[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]
