I spend a surprising amount of my time
telling my kids that they shouldn’t do
everything that comes into their head
they lack that life experience that
would trigger caution they have a ton of
energy and no inhibition it’s like
living with little drunk people I run a
tech company and it’s not that different
they’re drunk people running around
everywhere but not most of the time but
in technology we have no parents there’s
nobody to guide us towards things that
move us forward and away from things
that are you know dangerous we’re kind
of left to figure that out for ourselves
as a species we’re editing DNA and in
the coming decades it’s likely that
we’re gonna eradicate a whole pile of
genetic diseases we create new variants
of crops that require shorter growing
seasons and tolerate drought and we’re
editing the DNA of mosquitoes so that
they can’t breathe or transmit disease
but what happens when we start using
those same DNA editing techniques we
used in agriculture on our kids because
we will my wife and I both come from
genetic lines that carry at least one of
the mutations responsible for breast and
ovarian cancer and that means our kids
are probably carriers too and that sucks
if the technology had existed for us to
repair that mutation before we passed it
along to our kids and probably would
have used it even with the knowledge
that anytime we monkey with nature
there’s that chance of unexpected
consequence
it’s not like we know what we’re doing
in evolutionary terms we’re the same
dumb animal that was walking the earth
fifty thousand years ago we’re no
smarter today than we were then the only
thing that differentiates us from that
primitive beast is technology language
is a technology the ability to write
things down and transfer knowledge from
generation to generation as a technology
we’re a primitive beast
that’s discovering things at an
astonishing rate and we just need to be
aware of that and we need to be careful
the rate at which we’re bringing new
technology into existence is increasing
it used to be that you know we had time
to adapt but that’s no longer the case
my wife and I just bought a car that
sees the lines on the road and helps us
steer and you know we did we turned it
off for the life of us we could not
figure out how to drive like that this
morning my phone updated itself again
and now I’m having trouble working it
again
I run a technology company and I can’t
work my phone half the time but to find
an example of a technology that’s gone
completely sideways on us we need look
no further than nuclear and I would say
in nuclear technology is bad no
technology is inherently good or bad
technology just is but we can’t talk
about nuclear technology without
acknowledging its dark side and our
spectacular failure in controlling it
forget about the Cuban Missile Crisis
you know what scares me the close calls
that we know about 1979 1983 and 1995 we
brought ourselves to within minutes of
extinction we’ve accidentally dropped
two large nuclear weapons on North
Carolina one of which armed itself and
nearly went off like little kids who
don’t know how to clean up after
themselves we still don’t have a good
solution for what to do with all of our
spent nuclear fuel and now we have an
impulsive president toddling us all
towards nuclear war that can leave you
feeling kind of hopeless and powerless
but the rise of technology is also
changing the game never before in the
arc of human history have individuals
held so much power to affect global
change our company sent a team to Amman
Jordan to see if artificial intelligence
could be used to help formulate a
response to the refugee crisis the
world’s facing the largest number of
displaced people since the end of World
War two now estimated at over 65 million
people we met with extraordinary people
working the front lines of that crisis
doing everything they can with what they
have
to keep people alive and to get them
somewhere safe
we met with people from the United
Nations and UNICEF the International
Committee for the Red Cross a recurring
theme was the need to reunite families
including where it involved identifying
the dead over 28,000 people are forced
to flee their homes every day because of
conflict and families can end up
separate and in across refugee camps or
spontaneous settlements they might make
a run for it over land to Lebanon or
Jordan or Turkey or in what could only
charitably be called a boat to southern
Europe and many don’t make it we saw an
opportunity to use facial recognition to
help reunite these families so we
brainstorm some ideas we flew home and
we got to work we built a small portable
camera similar to a police body cam only
this one can recognize faces that’s been
taught to look for so now we have this
tool we can use to locate missing people
as they arrive on those beaches in
southern Europe or out in the field and
spontaneous settlements and refugee
camps in conflict zones and today we’re
working on getting it into the hands of
aid workers so that they can put it to
use but then we thought what else could
we do with this thing so we taught it to
recognize the UPS truck we got it to
send us an alert when an unrecognized
person came to the house we taught it to
recognize the neighbor’s dog and turn on
the sprinklers when she came over to
poop in our yard
but in our current political environment
it’s not hard to imagine this being used
in nefarious ways computer vision is a
near perfect tool for racial profiling
what happens when the license plate
scanners we drive through at toll booths
every day start to perform facial or
ethnic recognition because they will we
captured all your faces tonight we could
look through them to see who out there
might be Hispanic and maybe undocumented
or Somali or Arab but then we’re making
it so easy for them we are all posting
an enormous amount of personal data to
the internet and that means with a
little digging we can figure out who you
are where you live
who’s your significant other who are
your friends where you like to hang out
and what your political leanings are and
that’s an incredibly powerful tool for
anyone interested in political
repression and that at a time when we’re
seeing a resurgence of authoritarianism
across the globe and here at home we can
take it a step further and weaponize it
targeting individual eyes now somebody’s
a hundred bucks in parts from building a
blinding laser weapon that’s illegal
under international law but that they
could build in their garage so where are
the grown-ups who are our grown-ups it’s
pretty easy to make the argument that
our lawmakers are not equipped to answer
these questions for us and if history is
any guide they’re going to push us in
the wrong direction we’re gonna need to
force their hand fortunately there are
organizations like the Union of
Concerned Scientists formed in nineteen
69 by a bunch of researchers at MIT
during the height of the Vietnam War
they now have over a hundred thousand
members and they work every day to
direct scientific research away from the
military and towards solving humanity’s
pressing environmental and social
problems and there’s the International
Committee for the Red Cross the
defenders of the Geneva Convention they
document the use of illegal weapons of
war and the indiscriminate or
intentional targeting of civilians now
they need and deserve our help and we do
that by getting back to electing
lawmakers that support the ideals of
international humanitarian law we used
to do that we used to pride ourselves on
that and those of us working in
technology we have a responsibility to
lead through the choices that we make we
don’t have to take jobs building more
advanced weapons or tools that could be
used to support a surveillance state we
can make a conscious decision to direct
our efforts towards projects that
benefit the common good because there
are a ton of things that we can and
should do and it’s the choices that we
make that could very well determine the
future of our species and our planet
thank you
you
telling my kids that they shouldn’t do
everything that comes into their head
they lack that life experience that
would trigger caution they have a ton of
energy and no inhibition it’s like
living with little drunk people I run a
tech company and it’s not that different
they’re drunk people running around
everywhere but not most of the time but
in technology we have no parents there’s
nobody to guide us towards things that
move us forward and away from things
that are you know dangerous we’re kind
of left to figure that out for ourselves
as a species we’re editing DNA and in
the coming decades it’s likely that
we’re gonna eradicate a whole pile of
genetic diseases we create new variants
of crops that require shorter growing
seasons and tolerate drought and we’re
editing the DNA of mosquitoes so that
they can’t breathe or transmit disease
but what happens when we start using
those same DNA editing techniques we
used in agriculture on our kids because
we will my wife and I both come from
genetic lines that carry at least one of
the mutations responsible for breast and
ovarian cancer and that means our kids
are probably carriers too and that sucks
if the technology had existed for us to
repair that mutation before we passed it
along to our kids and probably would
have used it even with the knowledge
that anytime we monkey with nature
there’s that chance of unexpected
consequence
it’s not like we know what we’re doing
in evolutionary terms we’re the same
dumb animal that was walking the earth
fifty thousand years ago we’re no
smarter today than we were then the only
thing that differentiates us from that
primitive beast is technology language
is a technology the ability to write
things down and transfer knowledge from
generation to generation as a technology
we’re a primitive beast
that’s discovering things at an
astonishing rate and we just need to be
aware of that and we need to be careful
the rate at which we’re bringing new
technology into existence is increasing
it used to be that you know we had time
to adapt but that’s no longer the case
my wife and I just bought a car that
sees the lines on the road and helps us
steer and you know we did we turned it
off for the life of us we could not
figure out how to drive like that this
morning my phone updated itself again
and now I’m having trouble working it
again
I run a technology company and I can’t
work my phone half the time but to find
an example of a technology that’s gone
completely sideways on us we need look
no further than nuclear and I would say
in nuclear technology is bad no
technology is inherently good or bad
technology just is but we can’t talk
about nuclear technology without
acknowledging its dark side and our
spectacular failure in controlling it
forget about the Cuban Missile Crisis
you know what scares me the close calls
that we know about 1979 1983 and 1995 we
brought ourselves to within minutes of
extinction we’ve accidentally dropped
two large nuclear weapons on North
Carolina one of which armed itself and
nearly went off like little kids who
don’t know how to clean up after
themselves we still don’t have a good
solution for what to do with all of our
spent nuclear fuel and now we have an
impulsive president toddling us all
towards nuclear war that can leave you
feeling kind of hopeless and powerless
but the rise of technology is also
changing the game never before in the
arc of human history have individuals
held so much power to affect global
change our company sent a team to Amman
Jordan to see if artificial intelligence
could be used to help formulate a
response to the refugee crisis the
world’s facing the largest number of
displaced people since the end of World
War two now estimated at over 65 million
people we met with extraordinary people
working the front lines of that crisis
doing everything they can with what they
have
to keep people alive and to get them
somewhere safe
we met with people from the United
Nations and UNICEF the International
Committee for the Red Cross a recurring
theme was the need to reunite families
including where it involved identifying
the dead over 28,000 people are forced
to flee their homes every day because of
conflict and families can end up
separate and in across refugee camps or
spontaneous settlements they might make
a run for it over land to Lebanon or
Jordan or Turkey or in what could only
charitably be called a boat to southern
Europe and many don’t make it we saw an
opportunity to use facial recognition to
help reunite these families so we
brainstorm some ideas we flew home and
we got to work we built a small portable
camera similar to a police body cam only
this one can recognize faces that’s been
taught to look for so now we have this
tool we can use to locate missing people
as they arrive on those beaches in
southern Europe or out in the field and
spontaneous settlements and refugee
camps in conflict zones and today we’re
working on getting it into the hands of
aid workers so that they can put it to
use but then we thought what else could
we do with this thing so we taught it to
recognize the UPS truck we got it to
send us an alert when an unrecognized
person came to the house we taught it to
recognize the neighbor’s dog and turn on
the sprinklers when she came over to
poop in our yard
but in our current political environment
it’s not hard to imagine this being used
in nefarious ways computer vision is a
near perfect tool for racial profiling
what happens when the license plate
scanners we drive through at toll booths
every day start to perform facial or
ethnic recognition because they will we
captured all your faces tonight we could
look through them to see who out there
might be Hispanic and maybe undocumented
or Somali or Arab but then we’re making
it so easy for them we are all posting
an enormous amount of personal data to
the internet and that means with a
little digging we can figure out who you
are where you live
who’s your significant other who are
your friends where you like to hang out
and what your political leanings are and
that’s an incredibly powerful tool for
anyone interested in political
repression and that at a time when we’re
seeing a resurgence of authoritarianism
across the globe and here at home we can
take it a step further and weaponize it
targeting individual eyes now somebody’s
a hundred bucks in parts from building a
blinding laser weapon that’s illegal
under international law but that they
could build in their garage so where are
the grown-ups who are our grown-ups it’s
pretty easy to make the argument that
our lawmakers are not equipped to answer
these questions for us and if history is
any guide they’re going to push us in
the wrong direction we’re gonna need to
force their hand fortunately there are
organizations like the Union of
Concerned Scientists formed in nineteen
69 by a bunch of researchers at MIT
during the height of the Vietnam War
they now have over a hundred thousand
members and they work every day to
direct scientific research away from the
military and towards solving humanity’s
pressing environmental and social
problems and there’s the International
Committee for the Red Cross the
defenders of the Geneva Convention they
document the use of illegal weapons of
war and the indiscriminate or
intentional targeting of civilians now
they need and deserve our help and we do
that by getting back to electing
lawmakers that support the ideals of
international humanitarian law we used
to do that we used to pride ourselves on
that and those of us working in
technology we have a responsibility to
lead through the choices that we make we
don’t have to take jobs building more
advanced weapons or tools that could be
used to support a surveillance state we
can make a conscious decision to direct
our efforts towards projects that
benefit the common good because there
are a ton of things that we can and
should do and it’s the choices that we
make that could very well determine the
future of our species and our planet
thank you
you
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