people here are dying of overdoses that could be reversed if someone had this on the scene, we need to be doing everything in our power to make it more widely accessible. host: here is john from seattle, washington. caller: good morning, gentlemen. this is an interesting conversation. this the second time i have called the spin in about 30 years. i just came from rhode island, and i find this conversation from theng, especially law enforcement aspect with the tillman said police basically when it comes to heroin, they -- the lawfish enforcement aspect where the gentleman said police are kind of standoffish. my son graduated from st. john's university and told me the only time he was stopped and frist, the only time someone put their hands on him was when he was going up there in new york. the first conversation we had was with this heroin epidemic of their, why are they not doing it there -- it's coming to the law enforcement aspect, like they pick and choose what they want .o attack if it was crack in the inner cities, you would see every police presence pulling everybody over. but now that you have this serious epidemic of heroin in rural and suburban america, it's, you know, totally this is beinghow handled. i wish this could be handled in an even way, and i wish there were treatment for everyone, but this kind of connects us with the -- i started losing my train of thought here, so forgive me. it was the correction, private prisons, all of this stuff is connected in a sense. that's why we see the disparagement in treatment, in response to this epidemic. really feel for the families going through this. for me, it's like i'm facing the crack epidemic again but in rural america. this is not the first time we have seen drug issues hit rural america. we certainly saw that and continue seeing this in some parts of the country with methamphetamine or crystal meth. the challenges that a lot of these communities have issues with -- unemployment, issues with poverty, issues with poor access to health care -- and when they are vulnerable to a broader societal crisis like addiction, if it's methamphetamine, alcohol, heroin , there are not a lot of resources, and it's easy for in a issues to take hold lot of these communities. i think in many parts of the country, it's not so much that the police have then hands in terms of heroin, it that they have their hands full and own sure what else they can be doing. that's why this public health peace comes into the picture. we've heard the police chief saying we need public health to step it up because we got our hands full. where you guys are dealing with the treatment side and the prevention site, we see in many places in new england in particular, the police reaching out, reaching across the silos to their public health counterparts in saying we got to work on this together, and public health has not always been part of these conversations, including this new white house funding. i think we are seeing that shift so we are treating the whole spectrum of the problem, not just handcuffs over here and health care over here. talk about needle exchanges in this heroin issue we are talking about. does the white house program address any of that, or has the white house addressed the topic of needle exchanges? guest: the white house recently updated their national aids/hiv strategy, which is the federal plan to address the hiv epidemic. one of the things they reiterated when they release a strategy last month is that needle exchange is still an evidence-based effective way to prevent the spread of hiv amongst people who are injecting drugs. it has become more relevant than ever because we saw a few months outbreake indiana hiv linked to the injection of prescription painkillers. we are seeing hepatitis see spreading due to the heroin epidemic in many parts of the country, including many of the state that are covered by this new white house initiative, so while the initiative is health does not directly address syringe exchange, we're seeing law enforcement officers and public health officials in places like west virginia, kentucky, indiana, ohio, pennsylvania saying, "we got to take a look at this as part of the strategy." it makes sense as early intervention and as a way to hook people up with health care and drug treatment. we cannot just say if you got needles, we have a right to lock you up because we know that's not going to solve the public health or the criminal justice side of the problem, so there has been a groundswell of support and a lot of these communities that are really hard ,it or needle exchange recognizing there's a history of controversy over these programs, but the evidence points in the direction that they can be an important part of the solution. our guest is the policy director with the harm reduction coalition. daniel raymond joining us from new york. harmreduction.org is the website if you want to learn more. were talking about heroin abuse in the united states and a new white house effort to counteract that. sarah from florida, hello, you are on. i have been struggling with opiate and heroin addiction for a little over seven years now, and i have then through rehab. i have then through jail. i do want to say one thing, though -- there is, you know, the jail since of it, but an i knowis an addict, and i've looked at as a criminal as ,ell just because i use drugs and i obtain them, but i do not, commit crimes to obtain, and i know the crime rate is completely up right now , and i'm int central florida. in order to not be sick -- that's another thing. die from, and you can coming off these drugs, and .hat's the worst part once you abstain and don't use anything for about 10 of months, you start feeling normal again, and it is insanity because we go right back to it. i have then put in treatment facilities, and it does not work unless you want it. host: can i ask how it started for you? was it painkillers or other means? caller: painkillers. and there's gateway pills, too. muscle relaxers. the doctors definitely pounded were allowed to, before they cracked down on all of them. up fromike i'm washed , and i still obtained to feel normal. it's not even a high anymore. it's just to feel normal. host: stay on the line. we will let our guest talk to you. caller: thank you for calling. i wish you the best of luck. please don't give up and continue to hold out. i think that another life as possible for you, but everything you said resonates so much for me. i think people ask why you just don't going to drug treatment. drug treatment doesn't work the first time for everybody. people ask what you keep using even when you know what it is doing to your life, and that description you have of the withdrawal process, when you become physically dependent, its agonizing. it's the most horrible feeling. you feel like you are going to die. it's so painful, and that is what propels people forward, even when their rational mind knows that this is potentially harming them. but i know that you are not alone. many other people are struggling. i hope you get the support and help you need, and please do not give up. know that people listening today will be rooting for you. phyllis next, and he's also from florida. go ahead. -- phil is next. caller: i was certified back in 1971, and i was put into the rockefeller program, it was called, and it was voluntary. i was not put there by the law. i spent six months there. i got out of there for six months. you went to school. they had woodworking classes. they had electrician classes. they had a program, and they had therapy. i don't even know if it is still in existence, but i'm down here in florida, and i did not know what to do. it cost me $350 just to get on the clinic. $340 a month. was on the wages they pay in florida, how the hell is anyone going to organize their lives or ? y to get themselves together medicaid pays for your methadone in new york. in florida, uh-uh. every penny you make goes to the clinic. host: let's get the perspective of our guest. guest: you are talking about an issue that we in florida and many parts of the country here that people are seeking help, trying a methadone program, and they've learned what they need to know and are ready to make a change, and a lot of these programs, some of them are cash only. some of the states, the programs are not paying for the methadone, and we have this fantastic treatment. nothing is one size fits all. nothing is the perfect treatment for absolutely everybody, but the people it works for, it really works for. if you have to fight to get access to methadone, fight to pay for methadone, then we are doing something wrong, and we need to look at how our state medicaid program policies are looking at covering methadone as well as look at how private insurance markets are covering it because far too many places we're seeing will only cover for six months or will cover this treatment but not this treatment or will only cover it up to a certain dose, and these are not waste on medical expertise. these are not based on scientific guidelines. these are restrictions that are payers to save these money, and they are hurting our efforts to end the heroin and opium crisis. i think the stories i'm hearing from you and many other people around the country need to become a ground spring of change and reform and how we are financing and paying for effective medication assisted treatment for heroin use. host: how do we know if the white house effort they are going to make is going to be a successful one? i asked howest: they will be measuring success, and they are negotiating it with states they fun right now, but in my opinion, part of it is a shift from saying traditionally, the measure of success for law is around arrests, around drug trafficking organizations disrupted. when you bring public health into the picture, you are looking at a different set of indicators. how many lives are we saving because we prevented people run dying of overdose? those are the questions we need to be asking the administration and the states that are funded to implement this. how are you measuring success, and can we use these public health measures of preventing fatal overdose, connecting people to drug treatment programs, as the measures we want to see advanced here? host: daniel raymond with the harm reduction coalition. if you want to find out more, you can find a link on our c-span website >> on the next washington for the jobector market for college grads talks about hyping jobs -- hyping jobs and effects on soon-to-be college graduates. a discussion on opposition to the iranian deal. war" ahor of "ashley's tale of women soldiers on the special ops battlefield talk about the role that women have on battlefield. as always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook or twitter. washington journal on c-span. virtual reality pioneers and sebastian thrun recently discussed the work of douglas engelbert, who invented the computer mouse, developed hypertext, and the networked computers. from stanford university, this is one hour and 15 minutes. [applause] >> welcome to our conversation about a digital future. i will start a fight introducing our speakers, jared and sebastian -- jaron and sebastian. i will start with the first question. there will be plenty of time and budget microphones for your questions, so be paired for that. let's move on to our speakers, jaron, who is next to me. a computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on a numerous topics including high technology business, the social impact of technology, consciousness information, internet politics, and the future of humanism. jaron has been on because but technological innovation for some time as a pioneer in virtual reality, a term coined by the first company to sell vr products. he is currently an interdisciplinary science at microsoft research. remain acclaimed books international bestsellers. he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by time magazine. sebastian thrun is c.e.o. of udacity, a google fellow. and a research professor at stanford university. he has published over 370 scientific papers and 11 books, and he is a member of the u.s. national academy of engineering. that company named thrun the fifth most creative business, and one touted him global thinker number four. [laughter] thrun works on revolutionizing transportation, education and mobile devices. in 2011, he was the first recipient of the first prize given for the advancement of artificial intelligence. at google, he founded google x, which is home to projects like the self-driving car and google glass. we hope this will get you in the mood for this evening's performance. you may be wondering what is this demo? what demo are we talking about? well, the performance work, the demo was inspired by a 1968 demonstration at the fall joint computer conference of a system that his group had developed at the stanford research institute. the announcement described it as a"presentiatoin on a computer-based interactive multi-console display system in which interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capacity." the demo introduced to us the computer mouse, hyper text, computer conferencing network , collaboration and much more. again, all of this was in 1968. the demo was spectacular, surprising and influential. it is often called the mother of all demos. the project reoriented thinking about how human beings might benefit from computer technology. he changed the conversation about improving computers as calculate machines to ways to use computers to improve things and work collaboratively with other human beings. i want to start with a quotation from an oral history interview, one of several that i did with doug in 1986. i was talking to doug about his work at s.r.i. and asked him why he had called his laboratory the augmentation research center. the question was why did you use the word augmentation to describe his research? i am going to get it and ask for thoughts. here's what doug said. you are just augmenting basic human capability. there already is a fantastic system. we have to augment basic human capability. but the computer was just another artifact. so that really jolted me. then i began to realize the unusual characteristics that computer and communication things were offering in speed and quantity. i had done enough work on scaling effects to realize that the whole qualitative nature of some phenomenon can change if you start changing the scale of some part of it. i began to realize how directly the computer could interact with the capabilities we already got. it began to dawn on me that the accumulation of all those changes would make a big impact. a very large thing that came out of that, probably the thing that made the biggest difference in my perspective was the , realization to go after the value that was there, you needed to look at all the candidate changes in the existing human system. sebastian, i am going to start with you and ask what do you think about work on technology is about augmenting human capabilities? stien: i would say we have been in the human augmentation for hundreds if thought thousands of years. -- if not thousands of years. digital and works incredibly well to carry one information to another person. take augmentation machine on farms. now we have machines that make us very strong. we have planes that carry us across the ocean. we can it faster, fly higher, and go further. the computer is a step in that journey. it is a massive step. it will have enormous ramifications on our lives. but yes, in the center of it all are we the people. i have never believed in the vision of replacing people. i believe in the vision of empowering people. henry: so you are in the field of artificial intelligence, and it is receiving the rap of replacing people? sebastien: some of my colleagues would like to get rid of people. i actually like people. [laughter] there is a reason i am not eager to replicate people pause it is easy. it takes 15 minutes and a lot of passion. we do this all the time. henry: 15 minutes and 21 years. sebastien: let's leave it at that. not the point i want to make. if we look at successful technology, and i love the idea of looking at it from a historical perspective, because when we zoom out from the iphones and the google glasses and look at hundreds of years, we can understand what's happening today much better. that successful technologies are completely comes lamentably -- completely complement 32 people. -- complementary to people. if we build a machine that looks behaves like us. i don't want my dish washer to say,, not today. i wanted to work. if you make it look like us and behave like us, what is the point? it is not about replacement. it is entirely about augmenting us. if you don't believe it, look at the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the heat you have, all these things around you. transportation to move around. all of these are human augmentation. henry: jaron, what are your thoughts about this augmentation pentagon? jaron: i knew engelbert for many years. he was important to me in my early career. i kept up with him for a long time. the first group started just south of campus here on a stream, now there are condos and not knows what. -- and god knows what. used to pick flowers by the cottages in the fields. he was such a lovely guy. i just have to say that. when i was a kid and a teenager, my most important mentor was one of the founders in the field of artificial intelligence. he and doug used to have these arguments all the time. if i can characterize him, like this. he would say we would do this and this for machines, and doug would say, what are you doing for the people? you get to the divide you are asking sebastian about. what it boils down to is that for dog the idea of progress , meant expecting more and more from people, not creating conveniences for people not , creating superpowers for people or science fiction scenarios. rather, expecting more in more from people on many levels. he expected people to take more responsibility, to be more ethical, to be more considered in their actions. he wanted them to gain a virtuoso capabilities with technology. but what i think went wrong -- i am not sure. it is hard to get a real over view of this. but since we have been living with this regime of moore's law, where everything is getting more cheaper and plentiful all the time, we never get the chance to become a virtuoso with any particular technology. there is always the better thing and the new design. that speed of change has caused us to become a little lazy in a way. there's always this new thing. now there is a button to replace your toilet paper apparently. i think doug would have hated that kind of thing. doug would have wanted to know more math and more engineering, for people to do more and more. he wanted people to expect more and more of ourselves with each passing year. which it is happened is a slightly perverse one. people are very good at things like trying to manipulate their reputation online, or detect censoring. all these weird, indirect things, trying to be avoided by manipulating algorithms. there is a strange new skill that maybe we are becoming virtuosos of. but in terms of a direct literal skill, we are not doing got as much as dug would have wanted. -- as doug would have wanted. henry: i am sure all of you who are seeing the performance tonight, there is a moment in the demo itself when doug wants to talk about the responsiveness of the machine to the human. he has a little bit of a glitch while talking. instead of saying responsiveness, he said responsibility in that moment. that has something that struck with me about doug, this notion of responsibility to the machine to human beating, but conversely the human being back to the system in some way. can you talk about that? these ideas of responsibility? either one of you, whoever feels compelled to go. jaron: if we go back to late 1970's and late 1980's, a lot of the concept of responsibility for people who had technical skills related to the nuclear arms race, and there was a strong feeling that people who were technical had to be able to step up and act as ethical and moral agents in the world to prevent our inventions from destroying everything. that was a very present idea. we have backed away from that a little bit because a lot of things have actually turned out pretty well. i try to imagine if doug was with us today. it is very hard to try to imagine what he would make of some things. i will give you an example of the sort of thing i think he would be skeptical of. there was this tremendous outworking of pride in silicon valley when the first egyptian revolution happened. there were people in the square, using social networking and mobile devices. then when it started to go wrong, we don't take responsibility for that. there is a way in which we are being selective in tallying our victories. i think he would be pretty upset by that. he would say, no, if you are going to be an engineer, you have to be empirical. you have measure what affect you are having on the world. world. if you are creating a freer society, measure it, if you are creating a society with more opportunities, measure it. if you are saying at the same time the middle classy is declining and more people are living on the edge, then you are failing. but i think he would demand much more to close the empirical loop. i think he would tend to resist the way of talking we tend to have. at the same time we have had some tremendous successes. i think he would demand hero realism, more balance and self-assessment. >> maybe a related question to you. this idea of collaboration and using computer systems to help human beings work with other human beings. is that an inspiration for you, or something you would like to talk with google on? >> absolutely. doug is credited with the idea of computer supported collaborative work. as a student, i thought it would never work. today we do e-mail, google docs, and shared separate sheets. some of my employees are in singapore or in lebanon, to work together beyond belief. i always felt this world is about people. the answer is they are very smart. i felt the technology was a way to get people together. even today, traps takes is perhaps the biggest invention, the car in trick, of the 20th century. maybe television. i don't know. but cars changed the infrastructure, or reaction patterns. making them saver i thought was a good idea. google glass was something about being in a space and having interaction at the same time. what i generally find in this day and age of heavy texting, facebooking and things, the ability to interact with many people digitally has been so much enhanced. so many people and opinions i can see. i can go to amazon.com and find feedback. it took 40 or 45 years to get to this point, but it is now really unfolding. >> do you want to continue with that? >> i was thinking about how virtual reality could be seen in terms of helping people collaborate. >> the first display was not made by me. it was made by southerland, who might be the one rival to doug's demo. it is called sketchpad if you are not aware of it. it was actually a little earlier. the term virtual reality originally meant having a social version of virtual worlds where people would see each other as avatars. but the term became popularly used for the generally field. to me it is jarring to keep up with the way people use terms. but that was the original meaning of it. it was very much in the spirit of doug's work. in fact, i remember having to go over when we got the first versions working. it was very exciting. it was an amazing team, electrifying. it is fun for me now when i can put my 8-year-old daughter in a virtual world at home now that it is becoming available. it is charming. i think during the period when i was working in the 80's, and before and since there is a tendency sometimes to maybe expect too much from these innovations. i used to talk about it as a thing that would totally transform human culture, and there would be less violence. i remember giving talks about the notion that if you could have more instant awareness of what is going on around the world, you would realize how horrible war really is and it would become more peaceful. the opposite is heating. media has been used to recruit people for ever more horrific cultures of violence. that is reversing a trend and not what we anticipated. it is very hard to predict how these tools will have an effect on the world, and it is very easy to see only the benefits. it is something i struggle with still. if you are inventing things, and you are not struggling with assessing their impact, then you are not doing your job. you should feel a little tortured trying to understand it because the effects are complex. for me, there is this moment of anticipation now where the world is about to be flooded with virtual reality stuff. some of it is really good and some of it is not. i don't know what impact it will have on the world. it is a grand experiment. i am thrilled, charmed and worried i am going to be embarrassed. i don't know what will happen in the next year or two. it will be amazing to watch. >> it often happens with somebody who has invented something, as the story unfolds, they are sometimes not very happy with the way their work is interpreted. do you see the virtual reality we are seeing accelerated in its development as being the virtual reality that you started? >> yeah, kind of. if you look at the current oculus development kit and the worlds people are building on it. aside from that, the stuff looks and feels so much like what we were doing in the 80's. i can compare some of the old videos for the downloads for oculus, it is very similar, and it is very strange actually. >> $2 billion. >> $2, too. >> a lot of money. >> yeah. it was less than $19 billion. \[laughter] >> well on that note let me change the subject. third period is a different ship. this is going to be a bit more personal. you have -- you may post both know. it was a life's work the way he saw what he was doing. there were specific moments in his life, kinds of epiphanies. he ran a book that inspired him. then there was a later one, less well known, as i was driving down 101 from working in mount view and living up north somewhere. i am going to quote from the oral history and ask you about similar things in your own lives. he told me in the oral history i soon realized that if i wanted to contribute in some maximum way, i would need to provide some real driving force. so i had better first pick a field that is really something. and if i find a set of goals so there is some way i could use the engineering training, then that would be very valuable. but somehow had the feeling that more engineering was not what the world's dominant need was then. it is a complex world. somewhere along the way i had this flash that the complexity of the problems and the means for solving them is getting to be too much. the time available for solving a lot of the problems is getting shorter and shorter. so the urgency goes up. the product of these two factors, complexity and urgency are the measure for organizations and institutions. the complexity and urgency factor transcended what we were able to cope with. if you transcend human capability to deal with that, then you would have something. that resonated. i think in an hour i had the image of sitting at a big c.r.t. screen. sebastian, can you relate to this intense personal motivational moment? >> yes. several times in my life i had these moments where i recognized something of importance. i would tell my students don't worry about what job you are going to get. your job finds you. recently i had a job that was important to take. in history, the first time was about four years ago roughly, or five years ago when i realized i was really good on paper writing. i wrote a lot of books and academic papers. i ran into this guy who had dropped out of grad school and started a start-up company in a space ant didn't care about paper writing, but influenced about a billion people. so i had dinner with larry paige, and we started comparing notes. it dawned on me that all this competition on paper writing, they had to draw the arc to what i really cared about, which was changing people's lives. it required people to read my papers and like them and implement them. but the papers weren't very good, so not enough people read them. so i went to google to learn how to influence the world. i started as a middle manager and worked my way up. more recently i was building up google x, and we did all kinds of things like balloons in the stratosphere, to contact lenses to detect plug sugar, learning smart things. and then we put this palace out on artificial intelligence at stanford a few years ago. i happened to teach on the side still. we put this e-mail out saying you could take this class for free. we had a 160,000 students sign up. with all these machines that eventually replace people, who really cares about the people as opposed to the machines? i felt education is the thing. you can make machines smarter and they are going to take over the jobs of people, but no one is going to be making people smarter. to the present day i have been influenced by a moment. it may not be as obvious to anybody in the audience, but it was a moment where i was an artificial intelligence guy, making machines smart. but i care about people and not machines. why not go back and do something for the many people who need jobs? >> excellent. >> have you had a moment like that? >> gosh, i have had a lot of moments like that. the most satisfying moment has been building a surgical simulator. there became a critical point where there was too much simulation in teaching surgery. back in the 80's it was exciting and there were several people involved. that was the moment when i felt that virtual reality was actually good for something. it was beautiful, electrifying and it was clear. being of use was not as clear. we are here actually making a difference. but earlier than that, wow -- i mean -- you know, i will tell you the moment that really got to me was when i was a little kid. e.u. grew up in new mexico, and one of our neighbors is the one who discovered pluto. he was the head of optics at white sands missile range. he showed me how to make telescopes and fwrained mirrors. this was the prototypical experience that led me into virtual reality. i remember that so clearly. and just the sense of magic you can get there standing your contact with the universe with technology. it is the best thing. >> thank you. i am going to do two more questions so you can start thinking about the questions you are going to have. when we were talking before, they both agreed we wanted to have as much interaction with you as possible. just two more questions here, and then we will do the interactive side of it. as i am sure both of you know, doug's project, the historical one, was in many ways a failure. it succeeded in brings us things burks as far as funding, it ended up as a failure. >> wrong metric. >> i could hear that. >> what a loser. \[laughter] >> what role does failure, however you want to define it, play in what you do? is it an important aspect of it or not? >> oh, my god. we are never going to come home. kidding. failure is essential. we all climb mountains we have never done before. there is no playbook. if you believe that you can figure it all out in your brain and just do it, and it works. they have never looked from the outside. they fail a lot on the way and get up again and do something else. for every great entrepreneurs, there are five not to great entrepreneurs who massively fail along the way. so the system itself is based on failure. when we fail at google x, we throw a party. we are happy. we have something in our company that if you break the company, you get a bottle of fine wine. you hurt somebody has a worst possible failure, cancel a project, fire people. at some other level, it is actually the most gratifying thing that makes it so amazing, which is you learn something. you went out with your best hypothesis, and believe this is the way to climb the mountain, and then you have to backtrack. but the reality is you have learned something you couldn't know before. so in the space of what you know, you didn't fail. you fail if you are unable to learn. but if you are able to learn and keep an open mind and survive on the surprise, then you have enriched your work and your team. if you do this enough, you will eventually make it up to the top of the mountain, no question. you see people wavering along the way. that is the reason they don't reach the team. it is not that the mountain can't be climbed. when you hear about people failing in silicon con, it is not a massive 0/1 and my life is over. there are moments where you recognize something essential, and what you just learned will be with you forever. it is an amazing gift of god that you have this thing in your brain. it sets yourself apart from the past. as a result, we celebrate failures. >> jaron, i want to give you a chance before you answer about the role of failure, talk about why doug englebart was not a failure? i think that is important to hear. >> wow. if you are going to have a standard of what success is where in order to be successful you have to be a business success, then that is a terrible narrowing of the scope of human affairs. i don't know anybody who really thinks that way. i have never heard anybody in silicon valley describe doug as a failure. that is just you. [laughter] ive never heard anybody say that. i think most of the people who unveil something in computing don't become moguls of it. there have been a few exceptions, but overall, your allen kay and ted nelsons they end up as research types. it is a different kind of person. there is a certain kind of intensity, focus and ambition that the entrepreneurs have which is different than the exploratory mindset. if we have only one criteria for what success is, then we have to become the same. i can't accept that. if we think about creativity, influence and impact there, is a whole measure of success. maybe there is a trend in silicon valley lately to focus only on that one measure of success. i don't think that is really so true. >> there has been an influx of people who play golf and wall street types. there is a different society now. i was remembering this event when i was with doug and something came up about a fraternity, and there was someone we couldn't find in the xerox park fraternity. it used to be that the business happened, and now there are people who come here to do business more often. so maybe there is a business of a shift. but i haven't detected. >> i think that is correct. i think he did have a feeling of being a little under appreciated, and there was a kind of -- some of the people who were creating the new world of computing. at that time there was a divide between the personal computing edge insurgence and the old good. but there was a bruskness that probably didn't give him enough credit. the other thing i want to say is it didn't last. by the 90's. one of the things that is nice is we were able to celebrate his contribution while he was alive. felt that but he corrected it. >> one more question. i ask students to come up with questions about things i probably know nothing about. but that is fine because i want them to see how i deal with beginning to answer a question. i thought how do i deal with that with you. maybe an out of the blue question i can ask you, since we are going to be seeing this performance tonight about a demo. what would the next demo be? i know we can't build surprise into this so much because you are answering a question, but where could you see that happening today, something that would surprise people, get the way moving forward. sebastian, we start with you. >> i take this to be a question for me about what cool great technologies will we see in the next few years. i have had the privilege to work on a few of those at google. example, curing many types of cancer by finding ways to diagnose them differently than the way we diagnose them today. we have a program at google to did he detect it. flying cars. implantable computers. that might sound icky, but it has a lot of interesting perspectives for people. a lot of people and things where we are outsourcing personal experience into a computer. possibly our own permanent. maybe we will have a demo at some point where there is a computer of sebastian. that is not as far off as you think. that is doable. i act le do believe in all these technologies, we have only scratched the surface. if you just have an imagination, most of these things act li have very strong technical solutions. >> jaron, do you have a thought about a demo you would like to see. sure. i have spent a lot of times also starting crazy projects. in my book i speculate about artificial glands that manufacture molecules for the body on an as needed bases. i set the narrative of it on the stanford campus with some kids who use these devices not as intended. the point of imagining that for me was to think about how it is brought out in the world economically can influence how the invention affects people. these things can turn out well or badly, and a lot of it depends on the context in which they are introduced. i think you are a moving target and the way you change yourself in the presence and responding to technology what undo any measure of it succeeded. >> let's wait. >> i believe you are only pretending that is so. but if you pretended enough to make the demo work, you might make is t- so, which is a great danger to you. [laughter] a couple of demos. i remember a crazy thing. when i was like to and we were making virtual reality systems for the first time, and that was a long time ago. we are talking 35 years ago. my friends are saying if we have kids, we are going to slap them in virtual reality, and they are going to grow up in four dimensions. when my first baby came out, i said no, i am not going to do that to you. [laughter] i have always been curious about trying to build up intuition into higher dimensions and other sorts of mathematical abilities. a demos that blasted through that that blasted human intuition in math would be something i would be interested in. doug wanted us to expect more from ours. that would be a golden example. >> those answers opened up a lot of topics. i understand there are america phones around. right there is one, and there is another. if you have a question, raise your hand and a microphone will find you, and we will go from there. let's start over with the blue shirt over there. >> about pa years ago, i think it was 1980, i took my wife to hear you speak on the fourth floor of an unfinished office building in san jose on first street. you talked about something called the data globe -- >> called the what? >> i think you called it the data globe. >> oh, yes. >> and you talked about your views of the future. as you look back now versus projecting forward, how would you compare? >> the data globe was how we handled information. the first globe was made by tom zimmerman. i should give him credit. he is currently a researcher at ibm. when we came out with the i-phone, people were confused. to answer your question, i'm working on an autobiography, and but anyway, to answer your question, yeah. i've been -- i'm working on an autobiography and trying to reconcile my current view of the world with the one i had in my 20's in the 1980's. and i feel just as optimistic now as i did then. and i feel wild eyed and enthusiastic. and i love working on technology as much as i ever did. but i also feel a sense of balance about it. that i don't think i had at the time. i think i fell into the fallacy of utopian thinking. and any time you start to believe that -- you're on path to utopia you're almost certainly going to shoot yourself in the foot. it's a guarantee. and it's very, very hard to out grow utopian illusions and very painful and really growing up. and it was hard. i mentioned before that i had thought that being aware of violence would reduce violence and in fact it changes the nature of violence. there is actually less violence overall but that violence that there is is perhaps more cruel and more cruelly focused and more personal. and there's -- it's -- the result is more complex. and it's more of a mixed bag than you might want. i still believe the world is getting better. i still believe people will pull through. but i also -- i also recognize how tough that's going to be. and i think we're going to go through a pretty tight squeeze. i mean, where i find the difference with some of my fellows in silicon valley is there's -- there tends to be a belief in some people in the valley who are in the extropian or the community that it will get better and better and technology will solve all ills and i think we're going to go through some tight squeezes and a lot of rough stuff. i think we're going to have a define uggle to ourselves in a humane and sweet way going through a lot of changes. i think there are going to be deceptive and treky technologies that we'll have to unravel. i think the interests of entrepreneurs and everyone else are not always aligned. i don't think that's automatic. sometimes they are. sebastian: i'm part of a group of people that shoot themselves in the foot because i'm actually much more positive. and what makes me positive about the situation in silicon valley is just extrapolate from history and look at what we've done in technology in the last 300 years and almost everybody worked in farming. and the living conditions were horrible. the average age was like in the 30's when you died. there was no cure against many, many diseases and illnesses. we can easily cure today. to today, where we have more peace, a higher probability of dying a natural death. more longevity. even the bottom of the world has been lifted in terms of its living standards. it's uneven admittedly. that's all been driven in part by technology. the globalization that we have, the interconnectedness. i come from a place in europe which hundreds of years of ferocious wars. and all those disappeared because now all the countries are interacting and doing business with each other. i think that's going to continue. i think -- see no reason why we're at a point all of a sudden things are different. now, when we ask people how we el about it, most people are -- on the negative side or the balance side. because people aren't as optimistic as i usually am. and i think it's in part because there's a lot of uncertainty. what's it going to mean and what does it mean if uber takes over? what if google takes over? how is my life affected by this? and i think that feeling of almost -- almost of fear about what the future might bring, gives people the feeling of being worse. in reality it's getting better and you said it several times. and this beautiful book based on love about war and safety and he found out century after century has become safer and safer and safer including the 20th century with two horrible world wars and starting in russia was still safer than the 18th century which was safer than the 18th century. so perception and reality. jaron: the way i think this falls out is technology is a necessary but insufficient resource for improving human state of affairs. technology has -- it creates the wiggle room for people to make a better society. but it doesn't itself do that. so i think a lot of the credit that technology -- so i agree with you in terms of the factual record. i think that things have basketball getting better -- have been getting better. and i find myself on the other side of the argument where new age idiot is saying everybody needs to be healthier for modern medicine -- oh, my god. and you can find hundreds of thousands of those people in marin county and nearby and blows my mind that anybody can believe that. t at the same time, as technologists we take full credit for improvement but better technology has created the wiggle room within which people could decide to make a better society. so if we look at the improvements in public health, yes, vaccines, understanding the importance of clean water, all these things are crucial. but it was the societal structures to actually spread those around and make them happen that was also necessary. so technology is necessary but not sufficient to create improvement. and this is the thing i think we've forgotten. we have this idea that some abstract ramp of improvement, whether it be technology or business competition can run on autopilot and will be aligned with human interests automatically. and it's a way of not taking responsibility for the very difficult political job of creating a society that actually benefits from those things. and so i think we have to take the whole picture into account. so i think -- we agree more than we disagree. but -- sebastian: come on. jaron: you feel we disagree more than degree? sebastian: i don't want to take credit for this. jaron: there's a real problem -- and we talked on the phone, and i said something about how we're so successful that in a way we live in this bubble and it's hard to appreciate what it's like for a lot of people. and you said something like, well, compared to larry or -- or we're not successful. but we're successful. you know, it -- sebastian: a private phone conversation. jaron: i found a transcript on a google server. sebastian: there you go. [laughter] henry: ok. i think we better move to the next question. over here. >> henry, this is maybin. henry: go ahead. >> i'm here. in the middle, higher up. henry: ok. all right. >> hi. i chaired a planning committee from 2001 to 2004. and i want to touch on something that henry said about being a failure. doug had a 200-year version. he had the advances but the unfinished revolution. and i just want to touch on that. that he felt that we should have a vision of how technology could alter our humanity. and we still have to live up to that tha dream. and he fought to the last breath to get that message out. so he did feel he was a failure. even though he had done so much. but because he looks to us to gather in community to harners technology for humanity and that fight still goes on. so i would like to hear your comments, as world thinkers and so on. when i went around with doug, that message was very, very hard for people to hear. you mean we aren't good enough? we're the masters of the universe. but yes, 200-year dream about what technology can do to augment our humanity. [applause] sebastian: interesting to see your comment and two definite things now. and i never met him in person. you mentioned that he didn't get enough recognition. as a metric for failure. and maybe that was part of it. and his urge to implement this amazing vision and the slowness of society relative to his own life block. on the recognition side, i think we should never ution the recognition we get as a measure of success. ever. i think it's a big mistake. if we do this, you're going to be very inhibited and do very incremental things in life. the true innovators in the world i believe do things that are not recognized or are even threatening to people. and they often receive negative feedback because they might disturb something. so recognition itself in my opinion is plainly the wrong metric. as is money in my opinion. the real question is for me always, how much do you affect people's life to the better in the future? and in doug's case he was probably ahead of his time. he was the first. he did some really amazing and invented a whole bunch of things we use every day and you could even say the internet to some extent and computer graphics and the mouse, and other devices. interactive text editing and all things we share today and have massively influenced people. and they might -- he put the intellectual thing out there. that people then picked up and rightfully credited him for to do the right thing. i would -- if he was around today on this podium and says i'm a failure. sit up. we have a symposium in your honor and not exactly a failure. the computer field knows how amazing your contributions really are. jaron: another story occurs to me that your comment brought up, one of my sort of weird illnesses is that i collect acoustic musical instruments, really obscure ones and feel compelled to play them and have lots and lots of instruments. and doug would come over and we would look at these instruments. and we both thought that these were the best user interfaces that had ever come about. but the thing about them is each one of them took centuries to evolve. if you look at a modern clarinet or a violin or something, it wasn't like born in some burst. it was something that co-evolved with the culture of playing it over a long time. in some cases it was awaiting better metallurgy or something. but a lot of cases the refinement of the design took that long. and would still take that long. and so there is this notion that some things in technology can improve very rapidly. the moore's law like things where you can say let's make this chip faster and more efficient. and all that. that's great. but there's some things that just take their time. and this notion that maybe in 200 years we'll have interfaces that we use that are as good as a violin or a piano. it's just -- it's something that's so beguiling. and i often try to dream of what those might be like but those are for the future. by definition we can't -- we can't see those things yet. we can't know them. and you have to have a sort of trust that that will come about. i mean, there's -- can you imagine us dictating to people 200 years from now? this is the wonderful thing you will have done and know in great detail -- and also the -- that worship is maybe a little too much as some people do our constitution or something. and hang on every word. we say in either case we need to leave some room for the future or we can't expect it to evolve to be better. henry: ok. the microphone. >> my question goes to an earlier point and regarding the ethics and economics of augmentation. i find this to be a very critical theme in lanier's books. one of the beauties of technology is that it -- it's sort of mediates our perception of reality. however, with increasing mediation, there's complexity d there's also danger that it's difficult to see the consequences of our actions. because of this mediation. and this potentially could also undermine our ability to choose. and to have responsibility. because of this thick layer of mediation. so based on this, do we see -- and i would like to hear some discussion, is there a danger of -- with the march of technology that we really contribute to the further concentration of wealth and knowledge and power in the hands of the very few, to the point where we have no longer have any consumers to buy our roducts? sebastian: the question is about technology most recent developments changing the balance of the distribution of wealth? yes, no? really about the effect of the most recent technology developments in silicon valley on wealth, global wealth and inequity and different things in the world? certainly the divergence of wealth in this country, and the middle class used to be a floor and the elevator and get there and stay there. and now it's an escalator that you have to keep running up but is running in the opposite direction and you have to keep running faster and faster to even attain this. and a very concerning development i think for us as a nation. the division of the people who have a chance and the people who don't have a chance. and i think it's a concerning development worldwide. that that has to be addressed ecause under utilizing our resources by giving some people enormous power and other people no power at all. and having said this this goes hand in hand that basic services are becoming more available for everybody. not that -- just leads to a really -- leads to a really bad situation. but it's not quite as bad as it could be if for the poorest of the poor, and worse and worse and worse and worse. and a long discussion about what the implications are. i'm a big fan of the estate tax. and it has a chance to reset dynasties. jaron: i'll applaud that. sebastian: very important. and i'm coming from europe. where we're much more socialist than you guys are. and how little is done for poor people in this country. and people of low income people, of race, people of color and so on. and how badly we manage ourselves in terms of people having a chance to get a great education. but i also hope that we can invent technologies that help that. so my own company works in the education space. and our objective is to democratize education. and take the best education to the world. and we're not the only ones. there's other companies that do the same thing. and they're using technology to leverage what used to be behind stanford's walls and make it available. and responsibility, absolutely yes. we should think globally. we should think about people. because we have 7.2 billion of us and an amazing gift that we can turn into an amazing progress in the world. and not everything is peachy obviously. but to think about what -- how could use silicon valley to redemocratize the world. jaron: so the question about whether the world becomes more obscure to us because it's so mediated by technology, particularly technologies from other people? right now, a lot of the news you read is selected by algorithms and those algorithms are based on data that's often gamed by a bunch of people trying to manipulate it and becomes obscure why you're reading what you're reading. and you know, going back to this question of empirically whether we're willing -- if you would ask me in the 1980's would it be possible, once the internet is really -- we weren't calling it that yet but once everything was networked and people were sharing media and they were collaborating all over the world would it be possible for something like

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