm working as a full-time automation tester at eBam Systems Hyderabad. I joined the open source Selenium community around in 2019 so I started contributing for the documentation and later I moved to the JavaScript binding and currently fixing things and managing those. So as I'm speaking about myself I'll say fun fact about me so even like you know I think a few committers in this panel is not aware maybe. The fun fact is like you know this is the most embarrassing thing that happened a year ago. I accidentally deleted Selenium repository. Really fun fact. We learned very quickly that code is definitely mutable at that point but we were able to reverse. I remember that fondly. Yeah so Manoj were you aware of this? I think after not on that Saturday but after. Okay okay cool. So now I think you guys have passed the test kind of thing knowing each other and some of you did not pick others so it means that guys watch out for it like who picked you. That is your bestie to hang on but now yeah like like Pooja had said that even being competitions like when we come for the critical cause we have to get that and we celebrate each other's success. So thank you for doing that. With that I will move on to the first very important question that so I kind of meet a lot of people inside the community or otherwise also and a lot of people want to come and contribute to Selenium become one of you and they have a certain set of queries around starting from like how can they do it get started along with there is also a kind of stress check like we the first thing optical weight also we understood that the first thing is to the self-care is most important and that's where this kind of very very some questions comes from the people that okay like most of you do your full-time job and then you also do this the committing code so so that is where I want to go with one question there we will go in the round or probably you would want to who wants to take a stab at this question so the question is for everyone like when you started and what was your first commit and how are you able to do it in a sustainable way till date basically without generalizing your life from that life as well how do you manage and still be able to enjoy the life so this is literally a question some people like oh are you even enjoying life if you're working 24 by 7 for your actual work and the this Selenium work as well so yeah starting with what was your first commit to how are you able to keep it up while enjoying the life who wants to go first oh there first because I'm probably one of the oldest committers on this project so how how did I what was my first commit my first commit was documentation kind of the same way harsher started I was doing I was working for a dotnet company at the time and documentation was abysmal it's not got much better over the years but it has and then the way I did it was that like I was setting up automation in the company and I was trying to get Selenium going and so I was always using the latest nightly like I was pulling the code down building it doing things and kind of the the meme where who broke it kind of very quickly became like the thing from the Selenium project which was always Simon Stewart right like he would land code well meaning but he would break something he would like oh I've just rewritten the findings but I don't have a dotnet machine so I've not compiled it and you're like what what are you doing so that's how I got started and then how do I how have I maintained it well fortunately my next job after that was working at Mozilla and I got essentially paid to work on the Selenium project so and it maintained that way and still today I'm getting paid to work on it yep maybe my thing can moderate people so my first commit was like to the documents and it was a typo so it's not much of document it's just a typo and Simon Stewart accepted it and like you know that that was the most happiest moment that might there was a first commit on the Selenium after like you know six months I was starting to commit into the Selenium and how do I manage is something like to be different like you know I work as a full stack automation test student like you know I have a paid job so I spend only like you know 30 minutes one hour to set the document or you know to look out the missing parts in the documentation and to like you know to write it and to provide the PR and that's how I started let's go probably go next um saying my first commit was um same documentation I think that is a trend that's been following so folks if you're listening to it so documentation seems to be the best place to become a computer so yeah I still remember a thing I said it before as well it was all an RST format in uh back in days uh on 2020 12 or 13 I believe that was my first conversation I think after that I've been I've been a consultant uh there's a going there's a saying that goes by you should be a jack of all trades so I've done a bunch of things around Selenium never been stuck to one thing so so if you ask me anything in Selenium project I can do but thank you if I have to go deep I'll you know rely upon my colleagues here to get some expertise that's what I've been doing and how I've been managing um I think the question was around sustainable contribution um I mean honestly I've never been a sustainable contributor like I've never been um if you look at my gator profile I've been on and off a contributor not not every year I think that's still okay to do as long as you know what the code is happening around and you should always take your time to you know unwind a bit um if to work take priority please go ahead and do it and unlike the other company uh the id industry as it goes the culture is very different when it compares to happen in India so I had my first own laptop after six years of my experience in my career so only then I actually started to you know contribute until then I was not allowed to contribute in the company that I used to work for so I'm sure many of you would have been in same situations and now you know it's it's a lot different so um there's it's never too late so go ahead and do any contributions at any point in time who wanted and how I unwind I mean um I like biking that's also my fun fact so I uh owner a super fast bike I would say and I used to go go on a weekend ride and enjoy with my friends I think let me let me jump in and give give a different answer than documentation I was uh I was working at a company in Austin in 2015 um I was working with uh excuse me I was working with Brett Packor um I'm started using water for the first time I met the company there's a problem with how we're switching windows and I'm like oh well I can fix this in our company's code and I'm like well but really this is a bug in water and so I go to water and I fix water submit it and then but I'm like well wait in order to actually get this to work at water we need to fix it in selenium so essentially I just walked up the code base until I found the root cause and then put in a request and I still remember when Yari's like oh yeah no we absolutely need to fix this but do this a little differently here and I'm like oh and I fixed it and I sent it in and I was beyond excited when that commit got accepted by Yari in October of uh 2015 that was like one of the best or 2014 it was 2014 but uh but yeah that was super exciting but and from there it was just a lot of I did a lot of running the tests and finding bugs in the test suites and then finding ways to fix it or report it and so like a lot of what I did early on was bug reporting just hey let's try running the suite in windows oh hey Firefox you know 40 just came out let's let's run the test suite on mac and oh look there's some things that are broken let me file I think the edge team said I had over 50 percent of the bugs reported in the edge html version at one point just because of all of the stuff I was doing so that's another way that is is easy to jump in and contribute is just find the problems and report them as far as maintain maintaining energy I think this is where the collaborative process comes in a little bit is I have stepped back a couple times in the course of the last eight years where I'm just like you know what I'm a little burned out on selenium alex can you take care of the ruby stuff I'm just gonna you know take a break for a couple years take a break come back for six months while he's doing something else and then someone else steps in and does some stuff and I take another small break and now I'm just back in it again on this past year partly because I work at sawslabs and my job at sawslabs actually isn't focused on writing selenium code but I ended up doing a lot of that just because I really enjoy the work and I enjoy the people and and the project needs it right now so I can jump next my first contribution was to the docker selenium project and then a bit to the grid but but most of all I was helping with the with the read me in the docker selenium project so we could call that documentation but more than that like taking the time because I have seen in the last couple of years many people joining in the sense of getting the almost there to get the commit bit so I think my message about how to get a contributor is actually it's not that hard to get a contributor if you need to contribute to the dogs or another part of the code because you just need 10 commits to actually become a become a committer what I have seen is that people start very strong and lose the consistency so you don't need to work a lot of hours every day just maybe three sorry 30 minutes or one hour like every now and then to find a task you work to work on but more more importantly than everything you actually don't need to contribute code to join the selenium project you can be a triager and help with the grid have issues you can answer questions or you can just be someone who promotes selenium by doing talks by helping us to I don't know give tweets about it and so on and the perfect example is is someone who has a lot of experience no selenium understand selenium is part of the project and has never contributed a line of code and that is bio for example like he's part of the team and like you don't need to write code to be part of selenium and if I was to contribute anything it would probably be to erase the code base or whatever but thank you Diego I appreciate that and you're absolutely right I mean my first contribution was working on a conference with you all and really you know carrying the torch forward in terms of building community and educating so I appreciate that but one of these days I will make a commitment to documentation probably so so maybe with the interest of time I'll I'll just fill here more bill so so we got to know that you you plan for retirement and it's still chose to to work with us on the program committee so how has your experience now looks like and what do you feel for the the incoming days about your contribution apart from the documentation that you want to do now well I think retirement hasn't lasted very long I'm actually in the coming days hope to some of you know Denali Luma and I've been working with Denali on a project that she has been doing and I'm very very much looking forward to sharing that with everyone still in stealth mode right now but it's good one of the things is you know I went out and I signed up for a computer science class and I figured I'd learn you know fix my golf game and I'd be a you know contribute to the Selenium project and I would do this and I would do that and it it's kind of interesting how you try to fill your day and what I've found is that you really do need to focus and you know pick one or two things and and pursue those make them your mantra so that's been good but I'm very much looking forward to working with the team getting to know others other committers and talk about what we do next with the Selenium conference are we going to do Q&A before that or should I this is the reveal yeah okay so thanks Bill and then we appreciate you taking time and working with us I'll move to the next question now which is more about people wanted to know it's a common question across that web being ever evolving with the the new protocols like W3 sorry web 3 web 3 and in the world of AML 2 web 3 what do we think that Selenium is keeping up with that base to be able to to basically add value as an automation tool I think Selenium can add value when web 3 decides that it's not going to be grifter's paradise and that actually adds value to the web that's my belief like crypto and web 3 has a lot of bad actors that I think need to kind of the that area needs to get rid of all the bad actors to actually so show something of value I like some of the things that are coming out with I think they're calling it web 5 now which is properly decentralized stuff the idea is it's web 3 plus web 2 which is why you've got web 5 but again there's some beliefs that I think need to change like the idea that I can have an NFT of a diamond that is more valuable than the actual diamond and I could try smash the diamond it seems bizarre that the you know people who seem to be smart seem to be going in on this but I appreciate I'm biased on these things yeah anyone has anything to add to that with AML also already being in the place well I think it's interesting that more technologies emerge and we feel that they will help us to solve the problems that we have currently and that is leading us to think that tools are the things that will solve problems when we don't actually think about the problem itself so at some point that evidently some AI tool will help you to find better locators and all this but but taking one step back and sitting together in your team where you develop and trying to make the application more testable like figuring out those things is is much more better than actually figuring out how the new technologies will help us so so we need to keep up to date and figure out how these things work so when we understand our current problems we can use them together with them so far I mean there is a lot of opportunity but I don't see it so far how we can put those things together yet but really keep up to date and and let's figure out how to solve the things we have currently so we can actually use the new technologies. Yeah so that's very very fair point David and the other thanks for answering that I personally get these questions okay we are like a lot of people work in analytics data analytics projects and they want to figure out if Selenium can do that also along with it and my answer always goes like okay the way this is built we can also build and we can use Selenium to drive the things which you have to do mentally but people expect that probably Selenium would magically do that so yeah more awareness we can create or more frameworks we can create which also brings me to the next question that in all of your experience what are the community projects which are built on top of Selenium which may not necessarily be about only test automation? I think someone has tried automating the Google's offline Tino game that we used to play so Darshan the name is right I still call that as a project because it's an innovative way of using Selenium Selenium is not I mean we say it's a browser automation but if you read the documentation the line it says we automate browser but the rest is up on you like whatever you like to do you can do and I think that's been proved and that is one of the cases and we've also seen Michael means we're giving a talk around automating wordals the power is up to you and you get to I think to me that was fascinating. Yeah that would be cool any other examples like I heard in IRC a lot of requests comes asking for fancy things or doing some bad things as well any fun example? Someone's asked that oh sorry I don't think they've built that yet but I know someone reached out because they wanted to discuss about this AI product they wanted to build to use the web to assist humans I think more like web GPT to have that browser or question answer conversation sort of going not exactly but they wanted to see how Selenium can help the conversation never went ahead for various reasons but I know that was being looked into so something different. Yeah cool David do you want it to go? The silliest your question was what's the silliest thing people have wanted to use Selenium for? My favorite of all time is someone asked I need to do some database tests how can I do this with Selenium? I was like what? No? I'm probably going to get into trouble for this but I'm going to kind of reiterate something Simon Stewart used to say quite regularly is like if you've got more than one test there's a likelihood you're doing it wrong right and he said like if you say 10 people focus on you know you can only have 10 but like one is a hard number and so like don't focus on the number but the idea that like you know you should be thinking of other things not just Selenium and there are the tools for other things it's the reason why Selenium come to capture like you know it's firstly it's not designed to do that and capture is not designed to be automated like that's the whole point of it it's the same as when people go I'd like Selenium to log into Gmail so I can get my emails for me I'm like that's not not what it's really designed for I appreciate it's an automation tool but there's a IMAP use that. So there is one more related question in the Q&A if we have any plans to build API testing automation directly within the Selenium maybe let me jump in on some of this this is one of the issues you know we've been talking about this quite a bit on the Selenium team one of our frustrations is really since WebDriver kind of took over Selenium Selenium is not itself a testing tool it is a browser automation tool that you can use to do really good testing if you set it up well we're Selenium is constantly compared with other tools that are testing tools there are quasi open source tools out there that set up a bunch of opinions for how here's a test runner here's here's the you know the the assertion library here are the things that make it easy to synchronize and do things for testing Selenium intentionally tries to be unopinionated it intentionally tries to know you can do whatever we're not going to force synchronization on you we're not going to force a specific test runner on you you have everything available to you with this code and so the idea from from our side when someone's like well why aren't we doing API testing with it it's like well there's this is a browser automation tool it is not an API tool there's another API tool in your language that you just use at the same time as as Selenium and I think what a lot of people are looking for is a tool that will wrap everything together for them and there are tools out there in the open source that do that that work on top of Selenium and that's one of the things that we on the team here want to be pushing forward more is the water the capybara the selenium the all of these things that that try to provide testers with a testing experience while still using the the powerful tooling of web driver and and all the work the Selenium team is doing under the hood and one of the first things we're looking at doing I'm just going to throw this out there I'm not sure if it's been said at the conference already but we are trying to put together I am putting together a conference next month a small summit to get the the maintainers of these different projects in the same room as some of the Selenium devs here so we can talk about these things and figure out how we can get what our users who want to use Selenium for testing we want to find ways to get them what they need in our ecosystem better because we recognize that we're just one component and we think a lot of people have this idea that we should be all of the components and the only way we can provide what the users need is to work together and collaborate and to get more people with more perspectives working together to do those things yeah thanks Titus we did for the interest of time we have so many more questions to be addressed but I would pick maybe one from them so with the adoption of W3C which we did last year and the upcoming for the web drive by by the protocol which Diego and Manoj also touched upon in the keynote class yesterday I want to know like what does happen in those meetings and as a user or as a contributor in some way can someone be observer there learn from it or contribute back also I'm going to dive into this one since I chair those meetings can anyone join those meetings most definitely are those meetings minuted and are the minutes shareable yes they are like we do nothing hidden whatsoever everything is done on github in the W3C's organization so I think it's github.com slash W3C slash web driver hyphen by die b i d i and so all of that is in the open and so there's some work that is going on there anyone is more than welcome to join there is even a public mailing list that you can join it's like super low traffic so it's the public it's the the the working group is the browser testing and tools working group which I chair and anyone can join it there's a mailing list you join that in the mailing list like if there's updates to the like calendar invites or the all the calendar invites go there mostly because if I have to invite people individually it becomes untenable like it's just so much work to go or have I remembered this person if I just send this to the mailing list then people can do it themselves and then kind of I can just make minor changes as in when I need them and then just like if you're still unsure if you don't aware to go what I'll do for after this is I'll create a I'll do a tweet with all the links for people so I'm at automated tester on Twitter and I'll do the same on LinkedIn so that is be public and people can join it like nothing is done in behind closed doors and then I'm going to hand off to puja on this one but like puja's doing some awesome work in this space as well again none of it is hidden so do you want to fill in what you've been doing puja on the pie dough stuff um yeah I think we when we we want to see we want to support by time the way we started is a CDP came into the picture and I think we already had a few talks yesterday I think you know 30 a go and many which covered a few differences in the transitions and you also had a dedicated webinar or just to show the buy that Robert has browser sites I'm not going to cover that but um we have some we designed some front-facing APIs which are backed by CDP because that is what we had and as the buy dice spec is work in progress um Selenium is trying to create the set of API's and there's a lot of discussion that's been between I think the equal titans day with myself around how we can do this so we work on a tech spec where we work with um and come up with these APIs that are easy to use from the user maybe as simple as the way you do driver dot get for a url you do driver dot you know start a browsing contacts driver dot get a dorm event something very simple very intuitive but in the background that uses the buy dice protocol um the users don't have to be aware of the implementation details but so we're trying to work towards a more unified API that all languages and follow um again you can think the way our wc3 spec was there and we had commands to do the same thing and some other you know supporting API's that do a little bit over it we have that for wc3 or web driver spec similarly we have a plan that's in process or the effort that's been going on to do the same thing for buy dice that's with the buy dice spec we'll have the commands that will be mapping ish and something more that use a friendly method that can do a little bit more on top of that so that's that's it and folks in india it is buy die not baby it's buy die yeah it's short for bidirectional which is why we keep calling it buy die so it's it's we're lazy for context of for david bill the ago and tata's baby is a indian name for cigarette uh and it also is fail as the id i so yeah it's buy die folks all right so this with this we are towards the end of this session um but i just want to leave the audience um especially came for this is to know um basically like how much as a newcomer uh i need to prepare myself i'm talking in in in the context of somebody asking as a commit somebody looking up to commit um what is the fundamental core fundamentals and architecture of selenium project that i need to be aware myself prepare uh to be able to contribute uh since puja and harsha been fair being little fairly uh recent to join and maybe they can shed more lights my more light on what somebody in the position to basically uh start with and where they can just start with okay so i suggest like you know this can start contributing from the documentation itself so uh i'm talking about it again yeah that is the like in the main place to get started so whatever you say uh if i'm like you know not developer uh so if i'm going to contribute to the to learn how it is structured first i say this is the documentation so whether it is the selenium documentation or go into the read me or what what your and somebody wants somebody wants to know somebody sorry sorry for interrupting uh somebody wants to know like is there something i need to understand the entire selenium architecture before i begin uh what would you say about them uh this is the preq one so uh you you need to spend some time to understand the selenium architecture a lot like you know first uh you need to go into the selenium code and you can also look into the web driver like now on specifications how it is structured and kind of thing so yeah i can see pretty yeah you need to spend some time um i have a slightly different opinion on that uh thank you harsha for that but so i think if you want to get started i know we've covered a lot on documentation and a very valid point there but i think we've been trying everyone as we go through the issue tracker everyone's been trying to add some useful tags uh there's one that says needs help this is one that says maybe easy i'm not sure the exact naming part in the bottom that's wrong but if you ever go through the issue tracker you might see these small bugs that you can help with uh these are pretty much bugs or small features that might not need you to understand the entire system and i also say this contributing to selenium yes depending on the feature you're working on or the bug you're solving you might need a understanding of the entire ecosystem but it's a simple energy i think most of us in our day-to-day jobs uh we work on really big systems really big code bases we don't necessarily understand the whole thing um a small part a small slice is sometimes enough to just get you started and then you build on top of it it could be something how um tight this is experience when you're like okay there's a bug here there's a bug here there's like a waterfall that went to which trickled down to selenium having a bug and without understanding the whole system uh someone was able to pitch in that could be a process as well while using selenium that's the other side if i do so um understanding the whole picture is um again it depends but it's not something how one what one needs to get started also uh when i joined i had a lot of questions even for a small issue i would just have a lot of questions as well as to be done uh selenium community has been beautifully supportive they answer all your questions um they make sure if you're doing the right practices they'll guide you in the right direction always uh so just trust the community if you're coming i'll come into us just trust the lovely team that we have to help guide you in anything that you need we're also mindful of your times and timelines uh there's never a pressure hey could you do this right now no one ever talks in that sense everyone's appreciative of the type and effort that goes in cool thanks jump in real quick on on that i just want to say that's exactly correct and you don't even need to solve a problem on the issue tracker if you come to selenium's issue tracker just reproduce something just say oh yes i tried out this this scenario on windows with firefox you know 102 and i saw the exact same issue that helps us a lot because otherwise we have to try and do the same thing and and time adds up a lot it's so helpful when people can be like i see the same thing or oh hey i got something slightly different for this reason so that's another thing that you can do as well and we keep talking about conversations with us make sure that you're you're in the selenium slack channels find our selenium slack and all of the conversations with the contributors in the community are available there course likely related to that i would say if you're looking at issues that's great thanks for all of the answers i would say firstly try to look at the documentation and build selenium and that's the first thing i would recommend and there is a lot of tests that we've written and try to run them i think that would be my first pick to look at because if i'm able to run the basic selenium jar uh and looking at you know building selenium or different client language findings and know where the test is i think from there it'll be a lot easier and then i would look at the issues to see maybe label as uh help wanted i think that's attacked views or easy medium i'll go by that phase to see if there is anything that i can pick up on wrong so hope that helps cool so we we thanks Manoj for that um we are about to end the session now uh but the energy is so high right now in the chat and in the qna so we are just extending a few more minutes i hope that's okay for everyone uh so we'll just pick one last question uh which is a hard question uh there is cypress picking up pace rapidly uh so how and what are we looking to improve in selenium to still stay relevant uh i i think there are several uh facts that we need to establish first and is um there's a huge difference between both things as status mentioned cypress is a full-fledged testing tool uh selenium is a is a tool to to automate browsers and another fundamental difference is that selenium is a is a completely open source project not for profit cypress is a company that runs for profit and and then you are just uh bind it to whatever they do in their tool you cannot really um influence their um roadmap much so so that those are huge differences and one key thing that may mislead uh users in the community is that we believe that cypress is growing a lot and yeah i mean they're they're growing because there are needs in the community to to to fill out different functionalities but if you check the keynote with manoj we were we were sharing with you all the data that for example david has been collecting and we see that selenium is still growing in the last two years every quarter there is a 25 growth so the difference is that we don't have a lot of marketing to show that to everyone right we're not like shouting every single second that we are bigger than the other ones we're actually helping the community to grow to to understand how to automate help you if you want to become a commuter if you want to contribute if you want to do a talk we help you with all those things and to address the specific question yes we are doing things we're connected with the web driver by die um standard we're going to have all these features part of selenium that will help you to have testing much more stable much more uh long lasting and and and future proof because we are working on a standard that will make your code work when you upgrade to a new version like what happens with other new frameworks is that they change the api very often so when you have to upgrade you have to change a bunch of code we're working on a standard so you have tests that work for years actually this is what has happened um and in general i think it's good to have competition they have good things we have learned from them we have good things they have learned from us and the important thing is that we're open to talk to any other tool that has interesting approaches so we can work on all together and and and we can make things further for the community and the sun is on top of me okay that's real sunshine the ego answering for the the controversial controversial question but yeah that's a very good perspective like we we we embrace the diversity and diversified opinions even from the competitors to to keep going and also the kind of supports with the different binding uh that's that's really big and the question is not more for who is best or who is better but depending on your needs you choose different things and sometimes you just bring them together and amagination of it and then you if you get your results out of it so so so i am going is going to stay all all hell um uh for that so uh with that we reached towards the end and i like to thank everyone of you the speakers and the attendees to stick around and hearing us what the conference learning with each other and i hand over my tool bill uh for the announcement of the next conference he had some secret announcement thanks puja and again thanks to everyone on the panel it's been uh great to share this um so for those of you who have been to prior selenium conferences you know that this is the time where we do reveal uh where the next conference is going to be and it gives me a very great deal of pleasure to announce that our next us conference is going to be back in person uh so it will be great to uh to see you all i know there's a lot of pent up demand and and excitement to get to see everyone in the community again so we are going back to chicago uh it will be in march of 2023 the last week of march march 28th through 30th uh and uh more to follow um there is a save the day page up right now and we will soon get the cfp up and running but uh please do mark your calendar and uh we hope that you'll be able to uh to join us um the fun fact about chicago is that it's now where jason huggins the creator selenium lives with his family and i've been talking to him about that we're the fact that we're coming back to chicago and uh while his interest is still automation it's in the world of robots right now and uh he'd very much like to do a robot dance off uh while we're in chicago so stay tuned for more on that but uh thank you uh puja for moderating and again to the panelists uh and uh hope to see everybody in chicago next march thanks bill and with this we are completely at the end finally uh but i know a lot of faces do not want to go though sleep deprived but i still want to be uh talking to each other so i like to end this with thanking each and everyone again um especially the people who are not visible on this uh working in the background a lot of commuters who could not make today but uh like special get to do to all of them and uh there will be few questions from uh for conscious perspective uh a lot of people uh asking like how can we uh contribute uh apart from uh committing that answer also probably has come uh from money money earlier and that deal go that there are so many ways you can contribute and then there's a question like how can i speak at the conference next time uh for that also we have a pretty open process thanks to narration team there uh we have the uh we have the convention platform uh everywhere every proposal comes in uh and uh it gets reviewed by again people chosen uh from the community uh uh basis uh their contributions before and that is also open again so there is an announcement for uh call for proposal happens there's an announcement for committee members also happens it's not something uh that uh we have randomly picked up some some people uh it's the proposals comes in and then we see that okay this people this person can actually add a value and they come on board help us review the proposals and these all process starts like six months to one year before um uh actually and then uh then finally what you see these two days of version comes out to you so yeah uh we pretty open that way uh and every proposal goes uh via the the uh constructive uh reviews and feedbacks also so that's something uh most of us as reviewers are trying to do so thanks every um uh every basically come committee members also to do that uh we also say i'm at marty doing wonderful job people thinking um getting the nice feedbacks that that that can convert into the actual talks and also for the next time so uh thank you again uh we i also want to thank you the the the logistics uh team uh that also works with narration to make this uh find out which platform where can we do oh we are offline how do we still be able to connect and all of that so so so thank you everybody and thank you thanks to the food committee at your home who are making sure that you are still staying sticking on your seats and can watch and talk and eat food on time so thank you uh thanks thanks for that as well um and last last note the least nourish again thanks to you and with that signing off thank you and see you all again uh wherever and whenever we can meet but at least in the next stadium con thank you bye bye thank you thank you so much puja for hosting us and everyone i think this is the sixth edition uh can't wait for the next one


Thank you, Peter. It's wonderful to be back at New America and nice to be here for Arizona State University. So we have a wonderful panel and not a lot of time, so we're going to get right into it. I'm going to be very short on the introductions. To my left is Assistant Secretary at the Department of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Tom Malinowski. You might have known him in Washington Circles for being Director of Human Rights Watch here. He has a distinguished record of speaking out on human rights topics and writing about them, and we're going to see what he looks like in his new dress today, and we'll push him a little bit. To his left is Ryan Goodman, an old colleague of mine from NYU Law School. Ryan wears many hats. He's not only at the law school, he's in the sociology department as well as the political science department at NYU. So he's vastly knowledgeable on a lot of topics, but mostly he's the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, which is the most amazing blog you can imagine about the national security issues, the rule of law issues, and law in general, as it applies to the world we're living in today. So if you don't know it, you should get to know it. To his left is Daniel Rothenberg, who's probably been introduced a thousand times here already, but I'm going to say that in addition to being the co-director of this wonderful Future of War project with New America, he's also with Peter, the editor of a book that's just coming out, Drone Wars, and I think you should all get to read it. There's a lot of stellar people that have contributed essays, and so we're here to talk about human rights today, and human rights, the future of human rights within the context of this Future of War question. And each one of our panelists is going to talk to you about a different aspect of this, but I think the basic question is, how much has the way in which the Future of War changed altered the way in which human rights and how we understand human rights has changed, and what are the challenges that we may not really know or have thought about that are going to perplex us as we go forward. And I would say, echoing one of the speakers this morning, we're already here. So the question is not just the future, but what right now is in our face that will be even more so in the future that has to do with the human rights dilemmas, the human rights challenges. So we're going to begin with Tom Alanowski. Thank you, and thanks everybody. So Karen, you asked me to talk about new technologies and their implications. So I asked my staff, so what do you think I should talk about? And they gave me a list that included exoskeletons that increase human strength, aquasuits that emulate the locomotion of dolphins, invisibility cloaks, and so on. And I thought, no, we can't reveal the stuff that we're working on at the Human Rights Bureau or the State Department. So I'm not going to talk about those, but I did want to... So I chose a topic that I've been thinking about for some time, including before taking this job, and that is very much a subject of discussion in and out of government. And that's the issue of autonomy, lethal autonomy in particular. And I'm not going to be revelatory in my new suit. I'm not going to make news, but I did want to talk a little bit about why I think it's interesting and important. And the debate on autonomy is very different from the debate that's most in the public eye, the debate about drones. The current generation of drones, very interesting, important debates, but they're not really new. Drone, the current version, is really an extension of a human being. They may separate the human being physically from the battlefield, but not from its choices. The human operator still makes the ultimate choice about whether or not to kill, but we are moving inexorably in the direction of technology that could, if we chose to employ it this way, make the decision to kill or not to kill itself based on the fantastical advances that we are seeing in artificial intelligence and in the collection of data and the potential marriage of these two different advances. Now, there are a lot of potential uses for this, military uses for this technology that I think would be completely non-controversial and that we will probably see in our lifetimes. You can see unmanned, fully autonomous systems doing things like putting out fires or surveillance, a battle space or search and rescue, minesweeping, humanitarian relief going into a dangerous war zone and using the targeting technology to identify civilians who need help and then dropping or delivering humanitarian relief and so on. One could also imagine the use of kinetic force by autonomous systems that might not be entirely controversial, such as static defense against incoming objects, missiles, things that are not manned by human beings. The tough question is whether weapon systems on the battlefield should be able to make the autonomous decision to kill, to target and kill human beings. That is the question that we face and I think we need to understand that number one such systems would have obvious military advantages on the battlefield, particularly the ability to make decisions much more quickly than any human being ever could make. Because they confer advantages absent any conscious decision not to develop them, I think their development is inevitable given the pace of the technological advances and if other nations develop them then we might be in a position where we feel we have to counter and compete in some way. So how does the US government address this question right now? As many of you may know there is a current policy outlined in a DOD directive on autonomy in weapon systems and the basic principle is that we want to try at this stage to ensure what the directive refers to as an appropriate level of human judgment. The directive talks about three different kinds of autonomous systems, semi-autonomous systems which can only execute targeting decisions that have been made by a human operator are in principle allowed to use lethal force. Then we talk about human supervised autonomous weapon systems. These are largely autonomous systems but where a human operator is aware of what the machine is doing and has the opportunity to intervene even at the last minute if he or she decides that unacceptable harm may ensue and these systems under our current policy could be used to apply kinetic force against objects but not lethal force against human beings. Then we have the category of fully autonomous where decisions at every stage are made by the machine and its computer and under the current policy such machines would not be able to apply lethal or kinetic force. So it's a pretty restrictive policy that basically embraces the principle of a man in the loop. A human being must make a decision to kill another human being but I would stress that this is a policy that is based on our sense of the limitations, practical, legal, ethical limitations of the current technology and we have not yet as a government, as a country made the fundamental decision, the ultimate decision about whether such weapons should be built in the future. Should they be prohibited in some way? If not, should they be regulated? What is the answer to that ultimate question? Now we feel we have time to come up with the answers but they are very very important and eventually they're going to have to be settled. So how do we think about them? Again I'm not going to weigh in on one side or the other today but I want to lay out some of the factors, some of the considerations. Some of them are legal ones. Can such weapons be built and programmed in a way that satisfies the requirements of international humanitarian law? Maybe the answer to that is yes at some point. People debate that but even if the answer is yes it's not all that we need to consider because ultimately there are going to be policy questions as well. Ultimately the question is will we be better off or worse off if such weapons become ubiquitous on the battlefield? And here there are arguments in favor of such systems even from a humanitarian point of view. Some people will argue that a robot on the battlefield will never experience fear or anger or any of the emotions that lead human soldiers sometimes to commit war crimes and other terrible abuses. On the other hand one can argue that some of those benefits could be obtained as easily by using remote controlled weapons of the sort that we currently have and will be continuing to develop in which the weapon itself goes into the danger space. The human operator is not in danger but the human operator could still make the ultimate decision. And there are obviously a number of other practical, ethical, moral and philosophical questions. Could a machine ever be programmed to make the kinds of complex decisions that a human soldier has to make, ethical decisions on a constantly changing battlefield? Could a programmer foresee in advance all of the different contingencies that the machine he or she programs would have to make? Are we comfortable with machines making decisions about proportionality, which ultimately entail judgments about the relative value of a human life even if a machine could be programmed to make those decisions in the same way that a JAG officer might make? Who would be accountable if a machine makes a mistake? One question that I ask is someone who focuses on human rights. What would happen if such machines were to proliferate into the hands of authoritarian governments? Imagine a future Assad with an army of autonomous police officers or soldiers.  Those questions incline many people to support a preemptive ban or to put it more precisely a rule that embraces, that takes the man in the loop principle and makes it law. But then one has to contend with the practical question of whether a legal ban would be enforceable and practical and some will argue that actually if we aim to regulate them we may actually get more benefit. So those are the questions. We do not yet have the answers to those questions nor I think have we answered as a government or a society an even more fundamental question which applies not just to autonomous weapons but to autonomous everything, self-driving cars and all the other things that are out there and that is what is the right relationship between human beings and machines as this technology races ahead. Eventually I think it's fair to say that machines will be able to do everything better than human beings can, everything. But does it follow necessarily that we should then cede everything to them, every single decision. Right now machines can fly planes more safely than human beings can. We haven't made the decision to cede that decision to them. So the debate for me is not just about machine autonomy it's ultimately about human autonomy and how much of that we're willing to give up. Thanks. So that's quite thought-provoking because the real question even though you've concluded that machines will do everything better than human beings the real issue going forward is who are we as human beings and how much do we want to delegate to these machines and where is it when machines take over that it's better in terms of judgment than we would do and what do we want to preserve about ourselves. So one of the ways to think about that beyond policy is the law and how these different technologies and the world we're finding ourselves in now and in the future needs the law to set parameters around this as we go forward and figure out the policies. So maybe Ryan you could weigh in here. Sure so what I thought I would talk about is the next frontier since we're talking about future war and what it might mean when we're in a post-war footing and the idea here is taking a little bit of a riff off of what Harold Codes spoke about yesterday which is how can we ever end a perpetual war and get to another frontier and what I want to think about what legal regimes apply in that context which then might also obviously introduce autonomous weapons and other uses of kinetic force lethal actions that are taken in a kind of a war fighting mode but aren't actually operating in what is traditionally thought of as an armed conflict so that's kind of the question and even though this is a sense of a post-war so for example after al-Qaeda's leadership has been decimated and the Taliban has reached some kind of an equilibrium it's also what I would want to suggest is that we're already kind of there and there are aspects of the post-war that we're already dealing with because there might be other terrorist groups that arise that just don't reach the level of an armed conflict kind of threshold or the context of a war so that's that's the question introducing those kinds of contexts and what legal regimes might apply I think there has already been quite a bit of thinking done about this inside the US military but not really outside and that is incumbent upon us to do a lot of international heavy lifting so that when we get to more instances of the post-war we're ready to have that conversation um because I just don't think we're there yet um there's a piece published by Michael Adams who's the deputy legal counsel of the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Harvard National Security Journal calling it a use extrabellum so he talks about these zones in which we're in a post-war type setting or a pre-war type setting dealing with non-state actor terrorists and says it's actually kind of a free-for-all in that there are no legal regimes that necessarily apply except for the use of self-defense but use in Bella and humanitarian law wouldn't apply to autonomous weapons happening extraterritorially human rights law according to the US government would not apply extraterritorially when the United States uses lethal force in other countries and Bobby Chesney has also written about this he actually calls it post-war and he kind of the wake-up moment in Bobby's article is to say for those of you who think that you want to return to a pre-911 model the pre-911 model was not law enforcement it was kinetic action and lethal actions for example Reagan's presidential finding for the CIA to engage in targeted killings of Hezbollah's leaders um the um Washington Post just recently reporting about uh in 2008 supposedly the CIA and Mossad engaging in the car bombing of a Hezbollah head of Hezbollah's international operations each of those taking place outside of armed conflict so humanitarian law doesn't apply and extraterritorially so human rights law apparently doesn't apply so that's what I mean by this kind of free zone and what we think about it um the idea is that they're all operating only under the standard under international law of self-defense the nation having the right to use force to defend itself from attack so what I want to suggest is first that we're already are here that the future is here in a certain sense because the president's starting to take us off of a war footing by in May of 23rd May 23rd 2013 not just making a speech at NDEU but also promulgating new sets of rules for targeted action outside of areas of active hostilities and outside of areas of active hostilities we raise the threshold of restrictions that apply so that they're more regulated and it's more like peacetime and not like a battlefield so in some sense I even think it's preparing us for a soft landing for the post war because it's kind of a midway stage to getting to that point and in fact the president's uh the national security strategy that was just issued earlier this month and the state of the union the president says quite clearly we will take unilateral action when there is a continuing imminent threat and that's the model the model is the continuing imminent threat model that president Reagan used in the early 1980s that's traveled all the way through to today but that model is one in which it means that the united states can use lethal actions against terrorist threats even outside of an armed conflict and at one point the first strikes against the karsan group were justified in that kind of framework um I think there are other better frameworks for justifying it but that's one one instance of it so there are three issues I just thought I would raise about the the post war and the continuing imminent threat model the first is how the model actually operates in the second are the legal regimes that apply to it so in terms of how it operates the big question is what is the word imminent mean and continuing imminent threat and the question is uh some I think it's being confused in part because of the department of justice's white paper that was leaked which was in the case of the US citizen Anwar Alaki who was located in Yemen the DOJ's white paper said that the US could take action against him because it was an imminent threat even though he was only plotting uh strikes against the united states so the notion of imminence in my mind it kind of does a great disservice to the english language to suggest that's imminent it's not an immediate or an about to happen event is quite far off in the future but that's actually okay if we don't make the category mistake and just think about it as a targeting rule in wartime in wartime you don't need to wait for your um opponent to be in an imminent stage of attack you can kill them in their barracks while they're asleep um or plotting for the next strike that they might occur in the future so in some sense the elongated imminent standard is actually not anathema to humanitarian law it's almost an act of grace because it's not required by the law uh that you would only wait until your opponent is about to strike then you'd strike them but if we don't make the category mistake and think of it purely in terms of self-defense I mean the United States is able to take action against a group that it has not yet entered into a conflict with that's a different story and the baseline is that uh under international law you can only act in self-defense if you've been subject to an arm attack an armed attack is on the way almost the quintessential example given is Japan with Pearl Harbor if the aircraft carriers were on their way the United States didn't have to absorb the hit it could respond in that moment but there if that's the baseline the elongated imminence in some individuals just preparing for an attack down the line that's a real stretch so if we try to separate those two it's it's useful to think about John Brennan's speech at Harvard Law School in 2011 in which he said quote over time an increasing number of our international counterterrorism partners have begun to recognize that the traditional conception of what constitutes an imminent attack should be broadened I doubt it um I doubt it based on the baseline under international law for self-defense it would be a heavy lift to get international partners to agree to that I think the fact that they can't be named I'd have to just be referred to as international partners kind of suggests that it's not exactly a legitimate standard that they're willing to step out on I'm not sure what the word increasing means maybe that's from two to five um that would be an exponential growth um but so there's ambiguity there and I also doubt that we would that the international community is ready to to absorb that standard with respect to non-state actors so the move by John Brennan was to in some sense suggest look the previous administration tried to use a notion of elongated imminence to deal with Saddam Hussein the international community rejected that the US position has pretty much turned a corner on it but that's because other states thought that they might be on the receiving end of that kind of justification with non-state actors they don't necessarily feel that way it's a kind of a common enemy I don't think so partly because and you can see with Syria in some ways it's not a good case because Assad is uh is an Assad and the Syrian government is a rogue regime but the US using force in Syria kind of just gives an indication of it's not just about non-state actors because it justifies the use of force in other countries that are unwilling or unable to quell the threat from those non-state actors and you can see it so even though there are many international partners of the US that are with us in airstrikes in Iraq they're not engaged in the airstrikes in Syria France the Netherlands Australia have all in fact said part of the reason they're not engaged in the airstrikes is because of international law concerns the UK is also not engaged in airstrikes in Syria and Cameron was not willing to put that to his parliament the only question there was whether or not they would engage in airstrikes in Iraq so I'm doubtful about how much the international community is on board which might even be if one's purely interested in maximizing US national interest just a concern that we have a long road to travel before you can get to that point last two points are just about what legal regimes apply so unlike Bobby Chesney and Mike Adams I disagree with the idea that international humanitarian law doesn't apply and as an historical matter I know we had the panel this morning about what this history teaches the Reagan administration in fact did apply international humanitarian law to some of the very lethal actions that Bobby Chesney analyzes so Operation El Dorado in 1986 to strike Tripoli Bobby incites that as an example but in fact Hayes Parks who is one of the major legal advisors to the US military has spoken about the internal workings of the administration at the time in which Reagan had said we will apply the laws of war because we're dealing with terrorists we want to distinguish ourselves from the terrorists from from state sponsors of terrorists and a terrorism action also the CIA memo that is cited as the legal memorandum for justifying Reagan's presidential finding to take out Hezbollah leaders interestingly the legal memo according to Bob Woodard's book refers to minimization of civilian casualties which is intriguing at least it's an ambiguous historical record suggesting that our nation does have more of a tradition or history of trying to abide by certain kinds of humanitarian safeguards or floors fundamental floors when we engage in these actions even outside of armed conflict or the war scenario in which we might otherwise think about it last point is the application of human rights so for anybody who's been studying observing US representations before UN bodies over the last year year and a half you'll know the US position is basically that international human rights treaties do not apply extraterritorially if they were to apply extraterritorially then the law of armed conflict would displace human rights under this international legal rule of leg specialist if it didn't displace international human rights and it applied extraterritorially then would only apply in a situation of effective control for civil and political rights and even if it did apply in a situation of effective control which the United States government position is lethal actions are not effective control then it wouldn't be an arbitrary deprivation of life so it doesn't apply because human rights humanitarian law kicks it out doesn't apply because it's not it doesn't apply extraterritorially doesn't apply because the United States doesn't exercise effective control in lethal operations and doesn't apply because it's not an arbitrary deprivation life so I just want to tackle one of those here the extraterritorial application that has been in some sense the current that is the current US position with respect to the treaties but it's actually not the US position with respect to customer international law so if you look at the handbooks that the US military produces for its own service personnel the international handbook basically it says not basically it says that customary international human rights law so even uncodified unwritten rules the fundamental guarantees of human rights do apply extraterritorially which is an important caveat Mike Adams in his analysis of use extra bellum makes the claim that human that the US position is human rights doesn't apply but he just cites treaties that's a separate source of authority the independent sources customary rules they do apply and the last one is just to suggest that there are other traditions of us foreign policy interests in which we ourselves have applied human rights norms and evaluating other countries military operations in foreign lands and what I want to suggest is that we have to think about which of those how do we maximize and reconcile those different traditions so just to leave it at that the United States took a very strong position when the USSR entered Afghanistan and we condemned them for human rights practices at the UN we did the same when India Asia was in East Timor we did the same when Milosevic was in Bosnia Herzegovina we did the same when Russia went back into Georgia we applied human rights under customary international law to their military operations in foreign countries I think that's a tradition that we're going to have to try to sort through in the post war setting this is between the two of you the amount of work that's going to have to be done seriously I mean I think Washington is going to be very busy for a long time so whatever you say make sure that you make it seem like it's achievable in the moment okay so no no no no so so one of the things that's clear in in in in both these discussions is how what we know and how we collect information and how we use the information we collect helps determine how you're going to categorize the response and you talked about it sort of on the ground you talked about it in the law how do you think about this we'd like to bring up a point that links the two presentations which has to do with the use of data data and information has always been a part of warfare obviously intelligence is core to all military operations but we're in a in some ways the future of war is now in the sense that we're already going through a data transformation what we could even call data-driven warfare where the massive amounts of digital information that's gathered as a part of war fighting but also as a part of all sorts of ordinary commercial practices and all sorts of elements of our regular lives can feed into the management and use of force and the and the understanding of worlds apart from our own I didn't mean that sounds a little bit abstract but it isn't really so abstract when we think of for example how what drones really do that are revolutionary or at least transformative which is they're mainly intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms they they can hold missiles but they provide the capacity to gather an enormous amount of information over the areas that they surveil and that information isn't solitary it's unified with human intelligence with signals intelligence and it allows for the the picturing and the imaging of of targeting operations but all sorts of other operations that begin to take us to a place that we really haven't yet been or at least we don't fully recognize the implications so think of all of the massive amounts of data that's gathered in your regular lives and think of how military practices now gather data of various kinds whether it's biomedical data think of the biomedical data gathered of those who've been detained by us forces in iraq and afghanistan and this plays into the time limit issue that was raised and plays into automated issues in that this is digital material it's stored forever it's not clear under what certain legal regimes and policy mechanisms this is gathered and it's certainly less true under whose authority that material can be continually processed and analyzed forever and if this is the beginning of this process imagine where this will take us and to get to the title of this panel so what human rights will be most at risk in future wars i'd submit to you that perhaps the core human right one core human right is the right to life but as intimately in as intimately bound to the right to life and to the entire human right system is something that's not often referenced in a lot of discussions of warfare and often in more technical discussions of legal regimes is the concept of dignity and i submit to you that the mass gathering of data in the digital form its correlation in current through current mechanisms and through future mechanisms presents an extraordinary affront to human dignity that we don't yet even have the language to process tom can i ask you to follow up on that a little bit how that fits into your notion of human versus non-human which we didn't say inhuman but i actually think we're saying the same thing i i i think at the end of my talk i invented a new human right the right to autonomy yeah which you know it maybe it's not such a new concept because of course our autonomy is taken from us if we're imprisoned our autonomy you know when our ability to make decisions is taken from us in that old fashioned way i i guess i'm suggesting whether i'm asking whether that right is implicated in the decisions that we are going to make about um about autonomous machines whether on the battlefield or in in terms of other applications and i think that right to autonomy is encompassed in in the notion of dignity which is the the baseline principle of of human rights right but the trade-off of how we went down this road is important at least in what you are focusing on is the idea that americans and others who use these technologies will incur less death you said the right to life and so there's a sense right of preserving human beings from being killed in combat in a war that's one of the places we start so is this awaying the human right is it is somehow we're weighing very unusual human rights here one is autonomy dignity and the other it's what it's coming into conflict with is the removal of human beings from the actual conflict right so i think in terms of autonomous warfare we don't know yet the answer to the question of whether the deployment of such systems will lead to more or less civilian death that's a debate that people people are having but let's pause it that we reach a point where under some or many circumstances the deployment of a very smart artificially intelligent system arguably leads to fewer civilians being killed i'm not certain that that will settle the debate for for many people that's why i offered up the proportionality example i it seems to me that it will be very possible to for for a programmed machine to make proportionality judgments because they are basically you know even human beings make them in a fairly mathematical way what is the value of a target military value of a target and then how many civilians will die you can write a program but imagine if it was your mother or father or son or daughter who was killed on the battlefield and you wanted to know why and somebody came to you and said you know a military officer advised by lawyers made a really difficult human judgment and here's why we decided that that risk of collateral damage was worth the ultimate target you might you you're not going to be maybe never accept that but at least you can sort of understand a human being grappled about if someone were to tell you a machine made that judgment even if the machine made the judgment in exactly the same way mathematically as the human drag officer would have advised it to be made would we accept that as easily and i think that gets back to this more amorphous question of of dignity and of something that humans do better it was what they do is they they do better take the responsibility and and be able to tell the story yes that's right all right good even if the results may be mathematically right right that's interesting ryan and we're going to turn to questions um how far behind are we legally from grappling with these kinds of we're not going to turn to question oh oh we're not going to turn to questions ryan you're going to answer this question and that's going to be the end um how far are we behind legally for for dealing with these really rather philosophical um issues that that seem to put them in either law or policy seems just way on a lower level they are these are cosmic issues so how far below is is it how what does the law have to do to catch up with this really sure um so i think you'd have two different answers to the question depending on who you ask um because one answer is that the law has a certain kind of flexibility in it just like the u.s constitution has flexibility to deal with certain types of technologies today that were unimaginable um when it was written so that you could have an existing kind of legal framework we have some fundamental kinds of concerns or considerations about privacy liberty autonomy as a part of privacy um that might just need to be translated to modern day context that's one answer the other answer might be that these really outstrip um the kind of even the consideration of what the framers of those original codes anticipated and the kinds of trade-offs they were considering these are very different kinds of trade-offs okay so we're out of time that's what i'm told so we can't take your questions and join me in really thank you for taking the time to be here


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Hi, I'm Lucy and in this video, we're going to learn how to find the gradient of a straight line from a graph. The gradient tells us how steep a line is, like how steep a hill or a mountain is, and the steeper is the bigger the gradient. On graphs, though, we do need to be careful because lines going in this direction have a positive gradient, whereas lines going in this direction have a negative gradient. Straight line graphs are found everywhere, like for comparing fuel consumption, currency conversions, and for comparing data. Sometimes you are given a straight line and you need to find its gradient because the gradient tells us some important information. Like on a distance time graph, the gradient is the speed, or on a currency conversion curve, it tells us the exact conversion rate. So, looking at this graph, we straight away know that it is a positive gradient because it is in this direction. Right, so for finding the gradient, you take any two points on the line, but make sure they have to be exact coordinates. So these ones are good, zero negative three and four three. But these ones, for example, aren't so good. Two and a half and about zero point seven and five and a half and about five point two five. With your two points, draw a triangle and how much the triangle goes up, the rise, which is six, and how much the triangle goes along the run, which is four. All you need to remember is that the gradient is the rise over the run, or the change in Y divided by the change in X. So for our line, gradient is rise over run, so six divided by four, which we simplify, so the gradient is positive three over two. So give this one a go yourself. Follow the exact same process, so take two points, and the only difference is that the gradient is going to be negative because it's going in the negative direction. Pause the video, work out the answer, and click play when you're ready to check. Did you get a negative two? If you got it right and you want to skip the explanation, click here. Otherwise, keep watching. So I'm going to choose these two points, but you may have chosen different ones. The rise is six and the run is three. So gradient equals rise over run, so six divided by three, which we simplify, the gradient is negative two. Remembering it is negative because it is going in this direction. But what do these numbers really mean? A gradient of three over two and a gradient of negative two. Look at the graph. A three over two gradient means that for every two squares we go along, we go up three. And then a negative two over one gradient, every time we go along one, we go down two. So there you have finding the gradient of a straight line from the graph. You just need to remember to take two points on the line, and then using gradient as the rise over the run, or the change in y over the change in x, you can easily find the gradient. But be careful because lines going in this direction have a positive gradient, but lines going in this direction have a negative gradient. In the next video, we're not just going to look at finding the gradient, we're going to find the equation of the whole line. Thanks for watching.