Dr. Kissinger has been a key person you can go to it for advice about career things as well as geopolitical. No kissinger needs introduction. He is one of the worlds most renowned geopolitical practitioners as well as thinkers. Camed that well before ai into being. He has that rare combination of true intellect, and i really admire him for taking on something relatively new like ai after the height of his career. Ai is pretty daunting. Dr. Kissinger decided he wanted the technology and implications for our political system and geopolitics written large. As you know, he has written two articles, both published in the atlantic. 2018 and 2019. I would encourage you to read both of them. He also wrote a book in 2014 cold world order. One of the last chapters of the book talks about the implications of technology. It has a really interesting insight. He talks about the ordering system for the world. During the age of enlightenment, it was reason. In the medieval period, it was religion. This era is technology. I think that is a useful way to think about what we are going to talk about. He calls it the governing concept age. Thee are several points in articles relevant to the commission as well. I will draw out some of these and use them as questions to start with. First, he describes ai as inherently unstable. Insystems are constantly flux as they acquire and analyze new data. Who are National Security professionals, stability is a concept we like to have in systems. There is an inherent contradiction in the instability of ai and National Security concepts. That is something i would like dr. Kissinger to talk about a little bit. Even proceeding that, we are here as we talk about this competition and the tension of the interim report because ultimately, this is a contest between two political systems. We should not forget that. It is between two political systems and the impact that Artificial Intelligence will have on those systems. It is about whether or not Artificial Intelligence will advantage open and democratic countries like ours or authoritarian states. That is something i would like to start with by asking dr. Kissinger to talk a little bit about his views about that. Then we will move onto a couple of other questions. Thanks, dr. Kissinger. Thank you very much. I have had the pleasure of working with knotty a nadia on several projects. We were on the advisory board, the defense advisory board. It is a great pleasure to be here. So that you can calibrate what i am saying, let me give you a few words about how i got into this field. Of alex, great friend who was one of my best friends. He invited me to give a speech. He showed me several extraordinary achievements. I had barely met him before that. Saying, i speech by am tremendously impressed by what i have seen. Understandyou all to that i consider google a threat as i understand it. [laughter] dr. Kissinger this was the beginning of our friendship. The next step in my being here was i was at the national ,onference, which in europe which on its schedule had a provision for Artificial Intelligence. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to catch up on my jet lag. I was heading out of the door when eric was standing there, said this might interest you. You really ought to hear it. Except for that, you might have been spared this occasion. [laughter] there andger i went somebody from deep think was explaining that he was designing toomputer that would be able play the game of go. He could design it so it would be the champions beat the champions of china. Know go has 180 pieces for each side, beginning on an open square. Is toal of the game constrict the ability of the opponent until they cant move at all. But when you put your third piece down, it is not like chess. ,ou put your first piece down you dont know how this is going to develop. It takes a long time to develop. The idea you could design a match thisat could creative game seemed extraordinary to me. I went up to the speaker afterwards and said, how long that they will achieve intellectual dominance . That. D he was working on [laughter] dr. Kissinger and he is. , he was kinds enough to introduce me to a lot of Artificial Intelligence researchers. I look at it not as a technical challenge or dont debate the technical side of it. With theerned historical, philosophical, strategic aspect of it. I think i am convinced Artificial Intelligence and its surrounding disciplines is going to bring a change in human consciousness exceeding that of the enlightenment. Inherent scope of the investigations and impulses. That is why i am here. At the opening of the Artificial Intelligence center a few weeks ago, it is sort of absurd i am here. You people have written thousands of articles. I have written two. Withas joint authorship eric and one other person. Significance of my is thee and of what i do implications, the applications. I work on the implications. I dont challenge the applications. I think they are important. They are crucial. Frankly, i think they dont do enough. You dont go the next step. Those of you who know something about the field, of what does it mean if mankind is surrounded by actions, that it sometimes cannot explain. It can explain what happens, but as i understand, not always why it happens. This is why i am here. Context that you are to assess what i am saying. But i have put aside some other tok for the last three years work on this. And to educate myself. Field, in the conceptual a big step for mankind. Did they listen to you at the sanford audience . Dr. Kissinger i think the technicians are too modest in the sense they are doing spectacular things, but they dont ask enough of what it means. I would say the same for strategists. Change thend to strategy and of warfare. The globalnk on understood what this will do. It is still handled as a new technical departure. It is not yet understood that it must bring a change in philosophical perception of the world. Been tohuman effort has explain the reality around it. The enlightenment brought a way on aoking at it mathematical basis and a rational basis. That was a huge departure already. It changed history fundamentally. Exploreidea you can reality in partnership of what is out there and that you where you being know what they will produce but , that ist yet know why when people start thinking about when, as they will, they will fundamentally affect human perceptions. This way of thinking up to now, historically, has been largely western centric. Other regions have adopted it from the west. As that spreads around the world , now unpredictable consequences are going to follow. Optimistic in terms of ai and its interactions with democracy and ai changing human cognition, as you pointed out in ai having explanatory powers or humans having explanatory powers, ai not necessarily. There is an interesting point you make about how ai by its very nature is going to change human cognition and reasoning because ai will get their first before us. Dr. Kissinger the point i made , but wes consequences dont always know why. Now, am i optimistic . First, i would have to say the future of democracy itself, is somethingde that should concern us because great, itety to be has to have a vision of the future. Have enough confidence in itself to do it. When you look at too many democracies, the political bitter contest is so and rivalries are so great that to get an objective view of the future is getting more and more difficult. Who would have thought the house of commons could break down into pressure groups operating like the house of representatives without the representatives as part of a system of checks and britain well while is placed under a system that requires consensus for its operation . What ai does is inject a new a new level ofy, perceiving reality. Most people dont understand that yet. Most people dont know what it is. Think those of you who are pioneers in an and when weuture, think the Defense Department about the future, this is a huge problem, because increasingly, theill help shape approaches to problems. I was in office it the period of started with massive retaliation and developed into various applications, but the key problem we face in actual crisis , how do you advisor threaten with Nuclear Weapons without triggering a preemptive strike . It became more esoteric even in terms of the 1970s when we fixed landbased missiles. They had a high potential for retaliation, but next to no usedtial for being diplomatically. When histories of that period are written, there is a page about the trigger happiness of the administration that went on alert. We went on alert from level four to level three, which is a high level of alert. But one reason we went on alert as because we could generate and you could see things that were being done. Planes were in the air. They were not yet threatening. With ai, you cannot see. Dr. Kissinger even with missiles. Ai, we what goes on in believe arms control was an important aspect. Makes itknow of ai infinitely more important, but much of what you can do in ai you dont want to put on the capability because it is secrecy. Secrecy itself is part of its strength. In the field of strategy, we are moving into an area where you capability,a extraordinary capability, even permitting tremendous discrimination. One of your problems is the enemy may not, if you choose, may not know where the threat came from for a while. Rethink the element of arms control. You have to rethink even how the concept of arms control, if at all, applies to that world. You have a nice line in one of the articles about how ai upends the strategic verities we have taken as part of our way of thinking over the past 30 years, including arms control, deterrence, stability. I wanted to ask you one specific question and then i will open it up. Are there situations in which, going backwards, at the white house again, you are making decisions, are there situations in which you would trust an ai algorithm to make a decision in the National Security space . Are there areas where you could cai algorithms helping National Security decisionmakers . Dr. Kissinger i think it will aiome standard that algorithms will be part of the decisionmaking process. Before that happens, or as that happens, the decisionmakers have to think through the limits and what might be wrong with it. They have to test themselves in wargames and even in some actual situations. That what degree of they give to the algorithms. Also, they have to think through the consequences. Things,alk about these i studied a lot about the outbreak of world war i because the disparity between the intention of the leaders and what they produced is so shocking. Not one of the leaders who started the war in 1914 would have undertaken it if they had had any conception of what the world would look like in 1918, 1917. N in thought they were dealing with a local problem and they were facing each other down, but they did not know how to turn it off. Once the mobilization process end. Ed, it had to go to an the crisis over serbia ended with a german attack on belgium, which neither of which had it, but thedo with attack on belgium was an absolutely logical consequence of a system that had been set up and that required a quick victory. Quick victory could only be achieved in northern france, so the crisis in the balkans, germany and france are not technically involved in the outcome. An advantageto get in time over the possible was toation of russia defeat france no matter how the war started. Planningmasterpiece of. One of the really interesting things is that the germans had to knock out france within six the man whoks and designed this plan said on his deathbed, make sure my late frank is strong my right flank is strong. When the attack developed and russia began to move in the east , the germans lost their nerve and pulled two army cores out of their right flanks, which is exactly where they were stopped. The important battles on both sides were taking place. See through the implications of the technology to which you have whetted yourself, wedded including emotional capacity to handle the consequences, you are going to fail. Side. Strategic diplomacy when even the testing of new weapons can be shielded so you do not know what the other side is thinking, and it is not even reassure you could somebody if you wanted to, that is a topic very important to think about. As you develop weapons of great greatty and even how do you talk about them . Build a restraint on and how do you , when the weapons in a way become your partner, when they are assigned certain tasks, how you can modify conditions. Questions which have to be answered, and will be, im sure, answered in some way. Think you are only in the foothills of the real. Ssues you will be facing ai. Not arguing against ai will exist and will shape us. Before i open it to the audience, a quick comment because you are a geopolitical thinker. You talk about diplomacy and restraint. Could you comment on how you see the evolution of the u. S. China and russia relationship . Then i will open it up. I think it is a mixed opportunity a missed opportunity not task a question that is a little bit broader. Dr. Kissinger a sign of great faith. [laughter] you are getting set to go to china. We are talking a little bit about some of your goals for that trip. Dr. Kissinger i look at this issue. Ly as a strategic the impact of the societies on each other over an extended period of time. Capabilitiesh huge. The conventional way, the that someay, is military conflict settles the relative position of the sides cost, butmes at huge , atlly historically survivable cost. The key question is, do we define our enemy . When that policy from a confrontational point of view my preference of looking at it and intrategic issue every moment, you try to shape the environment to get, on the one hand, a relative advantage, but on the other hand, if your opponent give your opponent an opportunity to move toward a less threatening position. If your basic strategy is confrontation, then the other side loses nothing by being confrontational because it is there anyway. Onetherefore, i believe should put an element of these strategic relationships. Point, i wasat one there was a little booklet by somebody who served as a notetaker and if you go through that book, you will see that on the one hand they have leading toward other,ment, but on the there is always somebody arguing , sot what we call detente they did not ever go all out and so we could out match them when we went in there. I favor a strategy of complexity. So, i would like containment to evolve out of a diplomacy that doesnt put it into a confrontational style. What that means is that we come in the outside, have to know what our limits are, and we have to understand what we are trying to avoid in addition to what we want to achieve. Strategies to have in high office which is not the way we select people, but we have got to come to im talking about what weve got to come to. So. When you look at strategic , thens of the 19th century of directhad one lines on both sides. The british on the road to india friendshipf lines in , but not such a precise system, but when you got on the road to far, before you got very you would meet a lot of resistance organized by the british, even though it was not proclaimed and nobody ever quite made it. Im talking about 19th century. So, that is what we have to partsp at least in some of the world. Now, i dont put russia into quite the same category because russia is a big country. It is a weak country with Nuclear Weapons and one of its utilities is its existence because while sitting there in the middle of eurasia, it guarantees by its existence the absence of yugoslaviantype conflict in the middle of central asia, where it would in the greeks, the turkish, the persian, and all of the other empires. Need is a think we way of thinking about the world in that category. The basic principle has to be we hegemony ofate anybody over parts of the world we consider essential for our tolerate so we cannot the hegemony of any country over eurasia, but how to get there . It would require flexible thinking. Technology and we have never been faced with such a situation. Also, if you go to most find aities, you will huge majority that will contradict this approach. So maybe im wrong. [laughter] i will open it up now. Clearly some of your ideas about that strategic design can find a way into the Ai Commission report. I will open it up now to questions in the audience. It is hard to see. Thank you. Dr. Kissinger, thank you so much for talking to us today. Residentctitioner and of the Georgetown University school of foreign service. I was wondering if you could expand on thoughts about the Emotional Intelligence quotient and how do you take into account relying on ai for issues of Emotional Intelligence like empathy, when the internet was expanding a lot of critics of the new technology, saying it would make humans less personal and mentally lazy and the champions and the postmodernists said it would free up the mind for bigger thoughts and more profound thinking and that is true in some sense, but it is also being used by smaller minded people to kind of spread their original negativity and thinking. Im wondering how you square the intentions with the new avenues. F ai thank you so much. Dr. Kissinger i dont know. [laughter] dr. Kissinger i dont know the answer to this question. You have defined what the must deal that we with when the enlightenment came along. There were a lot of philosophers because growing out of a religious period, there was another reflection about the nature of the universe and if the 1960s or the 1970s, you find a lot of very about thensights nature of the universe. Whether you could express it in mathematical equations, but in our present period, philosophy is not a major as major of a term we put our talents into. We put our talents into the technological field and this is why this happened. Time, we are changing events. Which have no philosophic explanation or attempted explanation, but sooner or later, it will come. With theof assessed alpha zero phenomenon of whohing chess to a computer thatlearns a form of chess no human being in all of history has ever developed or has ever worked. We, with ourhich traditional chess methods, even in the most advanced computer space in previous intelligence, it is in a way defenseless. So, what does that mean . Somethingould teach to somebody who did not learn what you set out to do, but would learn something entirely worldent, and within that . I dont know the answer to this. But it sort of obsesses me. Does anyone else know the answer . [laughter] dr. Kissinger what else are we going to do . There are two levels of this. One that i know the answer, that would be terrific. I would become very rich. [laughter] dr. Kissinger but im 97, nearly. But the other answer, the other that we have to get our mind open to studying this in we have to find people the key jobs that are capable of to they in relation everchanging world, which is being changed by our own efforts that has never happened before in that way. Are not conscious of that yet as a society. Time for one final question before we wrap. Yes, sir. So, there is a story about the moon coming up over the horizon in this country going on alert, strategic alert against russia, but there were cooler heads that decided that it was not an attack, it was something else. Are what you trying to say we need very elegant ai before we put it in control of the button . Dr. Kissinger [indiscernible] you want to repeat the question . Essentially, do we need more elegant ai before we put it in control of the button . That was the question. Dr. Kissinger in one way or be the, ai will philosophical challenge of the future. Hand, you are one in partnership with object, you go to intelligence that has never happened before. In deeper ways, the implications of several things are so vast. That unless one reflects about , for example, im told , whenfdriving cars stopcome to a stop light, because they are engineered that way, but then when the cars next to them stop inching start inching forward to get a jump on the others, they do it also. Why . Where did they learn it . And what else have they learned that they are not telling us . [laughter] i think time is up now. Dr. Kissinger and how did they talk to each other . [laughter] next time i come, i will give you answers to that. [laughter] [applause] thank you, dr. Kissinger. We are going to take a 10 minute break now and then we will be looking at aiere and the workforce. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [general chatter] [applause] good afternoon, everyone. In, isettle