Original subtitles

Werner: This is the campus of

University of California in Los Angeles.

Today, no one of the students is aware

that this is ground zero of one of the biggest revolutions

we as humans are experiencing.

One of the science buildings here

is considered the birthplace of the internet.

This picture of some of the scientists involved

was taken at this very moment.

The corridors here look repulsive

and yet this one leads to some sort of a shrine

reconstructed years later

when its importance had sunk in.

Let's enter this very special place.

We are now entering a sacred location.

It's the location where the internet began.

It's a holy place.

And we've just come back to 1969

when the critical events of the origin began.

That machine over there is the first piece

of the internet equipment ever installed.

It's a mini computer,

which we now call a packet switch.

This is a...

(loud banging)

military hardened machine.

You can't break it.

And it was meant to sustain itself

unattended for years at a time.

This particular machine

is so ugly on the inside,

it is beautiful.

It has a unique odor. (sniffs)

A delicious old odor from all the old parts.

It consists of modems,

CPU logic units, memory,

power supply - all the things you need

to make an efficient computer work.

This machine served as the first node

of the internet for decades.

And it was from here that the first message was sent.

A revolution began.

And the only record we have

of what happened that day

is in this log.

On October 29th, 1969 at 10:30 at night

we enter that we "talked to Stanford Research Institute

host to host" computer to computer.

It's very much like when on Columbus' ship,

the fellow up on top who first spotted land,

he noticed it was and he basically made an entry

saying "we spotted land".

That document and this document

have at least the same equivalent importance.

Now what was that first message?

Many people don't know it.

All we wanted to do was log in

from our computer

to a computer 400 miles to the north

up in Stanford Research Institute.

To log in you have to type "LOG"

and that machine is smart enough to type the "IN".

Now to make sure this was happening properly,

we had our programmer and the programmer

up north connected by a telephone handset

just to make sure it was going correctly.

So Charlie typed the L and he said

"You get the L?" Bill said, "Yup, I got the L."

He typed the O. "Get the O?"

"Yup, I got the O".

He typed the G. "Get the G?"

Crash! The SRI computer crashed.

So the first message ever on the internet was "Lo"

as in "Lo and Behold".

We couldn't have asked for a more succinct,

more powerful, more prophetic message

than "Lo".

Well, I've been involved with the internet

really since the very beginning.

There are a number of things

that would characterize that involvement.

One was I started out being the,

essentially the system designer of the ARPANET,

the very first packet net.

I joined DARPA in the early 1970s

and started two other networking programs:

one a ground base packet radio net

like today's cellular phones and a satellite net

on Intel's Dot4 based on packets.

And the internet was about connecting them all together

and the essential elements there

were the protocols that would make that possible

and the technology that would be needed

inside the net to enable these different nets

to work together.

Werner: Vint Cerf, here in 1973,

and Bob Kahn collaborating together

created the fundamental protocol for the internet.

For this they received some of the highest honors

our society can bestow.

Imagine, if you will,

sitting down to your morning coffee,

turning on your home computer

to read the day's newspaper.

Well, it's not as far fetched as it may seem.

17 stories up

in his fashionable North Beach apartment,

Richard Halloran is calling a local number

that will connect him with a computer in Columbus, Ohio.

Meanwhile, across town in this less than fashionable

cubby hole at The San Francisco Examiner

these editors are programming today's copy of the paper

into that same Ohio computer.

When the telephone connection between these two terminals

is made, the newest form of electronic journalism

lights up Mr. Halloran's television

with just about everything

The Examiner prints in its regular edition.

Of the estimated two to three thousand

home computer owners in the Bay Area,

The Chronicle reports over 500 have responded

by sending back coupons.

Werner: This report,

considering the numbers of internet users today,

sounds already like pre-history.

No one at that time had a clue

about the explosion of information technology.

Today if you would burn CDs

of the worldwide data flow for one single day

and stack them up to a pile,

this pile would reach up to Mars and back.

The internet is already permeating everything.

Even on the International Space Station

a phone call from one module to the next

goes via the internet.

But how do we keep it running?

How do we guard it?

I still have a copy of the phone directory

from the late 1970s of everybody

who was on the internet and it was a document about that thick

and it had the name, address,

and telephone number of every single person.

Actually it had it twice

because it had it once sorted by their email address

and once sorted by their actual name.

So if you had a problem with anybody,

you could look them up, you could find them.

You could find who the actual person was

associated with that email address.

And still today I thumb through that

and a surprising fraction of the people

I actually knew.

For example, there were two other Dannys on the internet,

and I knew them both.

I still know them both.

Of course now you can't even comprehend

the idea of a directory

that contains the name of everybody.

Werner: Today, we couldn't know exactly,

the directory might be some 72 miles thick.

The capacity on the ith channel

should be the traffic on the ith channel

over the speed of the ith channel

plus how much is left over,

that's how much capacity is left over -

and you split it

according to the square root of the traffic on that channel

over the summation

of the square root over all channels.

Dany Hills: The way the internet works,

there's no fixed route that a message takes.

In the early days of the protocol

there was a kind of a bug and one of the computers

actually had a hardware failure

that made it believe

that it could get a message to some place

in negative time.

So of course every message in the internet

did better by sending it through that computer

because it subtracted the time

net required to send the message.

And so all the messages in the internet

started getting sent through that computer,

which of course got slower and slower and slower.

So the internet kind of started to grind to a halt.

Leonard Kleinrock: The mean response time now

will look like this.

It will be equal to the average path length

times the summation of the square root

of the traffic on the J channel

over the sum of all traffics

summed over all channels squared

over uc (1 minus n-bar Rho).

Whatever that equation means it tells you

what the minimum response time will be

for a network once it's optimized.

The computer was claiming that it could

deliver the message before you even sent it.

So if you had a post office like that

of course you would use it, right?

This was a simplified but exact model at the time.

Now we have other aspects of it.

But it's basically the underlying principles of

the network and one of the things we found,

surprisingly, was that the larger the network is

the far more efficient it becomes.

Werner: Like a gambling casino that certainly

makes money if you have millions of gamblers

at the slot machines?

Very much so.

You've articulated what we call

the law of large numbers.

The law of large numbers says

that a large population of unpredictable players,

or messages,

collectively behaves in a very predictable fashion,

a fashion we can write down exactly.

And therefore we can predict the performance

of a network when its large.

The underlying technology has scaled

by a factor of a million in computational speed,

in bandwidth of communications,

in storage capacity and it may go for another decade

to a factor of a billion or even a trillion.

Nothing in the history of mankind has ever worked

as a technological contribution

over that span of growth.

Werner: Back to the very early times,

times of speculative concepts of a connected world...

in the early 60s,

many years before the first Apple personal computer,

a young thinker, Ted Nelson,

had his own ideas about creating a computer network.

The web as we know it took a different route,

but Nelson's ideas are still dormant.

Ted Nelson: It was an experience of water and interconnection.

I was with my grandparents in a rowboat

in Chicago, so I must have been five years old and

I was trailing my hand in the water.

And I thought about how the water was

moving around my fingers,

opening on one side and closing on the other,

and that changing system of relationships

where everything was kind of similar,

kind of the same and yet different.

That was so difficult to visualize and express,

and just generalizing that to the entire universe that

the world is a system of

ever changing relationships and structures

struck me as...

a vast truth - which it is!

And...

so interconnection and expressing that

interconnection has been the center of all my thinking,

and all my computer work

has been about expressing and representing

and showing interconnection among writings especially.

And writing is the process of reducing

a tapestry of interconnection

to a narrow sequence.

And this is in a sense illicit.

This is a wrongful compression

of what should spread out.

And today's computers they've betrayed that

because there's no system

for decent cut and paste and they've changed

the meaning of the words "cut and paste"

and pretended it was the same thing.

So a guy named Larry Tesler,

whom I consider to be a good friend,

nevertheless changed those words

and I consider that to be a crime against humanity

and he doesn't understand why.

Because humanity has no decent writing tools.

In any case,

this is the problem:

interconnection and representation

and sequentialization all...

similar to the issue of water.

So here we have

a parallel presentation

that shows the quotation

connected to its original context.

"In the beginning God created the heaven

and the earth" and where is that from?

That is from the King James Bible.

So we can step down to the next quotation.

"Adam and Lilith immediately began

to fight" and that is from the Alphabet of ben Sira.

And so as we pull back we can see successive pages

coming up to connect with their sources

or with their linked contents.

Werner: His vision of links never materialized.

By some he was labeled insane for clinging on.

There are two contradictory slogans.

One is that continuing to do the same thing

and expecting a different result

is the definition of insanity.

On the other hand, if at first you don't succeed,

try, try again.

I prefer the latter because I don't want

to be remembered as the guy who didn't.

Werner: No, to us you appear to be the only one

around who is clinically sane.

No one has ever said that before.

(laughs)

Usually I hear the opposite.

Werner: Thank you very much for talking with us.

It was wonderful.

(both laughing)

Marvelous.

What a team.

Werner: Yes, now it's your turn.

Werner: Today the sheer numbers

of unpredictable players on the internet

has led to some of its greatest glories.

Fundamental research into cancer, AIDS,

and other diseases,

has been slowed down by a complex problem

which has to do with

the intricate folding of molecules.

Scientists using super computers

could not solve it.

Adrien Treuille was one of the creators

of a video game calling upon the community

of video gamers out there in the world.

Here we can see an RNA molecule

folded up into

this beautiful helical pattern,

it forms a helix,

and the amazing thing is that this pattern

is formed out of very, very simple rules

which pull it together and create this shape.

And so it's a little bit like...

you can think of your hands as there are simple rules

which determine how it can bend,

and then there are certain ways

in which it loves to come together

to form a compact shape and that's just

what these molecules are doing in the body.

Werner: And your shirts, for example,

you are into shirt folding?

These molecules

fold up in much the same way

that a shirt folds.

You can imagine it starts completely unfolded

and not at all suitable to put in your drawer,

but if you follow very, very simple rules

it becomes this beautiful package

that you can then

store and show.

We took the latest scientific models

of a biomolecule folding

and we created a game

and we put it on the web without knowing what would happen

and without knowing if it would be fun at all,

if anyone would come, and...

instantly people arrived

and they broke down the computers.

We had to build new computers.

And they played and they spoke with one another

and they taught one another

about the science as non-experts

and they began reading papers

and they began studying and understanding.

We have lawyers, we have school kids,

we have retired people, we have bedridden people,

we have grandmas.

It's really everyone from age 10 to age 100.

Werner: This idea was impossible

before the internet and the response was stunning.

Within days, hundreds of thousands joined in

and they solved the puzzle.

The world responded,

and it was beautiful.

And here is where you'd design a new molecule

and in many ways we tried to...

subliminally, you might say,

help the players understand

and inhabit the world of the molecule.

So we placed the whole game in this water

and we put all of these little bubbles

in the background,

but they're part of the story of what's happening.

Each molecule has its own sound,

and these sounds are specifically designed

so that when the molecule is well folded

they form harmonies.

(short chords)

And if something doesn't fit together

it will form a dissonance.

(short chords)

It's actually kind of hard to make it do it. (laughs)

These are real chemical results

of actual molecules that we, players designed

and we built them. So we say, EteRNA

is played by humans but scored by nature.

In other words,

nature determines who wins and who loses the game

and that's science.

Werner: The solutions of the video gamers

are not just fantasies.

They are verifiable

and can be synthesized in the lab.

Sebastian Thrun is also reaching out into the world.

Originally he's become famous

with self-driving cars.

My dream is to go and give every human being

a chance and the best way to do this is education.

So we built this little company

that we called Udacity that offers education for free.

We have hundreds of thousands of students

staying with us at any given point in time.

We've been amazed how fast

our student base has grown.

There's a real thirst for education, like,

as the machines are becoming smarter

I think people want to become smarter.

People want to make a contribution

and it's harder and harder to make a contribution today

and it'll be even harder in the future so we've

really got to go and do something for ourselves

and the best thing we can do I think is education.

In the very beginning of my journey into education,

I had a chance to teach a class online

and teach a class at Stanford.

At Stanford you got 200 students.

I considered myself an extremely great teacher

so I got a large class,

but online we got 160,000 students.

160 thousand.

and when we finally finished this class

we were able to stack rank the Stanford students,

who are the most privileged

and most selected students,

with the students from the open world.

And the top 412 students, they weren't at Stanford.

The best performing Stanford student

was number 413 out of a class of 200.

That kind of opened my eyes and I realized,

my god, for every great Stanford student

there is 412 amazingly great,

even better students in the world

that don't make it to Stanford.

Reporter: Just before heading into the mountain section

of the course, Stanley tracked down

and passed the crippled Highlander,

putting Stanford racing team's Volkswagen Touareg

into the leader position and effectively ending

the Highlander's bid for glory.

As Stanley crosses the finish line,

the Stanford racing team

has made its way into the history books.

Werner: This was Sebastian Thrun's

moment of glory back in 2005.

Most of his competitors were a sorry sight.

Reporter: History has already been made

as Highlander crosses the 8-mile mark,

further than any vehicle traveled

in the inaugural Grand Challenge.

20 more teams followed the big three out of the gate,

all hoping to complete

the 132-mile course in a winning time.

Team Dad, with its rotating cluster

of sensors, sped off the line making up ground

and passing team Axion in the process.

Team ENSCO's buggy style robot, Dexter,

also left the line with a full head of steam,

fiercely attacking the desert terrain.

Kat-5, the Ford Escape hybrid from Louisiana's Gray team,

eased its way past the crowd,

and TerraMax, the 16-ton cargo hauler,

left the gate determined to finish the course.

Werner: Autonomous cars are developing rapidly.

Today you don't see big radar installations

or tons of equipment.

So the primary objective when we built this car

was to basically make it look very normal

on the outside and the inside.

The vehicle can send information

about what it is seeing to the internet -

this can be useful to other vehicles on the road.

It can also download information about

what is happening on the roads before it reaches

an accident area or a traffic jam, for example.

Werner: So the internet will be decisive very soon?

The internet will play a very important role

in this, yes.

Werner: Can you open it? It must be packed with electronics.

Yes.

So just like we humans have brains to basically

process all the incoming signals, we need to have

computers basically, which process all the signals

from the lidars and the radars and the cameras.

Werner: I can't see anything.

It turns out there really is nothing to see.

It's a completely useable empty trunk space,

but hidden behind...

under the... trunk,

is a set of computers.

There are four computers, each with four so called

processing cores which is really equivalent to

16-piece personal computing machines

which basically crunch all the data

coming in from the sensors.

These dots that you see are basically reflections

from laser beams

from the laser lidar sensors on the car.

They emit light beams, hit obstacles, and they

come back as reflections and they show up as dots.

Werner: It really sees a virtual world.

It literally sees a virtual world.

The big question basically is that

does it understand the ethics of a human?

Does it understand the values of human society?

For example, our vehicle,

what it would like to do

basically is not hit anybody as the highest priority.

And then if it has to hit something it would prefer

to rather hit some thing than somebody,

but what it really wants to do is basically

not hit anything at all or anybody at all.

Werner: But who is going to be liable

in case of an accident?

The on-board computer? Its designer?

The GPS system? The internet?

Or the driver who eats his breakfast?

When a car makes a mistake

and learns from it, that experience is

instantaneously shared with all the other cars,

so all the other cars learn from it as well.

It's actually something that people can't do very well.

So, if I make a mistake, which I've made many in driving,

then I can commiserate and I can improve,

but nobody else learns from it.

When a self-driving car makes a mistake

automatically all the other cars know about it,

including all future unborn cars,

will never make that same mistake again.

Which means the ability for cars to develop

an artificial intelligence is so much greater

than the ability of people to keep up with them.

Let me show you one of our robots.

This robot essentially has four wheels

and each of these wheels have these tiny rollers on them

and what this allows this robot to do

is essentially it allows it to drive sideways

as well as forwards, as well as turn,

without having to do anything

like parallel parking maneuvers.

So that makes these robots

extremely versatile in their motion.

To kick the ball,

what these robots have is a main kicker,

which slides the length of the robot

and kicks the ball forward.

We also have a chip kicker,

which can kick the ball upward

and that makes the ball go up into the air.

Werner: These robots are autonomous.

Nobody steers them with a joystick.

Joydeep Biswas: Once a defender is in place,

it'll be a bit more challenging for this robot to score.

RoboCup this year we have not let in a single goal,

although we scored 48 goals in total

against our opponents.

Werner: So you are world champion?

We are.

We came first this year

in the RoboCup international competition.

The blue robots need to have an indirect free kick

so they're figuring out how they should pass

between themselves.

Werner: Could this team eventually beat

the real Brazilian football team?

Joydeep: That is the goal of RoboCup.

That is, by 2050

to have a team of soccer playing robots

which can defeat the FIFA world champions.

And we'll see it happen.

I'm very hopeful

that we'll actually get a team of robots

which are competent enough and smart and intelligent enough

to actually beat the world champions in 2050.

Werner: Better than Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar?

Um, it sounds difficult but we can get there.

We can get there.

We have a certain reverence for robot 8.

I mean, to us, saying robot 8 is equivalent

to someone saying Messi or Ronaldo or something -

it's the same.

This here is robot 8.

It's very identifiable because

its pattern includes four green dots on top and it's...

one of our favorites, actually.

Werner: Beautiful.

Do you love it?

Yes, we do.

We do love robot 8. (chuckles)

The day Nikki passed away

we were scheduled to see a psychiatrist.

She'd had some...

psychotic issues where she had

a brain tumor when she was very young

and it was time to do some research on her.

I think she was feeling nervous

that if she were to go to this appointment

she might get stuck in hospital

because that had happened before.

And at some point

a couple hours before her appointment,

she left the house.

She took Christos' Porsche and drove away.

I saw all the police

and I started to walk down

the on-ramp and they stopped me

and they said I wasn't allowed down there.

And I asked if it was my daughter in the car,

what car it was,

and they wouldn't give me any information.

and then a crane lifted up the car

and once it lifted up the car,

I realized it was the Porsche.

Werner: Adding to the tragedy,

the first responder took photos

of the nearly decapitated head of the girl

and emailed it to some friends.

Almost instantly the pictures were out on the internet,

and hundreds of thousands,

possibly millions, clicked on them.

Hoping to avoid a new wave of sick curiosity,

we are here not even showing a picture of Nikki alive,

only a place in the house she liked.

Up until I saw the pictures on the internet

I had an image of Nikki...

as a perfect...

as a perfect face, perfect, uh...

condition.

The coroner told us,

the only thing the coroner told us

is that a portion of her thumb

had been severed in the accident

and that she had head trauma,

but they never gave us any detail.

So I always focused on the thumb.

I received emails with the pictures attached

and it was a short time after the accident.

Um...

It was disguised. I didn't know who the email came from,

and I opened it up.

And the bad ones were very, um... hateful,

very hateful... towards me,

towards Nikki, towards our family.

It said "Dead girl walking.

Woo hoo, daddy, I'm still alive".

Werner: Woo hoo?

Woo hoo.

Werner: Do you still feel the pain

when you received this?

Yes.

Werner: And it's never gonna leave you?

Never.

Werner: Some of the hate mail

was so unspeakably horrifying

that we cannot repeat it here.

We were told there was nothing that could be done

because... there's no law in place

for...

pictures of deceased people

because when they pass away,

their privacy rights go with them.

I didn't know such depravity existed in humans,

and I think dogs treat their kind

better than humans treat their kind.

It's just... there is no dignity

or respect on the internet

because we're not held accountable.

Nobody's there to tell us not to.

I have always believed that the internet

is a manifestation of the antichrist,

of evil itself.

It is the spirit of evil.

And I feel like it's running through...

everybody on earth and it's...

claiming its victories

in those people that are also evil.

Werner: West Virginia,

the small town of Green Bank in Appalachia.

What you're seeing behind me is a very large telescope,

a hundred meters in diameter,

but instead of picking up the light

as normal telescopes do,

it picks up the radio waves that are coming from the universe,

from objects out there as close as the planets

but as far as actually the Big Bang.

Werner: The telescope discovered the black hole

in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

In the Visitor Center

you can roll your coins into a funnel,

which resembles a black hole.

Your coins indeed disappear irretrievably.

Jay Locman: If there was a civilization like ours

on a nearby planet, we could almost certainly pick up

some of their television stations perhaps,

some of their radar... who knows what.

This collecting area is several acres in size

and it can pick up enormous signals

from an enormous distance, but they've traveled so far

that they are so faint that

typically they contain a lot less energy

than the energy of a falling snowflake

settling on the ground.

The enemy of radio astronomy

is the natural radio signals that we make on earth

either deliberately or accidentally.

Things like microwave ovens can emit radiation

which can blind us to the signals

that are coming from the stars.

Cell phones are billions of billions of times

stronger than the faint signals we're looking for.

Satellites, they beam straight down on us.

Werner: Music stations?

Music stations, yes.

Werner: Playing Elvis?

Playing Elvis. (laughs)

We've managed to keep cell phone transmissions out.

Your smart phones are dumb here;

they just do not work.

We really try to keep wireless transmissions

of any kind suppressed

within about ten miles of the observatory.

For a long time we had a fleet of Checker diesels

and these were the standard New York City cabs

and they were precious to us

because they were the perfect vehicle for radio astronomers.

These do not have spark plugs, they don't make noise.

Werner: In the forest near the telescope

we met a modern day hermit.

So, see, I've finally gone high tech.

I've got a faucet installed.

It really makes a difference, I have to say.

I became very ill from radiation sickness in 1996

and I lost 50 pounds.

I nearly died three times

and I became reactive

to all the wireless radiation signals

when all the cell phones went up.

They went up in massive numbers in 1996

and I tried to do all kind of treatment,

I moved, I'd lost my career.

I was working as an architect in Honolulu.

I had to be separated from my family and children

and finally I heard about this in 2011

and...

as soon as I heard there was a place with no cell towers,

I was here in 48 hours.

Sometimes if I have really bad reactions to radiation,

I actually will sleep on the ground.

I feel better on the ground.

And there may be a science to this.

They say the ground emits 7.83 hertz

and it's the natural rhythm for animals and humans.

I also sleep in my car,

which I instinctively did in the beginning

and I later learned that it acts like a partial Faraday Cage.

The metal keeps out the radiation.

This place in Green Bank is wonderful.

It's not perfect but I can go outside.

I can see the trees, I can see the sky,

I can see the stars.

When I lived in the Faraday Cage,

I had to live in a box and I only left the box

when I wanted to go to the bathroom

or to use the shower,

otherwise I stayed in that box day and night.

Werner: In a cage?

In a Faraday Cage.

Werner: How long?

(sighs) A couple years.

Several years.

I had a mattress

and I didn't have a place to stand up.

I had to stay on the bed the entire time.

My husband went grocery shopping,

he cooked the food,

he would bring and serve me the food.

We'd open the door, he'd hand me the plate

and I'd eat inside the Faraday Cage.

I've heard it also called as a super sense,

that we just have this ability to,

for whatever reason, feel these frequencies.

It's a very legitimate illness.

But at this point I don't consider it a gift.

I would give anything to give it back.

Werner: You're the refugee now?

I... Yes, I don't know what to call myself.

This is brand new

and I just want people

to know that this type of illness

- and doctors - I really want them to hear

that this is a legitimate illness.

Um, and it affects our lives tremendously, you have no idea.

When you go home today after this interview,

you have the luxury of going home

to your familiar surroundings.

You have that luxury to go back to your families.

I haven't had that in four and a half years.

I haven't had any stability.

And I just have to impress upon you

how serious this is for those of us that are suffering.

And I'm extremely grateful

that there is a location here

where I am no longer in pain.

Or whatever type of irreparable harm may be

being done to my body

will be either suspended or temporarily arrested.

Jay Locman: There's a lot more community interaction

in a place like this.

I think because of the absence of cellular technology and also

because of the isolation of a rural community

in such a beautiful place like this.

And, yes, I do play the fiddle and the banjo at night.

* (music plays)

* My old lady gets mad at me *

* She gets hotter than her tea *

* She is good and she is bad *

* She can be the devil when she gets mad *

* Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, goin' on a run *

* Goin' up t' Cripple Creek, have a little fun *

* Raise my britches high to my knees *

* Wade in ol' Cripple Creek when I please *

(birds chirping)

Werner: The state of Washington across the continent,

in an idyllic forest not far from Seattle,

a rehab center for internet addiction

named Restart was established.

Well, there are so many of these severe cases.

For instance in South Korea there was the case

of a couple that had a young baby

and they were very much addicted to a game

that they went to play while neglecting their child at home.

And this baby eventually starved to death

and they went to jail for this,

but it is because they were hooked on a game

and ironically it was a game in which

they were taking care of and nurturing in the game

a young girl,

but as they were doing that

their own child was starving to death.

Shortly after we opened Restart,

we got a call from a stepmom.

Her stepson was living with his grandmother

and had just had his leg amputated

because he'd developed a thrombosis in his leg

from lack of movement.

So we know of cases, many cases happening

in Korea and China, people who are dying

at the computer because they are playing for

40, 50, 60 hours at a time

and completely neglecting their body's physical needs.

Werner: It is not uncommon

that in South Korea teenage video gamers put on diapers.

This way they avoid losing points

by going to the bathroom.

Werner: Tom, you do not need any further introduction.

This was great.

My lowest point

came at the beginning of this year.

New Year's Eve I had lost a job,

I was losing my girlfriend, my family,

my relations were very strained

and I tried to drink myself to death.

Werner: Suicide?

I was playing video games 16 hours a day,

often drunk.

I watched porn a lot

and I just had given up.

I had no future, I had no will to live.

I was just waiting for the timer to run out.

I was in my spring quarter in college

and I was doing nothing except

sleeping about six hours a day

and playing video games

and absolutely not attending any of my classes,

not doing any of my work

and lying to my parents about my progress.

So it was a lot of lying, manipulation,

isolation especially,

which are all common things for addicts

but mine were pretty much sleep

and you know, interact with my addiction.

Werner: Did you adopt certain characters

that became almost like you?

(sighs)

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that

'cause I'm still in the phase

where thinking too deeply about my own intricacies

could set me off, could really start

that cravings and start those withdrawal symptoms again.

Werner: I wanted very much

to discuss fictional characters with Chloe,

like the malevolent Druid Dwarf

or whoever these figures are, but I had to desist.

(birds chirping)

The real danger to gaming is when...

you... or when I stopped

being present in the real world

more often than I was in the game world.

If...

If you get to the point where...

you're thinking about the game

more than you're thinking about real life -

what you're gonna do for food,

what you're gonna do the next day or two,

you're not thinking about a relationship

or a job or a career.

If you're thinking about the game...

it's a problem...

because eventually it'll get in the way of everything real.

Werner: Our sun, the giver of life.

At the same time it is hostile, destructive.

Protuberances unimaginable in size

are being hurled into the universe.

These flares may become the undoing of modern civilization.

The best known historical example

of a very large solar flare is an event

called the Carrington event which happened in 1859.

This was observed by an astronomer

named Carrington who saw a patch of the sun

as he was monitoring sun spots, grow brighter.

In those days, the predominant form of technology

was a telegraph, that was our main form of communication,

and this very, very large flare

that happened, that created a brightness change

so great that Carrington could actually

see it with his eye, which is very uncommon,

actually induced currents in telegraph wires

that created fires in the paper of the telegraph machines.

There's even reports from that time of Aurora being

seen as far south as the equator,

and there being Auroras so bright

at the Northern latitudes that

it was possible to read by them at night.

We've been fortunate

that nothing as large as the Carrington Event

has happened in these times of modern technology

but even the smaller solar flare events

that we do see do disrupt our communications

and create outages in our power grid

and disruptions for our satellites.

(people gasping and screaming)

Werner: New York City.

What Hurricane Sandy caused here

could happen on a worldwide scale and much worse.

No electricity, no internet,

no drinking water, no flushing of toilets,

no gas and no shopping.

News Reporter: All you could see was the outline

of the hospital against a darkened sky.

A lone flashlight up in one of the hospital rooms there

as doctors and nurses rushed from patient to patient.

Out front, ambulances.

These images from my iPhone as we approach the hospital,

just one of the nearly 300 patients who were

one by one brought out and taken to safety.

- (alarms blaring) - What we got going on here

is a complete blackout in New York City, and um...

I'm on the third floor of Clear Channel

where Z100, KTU, Lite FM, Q,

we're all located on the third floor.

Every station is off the air in New York City.

I don't think it's ever happened in the history

of broadcasting in New York.

It's like a Will Smith movie, man.

It's very weird. Very weird.

And I feel kind of helpless because

I'm glad I'm here and I'm safe,

but there's a lot of crap going on at home.

My neighbors tell me it's a big mess.

So I'm nervous about what I'm gonna head home to tomorrow.

Wassup?

This is a control room.

Werner: Meet Lawrence Krauss.

As a cosmologist

he is studying the origins of our universe.

Much of his attention has been focused on our planet.

Lawrence Krauss: If there's a solar flare...

if you destroyed the information fabric of the world right now,

modern civilization would collapse.

Hundreds of millions of people will die.

Billions of people will die.

The world will become,

for people like you and me,

unimaginably ugly, difficult,

and...

there's great likelihood that I couldn't survive.

If the internet shuts down,

people will not remember how they used to live before that.

I start to think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

I mean, let's get back to the base of the pyramid

and think about food and shelter.

You have food networks that are hugely

dependent on being able to route digitally

what the needs are and where

and, through efficiencies created

when the network is working well,

you don't have warehouses near people

stocked to the brim with food.

If you disrupt those networks I imagine,

what do they say?

"Civilization is always about four square meals

away from utter ruin"?

That's something

that it wouldn't be bad to prepare for.

As we've thought about an internet of things

where often for purely,

looked at at this moment, unnecessary reasons,

we not only attach daily objects to the internet

but make them reliant on that internet connection

in order to function properly.

So the idea that our standard appliances

couldn't work without connectivity,

that we wouldn't be able to get...

to a restaurant that in turn wouldn't be able

to get to food and to organize staff...

I suspect, however,

that some individuals will survive.

Let us remember that we come from a background

where at one point

there were less than a thousand individuals alive,

probably down in the southern part of Africa,

and we were a hair's breadth away

from disappearing as a species.

Lucianne Walkowicz: We have no control over

what the sun chooses to do.

We do know that there is a solar cycle,

so there are times of high activity

when there are many flares and there times of low activity

when there are relatively few.

Events like the Carrington Event appear

to be fairly uncommon but not non-existent,

they're not single isolated events.

We do see that flares are repeatable,

it's just that the large ones are less common

than the small ones.

So by observing other stars actually

we can get some idea of how frequently

these things happen and it seems to be

every few hundred years or so.

So it's really a matter of time

before we have a large solar flare.

- Um, not a matter of... - Werner: ...it's when.

Yes, not a matter "if" we'll have a large solar flare.

Will we disappear as a species?

Again, Werner, I can't tell you

because I don't make predictions.

It would be...

unimaginably bad

and I prefer to not think about it right now.

Werner: Las Vegas, Nevada.

One of the casinos is preparing to host DefCon,

the annual convention of the hacker community.

In less than two decades it has grown

to 20,000 participants.

At least a thousand of them will be FBI,

the CIA, Chinese secret service,

and other interested parties.

We are about to meet Kevin Mitnick,

a demigod among the community of hackers.

Just mentioning his name here

makes everyone fall silent in awe.

Am I proud of being the world's most famous hacker?

Um... It's a title that's kind of cool to have,

but I had a lot of trials and tribulations

to get to that point.

A lot of bad things happened in my life,

like, for example, going to a federal prison.

So it's a title that was earned,

but I took the hard road.

When I was a federal fugitive

I was really concerned obviously about getting arrested

so what I did is I hacked into the cell phone company,

one of the cell phone companies in Los Angeles,

and through what we call metadata...

It's interesting because nowadays

with the revelations of Edward Snowden,

he talked about metadata being very critical

in the NSA's ability to track us and surveil us

and the NSA says, oh, it's only metadata,

it doesn't mean anything.

Let me tell you how I was able to use

metadata to track the FBI in the 1990s.

I was able to hack into the cell phone company

and I was able to identify

the phone numbers that belonged

to the FBI white collar crime squad in Los Angeles.

And I was able to look at their...

I couldn't get the contents of the call

but I could see who they called and who called them

so I was able to get a lot of intelligence.

And then what I was able to do is,

through this device, I was able to program this device

with all the FBI cell phone numbers

of the people that were in charge of my investigation.

It would start sending me pager alerts

that the FBI cell phone is here, you know, within a mile.

So what I did that night is I took

all my computer stuff: my floppy disk, my CDs,

anything that's technology related -

I put it at a friend's house

and then I went to Winchell's Donuts

and I got a big...

I think it was a 24 box of, you know, donuts.

I took a Sharpie and wrote "FBI Donuts" on the box,

I put it in the refrigerator

and on a big post-it note outside the refrigerator

- you know the logo for Intel says "Intel inside"?

I put "FBI donuts inside" and stuck it on the refrigerator.

And it just so happens at 6:00 that morning

I wake up... And how I wake up is

I hear somebody jiggling the door.

The FBI knocks, they don't jiggle doors,

and I go "who is it?" just instinctively

because I thought someone was trying to break in.

"FBI, open up! Open up!"

And they're looking for anything electronic -

a computer, a cell phone, and nothing's there.

And as soon as one of the guys gets to the refrigerator...

(chuckles)

...he just goes... he goes "what the fuck?"

You know, he's pissed because

they obviously knew I knew they were coming,

so they were not happy.

I was arrested and I was in court and

I thought I was going home that day

and then this federal prosecutor tells the judge

that we not only have to hold Mr. Mitnick without bail

but we have to make sure he can't get to a telephone.

and I was really paying attention at this point,

and then the prosecutor starts telling the judge

that if we let Mr. Mitnick near a telephone,

he can dial up to NORAD, dial up the modem,

whistle into the phone and launch an ICBM.

Facing 400 years in prison

I had nothing to lose.

I ended up being held in federal prison

without bail in solitary confinement for a year.

Werner: After his time in solitary,

Mitnick languished four more years in federal prison.

Because the internet was designed

for a community that trusted each other

it didn't have a lot of protections in it.

We didn't worry about spying on each other,

for example.

We didn't worry about somebody sending out to us spam

or bad emails or viruses

because such a person would have been,

you know, banned from the community.

It would be really nice when I got a message

if I knew where the message came from.

But the way that the protocols of the internet work,

that's fundamentally impossible.

And so I kind of have to look at the message

and guess, is this somebody pretending

to be somebody else.

We can design systems that are really anonymous

or that are utterly identifiable down to the person

and it's time for us to think about

what contexts we'd want to support what.

A system that is utterly identifiable at all times

is a nightmare.

It's exactly what we don't want to hand a country

that doesn't embrace the rule of law -

ready made for them to employ with their populace.

At the same time, a system that can provide

no accountability at all...

We have pockets of that online

and most people do not find that appealing.

In any frontier, before the law gets there,

there's always people seeking to take advantage of the system.

I've seen in the United States, for instance,

probably something like five or six billion identities lost

but there aren't that many people in the United States

which makes everyone a little inured to it every time.

What does it really mean when they hear

their identity's been compromised?

It's not always an identity compromising totality.

Sometimes it's just a small portion of it.

Your identity comprises many, many things.

There is one you and there are many components

that represent you digitally.

Some compromises in that system

have very little impact on you, and some huge,

but the line between your physical life

and digital life is becoming far more blurred

and there will come a point where the threats online

will hamper your ability to embrace new technology.

That's what my colleagues and I have to push back.

Governments who can achieve all the same effects they would

for international affairs or foreign affairs

without having to rely on tools of war...

it's another tool at the table, right?

War is an extension of politics by other means?

Well, now there's another one with much less risk,

easier to fund, and it puts even some

smaller nation states on the same playing field

as larger ones.

So dozens of nation states have an ability

to hack others and they use this

as an extension of foreign policy.

Werner: We became curious to look

into the biggest cyber attack known until today.

Werner: You were at the Sandia National Laboratory.

What sort of a company is Sandia, can you explain?

Sure. Sandia National Laboratories

is a government research laboratory,

a Department of Energy Research laboratory

that does work in the national interests:

weapons work,

there's solar energy research,

micro machine research,

cyber security research,

those sorts of endeavors.

Werner: Nuclear weapons?

Nuclear weapons, yep.

It's part of the nuclear weapons complex

for stockpile stewardship along with some

of the other laboratories just to ensure

that the weapons will function properly and...

as they age through the years.

Werner: So a wonderful target for cyber-attacks.

It is.

Werner: It can't get any better.

It's, uh, it has a big target on it, yes.

Werner: You stumbled over a problem?

A problem, yes.

Terrifying in scope, basically, you know,

hundreds of organizations -

military, defense, industrial based

compromised as far as their networks

and, you know, just...

people maintaining a presence on the network

for the sole purpose of siphoning off

information of value.

Werner: But we know World Bank was affected,

NASA was affected, military was affected.

That's correct.

I just cannot talk about it. I'm sorry.

(laughs)

Werner: Alright, but...

we do know a name.

We do have a beautiful name: Titan Rain.

Mm hmm.

Werner: Can you at least nod?

Yes.

Werner: The scope of our conversation

was extremely reduced,

but some of the information here

became part of court proceedings.

The transcripts are public record,

including the name coined by the FBI.

Werner: You were not up at night in the office,

you were up at night at home?

Up at night at home, yes.

Werner: Lots of coffee?

Lots of coffee.

Lots of Nicorette. (laughs)

Werner: And how rewarding is it to trail the enemy?

To find the track?

It's very rewarding.

It's like a puzzle,

finding patterns within chaos

that shouldn't be there

and finding these anomalies.

And once you scratch the surface,

you start to put together clues

and develop a better picture.

You can be certain that you're pursuing

a certain person or a certain entity

and it could just be a ghost.

Until you have some physical proof,

you have someone that kicks a door down

and sees that this is the person

that's actually behind the keyboard,

it can all be a myth or an illusion.

It could be, you know, a layered sort of thing

or all at once, you know,

just to bring down power, financial systems,

and just degrade, corrupt them.

Sometimes it's even worse,

rather than bringing it down you corrupt it

and undermine faith, let's say, in the stock market.

Don't bring it down, you start altering prices,

you start altering records,

and you delete them en masse

and just cause chaos so the markets cannot even

restore and come up for days.

The possibilities of taking over spacecraft

and lowering the orbits of the spacecraft

so they burn up, and vital GPS communications

and other sorts of communications are...

there's nothing there to replace them anymore.

Werner: Could it be that we are right now already

in a cyber war that we don't even notice?

Sure.

Kevin Mitnick: It doesn't matter how much money

a company invests in technology.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars

on your firewall, on your intrusion prevention systems

and your spam, on your anti-virus,

and if I could just manipulate one person

inside that company, I'm in.

95% of the work, when I used to do this in the past,

is research and finding out about

the human element and gathering information

and emails and their personal emails and the conference

that they were just at and who spoke before them

and that person's email address so I can send

that person a rigged PDF attachment

that may look perfectly normal and forge it

because I just spoke with this guy so I'm gonna open it.

And nothing happens on my computer

but in the background a little Trojan is dropped

that starts communicating that allows me access

and then I, you know, gather more information.

I grab his contact book,

I find the people that know the information

that I'm interested in exploiting,

and then I send an email from him

with the same type of attachment

and eventually I have what I want.

People are the weakest link in security.

People. Not the technology.

TV: Now through this special TV offer you can receive

a Motorola flip phone with Cellular One service

for just pennies a day.

Now everyone can enjoy the freedom

of a personal cellular phone.

You can make a call anywhere...

Or get a call anytime.

(chuckles)

So I'm living in Denver, Colorado - incidentally

I'm not living under the name Kevin Mitnick,

I'm under the name of Eric Weiss.

Why Eric Weiss?

Because at the time I was a federal fugitive

I was hiding from the FBI

and my idol was Harry Houdini and that's Houdini's real name,

so I thought I had a sense of humor.

So I call directory assistance, I get the number to Motorola.

I'm now talking to the Vice President

for Research and Development for all of Motorola Mobility

and I go "Hey, this is Rick over at Arlington Heights"

because I found out they had an Arlington Heights facility.

"I'm looking for the project manager

of the MicroTAC".

And the VP goes "Oh, that's Pam.

She works for me, would you like her extension?"

I go "Sure, give it to me", and he gives me the extension.

So my next call is to Pam

but I don't get her, I get her outgoing greeting

on her voicemail and she told her callers

that she just left on a two week vacation,

the date she's returning, and if you need any help whatsoever

please call Alicia at extension blah, blah, blah.

So of course my next call is to Alicia

and she answers the phone and I go "Hey, Alicia,

this is Rick over at Arlington Heights.

Did Pam leave on vacation yet?"

Of course, I already knew she had.

And she goes "Yes" and I go "Well, before she left,

she said that you could help me get a copy

of the MicroTAC source code.

She said you would help me out".

About five minutes later she goes "I found the source code".

You know, she gave me the release number

and she goes "but there's a problem.

Rick, I'm gonna have to talk to my security manager

about what you're asking me to do. I'll be right back".

And I go "No, wait, wait!"

'cause I didn't want her to talk to any security manager

because obviously they'd figure out what's going on.

About eight minutes later she comes back on the line.

I'm nervous, thinking they hooked up a tape recorder

and that's gonna be Exhibit A in the court case later.

And she goes "Rick?" And I go "uh huh?"

and she goes "That IP address

you gave me to do the file transfer

is not inside Motorola's campus, it's outside,

and because of that I can't transfer the file

because we need to use a special proxy server to do so

and I don't have an account".

And I go "Uh huh", you know and I just go

"Alright, thank you very much"

and she goes "Wait, wait, I have some great news for you".

I go "what?"

She goes "My security manager gave me

his personal user name and password

so I could log onto the proxy server to send you the file!"

Motorola had a bunch of security, technical security,

but it only took me 15 minutes with a good gift of gab

to get the crown jewels.

So that's how that worked.

Werner: But you didn't sell it. It was curiosity.

- No. - Werner: It was a sport.

Trophy.

Narrator: This is Taurus, the concept that has evolved

from the work of these teams of scientists and engineers.

They believe the huge space colony

could be built before the year 2000.

Constructed almost entirely from ore mined on the moon,

the Taurus colony would become home

for 10,000 people.

Werner: Ideas of creating

colonies outside of planet Earth

have been around for a long time.

The problem of water, air and shelter

looks already solved.

In fact, nothing looks inviting out there.

There is a private company, SpaceX,

which is pursuing this idea in practical terms.

Here rockets are being assembled for the transport.

The founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk,

is not just a dreamer.

He made his fortune with PayPal,

he's building Tesla electric cars,

and is now constructing

the largest factory for batteries on this planet.

After setbacks,

he's now successfully launching rockets.

Elon Musk: For the first time in the history of Earth,

in 4.5 billion years,

the window of possibility is open for us

to extend life to another planet.

To the best of our knowledge life exists

only on Earth. You know...

There's a good argument that it exists elsewhere

but we've seen no sign of it.

I think it's important for us to take advantage

of that window while it is open

and to establish life

on another planet in the solar system

just in case something goes wrong with Earth.

Um...

And, uh...

You know, there could be either a natural or manmade disaster

that knocks the technology level

below that where it's possible

to travel to another planet.

The key to establishing

a self-sustained large civilization

is getting the cost-per-unit-mass

low enough that there's an intersection of sets:

the set of people that wish to move to Mars

and the set of people that can afford to move to Mars

inclusive of government aid.

I mean, right now we can't even get one person to Mars.

- So, clearly... - Werner: I would come along.

I wouldn't have a problem.

- Werner: One way ticket. - That sounds great.

Werner: I'd be your candidate.

Okay.

I do think we'll want to...

offer round trips because

a lot more people would be willing to go

if they think that if they don't like it,

they can come back.

Werner: But how would we talk to them

who chose to stay?

Who would tell them the outcome of the World Series?

Elon: Mars is actually a comparatively easy

internet thing to establish,

at least for local internet because

you wouldn't be living everywhere on Mars

so you'd really just need

maybe four satellites to have

global internet coverage because of how sparse

the civilization would be on Mars.

And then some relay satellites

to get back to Earth.

Particularly when Mars is on the other side of the sun,

you'd need to sort of bounce it off a relay satellite,

you couldn't communicate directly with it.

Werner: The skyline of Chicago.

It looks devoid of its inhabitants.

We have to assume that nearly everyone

has left for a colony out there.

* ("Are You Lonesome Tonight" by Elvis Presley playing) *

* Are you lonesome tonight?

* Do you miss me tonight?

* Are you sorry we drifted apart? *

* Does your memory stray

* To a brighter sunny day

Werner: The planetarium is the only point of contact.

Inside, a monument for those

who have levitated and left.

Yes, things must be real good out there.

* Do the chairs in your parlor *

* Seem empty and bare?

Werner: But then we met some stragglers

left behind.

They're all on their smartphones.

Have the monks stopped meditating?

Have they stopped praying?

They all seem to be tweeting.

* Shall I come back again? *

* Tell me, dear, are you lonesome tonight? *

Werner: How could we communicate with stars out there

that potentially have life?

Well, we can think of creating a kind of long range internet

either through the use of radio waves

or perhaps visible light.

So these would be the kinds of signals

that we could generate in the case of lower energy signals

like radio waves relatively cheaply

and we could broadcast,

if we came up with a suitable code

some way of transmitting information

over galactic and intergalactic distances.

Werner: But we would get an answer back

in 800,000 years?

Maybe 2.5 million years?

Well, I think that the more one looks for

planets in the universe beyond our solar system

that are potentially places

that might be hospitable to life,

the more you appreciate the wonderful planet

that we have here that allows us to do things

like swim in an ocean,

breathe the air without the help of our technology,

and so, while I would like us to explore Mars more,

I think the only thing that we've demonstrated is

that we're very good

at destroying the habitability of earth,

rather than improving the habitability

of a completely alien world.

The idea that Mars will somehow save us

from the decisions we've made here is a false one.

And it's a little like saying that

you're going to go live in the lifeboat when, you know,

even lifeboats need somewhere to land.

I don't think I have good dreams.

I'm sure I have good dreams sometimes,

but I don't seem to remember the good dreams.

The ones that I remember are the nightmares.

Werner: The Prussian war theoretician, Clausewitz,

Napoleonic times,

once famously said,

"sometimes war dreams of itself".

Could it be that the internet

starts to dream of itself?

Great question.

To think about dreaming,

there are maybe two aspects.

One is... what I'll call awareness,

when you wake up and you say

"I was just dreaming this" and you know it.

Another aspect is just...

some kind of pattern of activity that emerges,

not because of some external stimuli

but just because of something going on

in unpredictable patterns.

I think already the internet has the second of those,

has unpredictable patterns all the time.

They cause things like flash crashes

on the financial markets.

So we have plenty of kind of currents

running around in the internet

that are unpredictable,

in some cases unstoppable.

Werner: Imaginative?

Now it comes to what do we mean by imaginative.

But if we mean...

We call a person imaginative

if they come up with ideas that we didn't think of

and that we nevertheless admire.

If they can...

Usually admiration is part of it.

So for the internet, so far I think

it's mostly just unpredictable.

I haven't seen anything the internet did on its own

that I admire.

Does the internet dream of itself?

It does in the sense that it can beget

additional networks layered on top of it

that have the characteristics of the underlying internet.

So just as the basic internet is a series of computers

that happen to talk internet to each other

so that you can move a bit from here to there,

there's a fellow named Sir Tim Berners-Lee

who could conceive of something called

the World Wide Web and choose not to copyright it,

not to patent it, to allow anybody to speak "server"

and some people speak "client"

and then before you know it, you've got websites.

The web is the internet dreaming of itself.

Could it be that the internet dreams of itself?

It's a fascinating idea.

In fact, there was a wonderful science fiction story

which later got turned into a movie,

"Blade Runner", and I think it was called

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

The robot's dream,

but the internet is nothing but connections.

Will it have its own consciousness?

Will it have its own set of rules?

And perhaps...

on an even more scary realm,

a science fiction realm, will the internet

therefore make its own decisions?

And will the decisions about

how communication happens

go out of human hands?

That's certainly a possibility.

But since we don't even understand consciousness,

I am hesitant to make any predictions

and I think anyone who claims

they know what's going to happen to the internet,

is not worth listening to.

Werner: Pittsburg.

The Industrial Age -

the steel mills are long gone.

A new industry has established itself.

Here robots are being designed.

This one named Chimp

is testing its limbs on its own.

Soon battalions of them connected via internet

could perform rescue missions in disaster zones.

I think it's gonna run through the lift joints momentarily.

We're still a long ways away from a robot

having a complete understanding

of the world, of cause and effect,

of desires and hopes and dreams,

and those are the things that still make humans human

and robots on a much lesser scale.

Well, you could think of this scenario

almost as robot dreaming.

This is, you know, a robot

conceptualizing what is gonna happen in the future

and thinking about different scenarios

and for any of these motions it's considering

thousands and thousands of scenarios per second

that might happen,

um... especially when you get to the point

of robots exchanging information with one another,

then you might have a robot dreaming about places

it hasn't even been.

This is the Chimp view of the world

now using a high resolution laser scanner

and it has to really build up its...

its learning of what's going on in the environment.

In this case it's a valve that it's trying to turn

and we see the pre-planning -

this is like the robot imagination

of what's gonna happen:

where the gripper is gonna be,

how it's gonna come into that valve,

and how it can manipulate it.

Werner: It could have opened the valve in Fukushima

and prevented an explosion?

Vandeweghe: That was one of the key things

that spurred this research...

realizing that it was too dangerous for humans

to go in but if you could have had a robot

go in and just do some simple things,

straightforward things that the humans were unable to do:

open valves to change the cooling flow patterns,

maybe turn on pumps again.

That would have made all the difference

in preventing the hydrogen build-up

and the subsequent explosion.

Werner: How valuable is the cockroach for you?

I think any insect is amazingly, uh...

advanced, compared to the state of the art robots right now.

If you think about a cockroach,

the fact that it can scurry around on the floor,

it can avoid dangers, it can find food for itself,

it can reproduce,

and it can live for several years on its own,

robots are nowhere near that point yet

and I think it'll be great when we have even

as much capability as a cockroach.

Danny Hillis: I can not only imagine artificial intelligence

evolving spontaneously on the internet

but I can't tell you it hasn't happened already.

Because...

it wouldn't necessarily reveal itself to us.

I think that the biggest risk is not that the AI will...

develop a will of its own,

but rather that it will follow the will

of people that establish its utility function,

its optimization function, and that optimization function,

if it is...

if it is not well thought out -

I mean even if it's relatively...

if its intent is benign,

it could have quite a bad outcome.

For example, if you were...

a hedge fund or a private equity fund and you said,

well, all I want my AI to do is

maximize the value of my portfolio,

then...

the AI could decide,

well, the best way to do that is to short consumer stocks,

go long defense stocks, and start a war.

And that would obviously be quite bad.

Werner: Such an attack would be much more

prosaic than an invasion of these aliens

in the SpaceX reception area.

I think we're gonna get to the point where

almost everything we do will be done by machines.

And we'll still need people

but if you ask the question about will there ever be...

an artificial intelligent machine that makes movies?

Absolutely yes.

Will it be quite as good as yours?

No one can even come close.

Werner: Of course not.

But actually I think almost everything we do,

we find machines doing better,

and the reason why that's the case is because

machines learn faster than people can learn.

Werner: But they cannot fall in love as we can.

And will it be useful for machines to fall in love?

Would we want to have machines

that are just like people? I would say no.

Honestly, if a dishwasher came to me and said

"look, I'm falling in love with the refrigerator and,

as a result, I have no time to wash the dishes".

I wouldn't like that dishwasher.

We're going to have a revolution

not only in our technology, but in our theology.

We don't even have a name for it

but it's around the internet, it's around connectivity,

it's around building machines to think for us

and I think we're due for another shift

in our morals, in our....

in our definition of what it means to be human.

We're right just at the beginning of that,

and so you can see us trying to kind of...

feel out and invent this new society

and invent this new ideas of what's right and wrong.

What can we depend on each other for...

or what can we expect from each other?

How much do we want to do that?

So I think it's an incredibly creative time

in human history - not just technologically

but also morally and culturally.

(inaudible)

This room should know I'm here.

I should be able to talk to it.

It should be able to give me an answer verbally.

I should ask where, for example, is a high-speed printer?

Or where did I leave my keys?

Or where's a book on this subject?

And it should answer me with speech,

with a hologram, with a display,

in a very natural way.

I should maybe use gestures and touch,

and even smell and all my senses

to interact in a very humanistic way

with this technology around us.

And once that technology comes out

into our physical world

and becomes embedded

in our walls, in our desk, in our bodies,

in our fingernails, in our cars, in our offices,

in our homes,

it should disappear

and become invisible.

Whereas electricity...

there's a socket in the wall, you plug in,

you get electricity.

You don't care how it's made.

It's not a complicated interface.

It's invisible.

The internet is yet to evolve to that goal

I was hoping for of being invisible.

What's interesting about the internet

is what you're gonna build on top of it for you and for me.

I call it the internet of me.

It is a world where when you walk into a room

the lights dim to your preference level.

You may have music that starts up.

It may even have complex protocols for having

to interact with somebody else's internet of me.

That's interesting,

and the world that will emerge as a result,

eventually you won't even need phones.

The environment will be so wired

that your experience will be brought to you.

Your calls will be brought to you,

your advertising, your content, your work -

all of it will come with you. That's an internet of me.

It is going to take a leap of thought,

a leap of courage... societally

for us to accept a generation

that's always had an egotistical world.

We tell children very often

you have to play with others, you have to share,

your worldview isn't unique.

But when the world, the objects in it

start to tell them that they are,

that they're different, that's egotistical.

But it will also be a magical world,

one where the wave of a hand creates doors moving

and objects changing position.

Imagine a generation that's never known

anything else but that.

I deeply regret the fact

that deep critical thinking

and imaginative thinking,

that creative thinking is lost.

In my opinion, computers and in some sense

the internet are the worst enemy

of deep critical thinking.

Youth of today are using machines

to basically replace

their examination of the things they're observing.

They don't understand what they're looking at

or what they're hearing or what they're learning.

They depend upon the internet to tell them and decipher it.

They look at numbers instead of ideas.

They fail to understand concepts,

and this is a problem.

My hope would be there are still going to be

the appeal of deep immersion in something,

that through the school system

we still subject our kids to,

we can really try to

turn them onto its charms

so they become intrinsically self-motivated to pursue it.

Whether we use science or ancient Greek

or philosophy,

it's those tools that are important.

Those are the things that people

are gonna be able to use in the future.

The actual information they learn in school

won't be important because it'll be dwarfed

by the information that's coming out

on the internet every single day.

Historians I think will also see

an interesting thing.

They'll probably call the time around now

the Digital Dark Age.

It will be very mysterious

because a lot of things happened quickly

but the records will all be lost.

We don't have the handwritten letters

like we have from, you know,

the founders of the Constitution,

The founding fathers.

We have their letters with each other.

We can see the sort of background conversation

in creating the United States government.

We don't have the equivalent

for the background conversation in creating the internet

because it was all done on email.

There's a playful project

called the Wikipedia Emergency Project

that if there's ever going to be possibly

a world changing event, a big volcanic eruption,

Wikipedia volunteers are supposed to

start printing out Wikipedia pages madly

and storing the paper in places

that their heirs could find it later.

Marcel Just: What this scanner measures, it's an MRI scanner,

and it measures magnetic resonance energy

that's emanating from the brain.

So it's really extra sensory.

It's precise enough to tell us

what activity is occurring

in each little volume element

the size of a peppercorn.

When you read a sentence that says

"There are two elephants walking across the savanna"

a computer program can tell that the same thought

is going on in your brain

whether you're watching the video

or reading the sentence.

At a conceptual level it's the same.

It's also the same for people across languages.

There's a universality of the alphabet of human thoughts

and it applies to the videos

that Jack Gallant and his colleagues have found

but also applies to spoken and written speech

so, and it crosses languages.

We have a vocabulary, the brain has a vocabulary

and we're beginning to discover it.

Right now we need this two million dollar machine

that weighs 16,000 pounds,

but you ask, in the future will some genius biophysicist

invent a little cap or helmet that'll do it?

I think that that's likely.

The energy, the electromagnetic energy,

is just sitting there. It's sitting there.

So when you talk about telepathy -

telepathy is communication across a distance.

Well, we can already go a few millimeters

and it's just a matter of time

before we can go thousands of miles.

You could essentially,

in the not too distant future, tweet thoughts.

So not type your little tweet, but think it,

press a button

and all your followers could potentially read it.

Werner: Could you detect,

this woman who is passing by

and spots you, is just about to fall in love with you?

Now that would be an innovation.

That would be the...

the killer application I guess you would say.

Well, I try not to make predictions

about anything less than two trillion years from now -

for good reasons. One is that

no one will be able to know if I'm wrong.

But that's one of the wonderful things

about the future is you don't know where it's gonna go.

And the internet is, like most results in science,

out of control.

And if you think about predictions

about the future as done in the past,

they always miss the important stuff.

In fact, most science fiction

missed the most important thing about the present world,

which is the internet itself.

They had flying cars,

they had rocket ships.

None of that exists,

but the internet governs our lives today.

It used to be

that when you communicated with someone

the person you were communicating with

was as important as the information.

Now on the internet,

the person isn't important at all.

In fact it was developed so that

scientists like me could communicate with each other

without knowing where the other person was

or even who the other person was.

There's a famous cartoon from The New Yorker which says

"On the internet no one knows if you're a dog".

And in the future

you won't know if you're communicating with dogs

or robots or people,

and it won't matter.

But becoming your own filter

will be the challenge of the future.

Because the filter isn't provided with you.

There's no controls on the internet.

No matter what governments do

or no matter what industries do,

the internet is gonna propagate...

out of control

and people will have to be their own controls.

Tom Mitchell: I think in the future, one next step

from computation to communication

will be to sensing and remote sensing.

Werner: And mind reading via the internet?

One of those sensors will be brain imaging sensors.

Werner: And you will transmit thoughts?

(laughing)

The two of you.

Will our children's children's children

need the companionship of humans

or will they have evolved in a world

where that's not important?

It sounds awful, doesn't it?

But maybe it'll be fine.

Maybe the companionship of robots,

maybe the companionship of an intelligent internet

will be sufficient.

Who am I to say?

* (music plays)

* I'm standin' on a corner shovel in my hand

* I'm lookin' for a woman or a workin' man

* Honey, let me be your salty dog *

* Oh, let me be your salty dog *

* I won't be your man at all *

* Honey, let me be your salty dog *

* Let me be your salty dog

* I won't be your man at all

* Honey, let me be your salty dog *

* Well, let me be your salty dog *

* I won't be your man at all

* Honey, let me be your salty dog *

I want you do some...

(applause)