[APPLAUSE] ANNIE JACOBSEN:
Thank you so much. Can everyone hear me all right? And thank you so much
to Google for having me and the tech guys for
trying to make this work. We'll do a little test here. I'll [INAUDIBLE] work. OK. So I am Annie Jacobsen. Thank you for the intro. And this book is about
the Pentagon's Brain, which is sometimes how DARPA
is referred to at the Pentagon. One of the most frequent
questions that I am asked is how do I get these
guys to talk to me? So I just wanted to
begin for a moment with that, because I do
write about these seemingly impenetrable areas,
whether it's Area 51 or the old Nazi
scientists program, which was still very classified
up until recently, to DARPA. And what I would like to mention
is that one of my Area 51 sources, a physicist
who invented stealth technology for the
government going back to when Eisenhower was president
told me, he said, Annie, there's two things
to always remember. One, "fortune favors
the prepared mind," and he was quoting Pasteur, but
the idea is that we should just be as knowledgeable as
we can and be prepared for amazing things to happen. And the other thing that he
told me was look up, not down, and he said that because
physicists, as I have learned, are always looking
up to understand the mysteries of whatever it
is they have in front of them. And the physicists
that I work with are dealing with weapons
related issues, but looking up, whether it's at bees, birds,
bats, the moon, or the cosmos, that is where so
many of the answers lie to this kind of
a scientist's mind. But he also meant look
up, meaning go up. If you get a no,
[? Lavik ?] told me, then go to that guy's boss,
and if that guy gives you a no, then go to his boss. Because, he told me-- and I
have found this to be true-- that the most knowledgeable
people among us often want to share
their information. They do not want to
hoard the information. Particularly as
they get older, they find that it's important for
this country that they love. All of the national security
scientists I work with are real patriots, and
they talk about how even if they worked on
classified programs, they stay abreast of
what is unclassified as they get older so
that they can then share that information. And so that is how I approach
these things, and three of the scientists that
I was most happy to work with on this book-- Charles
Townes invented the laser, and he recently passed
at the age of 99. And the way that I
got to Townes was I was at the Pentagon trying to
learn about laser beam weapons. They're called directed
energy weapons, DEW weapons. They're among the most
classified systems in the government and no
one would tell me anything. They wouldn't even tell me basic
technology about how it worked. I followed [? Lavik's ?] lead. I looked up and not
down, and ultimately I found my way to Charles Townes,
still giving interviews at age 98 when we spoke at the
University of California, Berkeley. And he told me some amazing
stories about the laser and about early laser
development, which I write about in the
book, which give you a real clear idea of why these
weapons are so important, why they're so secret, and it has to
do with accuracy and precision. In the middle there
is Murph Goldberger, and he worked in the
Manhattan Project. He too passed this last year. He was the co-founder
of the Jason scientists. So if anyone has heard
of the Jason scientists, they are perhaps the most
elite, most secretive defense scientists in the
nation, and have been since they created
their organization in 1960, specifically to work for DARPA,
which was then called ARPA. It did not yet have the D. And Joseph Zasloff
also died recently, but I was able to interview him. And he was a social scientist,
and he ran the program during the Vietnam
War, specifically for ARPA, which was called the
Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Program. You could do a whole
linguistic study on that title. But it was interesting to
see how social science played a role in the Vietnam
War, and then again played a role in the Iraq
war, and even more interesting for a
reporter like me to realize that DARPA, who
is an organization that is so involved in the
highest technology weapons of the present
and of the future, is also in the business
of social science. I also say that-- I like
to say that the truth has many points of
view, and the reason why is this document, which
is this is one of my sources, and it says at the
top Francis Murray. It says he's at
headquarters, US Air Force. That's at the Pentagon. And it gives the
dates and everything, and it gives them grade
marks and whatnot. But Frank Murray was also
one of my Area 51 sources, and he was in fact out at Area
51 during this entire time that he was allegedly
at the Pentagon, even though this documentation
says he was there. So I like to say that as
a point that the truth has many parts to it. It has many points
of view, and whenever you're dealing with
government secrecy there's always the sense
that more will be revealed. This here, which is the
DARPA Cheetah robot runs. It starts at zero miles an hour,
and it begins to gain momentum through like 10, 11, 12, and
suddenly it's going so fast you can barely see its legs moving,
and then you cannot see its legs moving anymore. It's going 28 miles
an hour, and then suddenly it crashes by sort
of falling back on itself, and it's tethered to a rope,
so it doesn't really crash. The reason why this
is so astonishing is this is, you know, this
incredible thing to look at to watch, and you
realize this is where our weapons are heading. Our weapons are heading
toward autonomous robotics. And I write about this
at the end of the book, but I wanted to give you an
idea of what they look like now. So we'll jump way
back in time, when-- Because computers and computing
are so much of a part of where we are today and where the
Pentagon is with its weapons systems, it's
important to realize-- or at least it was for me-- to
realize that back in this day-- this is around 1946. That's John von Neumann
and Robert Oppenheimer, and they're at the Princeton
Institute for Advanced Study, and they're down
in the basement, and that's the MANIAC computer. And at the time, a little
before this, during the war, John von Neumann was what I
call the first Pentagon's brain. He was the smartest
man in Washington, DC, and the Pentagon looked
to him to solve solutions. For example, when
the decision was made to drop the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, scientists wondered
whether or not they should have it explode
when it hit the ground. Well, von Neumann,
in his ability to do math calculations in his
head at an extraordinary speed said no, and with a
little bit of pen to paper he determined that
actually the bomb should be dropped at
1,800 feet above Hiroshima for the largest kill rate. So that's how von
Neumann's mind worked. He was what was called
a human computer. That's what computers were then. He built this computer,
a machine computer, and he was one of the first
people in the United States who had this idea that one
day computers could think. And he actually called
what we now call software, he called it the
computer's organs, just like a human being. von Neumann died of cancer the
year before DARPA was started, most likely from a
speck of plutonium that he inhaled while he
was working on the Manhattan Project. But he is the first Pentagon's
brain that I write about. So why did I begin the
book here where I did, which this is the
thermonuclear bomb going off in the Marshall Islands. It's a 15 megaton
bomb, and what I found astounding was
for a while when I first used to look at
this photograph, I thought that those images
there at the bottom were the waves in the sea,
because I interviewed many of the scientists who
worked on this bomb program and they would talk to
me about being on boats and whatnot watching
it, and then I realized those
are actually clouds. That's how high up
that mushroom cloud is, and it's 70 miles across. It was a 15 megaton explosion. It was supposed to
be six megatons, and the science got away
with itself, so to speak. But this is why
DARPA was created. Scientists had created
a weapon against which there is no defense, and there
still is no defense today, by the way. One of the first
jobs that DARPA did was-- and this was a
very classified program. I don't think it's ever
been revealed before. I certainly couldn't find
it in the public domain, but I did find in an archive. One of the first things that
the DARPA scientists did was calculate down to the
second how many seconds it takes for a nuclear weapon like
this to leave the Soviet Union and travel to Washington, DC. Does anyone have a guess? How many seconds? I'll tell you. It's 1,600. 1,600 seconds. So that's not very much time. That is still a fact today,
by the way, and something that the nuclear
agency of the day will neither confirm nor deny. But it is a fact. So this is why
DARPA was created. How do we defend
against these weapons that there is no
defense against? And then the idea
was, well, we'll just go into the offensive. So we'll create more
and bigger weapons. This little slide
I like to show, just because it's so
astonishing to me. I was able to interview one of
the men who was in this bunker. There were 10
scientists and engineers 19 miles from ground zero
where that thermonuclear weapon went off. And the idea was the
Defense Department wanted to see, well, since
we can't defend against it, maybe we can create
these bunkers and we can all live
underground for a while. If we have enough time,
1,600 seconds, if we can all get in a
bunker before then. So they built this-- I mean, I
have all the specs in the book. It's just a crazy bunker. The men lived. They barely lived. But they had to be
airlifted out of it hours later because the radiation was
so intense no one could go in. So unless you had
one of these built to these wild
specifications, there's no way to survive
a nuclear bomb. Sputnik came along. This is a replica of that
23 inch diameter sphere that made the American public
go wild in October of 1957, thinking my god, the
Soviets are coming. "Time" magazine had
this on its cover. And the idea--
You know, Sputnik. Just a satellite. How bad could it be? But of course, this ICBM
would be the launch vehicle for that satellite,
and you can see this interesting
anthropomorphization of that nuclear weapon. It's got a brain,
and it has a finger pointed at the East Coast. So competition
creates excellence, and this is how DARPA began. Here you have the weapons
directors at the big two laboratories which were
created specifically to compete with one
another so that America could maintain technological
superiority over the Soviet Union and never again be beaten
by the Soviets after Sputnik. And here's what's interesting. DARPA is a double edged sword. On the one hand, there
are very serious concerns that I raise in the
book about where weapons technology is going. On the other hand, one
must keep on balance this idea that the
United States has never been taken by
technological surprise, and that is owing to DARPA. That's Murph Goldberger, and it
was-- he was the Jason founder, and there he is at
his home looking-- he's also served as a
presidential science adviser-- looking at one of the
photographs of when he was in his heyday, and talking
with me about what it was like working on nuclear--
what it was like working on these major DARPA programs
in the very beginning of DARPA. But of course, it all changed. These big nuclear
ballistic missile related defense
technologies that DARPA was pursuing-- By the way, it
was called ARPA up until 1972. For ease, I'm just going
to always call it DARPA. Along came Kennedy. He had a very different
attitude than Eisenhower. And you see LBJ in
the background there. Both of these men
would authorize some of the most controversial
DARPA weapons ever to exist. We had a problem in Vietnam. That is how it was seen. And ARPA was sent in
to take care of this. In President Diem
there in the front, we had a person who was very
interested in technology, and Johnson was sent by Kennedy
to make a deal with Diem that we would create some
weapons facilities in Saigon and begin manufacturing the
most state of the art weaponry to give them to the
Vietnamese soldiers. Diem thought this
was a fabulous idea, and that's where it all began. Now what's fascinating is
these are in the early years of the Kennedy presidency. Here's an example. So the small in
stature Vietnamese were having trouble handling
these semiautomatic weapons, and so DARPA pushed
through the AR-15 rifle. And what was
interesting, when you can see how swift and agile
DARPA is-- And by the way, the whole entire Vietnam program
was called Project Agile. It was like, we're going
to get things done, and we're going to
get them done fast. There had been a debate
going on at the Pentagon ever since the end of World
War II about what rifle would be the standard rifle. DARPA made it happen. They ordered 1,000 AR-15s. They sent them to Saigon. They gave them to the soldiers. And today that has
become the M16, and that is the standard bearer
of what all our soldiers carry. This is another example
of what DARPA got into. Because they had their hands
now in so many different pieces of the pie, chemical warfare
became a DARPA program, and this is of
course Agent Orange being sprayed over the jungles. It was perceived to be the magic
bullet that might end the war, and that's not what happened. So where was technology in 1960? I mean, stop for a moment. There is Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara with a pointer and a slideshow. Even more astonishing, this
is where technology was. This was a bright
red telephone that was installed in the
Secretary of Defense's house and also in the
President's house. And that analog idea--
So if-- In the event of a nuclear decision
needing to be made, that dreaded go/no go decision,
Khrushchev or Kennedy, this is what they had. First it had to go
through a White House operator on our end, then
it had to go like this, and then imagine dialing. And the Pentagon said,
this is-- Actually, Congress said this
is unacceptable, assigned DARPA to the job,
which meant the arrival of this fellow at ARPA in 1962. This is JCR Licklider. Many people consider him
the father of the internet. When he arrived at
ARPA, his job was to deal with
command and control, also called C2,
this idea that we must be better in command
and control of our technology than a red phone. And he had this crazy idea
of creating something called an intergalactic network,
and that is what we now know as the internet. It started out first
as the ARPANET at ARPA. The Jason scientist--
Another interesting way in which I write about
the Pentagon's brain and how it works is that
these different programs are kind of falling
into the background and then coming back
into the fore again, and that is what happened with
nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The Secretary-- This was a very,
very little known fact until recently that
Secretary McNamara, Secretary of Defense McNamara,
really considered using nuclear weapons on this, the
Ho Chi Minh trail, which was the trail in the
jungle that all the jungle fighters travelled from
the north to the south. And he gathered the Jason
scientists together and said, is this possible? And they conducted a
report as they always did. They would meet in the summers. They were full time academics
and part time defense contractors. They met and they said dropping
a nuclear weapon on the Ho Chi Minh trail is a bad idea,
because the Viet Cong are so crafty, they
will just figure out a way to create a trail
that goes around it. And so instead the idea that the
Jason scientists came up with was something called
McNamara's electronic fence. And pause for a moment and
consider this, if you will. This is really where all
sensor technology began. All the programs of the present
day, the prison programs, et cetera, et cetera,
the NSA, that people worry about and wonder
about and are curious about, they all began right
here in Vietnam, and they began with this idea
of McNamara's electronic fence. That large, weird,
dart looking thing with the antennas coming
out of that, that's what's called an ADSID, and
it's actually an audio detection device. And the guys who I interviewed
for this book, the VO-67 Navy crew, would get
into that aircraft and they would fly
low and slow over some of the most dangerous parts
of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and they would drop those
sensors out in a string. And they would come
hurtling out of the aircraft and they would sort of land
in the ground, hopefully. A lot of them fell on the side. And the idea was to create
this string of sensors with audio technology. The information would be
sent up to an aircraft that's flying around in a
racetrack formation. Then it goes back to
an information center at an airbase, a US
airbase, in Thailand. And then everyone's using these
new things called computers to try to make sense
of this information, basically to hear some
fighters say, yes, there are some trucks coming
down the trail tomorrow. They're bringing lots
of X, Y, and Z weapons. At which point, a targeting
strip would be made, and the aircraft would go
out and strike those targets. It was an idea that was
ridiculed at the Pentagon by the generals. No one liked this idea. There you see another. That's a different version
of things being thrown out of a helicopter. There were also seismic
sensors that were going out, magnetic sensors. This was early
sensor technology. You can see how big it is. I mean, now these
sensors are so small. DARPA even has some new
technology I've been told about, but I could not verify,
because it might still be in the classified department,
sensors that actually cannot be seen, but they go on people's
fingertips unwittingly. So when they're typing
everything is going back. And when you think
about that concept, that this all began on
the Ho Chi Minh trail, it's pretty remarkable. No amount of
technology could go up against this, which
was student protesters, and it had a great impact
on the Vietnam War, and ultimately we did get
the hell out of Vietnam. But it was a fascinating
time at DARPA. And there was the Mansfield
Amendment, and suddenly weapons, any kind of
new weapons technology was seen as thumbs down, and
Congress jumped and screamed and said we don't want any of
these pre-requirement research projects. We just want good old
military projects. But it was interesting,
because this fellow came in, Harold Brown, and he came up
with a new strategy, which was making science
and technology an industry at the Pentagon. And he put into play long
term research projects with all of that
sensor technology I was just talking about, and
it would build all the way to the Gulf War. I'll stop for a minute and tell
you quickly about this guy. This is Allen Macy Dulles. He was an infantry
lieutenant in the Korean War. And the reason he
was important to me-- his father was the director
of the CIA, Allen Dulles. And Allen Macy Dulles was
a young soldier in Korea, and he went out in
November of 1952 to check a perimeter
fence, as soldiers have been doing forever. And he was hit by a mortar, and
he suffered a traumatic brain injury that made
him have something called retrograde amnesia. He can't remember any--
He can speak eloquently, but he could not remember
anything that happened to him 10 minutes before. So this idea of
a perimeter fence was something that existed. In Vietnam we were creating
an electronic fence, and then now with Harold
Brown in the Pentagon, this movement came toward
creating a system where it wasn't a fence. It's an area network, and we
can watch and survey that. So they began-- they
being the Pentagon, DARPA-- began looking at
some of the technology from the Vietnam War and
rebundling it and working with the fact that
all technology was becoming nanotechnology. Not quite yet. But in other words, things
were getting smaller. And as things got smaller,
they could be more effective in the war theater. And these are two
of the earliest drones from the Vietnam War. This is like a reconfigured
helicopter that used to fly off of a submarine. And then the guy in the
Jeep is driving around with all that technology,
gathering the information, video and audio. And they really had
very little effect on winning the Vietnam
War, but it's certainly a different story now. So the Pentagon spent all
the way until the late '80s pushing technology,
pushing sensor technology, pushing drone technology,
building entire industries. The ARPANET became the
internet, and there was a movement
toward what is now called network-centric warfare. And in the Gulf
War with Secretary of Defense Cheney
in charge, the idea that technology could
win a war like that became evident instantly,
and you can see that. This was called the
highway of death, and this is just the results
of that kind of technology. That stealth fighter
back there, the F-117, which was another
DARPA project-- Again, stealth, early
workings in Vietnam. 20 years secretly in the making. 10,000 Lockheed
employees, by the way, were cleared for the
Skunk Works program. Not one single leak ever
in that 18, 19 years, until it made its
debut in the Gulf War. But that took a lot of the
limelight, when in fact there was so much other DARPA
technology going on in that Gulf War. I write about it in the book. And most importantly,
something called JSTARS. So that old idea from Vietnam
of having an aircraft flying around in circles
trying to gather the technology from those giant
sensors had gotten shrunk down. So you had this
computer in the sky-- it had 600,000 lines
of code-- gathering up the technology during the Gulf
War and relaying information, early drone technology. The Pentagon had a big
problem in urban warfare, and they knew it. But this was what their idea of
what urban warfare would look like, which is really laughable. They had, like, a
little drawing here, what looks to me like
a German village. So DARPA again got pulled
away when this happened, Mogadishu, Somalia, 1992. And there was lots of
activity at DARPA talking about how America
was going to deal with the possibility
of having to fight wars in urban environments. They would quote Sun Tzu a
lot, from 2,500 years ago. Sun Tzu said the worst
idea is to attack cities. And there was a lot
of debate at DARPA. Like, the worst idea
is to attack cities, but what are we
going to do about it? Another interesting
thing happened at DARPA right around this same time,
which is the Berlin Wall fell. And when the Berlin
Wall fell, a number of very serious
Soviet scientists who had been working on
biological weapons programs defected to the
United States and they began working for DARPA. And this is Ken Alibek,
whom I interviewed. He's back in Uzbekistan now. But he was a major player in
the biological weapons program, and was very
controversial, because some say that he created the problem
that then needed to be solved. So again, you see
that conundrum, which is a bit like the nuclear
weapon issue, the thermonuclear weapon issue, that you
create a weapon that then you must defend against. But Alibek worked for
us for a long time before he left the country. And what was interesting
about these Soviet scientists is-- in terms of the
big picture of DARPA-- was that before then there were
no biologists at the Pentagon. And that's kind of a term that
scientists will throw around loosely, but it's
pretty accurate. DARPA was interested in what I
call the Superman of science, the Murph Goldbergers, the Jason
scientists, the physicists, the engineers. Biology was considered
soft science. That all changed,
and that has taken us in a very different
direction, because we are now looking inside the body. And again, things took a
very big change after 9/11, because suddenly we had
to deal with urban warfare and we had to deal with this
biological weapons threat. But you cannot prepare
for everything, and what happened to DARPA in
the early days of the Gulf War was that a $25 homemade bomb
called a IED was very quickly became responsible for
63% of coalition deaths. And suddenly we were
spending-- We spent $6 billion trying to create technology
called Defeat the IED technology, and this
involved computers. We created jammers to
try to jam the IEDs, and then the terrorists would
create anti-jamming devices, and this went on and on,
and many, many people died. I write about
different technologies that were looked at
during the war on terror by DARPA in this process. So then the-- Finally one of
the solutions was the robots. And that is a Talon
robot, and it's an example of-- at
least to the EOD techs that I spoke with--
of how robots are saving lives in warfare. These robots can go in and do
a lot with looking at the IEDs and sending back
information to operators and even remotely
dismantling some of them. But another idea
that sprang forth was this idea-- from
the electronic fence. DARPA pumped an
enormous amount of money into its urban
operation programs, and it created a system
called Combat Zones That See. And that little WASP
drone there being shot off the arm
of an operator is-- it weighs just a
few pounds, and it has some of the most
incredible technology. All the specs are in the book. It flies in a swarm. If one of them is lost, the
others will reconfigure. And what they're doing is
taking an audio of an area. So for example, if the unit
goes into the war theater and they understand that there's
a terrorist hideout over there, they'll send the
WASPs in, and they will be taking video
and audio in real time and painting the picture for
the operators on the ground. The robots have moved
so quickly into a kind of advanced
technology world where it's really impossible
to even consider how fast things are moving. This is called the Modular
Advanced Armed Robotic System. It can kill a human
target two miles away. It has everything
that was ever designed in Vietnam shrunken down to
the size of my fingernail, and more. It also has encryption
software, so that no one can get a hold of it. But this is where our
defense systems are going. And there we have
the Atlas robot. Same thing. Looking more and
more like people for a very important reason. These are actually
the L3 robots. They carry the load. But what's also
fascinating about the L3 is that it works on an
operator's voice command. So the commanding officer
talks to the robot through a headpiece
and it follows. And if you've ever
seen these in video, it's astonishing
what they can do. I mean, they can fall
over and get back up. They can climb terrain. But again, these are
just the DARPA robots that we know about. I went to Los Alamos to
look at the synthetic brain that DARPA is
creating out there. This was the only
picture I could get. It just shows the force
protection outside. Inside, DARPA's using what's
left of this IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, which
in 2008 was the fastest computer in the world. It has since become obsolete. It was $100 million to build. But of course, Los Alamos
needs the best computer that there is, so-- And
they can't reuse it, because it has the
nuclear codes on it. So they're incinerating it. But in the meantime,
little pieces of it are being used to help power
this synthetic brain, which really begged the question
for me-- I was, like, is that a good idea? But you know, what
I really think, and what I write about
in the end of the book-- And I'm going to leave you
with this thought, which is that the idea of dual use. All technology has dual use. And you often hear--
You know, the Iranians are always getting in trouble
for dual use technologies. But DARPA does this too,
and here's an example. This is this incredible
prosthetic that DARPA makes. But from the guys I spoke to
who actually use this limb, it's really not as incredible
as it's often cracked up to be. There are problems with it. And so most of the
guys who use this, or who appear on "60
Minutes" or whatnot showing how great the
prosthetic is, they go home and they put back on their
Dorrance hook, which is that hook from 1922 technology. So this looks good. But is it really working? And what I believe
is going on at DARPA is that this dual
use technology, the synthetic brain,
the robots, we're moving-- I found a document
at the Defense Department that talks about human-robot
interaction, and that that is the movement
that the Pentagon is taking us toward, which is where
robots and humans learn to sort of love each other. And the idea that
we are creating cyborg drones, which we are. We now have rats
that we can control. We have moths that we
can steer at DARPA. Getting, you know, humans
to be ultimately turning over the reins to
autonomous weapons. And one of the ways
in which-- that I find difficulty in wrapping
my head around this-- and DARPA was one of the few places they
absolutely would not let me go, which was interviewing
soldiers who now have come back from that war in Iraq, the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with traumatic brain injuries. There are 300,000
of these soldiers. And the programs that DARPA has
put brain chips in the brain and are working with
sending electronic signals. In some cases, if the
soldiers have PTSD, it's a kind of electroshock
therapy on the go. In other cases, they're
trying to repair cognitive functioning. But it really does beg the
question, what is the dual use? And from the scientists
that I have interviewed, it appears that
DARPA now believes that that brain-computer
interface technology there will push us toward that
artificial intelligence which has long been sought and
coveted and has not yet been attainable. And the Jason scientists
who I spoke to-- these are old men who passed
on some words of wisdom, said that they-- and
showed me this report. They had written a report saying
DARPA should not be doing this. This is a dangerous area to get
into, because it is leading us toward brain control. And so DARPA has just
in the past few years pushed the Jason
scientists aside, and now takes their advice
from an in-house Pentagon organization called the
Defense Science Board. My final image I'm going
to leave you with is this. This is actually
Allen Macy Dulles, the CIA director's only son. He's 84 years old. There he is. He was the brain-- He had
a brain injury in Korea. He disappeared. No one knew he was alive. I tracked him down. That's his sister, a
delightful woman, Joan Dulles. She's been taking care
of him all this time. She was a Jungian analyst. But he cannot remember anything
from 10 minutes before. His entire life he only
remembers up to November 1952. And because he was
this brilliant man when he was young, or boy when he
was young-- He went to Princeton and he studied warfare,
and then he went to Oxford and got a PhD. And I sat with him in
his home and talked about the most incredible
historical ideas about warfare. I mean, it was like speaking
to the most erudite person you could imagine. But then I said to
him, Allen, will you remember this conversation
in 10 minutes? And he said no, and he wouldn't. And I asked him what
he had for breakfast, and he doesn't remember. And he won't remember having
been with me after I left. And the reason
why I bring him up is because it was astonishing
to me, because this-- And by the way, he lost
hearing in one ear. So he talks through this device
that's like 1980s technology. He's got an earpiece, and Joan
holds this little thing out and I talk into it. And he was amazed at
this high technology, right, because all of
the technology he knows is from before 1952. And he can apparently
remember a little bit about this technology because
it's with him every day. But what I would like to
remind you of is this, is that Carl Sagan
once said, if you're going to create
a world-- and I'm paraphrasing-- where science and
technology is beyond anyone's understanding, that's suicide. And Allen Dulles
gets a pass on that, because he doesn't remember
and he can't remember. But I believe the rest of
us, what President Eisenhower called an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry, we have a responsibility to
remain alert and knowledgeable, and to know what's going
on, and to be aware of it. And that is where, in
the words of Eisenhower, the military-industrial
complex and democracy can live together and flourish. Thank you so much. I'll now take some questions. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: What proportion
of ARPA's work is public and what proportion is not? If I were to [INAUDIBLE]? ANNIE JACOBSEN: You
mean in the present day? AUDIENCE: No. Let's say when we worked--
well, when I worked on it was a long time ago. But over time, how many
projects have been secret and how maybe have been public? ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, for
starters, DARPA's working on 100 of projects
at any given time, and thousands of scientists,
probably tens of thousands of scientists. So I look at it
from a reverse point of view, which is
looking back at history and looking at documents. I'm only seeing
declassified documents that are stamped in a certain
manner-- Top Secret, Secret, or No Dissemination. So I don't know that it's
possible to be able to know, you know, on a pie chart of how
much of its work is classified. But my guess is it would be
more like a Titanic structure. You know, that the tip is what
we know about at any given time, and the real research
is going on down here. Because scientists
that I interview often work-- the ones that work
on declassified programs-- For example, I read about
a limb regeneration lab in Irvine, California,
which is fascinating. And their project
is all unclassified, but they give the
technology to DARPA, and then DARPA takes
that technology and puts it into
classified programs. Yes. AUDIENCE: So I know that an area
of concern for a lot of people in military technology
is whether we should take human beings out
of the fire control loop. I worked in the
1990s on training for the Aegis-class
cruisers, and in the training we told people basically
that the computer is much smarter than you are,
it understands the combat theater better
than you, and when the computer says
shoot, just shoot, which was troubling to me. You talk about the notion
that a responsible citizenry needs to sort of apply
checks and balances. But given the history of DARPA
and other organizations-- so perhaps your Manhattan's
another good example-- to do very large scale things
over non-trivial timeframes with near-absolute secrecy, how
does a responsible citizenry stop something like weapons that
are in a combat theater that have autonomous fire control
and have serious fire control bugs, which is, I think,
one of the major concerns about the autonomy
of the fire control. So what do we do so we
avoid that happening? ANNIE JACOBSEN: So
that's a great question. And I'm going to add
one little detail which you might find
interesting, which is that when the
Pentagon came out with its roadmap for weapons
through 2038, autonomous weapons, drones,
unmanned technologies, it created kind of a
problem inside the Pentagon, in that many of the
generals, and also drone operators on down, did not
want to move in that direction. There was a lot of what
Ashton Carter, who was then the Undersecretary
of Defense, called unfortunate negative feedback. And so they created a
program called robot ethics, and this was taught
at the Pentagon. And the result of that was
exactly the problem that you're indicating, even more
dissent from generals down to drone
operators saying we don't trust this,
and the reason why had to do with what was called
robot ethics, that robots don't have ethics, that they
don't have morality. So then the Pentagon created a
program called the robot ethics program to educate people about
it, and the problem persisted. So I found out that DARPA
is now working on the answer to that, in my estimation. DARPA's working on a new program
called Narrative Networks. It's a very innocuous
sounding program title. But what it is working with
a chemical in the brain called oxytocin, which
manipulates a person's trust and loses their sense of fear. And so when you look at that
that might be the answer, then an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can draw their own conclusions. Both of those subject
matters are unclassified. But by being knowledgeable,
you can put A and B together, and in that example, I had
never seen A and B together. I had read some things
about what the heck is DARPA doing with a narrative program. Well, let's find out what the
narrative program really is. Questions? All these smart
people in the room. There have to be some questions. Or you know everything. Everything I said
was already known. AUDIENCE: So tell us a little
bit about the management style. When I worked on
ARPA projects, it was typically called a program
director or program manager. I forget what the title was. We seemed to have
a lot of autonomy, and we seemed to
have-- seemed to count a lot on his personal
relationships with principal
investigators, PIs. Is that the style of
management everywhere? Is that only in the
academia-facing side of ARPA? ANNIE JACOBSEN: From
what I've heard, that is exactly the same. There are about 120 program
managers at DARPA today, as there have been
through its history. And you're absolutely right. Those program managers
have serious autonomy. I mean, they have $50
or $150 million budgets at their discretion. They hire university labs. They hire military labs. And then they begin to put
their programs in effect, and they can really
start and stop just about anything they want. So it is one of--
The organization is almost entirely free from
red tape in that regard. And I was actually interviewing
one of the CIA fellows who set up the early
design for IARPA, which is the CIA's DARPA, in essence. And you know, the
two organizations don't always compliment one
another, to put it politely. But in this
situation, the Agency was very complementary
about how flexible and how financially
swift DARPA was, how they were able to do that. AUDIENCE: All right. I guess, to sort
of follow up here. That's part of the answer. The other issue
was the ones I saw, they weren't bureaucrats,
these program managers. They would say,
I want this done, and they would have an
idea of is this going well. Well, you know, no. I don't like the way it's going. Change it around. It wasn't at all what you
see in a more formal contract structure, where you say, OK,
you have a year to do this, here are the milestones,
again, we'll review it. It was, we're three months in. I'm not seeing
what I want to see. I'm going to pull the plug
and go to someone else. ANNIE JACOBSEN: You're
absolutely right. And the program managers
themselves are often-- or most of the time are--
very gifted scientists and engineers. That's who they put in charge. In the book, I
write about someone who I can think of
no better example, Doctor Jack Thorpe, who created
the first training program for DARPA using internet
technology, called SIMNET, and "Wired" magazine
called Thorpe the father of cyberspace. And you see his own talents
applied in exactly that manner you're talking about. He's having a problem
with this technology, so he bends and moves
and brings other people on board that can
solve it, which is unusual for government. You normally have
these long tags of things that get
pushed through a system. So to have these people--
most of them men-- who are able to just
make decisions happen like that is astonishing. I think that'll do it for us. Thank you all so
much for coming, and I hope you have a
great rest of the day. [APPLAUSE]
