First, we will have to use our imagination because there is no fireplace, but we are thinking of a fireside chat. Grateful to have this opportunity today. Dr. Kissinger has been a key person you can go to it for advice about career things as well as geopolitical. Dr. Kissinger needs no introduction. He is one of the worlds most renowned geopolitical practitioners as well as thinkers. He did that well before ai came 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 to 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 proceeding that called 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. There are several points in the 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. Ai systems are constantly in flux as they acquire and analyze new data. Those of you 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 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. I became a great friend of alex, who was one of my best friends. He invited me to give a speech. Before that, he showed me several extraordinary achievements. I had barely met him before that. I began my speech by saying, i am tremendously impressed by what i have seen. But i want you all to understand that i consider google a threat to civilization 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 conference, 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] dr. Kissinger i went there and somebody from deep think was explaining that he was designing a computer that would be able to play the game of go. He could design it so it would be the champions beat the champions of china. As you know go has 180 pieces for each side, beginning on an open square. The goal of the game is to 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. You 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 computer that could match this creative game seemed extraordinary to me. I went up to the speaker afterwards and said, how long will it be that they will achieve intellectual dominance . He said he was working on that. [laughter] dr. Kissinger and he is. Over the years, he was kind enough to introduce me to a lot of Artificial Intelligence researchers. I look at it not as a technical person, and i dont challenge or debate the technical side of it. I am concerned with the 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. Because of the 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. One was joint authorship with eric and one other person. The only significance of my presence and of what i do is the 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 automatic 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. It is in that context that you are to assess what i am saying. But i have put aside some other work for the last three years to work on this. And to educate myself. I think in the conceptual field, it is 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. This is bound to change the nature of strategy and of warfare. I dont think on the global field it is get 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. Much of human effort has been to explain the reality around it. The enlightenment brought a way of looking at it on a mathematical basis and a rational basis. That was a huge departure already. It changed history fundamentally. But the idea you can explore reality in partnership of what is out there and that you explore it by being where you know what they will produce but you do not yet know why, that is when people start thinking about it and 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. Are you 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 is ai has consequences, but we dont always know why. Now, am i optimistic . First, i would have to say the future of democracy itself, putting ai aside, is something that should concern us because for a society to be great, it 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 context contest is so bitter 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 balances well while britain is placed under a system that requires consensus for its operation . What ai does is inject a new level of reality, a new level of perceiving reality. Perceiving reality. Most people dont understand that yet. Most people dont know what it is, but i think those of you who work on it are pioneers in an inevitable future, and when we think the Defense Department about the future, this is a huge problem because, increasingly, ai will help shape the approaches to problems. For example, i was in Office Problem because, increasingly, in the period of it started with massive retaliation and developed into various applications, but the key problem we faced in actual crisis and security advisor, how do you threaten with Nuclear Weapons without triggering a preemptive strike . As the weapons themselves became more esoteric even in terms of the 1970s, when we moved to fixed landbased missiles, they had a high potential for retaliation, but next to no potential for being used diplomatically. It is often 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 isnt a high level of alert, but no newspaper reader knew that. One reason we went on alert was because we could generate a lot of traffic, and you could see things that were being done. Planes were in the air. They were not yet threatening. With ai, you cannot see a lot of that activity. Dr. Kissinger even with missiles. Much of what goes on in ai, we believe arms control was an important aspect. What you know of ai makes it infinitely more important, but much of what you can do in ai you dont want to put on the table as a capability to be restricted because it is secrecy. Secrecy itself is part of its strength. In the field of strategy, we are moving into an area where you can imagine a capability, 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. You have to rethink what were elements 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 essentially 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 see ai algorithms helping National Security decisionmakers . Dr. Kissinger i think it will become standard that ai algorithms will be part of the decisionmaking process. Before that happens, or as that happens, the decisionmakers have to think through the limits of it and what might be wrong with it. They have to test themselves in wargames and even in some actual situations to make sure that what degree of reliability they can give to the algorithms. Also, they have to think through the consequences. When i talk about these things, 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, or even in 1917. None wanted an act of such scope. They 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 started, it had to go to an end. In which the crisis over serbia ended with a german attack on belgium, which neither of which had anything to do with it, but the attack on belgium was an absolutely logical consequence of a system that had been set up and that required a quick victory. The quick victory could only be achieved in northern france, so nevermind that there is a crisis in the balkans, germany and france are not technically involved in the outcome. The only way to get an advantage in time over the possible mobilization of russia was to defeat france no matter how the war started. It was a masterpiece of planning. One of the really interesting things is that the germans had to knock out france within six to eight weeks, and the man who designed this plan said on his deathbed, make sure 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 corps out of their right flank, which is exactly where they were stopped. The important battles on both sides were taking place. If you dont see through the implications of the technology to which you have wedded yourself, including your emotional capacity to handle the predictable consequences, you are going to fail. Thats on the strategic side. How you conduct 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 clear how you could reassure somebody if you wanted to, that is a topic very important to think about. As you develop weapons of great capacity and even great discrimination, how do you talk about them . How do you build a restraint on their use, and how do you convince them, when the weapons in a way become your partner, when they are assigned certain tasks, how you can modify that under combat conditions. These are key questions which have to be answered, and will be, im sure, answered in some way. That is why i think you are only in the foothills of the real issues you will be facing. I am not arguing against ai. Ai will exist and will shape us. Before i open it to the audience, a quick comment because you are a geopolitical thinker. You have talked 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 missed opportunity not to ask a question that is a little bit broader. Dr. Kissinger asking me for brief answers, 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 primarily as a strategic issue. The impact of the societies on each other over an extended period of time. They have such huge capabilities. The conventional way, the historic way, is that some military conflict settles the relative position of the sides and sometimes at huge cost, but usually historically, at survivable cost. The key question is, do we define our enemy . When that policy from a confrontational point of view and with confrontational language at every stage, as again my preference of looking at it as a strategic issue and in which every moment, you try to shape the environment to get, on the one hand, a relative advantage, but on the other hand, give your opponent an opportunity to move toward a less threatening position. And so, if your basic strategy is confrontation, then the other side loses nothing by being confrontational because it is there anyway. And therefore, i believe one should put an element of potential cooperation into these strategic relationships. Ive studied, at one point, i was in office in 1973, and there was a little booklet by somebody who served as a notetaker of the politburo and if you go through that book, you will see that on the one hand they have arguments and leading toward involvement, but on the other, there is always somebody arguing about what we call detente, so 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. And 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 on our side 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. So we have to have strategies 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 designs of the 19th century, the europeans had one of direct lines with armies on both sides. The british on the road to india had a lot of alliances and friendship, but not such a precise system, but when you got on the road to india, before you got very far, 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 develop at least in some parts of the world. And now, i dont put russia into quite the same category because russia is a weak 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 draw in the greeks, the turkish, the persian, and all of the other erstwhile empires. So what i think we need is a way of thinking about the world in that category. The basic principle has to be we cannot tolerate hegemony of anybody over parts of the world we consider essential for our survival, so we cannot tolerate the hegemony of any country over eurasia, but how to get there . It would require flexible thinking and Flexible Technology and we have never been faced with such a situation. Also, if you go to most universities, you will find a huge majority that will contradict this approach, so maybe im wrong. [laughter] i will open it up now. Dr. Kissinger almost unthinkable. [laughter] 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. Im a practitioner and resident at 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 said 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 of ai. Thank you so much. Dr. Kissinger i dont know. [laughter] dr. Kissinger i dont know the answer to this question because you have defined what the problem is that we must deal with. When the enlightenment came along, there were a lot of philosophers because growing out of a religious period, there was a lot of reflection about the nature of the universe and if you study the 1670s, you find a lot of very profound insights about the nature of the universe. Whether you could express it in mathematical equations, but in our present period, philosophy and reflection 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. For the first time, world changing events are happening which have no philosophic explanation or attempted explanation, but sooner or later, it will come. Im sort of assessed with the alpha zero phenomenon of teaching chess to a computer who then learns a form of chess that no human being in all of history has ever developed or has ever worked, and against which we, with our traditional chess methods, even in the most advanced computers based in previous intelligence, it is in a way defenseless. So what does that mean . That you would teach something to somebody who did not learn what you set out to do, but learned something entirely different, and within that world decisive . 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 learn . 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 concern is that we have to get our mind open to studying this problem, and we have to find people in the key jobs that are capable of strategy in relation to an everchanging world, which is being changed by our own efforts. That has never happened before in that way. And we are not conscious of that yet as a society. We have time for one final question before we wrap. Yes, sir. So there is a story about the moon coming up over the horizon and 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] do 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 another, ai will be the philosophical challenge of the future. Because on the one hand, you are in partnership with objects when 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 it before, for example, im told selfdriving cars, when they come to a stop light, stop because they are engineered that way, but then when the cars next to them 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] on that note, i think time is up now. Dr. Kissinger and how did they talk to each other . [laughter] dr. Kissinger next time i come, i will give you answers to that. [applause] thank you, dr. Kissinger. We are going to take a 10 minute break now, and then we will be meeting back here looking at ai 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] cspans washington journal live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Up next, efforts to fix the u. S. Health care system. Be sure to watch washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern. Be sure to watch authors week. Mugs arengton journal available at cspans new online store. Check out the washington journal mugs and see all of the cspan products. Our is a look at some of feature programming this holiday week on cspan. On christmas day, at 10 00 a. M. Eastern, view this years white house decorations with Melania Trump and former white house decorations with laura bush and michelle obama. Later peter teel at the manhattan institute, and later john miller on the history of journalism and fake news at the liberty form. Economicay, a joint Committee Hearing on the high cost of raising a family. 9 10 p. M. , Justin Pearson talks about occupational licensing requirements at the federalist society. Watch this holiday week on cspan. University of washington history professor margaret omarosa discusses her book the code. You have the biggest of Big Government programs, the space race. Memorablyhower denotes the militaryindustrial complex. Innovation and private wealth creation, and an industry that considers itself that built itself on its own, that government has become almost invisible to many of the people who are in Silicon Valley who are the creators of these companies. They think there is no role, and actually there is. That is part of the magic, that it is government out of sight. Sunday night at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspans q a. A discussion about religious liberty and the law with kelly shuffleboard, who represented Civil Liberties union in front of the supreme court. This was held in beaver creek, colorado. [applause] dr. Thistlethwaite good evening. I have taught religion in america for more than 35 years. A