Middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. My job was to stand off the house floor and ask congressman what they thought of the days news. So i quit my job and moved to cambodia. I spent a year and a half there reporting on events there, and it was an amazing experience. The country was emerges from 30 years of civil war, from a genocide in which one in four people dies of murder, starvation and disease. What really struck me when i was there, the human resilience. D. C. , theres a lot of data there and information bush to be seeing peoples lives and how they bounce back, it started to change the way i looked at journalism and what i wanted do. And when i came back, i wanted to write more about the theme of human resilience and i found that in the United States, some of the most exciting stories of human resilience are being unleashed by technology. Thats what my book is about engineering. My presentation is less data driven than some of the stuff. What i tried to do is put some of trends we keep hearing about in the news into context. Some of these fields like dieonics, brain computer interfaces. Thats what i focussed on in my book here. Ill put it here. Its a little bionic vitruvan man here. What all these things have in common is we have sort of reach add etiping point. In the last century, we went to the moon, built skyscrapers. Mastered flight. My argument, and what i have seen in the last ten years of covering this beat for science magazines like the m. I. Tichld popular review, popular science. The new frontier now, some of the most talented engineers are turning their sights inward to the human body. We have always tried to do that, but now many of the technologies we have heard about here, sensing and computes technologies are allowing us to do things we have never been able to do before. Reverse eng mere the human body and mind at a level that wasnt possible a few years ago. These are trends we heard a lot about. Im a journalist soy went out to tuck to people to see what we are learning, where our limits loo i and how we might overcome them and how this is affects peoples lives. Its obvious this is going to be a tremendous area of growth in the next century. You guys are the ones who can figure out how to monetize it. Fairly different areas are coming along at different paces. The first person a wrote about, the first person i talked to sort of demonstrates one area where already theres progress that could be commercialized, and that person is a man named hugh herr. Ill tell you a little bit about him since its lunch and i like to tell stories. This guy, this was a great story of human resilience. He was not the best student in high school. He was a c and d student, but he loved to rock climb. He was already as a teenager, kind of a world famous rock climber. He had been on rock climbing magazines as a young prodigy. All he did was think about rock climbing. One day, he went hiking to mt. Wash in nafrp. He was with a friend. The wind shifted and they went down the wrong way. They wandered down into the wilderness and got lost and they almost died. They were rescued on the brink of death, and hugh herr had severe frostbite and both his legs were amputated below the knee. So the doctors told him he would never walk, run, never climb again. And every night he would go to sleep and dream that he was running through the cornfields behind his parents house with the wind running through his hair. He would wake up and see his legs were gone, and it was devastating. But soon he was tired of being in bed, so he scooted off bed. Started climbing around. He realized he could pull himself up on the refrigerator. He convinced his brothers to take him rock climbing. On the rock wall, he was lighter than ever before. He began tinkering with his pros ittics. He made them 7 feet long, made them little stumps. Soon he was better than ever before. She was on 60 minutes. An inspirational boy wonder. When he got down, the pros ittics were no better than the peg leg designed for the civil war soldiers or pirates 100 years ago. He began tinkering with them and enrolling enrollinged in math and science classes. Today hes one of the leading bionics engineers in the world. What he has done is he has taken these technologies im talking about that are driving this revolution, which are computing and sensing technologies and using them to make bionic limbs that are so close to the real thing that when i went to visit him, i couldnt tell he was wearing them. We were walking across a quad and i was slipping. He was wearing fancy italian shoes. What he did this is what well see more and more of at greater resolutions. When you think about it i wrote down this number here. We have how many . 200 bones, and about 4,000 tendons. A small portion of those are on our legs. He took ablebodies individuals, used the same kind of motion capture technologies that you see for ea sports or avatar, or any of those moves and rerecorded those. So he could tell, you know, when youre ankle is at this angle and our knee is here, what happens to your foot. And he was able to take these variables and put them into a computer algorithm and he put them on a computer chip. Then he built robotic parts that could imitate the real thing. 206 bones, 360 joints however many different parts. Still not able to figure out by hand, but when you think about the Computing Power it becomes a manageable problem. So he built robotic parts out of silicone and various things. And this device that he has made adjusts hundreds of times a second. You know, hes done tests on treadmills with oxygen and co 2. It feel secretary of state realistic that disabled people when they try it out begin to cry because it feel secretary of state real. Theres a long way to go. You have to hook it up to the nervous system, but thats just an example of what we can do. Thats what i want to look at in my book. All the areas we hear about has to do with reverse engineering except on a much greater level. How many neurorons do we have . 300 billion, i guess. Maybe 3 billion nuke leo tides in our genome. We cant reverse engineer that, but people are trying to to a certain extent and its amazing how far we have come in those certain areas. So when you think about genetic engineering, thats one area. There are some mutations that are caused by a single some conditions that are accused by a sing. Mutation. I looked at one of them. Theres a something called myo staten. If you knock out that gene, you get bigger muscles. Lee sweeney made these things call Arnold Schwarzenegger nice. They have been using this for people with dueshanes dystrophy. But then meatheads are getting ripped. Thats sort of the problems youll face. When you look at Something Like artificial intelligence, theres thousands of genes that can be involved and we dont necessarily have the computational ability yet. Theres a company in china that have been trying to get to the bottom of it. Theyre using supercomputers. But its only going get easier as these technologies improve. In terms of the brain, i looked at the most extreme example, trying to understand and decode speech. It seems like the ultimate challenge to me. There are people who are locked in, hoff lou gehrigs disease and lost their ability to speak. Theres a project funded by the u. S. Military. Theres a guy in the front office that was a Science Fiction growing up and he always imagined a thought helmet. Is there something here from Washington University . Eric lute luther. I rote about him. Watched him do brain surgery. Him and a collaborator they have discovered a neuro signature of imagined speech. What they found is when we talk, our mind sends a signal to the motor cortex to tell the muscles of our articulators how to talk, but it also sends a copy to the cortex as an error Correction System so we know when something is wrong. Oddly enough, when we imagine thinking, we still send the signal and you can pick up that signal. So eric and gerwin can actually tell if somebody is imagining reciting the gettysburg address or the Martin Luther king speech. You can imagine, when they have the power to look at 300 billion neurons, that may be possible. Theres all sorts of ethical issues as well. I asked someone at the beijing genomics institute, should we really be able to tweak intelligence . He said, i think every parent should be able to have their parent be as intelligent as they want. I said, is there anything that scares you . He said, i could imagine a tiger mom what wants to give her kid intelligence and ruthlessness and gives her child antisocial. Thats something to grapple about. I asked military scientists about if its a good thing or a bad thing . He said, it depends. Is a baseball bat a good thing ore a bad thing . Those are the things we are going to have to deal with. Commercialization, its just going increase specificity. Right now, we rely on small molecule drugs. We systemically alter to molecules in our body. We are going to be able to get more and more specific as these technologies improve. I also wrote about a technology where theyre trying to stimulate neurons directly with electricity. But we are a long ways away from this. So any way, that is my talk. Happy to answer questions. Thank you. Did anyone want to ask questions . I have a question. In your lifetime, do you think we will really be able to in your lifetime. Do you think we will have solved the most complex dangerous brain cancers, glioblahs toe mas . I dont know, but i have seen many encouraging things. One thing thats going on, you probably heard of is immune therapy. Somebody was just telling me last night, theyre using Super Computers to look at cancer and some of the data sets from veterans. As we have big data we can discover some of these things. I have been down to a place called m. D. Anderson in houston. They have set up this platform where theyre looking at theres an interesting battle that goes on between different cancerous tumors and the immune system. I dont know if anyone has heard of these things called checkpoint inhibitors. Theyre what saved jimmy carters life. Theres switches in the immune system that can be turned on and off. Some cancers are able to flip a switch that turns out of different components of the immune system. At md anderson, theyre learning to flip it back on. It seems a very effective way to fight cancer would be the harness the bodys own immune system, but i dont know specifically where they are on that. Im thinking about how you suggested a mother might choose particular traits for her child. It sort of raises the nature versus nurture argument from a different perspective, but the child would still be limited by the genetic material they had to work with. Right, but i guess the idea that bji is going by, or that people are talking about is if you tuns genetic code or what would predispose someone to intelligence, you could use Something Like crispr to rewrite the code to give them genes that would allow them to be the most intelligent. I getsz what im saying is there are so many variables involved and its so complicated that its such a complex combination of different nucleotides and we are so far away from it that will allow us to change the genetic environment. We thought as biologyists that when the human genome project was complete, weld understand all this. Turns out, each gene codes ultimately for a peptide or a protein, so if you know how many genes you have, you should be able to match those to the number of peptides. Turns out, theres several fold multiplication of diversity in the genome, so just be genetics wont get you that. The other complexity here is if you take two identity cal twins, humans, some of you may be aware their fingerprints with different. So even though they have the same genome, their phenome is different because of t. Is even if we can splice it, its far from reality. Nature has complexity. Im giving you examples. Its not just one gene, one trait, even if we think thats the case. On the other hand, there are some geneticists in some ways revolutionizing pharmaceuticals. Regenron has partnered with scientists that are studying populations with a rare defect. Also a company in iceland called decode. Because the icelandic population is so home okawho h i think one of reasons they bought decode was because they had found in elderly patients a mutation that seemed easier for them to get alzheimers disease. It didnt explain algz disease but made it hard tore form the plaques and tangles that cause it. If you could replicate that, you could seemingly pause al alzheimers intellectual augmentation versus physical augmentation . I dont know. There are some studies from scientific journals that many people in academic already tried to augment themselves with ritalin or all sorts of stuff, and i dont know what its like in college nowadays its a drug war all around. Yeah. But i have actually you know, you can see the same thing with steroids are the same like myostatin. As soon as they get discovered in the scientific literature and are used to help the weakest among us, steroids were originally used for musclewasting disease, and people who were original survivors of the holocaust, athletes start using them. I read about somebody for businessweek, a guy at ucsan diego names james evans, and hes actually found a mutation that these receptors that if you tweak them they can allow a mouse to run twice as far as he normally would. Its like this fat burning switch. So if you administer this drug, the body starts to burn more glucose and you delay the point at which the mouse hits the wall, and they call them marathon mice. When he First Published the paper about a drug that did this in 2008, he gave a copy of a reference sample to the world Anti Doping Authority, and i think they found samples on the Tour De France within like three weeks, you know . But then the world and Anti Doping Authority was so alarmed, they put out a notice warning it had been the trials had been stopped because they had been found to cause cancerous tumors in mice. That helped a little bit. The former soviet union doping authorities have used this in some places. But recently evans came out with a new drug that supposedly doesnt have these tumorcausing effects. And you can be sure that its already being made in china. And bought on the black market. Its hard to control. Okay, thank you. [ applause ] our next session is a series of fireside chats and t. E. D. Style talks featuring speakers representing a broad crosssection of the private sector who will highlight various Disruptive Technologies and their impact on the u. S. Economy. To moderate this session, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the executive Vice President for the council on competitiveness, mr. Chad evans. [ applause ] Economic Growth drivers evolve over time. In the pre18th century the main driver of Economic Growth was cultivation. Was extraction. In the 19th and 20th century the main economic drivers were really manufacturing and industry. As we look forward into the 21st century, building on a manufacturing renaissance and new Energy Strength, what we see is that compute powerdriven innovation, coupled with human potential, will be the core drivers for future growth. This afternoons conversation will reflect some of this revolution, some of this transformation. As we explore the implications and the impact of big data and Data Analytics, americas work force and challenges and opportunities they face. The rise of robotics, Autonomous Systems, and increasingly ondemand economy. A cashless society. New frontiers of medicine and health care and, of course, Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience in an increasingly fragile world. This afternoons first insights will come from dr. Jackson, the Vice President and chief Technology Officer of Lockheed Martin. Dr. Jackson will share with us some of his thoughts on how the physical and Digital World are colliding and converging every day through sensors, networks, and a tsunami of data. Big data is a game changer for generating value and enhancing competitiveness. As a society, we produce today or actually every two days, as much data that was generated from the beginning of time until the beginning of the 21st century. In two years the amount of available Digital Information in the world will rise from 5 to 50 zeta bytes. Within this data rich, image driven, intensive World Companies and organizations are finding ways to seize on opportunities, to expand their horizons and create new businesses, new industries, new markets. Id like to welcome to the stage dr. Jackson, who is going to share some of his insights and some of his perspectives from the aerospace and defense sector. [ applause ] thank you, chad. Finding the clicker here, let me start with a question, do a little show of hands. How many people got here to the forum by way of commercial airlines . So, first of all, im glad you all made it here safely but im hardly surprised. And the reason is the likelihood of anyone being involved in an accident, any accident, is about 3 in a million. So our airline industry, commercial aviation, has an amazing safety record. And the reason is, the industry has been laserfocused for many years on finding and fixing every problem, whether its materials and manufacturing, design, maintenance. Ultimately, things like pilot training, flight operations. And so if you look at the record over time you see this incredibly dramatic improvement every many years. Thats the great news. The disappointing part maybe is when you get that good, its really hard to continue to improve anymore. Or maybe that was the disappointing news. The reality is when we come up against these kinds of walls what happens is typically some gamechanger comes along that creates a whole brandnew paradigm. And for our generation, one of those gamechangers is big data. Let me give you an example and ill start with the s92 helicopter. The s92 is built by sa core ski, be one of Lockheed Martin<