Transcripts For CSPAN2 Washington Post Hosts Transformers Su

To cspan. Org. Now, a discussion about medical technology and new inventions to aid the disabled. It was part of the washington hosts transformer summit held on wednesday. This is two hours. We are delighted to welcome you here this morning. Thank you for joining us. [applause] were sitting in the center of what we call Washington Post live. The new initiative that extends the reach of our journalism through live events, streaming, and pairs or journalist with leaders and decisionmakers to dissect and explore the most important and compelling issues off our time. The idea of todays conference on transformers actually began with a conversation we had here about the transformation underway at the Washington Post. We have gone from what was once a locally focused newspaper, to a multiplatform Digital First News Organization serving a Broad National and global audience. And although we have made amazing progress and are leading the industry in many ways, well always view ourselves as being in the process of transforming and never fully transformed, because like so Many Industries the media space is changing to rapidly the process of transforming can never really be complete. With advance in technology, the speed and scope of change is only increasing only accelerating. Achieving or maintaining the status quo will never be sufficient. So for all of news journalism today, whether you have just started and your early in your career, or your in my stage, the reality is that our entire profession will be a time of continuous and increasing change, and that is the culture we are embracing here at the Washington Post. For any business, transformation is a delicate balance. What do you utilize and preserve from the past and what do you set aside to create room for the future . For us, the pillar of journalistic excellence has always been, and will always be, fundamental to our mission. But the rest, thats going to be determined by constant innovation and experimentation. As part our transformation we have imbedded more than 80 engineers in the news room to quickly bring stories to life in new and innovative ways. Our Technology Team now creates our own extensive and flexible site architecture and were now licensing that to others. Were constantly testing and experimenting and never standing still. We have bold ambitions to coin to grow across the country and around the world be a moodle for a rapidly changing industry. So, for purposes of todays conversation, how do we translate the broad disruption that were witnessing around the world in all sectors, into a thoughtprovoking event . I think we have accomplished that today with a very unique lineup of voices, who are pushing the boundaries on really every aspect of our lives. The transformers program is anchored by visionaries and innovators in the fields of space explore asia, Artificial Intelligence, impact philanthropy. National security and much more. Well be discussing breathtaking changes that are forever altering the way we live, connect, and learn, from the social platforms we use to communicate, to the cars we drive, or more accurately i say that will drive us. Today well explore efforts to define mortality and what that means for our future. And we even have the father of the internet their explain it all to us, and despite what we may have heard a few Campaign Seasons ago this is actually the father of the internet. To start us off, id like to thank our presenting sponsors. Lockheed martin and samsung electronics. Join me in showing our appreciation. [applause] i also draw your attention to the program where the rest of the supporting sponsors are listed. On the way in you may have seen students building robots. Theyre part of what we call the roporter competitions were holding today. The way we gather news that changed dramatically in many ways of the past few years. Virtual reality, and row boats are helping journalists to tell stories in new and engaging ways. We challenged a team of top science students from five major high schools to build a functioning robot that can help collect information from places that would otherwise be unreachable for journalists. That competition is underway right now, and well be announcing the winners to you later today. But now, please to start our program, please join me in welcoming the head of Samsung Catalyst Fund to say a few years. [applause] good morning. Thank you, fred, and thank you, Washington Post. Im honored to be here presenting samsung electronics. Its a privilege to join you today to listen to you and engage in a conversation about technology and how technology is going to impact us as individuals, as society, as well as our country. Perhaps to just kick it off here today, youre going to listen to some amazing speakers. These are the speakers that represent innovators who really are bringing in the next technology revolution, and you as audience get an opportunity to engage with them, really help shape the conversation how technology is going to in turn influence us as people and as society. At samsung we are very privileged to actually work in the technology industry. We do this every day. As we look out there into the future, we see some very significant challenges we face as a society, Climate Change is one. Shifting demographics. Chronic illnesses and the rising cost of managing chronic illnesses. Security, privacy. These are all very significant issues. We think technology has a role to play there. In just the last few years, theres been some Significant Technology breakthroughs. For example, deep learning, deep networks has been an amazing development. The human brain has been an inspiration for how these new technologies have come together, and deep learning is giving computers an ability to see as well as have a dialogue with us, and that is going to be transformative, quite similarly some of the new Big Data Analytics techniques are deeply influencing how quickly we can analyze dna sequencing and also how inexpensive thats going to become. Theres biology to technology and technology back to biology is creating an amazing cycle and we think we as partners can engage with that and make a transformation in society. We in sam sung believe we cant do this alone weapon would like to engage with grow a conversation. Wes like to figure out how we work in an open collaborative way and then make a fundamental difference in harnessing this technology. Let me perhaps at this point give you a little bit of sense of what we have outside this room. At some point today, if yous like to get a vision of what samsung is doing, we have some demonstrations of our gear. You can if you have some time, please stop by and take a look. Finally, id like to thank Washington Post for having us here, for giving us the opportunity, and thanks to all the speakers in the audience. Thank you. Discover a way to hear what others saw. Since before you could buy books on the internet transformers are dreamers, makers, doers. Theyre the famous and the unknown. They are people who can see, build, or leverage an idea that by design could better everyday life. How the age, how we move from here to there, the way we retreat each other, transformers push the boundaries of what we know. Good morning and welcome to transformers. I on behalf of the Washington Post, oiled like to introduce you to our first guest, who is a stunner. Its actually sort of impossible to imagine the modern World Without our first guest. One of her College Thesis became one of her satellite companies. She was also the president of the First Company to commercially offer gps devices in cars. After that she created sirius xm and was a founder of the entire idea of satellite radio. Not a bad start. As she left sirius 20 years ago she founded a company to assist her youngest daughter who was at the time dying of a then incurable lung disease. The resulting company is United Therapeutics. 6 billion biotech in silver spring, it has extended if not saved the lives of tens of thousands of people, including her daughter, who is now in her 30s. Ladies and gentlemen, she is also the recipient of this years Billy Jean King Leadership Initiative award devoted to alcs to lgbt issues and her company is based in North Carolina the might get arrest for going to the bathroom if the governor had anything to do about it. Ladies and gentlemen, martin. [applause] one of the basic concepts that youre interested in is not just improving life but actually immortality. Were all goes to live forever, and i might mention, founded a religion, as one does, known as its based on transhumannism and you have the idea that were not just going to live a long time but all going to live forever. Tell us your concept of immortality and how that would work. Thank you. Its great pleasure to be here. [inaudible] Information Technology industry for a while. Perhaps a prolific inventer is best known for the idea that as our abilities in the Information Processing industry, computer software, storage of more and more of our thoughts and our ideas outside of our body becomes easier, more automatic, less expensive, that ultimately were going to have sort of digital doppelgangers of ourselves stored in the cloud and are able to present themselves to any manner of devices, and that as thousands and thousands of software coders and hackers and people in the Maker Movement work to make the software that runs these digital doppelgangers ever more lifelike, ever more humanlike, theyll come a Tipping Point when people claim the digital doppelgangers have achieved what we call consciousness, an ability to have a sense of themselves, hope, fears and feelings, and at that point i think the activity will move to the legal arena as to whether or not these digital doppelgangers really are conscious, have an independent legal identity, and kind of the trend of progressive thinking is once theres a Scientific Consensus in this case the science of psychology, the science of the mind that these are digital doppelgangers are in fact cyber conscious. Then well begin to acquire the rights and protections that we assign to even our pets, laboratory animals, and to quite a high extent to primates like chimpanzees and well kind of morph into a digital consciousness that is recognized by the law as being alive. You have a kittyhawk typo jacket on this, named for your lovely spouse, which i have talked to and many others, and sort of a head on a table at this point but it talks to you. And you describe it this isnt the finished product where we want to go, but its the kittyhawk basis of how this call them doppelgangers, can we say robots . Yeah, robots is just as good. And if you put in i have the idea like the matrix, where the plug stuff into the back of people residents head and upload everybodys permits on what amounts to a thumb drive and then upload it to the clouds so youre always there and you can just plug it into a robot and there you are. Right. But its becoming even thats on the screen and thats a recent episode or Morgan Freemans series on the National Geographic channel about the nature of god and religion and whatnot. So, we did this project to really inspire young people, and id say young girls in particular, to become coders, and when they have an opportunity to speak with bina48 and see that even today in our somewhat primitive 20 teens were able to write software that can respond. She doesnt give the same answer any two times and theres no prescripted questions. You can ask her anything. Id say she is way better than siri. Id say just about catching up to her and im sure because theres thousands of people working on alexa shell soar past bina48. But this type of software inspires young people to become coders and why im so confident that cyber consciousness will emerge because its not just our foundation or a couple of Big Companies working on this. There are tens of thousands of people throughout the whole world who can make cyber consciousness. They dont need a factory to make it or a lot of investment to make it. Over a period of even a week we forget 90 percent of what we experienced. What is important to was with emotional context will stick with us for ever and that is what most of us refer to as our sole that does not change. In terms if your soul can be transferred into a cyberconscious form, it will be something that happens gradually and even today there is a debate did dogs or cats have been sold or are conscious and i feel they do. But most people in society that move in that direction when you could gratuitous blow dash gratuitously kill a dog in a horrible way know we would stop you from doing it in the 19th century or even most of the 20th now with is a crime in those states. Sebelius get to the point where there are friends of cyberconscious people with that personal have a lot of friends and i think very quickly we will get to a point where it has a soul in if god forbid getting in a car accident of death and disability you did he continues in the cyberconscious form one. One of the more frightening aspects that none of us want to live forever. Like hitler for example, so that you get into eugenics. So then we will make the drive better. You are a nice person but how do we avoid the the cyberrobots . Where does that come in . I have a point of view that it isnt realistic to fear because the cyberconsciousness and the robots developed are in in the environment it is still the environment much like the natural environment. Like the selection factors. Nobody will want to buy the hitler robot if that emerges from the same thing will happen to the robot as to the real hitler the rest of society will rise up to squash it down. There is no market so does that mean it doesnt exist . No because there are always new stations and there will be bad robots but the vast majority that comprise of the Decision Making with the economic powers will quash down the bad robots so it is a self correcting problem overwhelmingly good humans talk where the cyberconsciousness the verge [inaudible] this is my favorite project from West Virginia the by called genetic mutations but the purpose of these two therapeutics for possible future loan transplant so tell us how that works. Ever since my grandmother received a heart valve because hers had gone bad i have been aware the fact that loans and other organs are very close to the same size and shape and function of human major organs. Has our younger daughter developed of fatal heart and lung disease i learned rather quickly the only cure was a transplant but the problem was as there are too few organs to gore around and Organ Transplants trade one disease for another you trade the end stage organ disease for a chronic organ rejection type of disease ultimately takes the life of many if not most to receive transplants. I set about to solve the problem to make sure our daughter could live a normal life. I went back to school to get a ph. D. In transplantation which is the science of genetically modifying head genome so the organs not only used for humans as the same size and shape but to genetically modifying them it will not give rise to the rejection of flawed the transplants in the past in the thick genome can be modified the individuals who received those organs dont have to take a lifelong immunosuppressed and so with my Company Repurchased the early leaders in this area off the campus of Virginia Tech and hand we are the leaders of genetically modifying genomes so not only their lungs but their hearts and kidneys but can be used as human transplant all of the recent record announced by the nih program from the United Therapeutics with their own records and our goal i am confident to achieve this goal this is some of the earlier satellite communication projects is we can treat the limited supply of transplant organs through the modification of the genome so it is an unlimited supply of heart and liver and kidney and lungs to be tolerated by humans without the need for lifelong immunosuppression. Were on schedule to have reversed clinical procedures by the end of this decade and we hope for Regulatory Approval less than 10 years from now and i am pretty confident by the end of the 2020 is literally tens of thousands of people per year receiving Organ Transplants. To give some idea how quickly make progress how many people worldwide that anyone to but in many started with this and how many are alive now . The way you say that it comes out all i did but when genesis was diagnosed there were only 3,000 people with purges these she was designed at the Childrens National Medical Center we were told she would die because everybody with this condition guys so i knew i did not have time to get the organ transplant going so i left my satellite communication activities focused on pharmaceuticals to be a bridge to the bridge unfortunately our pharmaceuticals were for successful approved by the fda now in the United States there are 40,000 living with pulmonary hypertension so it does sound stranger to say when i started there only 3,000 now there are 40,000 but actually it is really good because that is a whole football stadium of people that are like that would not have been. There would have died already. Mortality is one to three years. Genesis is gr