>> Jimmy Jia: Good evening and welcome and thank you for coming tonight to the MIT
Enterprise Forum Program on Science Fiction: the Catalyst for Change. My name is Jimmy Jia,
and I am the Chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest Chapter, and we're really excited to
have you here. The MIT Enterprise Forum is a global organization of dedicated professionals
with 25 local chapters across the world affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute Technology
through the MIT Tech Review. We inform, connect, and coach technology entrepreneurs to
enable them to make rapid transformations of their ideas into world changing companies. This
local chapter is a volunteer run organization and over 70 people per year come to help us be
inspired and educated about things like tonight's technology leaderships programs. Just like all
of our other programs this would not have been possible without our cadre of volunteers
including Jan Greylorn whose the team lead, Rebecca Connor, Brenda Cooper, Glen Hiemstra,
Shirley Lundy, Vicki Owens, Adam Schuster, Jeb Winshi[phonetic] and Alan Steveman. So thank
you very much for your efforts putting this together.
Our programmatic season is also made possible by our sponsors: Frommers Lawrence and
Haug, T-Mobile, Microsoft, Btechnical Graphics, Freelock Computing, MIT Club of Puget Sound,
Puget Sound Video, and SeattleMet Magazine. For the program tonight what we're going to
hear are some stories of people who have been inspired by science fiction when they were very
young and to see how they have taken that and transformed their careers and created the
technologies of our lives. So hopefully we can walk away tonight to be inspired to do some of
that ourselves as well.
So to begin with let’s welcome our panel of authors Greg Bear and Nancy Kress. Both of them
have long lists of successes, long list of awards from Nebulas and Hugos for best science fiction.
But I would have to say few authors have been able to win both awards for the same work. So I
decided to give a little bit of a comparison of how rare that is, and so I kind of the deep into
some of my background which is in chemistry and I went back to my friend the periodic table of
elements. And what I found, and as you know that the higher the atomic number the more
rare the element, the shorter the half-life and the harder it is to create; and what I found was
that in all of human history we've created 75 atoms of copernicium which is element 112 and
80 atoms of thorrrium which is element 114. On the other hand only 16 authors, including
Nancy Kress, has won both the Hugo and Nebula for best novella, Beggars in Spain, and 14
authors including Greg Bear has won the Hugo and Nebula for best novelette for Blood Music.
So in conclusion we can say that a program with both Nancy and Greg is rare in the meetings of
the elements einsteinium and rutherfordium as they walk into a bar.
Now moderating the panel today and guiding our conversation is Jason Pontin the Editor in
Chief and Publisher of the MIT Technology Review. In his role Jason is responsible for the
editorial direction, media platform, business strategy of the widely respected media company.
He is also the Chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum, the global technology entrepreneurial
arm of the company; and he himself was born in London, raised in the Northern California,
although the accent doesn't say that, he was educated in England at the Harrow School and the
University of Oxford. So Jason, please take it away.
>> Jason Pontin: Thank you very much Jimmy. Science fiction is the secret religion of all
technologists which everyone who became a technologist became so because they grew up
reading science fiction which is why every year MIT Technology Review publishes a wildly
unprofitable but very dear to my heart special science fiction issue in which we have published
both the authors sitting to my right. It’s also an experiment in trying to recover the roots of the
golden age of science fiction. The science fiction we publish in the Twelve Tomorrows Special
SF Edition seeks to speculate on technologies being developed now and I'll ask what would
happen to society if they were broadly used. So what I like about both authors tonight is that
though they've done some very far out stuff what they write about is usually deeply based
upon the most current science and technology thinking so this is going to be a treat.
I'm going to begin first of all with Greg, I'm going to ask a few questions also to Nancy, and I'm
going to leave 15 minutes at the end to take questions from the audience. So Greg, Doris
Lessing, the great British mainstream writer won the Nobel in 2007 also wrote science fiction or
at least a kind of slipstream; and when she was asked about science fiction she said this: she
said what people don't realize is that science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our
time. I admire the classic sort of science fiction like Blood Music by Greg Bear. He's a great
writer.
>> Greg Bear: I love Doris, and when she got the Nobel I said go Doris.
>> Jason Pontin: So Greg's first sale was in 1973>> Greg Bear: That was a [inaudible] piece though.
>> Greg Bear: No, no. I got 10 dollars for a story. I was in 11th grade. That was pretty
impressive.
>> Jason Pontin: Whatever it was most of us first encountered Greg through Blood Music which
was published in ’85 and expanded from a short story published in Analog in 1983. I want to
see a show of hands who’s read Blood Music.
>> Greg Bear: What about the rest of you?
>> Jason Pontin: So for those of you who don't know it was the first science fiction novel that
really tackled nanotechnology in a notable way. A socially maladroit Southern California
researcher is banned by his employer from continuing experiments. So he does what we all do:
he injected himself with the Nanobots, the critters proliferate, everything goes very badly, and
that's just beginning of the novel. By the end reality itself is being reprogrammed. So I would
like you to talk a little bit about the genesis and development and the concepts of Blood Music.
>> Greg Bear: Well, Blood Music got started when I read a piece in New Scientist way back in
the good old days like ’81 or ’82 talking about biochips; and these were programmable silicon
chips attached to proteins that you could inject into the bloodstream and then run around
collected data on you and then you could collect them later from a blood sample apparently
and de-program and figure out what was going on. And I suddenly had this moment of
realization, wait a minute, DNA is a computational system. I was wrong, but it was where it
began. I said if you could do this you could actually program DNA and rewrite DNA, use it as a
memory store and as inspiration and everything else, and that's where it began.
So I sent the story off to Analog, actually I sent it to a couple places first, sent it to Omni and my
good friend Ellen Datlow said this is just too weird and it’s too tonky so she rejected it. I’ve
chided her about it ever since. But then I sent it off eventually to Analog. Playboy didn’t like it
either. Too much like sex I guess. Anyway, the folks at Analog, it was a Stan Schmidt at that
point, Stan says okay, you’ve got all of these pieces of DNA and then you’ve got all this memory.
Prove to me that you have enough memory in DNA to make this work. So I sat down and
calculated and used an extremely optimistic figure and he says, okay, we'll publish that. And
doing that little extra work sent me down the track to what would eventually become Darwin's
Radio and everything else which is there was a lot going on in the 80s and hardly anybody was
paying attention to it. A lot of biological companies were working on these things for business
models but the scientists weren’t attention. Certainly an evolutionary biology they were not
paying any attention at all. So I could go down to UCSD and visit the genetics lab there and talk
to people and everything but the companies wouldn't let me in. They didn't want a science
fiction writer talking to their scientists. I said okay, this is going to get interesting. Like the
story as a clue and a mystery that's pretty important. So that's what I was doing back in the
early 80s.
>> Jason Pontin: Thanks Greg. Nancy, you got going a little later than Greg, though having got
the date wrong before I'm not going to guess. When was your first short story sale?
>> Nancy Kress: 1976.
>> Jason Pontin: I would have got that one right. So after that Nancy's first three novels were
fantasy, but then she really moved over to SF mostly in the mid-80s, won a Nebula in ’86 for
Out of All Them Bright Stars, and I’m going to list her Nebulas. Jimmy kind of referred to them
but it's pretty amazing. Best novella 1991, Beggars in Spain; best novelette 1998, The Flowers
of Aulit Prison; best novella 2007, Fountains of Age; best novella 2012, After the Fall, Before the
Fall, and During the Fall; best novella 1992, Beggars in Spain; best novella 2009, the Erdmann
Nexus. So I guess the move to SF worked out pretty well. When you cast your mind back tell us
a little bit about the development, how you decided you were an SF writer, and how you
decided what kind of SF writer you wanted to be.
>> Nancy Kress: Well, as you said, I started out with fantasy and my science fiction has gotten
harder and harder. I don't mean more difficult, although that too, but it has become more
focused on actual science with every five-year interval. And as to why this has happened I don't
really know. My career has not been planned. I’m really in awe of those people who say well, I
have a 25 year plan for writing. I'm going to do this kind of book and establish a brand and then
this kind of a book and build on it. I can't do that. I never could do that.
But ever since I was young I've been a science groupie. I'm not trained as a scientist, I just
marry them. And I really got involved with the idea of science as it translates to technology as it
then affects real people because real people are not really affected by pure science. I don't
mean to slight anybody in this room, of course you’re real people, but the ordinary man in the
street really does not have his life affected by the cosmological constant or string theory. He
has it affected when science becomes technology and technology becomes something that
impacts his life and that's the point where I get really interested. What happens to ordinary,
normal people when technology, new technology comes in and upends everything that goes
on?
My arguably most successful book Beggars in Spain is about people genetically engineered to
never need to sleep; and I wrote this out of sheer jealousy. I need nine hours. I get cranky if I
don't get it, and I really envy those people that need very few hours of sleep. But I wrote it in
1992 and I didn't have a very firm scientific basis for what I did with the genetic engineering. As
time has gone on it's gotten firmer and firmer and firmer.
One of the moments I’m the most proud of is I wrote a book called Oaths and Miracles which
has to do with biological research at Whitehead Biological Research Institute in Boston. It has
to do with a scientist who is murdered while he's investigating envelope proteins. And I got a
call one day from somebody who said, you don't know me at Ms. Kress, but I'm a researcher at
Biological in Whitehead in Boston and we have a researcher who is a womanizer just like your
guy and he's working on envelope proteins and who do you know up here? So we had a 20
minute conversation on envelope proteins, it took him 30 seconds to discover I don't actually
know very much about envelope proteins, but this is what science fiction writers do if you're
not scientifically trained. You take small amounts of interesting not to say fascinating science
and you try to both extrapolate into how they would affect normal people and also try to make
it look like you both a lot more than you actually do.
>> Jason Pontin: Nancy, in Beggars in Spain it's not just that your protagonist Leisha Camden
doesn't need to sleep, that gene therapy is a benefit of a one percent. The gene modeled are
the beneficiaries of an alteration that is not available to a large portion of the population. On
the most current issue of Technology Review is a story about a brand-new technology called
CRISPR-Cas-9 that uses, who knows about CRISPR? So CRISPR is terrifying in some way because
though it has enormous potential right for prevention it can be very tempting to use some of
these technologies for alteration. At least initially those alterations are going to be available to
the very rich.
>>Nancy Kress: Yes. I read that article. And the last line of that article in the current issue of
the Technology Review is a quote from a researcher who says the public has no idea what's
coming. But it is coming. And when I speak to young people I tell them there are going to be
decisions on genetic engineering partly on bacteria, partly on animals, partly on crops and
partly on germline that you are going to have to make decisions about because once the genie
is out of the bottle you can't put it back in. There will have to be decisions made along these
lines.
>> Jason Pontin: Do you worry initially Nancy that, all technologies come down in price, but
initially these are going to be fairly pricey?
>> Nancy Kress: Well, that is what my book is about because when I wrote this I wanted to
create a genetic engineering on human beings that has no downside. Usually when science
fiction does genetic engineering on human beings they create clones that are monsters or they
have weird telepathic properties or there's some kind of strange side effect where they all drop
dead at age 20 of cancer or some weird kind of thing. I wanted to create a genetic engineering
on human beings with no downside. The problem is then you don't have a story because, as I
tell my writing students, fiction is about stuff that gets screwed up. Nobody wants to read a
400 page novel where everything goes well. You might want your life to be like that but that's
not fiction. So in order to have a conflict and a story with a genetic engineering on human
beings where nothing goes wrong I had to look at the sociological implications. What happens
if you start creating that one percent who has an evolutionary advantage; and not needing to
sleep would be a tremendous evolutionary advantage. You get an extra eight hours of life
every single day.
So what it has to do my story the conflict comes from the sleepless and those that have to
actually sleep and because it's inheritable, it’s a dominant gene, it only gets more pronounced
with each generation. And we'll have to face this. There’s only three ways that the control of
genetic engineering can go. It can be controlled by the market in which case the rich people
will eventually get it, it can try to be controlled by the government and we can see what a great
record Congress has of controlling pretty much anything at the moment, or it can be controlled
by scientists themselves as with the recent policy manifesto that just came out of China where
a great many Chinese researchers have agreed to not carry out any more CRISPR and other
experiments on germline embryos partly because the success rate at deleting genes is only 40
percent and inserting is only 20 percent. To do that on mice is one thing, to do it on human
beings is something else entirely. But you can have the scientists try to control it, you can have
the government to try to control it, or you let the market try to control it. And all of those
things have got downsides and that's what I was interested in exploring.
>> Jason Pontin: Greg, in Queen of Angels in 1990 and Slant in 1997 you also addressed social
stratification from therapies. I think in those novels the therapy have access to better jobs to
[indiscernible].
>> Greg Bear: We see that now. We see failure to launch in large portions of our populations,
3 to 7 percent, sometimes more is just a significant problem. These people cannot fit into
society, they go ballistic, and you give them guns you've got a major issue. Well, that happens
far too often and has for centuries. What would happen if you could take a person who has the
potential to not completely launch and give them the potential to launch? It would be like
staying awake longer. They're not dumb most of the time or they don't have fatal mental
errors that just crop up every time you turn around.
Well, society is going to start demanding more and more. If you want to get a job don't go
crazy on us and we don't want anybody who isn't guaranteed to be sane. So I don't know what
that long-term would be, but in Queen of Angels it results in a lot of different approaches and a
lot of pressures and kind of the same thing you get in Beggars in Spain. The whole background
of the story of course is crime, and so my major character is a police detective who has decided
to engineer a body so it works fine to be a police detective or a police person which is also
changed an Oriental physiology to very shiny black skin, orca shiny is how I describe it, to feet
that are like boots to all sorts of things. She's highly adapted to her job. Is she ever going to be
able to go back? She doesn't care. She likes what she does. But in solving crimes what
happens when you don't have that many crimes anymore? When people adapt well enough
not to, and this becomes kind of the Brave New World approach to writing about the future, I
find a lot of conflicts in there and of course a lot of rich people who really don't want to be
controlled in any way. So they may allow themselves to be natural and to be crazy because
that's good for them. We all know that CEOs psychopathic. So once we understand that fact,
and actually there's a certain amount of truth to this. We've met a lot of CEOs over the years
and those who start major companies have to have certain areas of focus which normal people
would stay away from.
>> Nancy Kress: Unlike writers?
>> Greg Bear: We know a lot of writers we could talk about but they don't actually control
whole segments of the economy unless they are Stephen King or Nick [indiscernible]. So this
comes back and forth into what is society, what is adaptability, what is creativity, what is the
society aiming for when it creates individuals of these sorts? And that's a really interesting
question because they are useful. We don't think of it that way. The metaphor I used way back
in the 70s was if you're in a fishing boat you would get up a bunch of minnows and you'd throw
one carp into the tank of minnows as you're going back to the dock and that carp would chase
the minnows all around the tank for hours and days until you got back to the dock and only eat
a few. And the minnows would hate it but it would keep them fit and keep them alert. They
wouldn’t just fall asleep and die floating to the bottom of the tank. Is that what we are talking
about with criminal behavior? If it is and we rid of it what's going to happen to the rest of
society?
>> Jason Pontin: Greg, do you think these technologies have such utility both for individuals
and for society as a whole that the democratization will become an absolute imperative?
>>Greg Bear: Probably. But the one thing I will not bet against is wherever you can make your
kids better or smarter or healthier, any those technologies will be put in place for good or ill at
some point. And so that's all you have to offer.
>> Nancy Kress: In a way they already are without anybody noticing. I can remember in 1978
when the first test tube baby Louise Brown was created and there was yelling and screaming
and the press: we’re creating monsters, we’re playing God; we have no right to do this. Now
there are tens of thousands of IVF babies. You could be one if you were born after 1978. Go
ask your mother. And they're no different than anybody else.
The next step, which also crept in very easily, was you fertilize in a petri dish and you create
maybe six embryos. So once we could scan for certain genetic diseases like Huntington's
Chorea you scan them and if you are carrying these you pick embryos without them. Nobody
really objects much to that. The one after that which is getting there is if we can identify genes
that contribute to other kinds of personality or physical attributes and you start scanning for
those then you haven't crossed a line because you haven’t actually messed around with the
germline yet but that is already going on. I'm told reliable by people in in vitro fertilization.
Even though we are not sure which genes they are we have some idea where some of them, for
instance increased dopamine receptors that tend to produce greater risk takers, and they're
starting to look at those things when they pick out which of the embryos if they have a choice
they want. So it's happening, but it’s happening very quietly and stealthily.
>> Greg Bear: Well, it’s been out there in science fiction for years. We've got to go back to the
1920s. Brave New World talks about all of this.
>> Nancy Kress: I hate that book.
>> Greg Bear: He calls it Balkanization. But you heat up the embryos and they change and then
you get what you want and you decamp them and raise them. Why do you hate it?
>> Nancy Kress: Why do I hate it? Because it does two things that I really object to. One is it
presumes that all of the planet or most of it or even all of the country will have the same
culture and the same control and everybody will be subjected to this. This is why I hated
Gattaca too. You’re never going to get it applied to everybody. The other reason is that
naturally it shows only the negative outcomes of what genetic engineering can be. And I have
done this too. I've written stories with mostly just negative outcomes of science and
technology and it makes me feel a little bit guilty because I'm the biggest science groupie you
ever saw. I have a big gung ho positive attitude towards most science and yet a lot of the
stories I write portray negative outcomes because it makes a better story. It's an ethics issue
that concerns me. Do you think about that?
>> Greg Bear: My stories are about societies that are what we have now which is a mixed bag
and I don't think we’ll ever escape from that. I don't like utopias too much. Dystopias have to
be really interesting and I'm not sure that Brave New World is a dystopia at all. Most of the
people are very happy. There's a lot of sex going on. And then you look at it and you say it's
like a rock music vision of heaven except why do we object? And Huxley is saying I don't know,
I'm not sure I object. And of course he died on LSD in ’63 so we don't know that it was a bad
place.
>> Jason Pontin: [inaudible] is that the hero who confident is a deeply maladjusted and not
particularly attractive individual.
>> Greg Bear: Which is Huxley. Every writer knows this feeling. You just write yourself into the
story and you’re then the carp in the middle of the minnows. But we go beyond that and we
have all the 30s and 40s. We have the Tissue-Culture King, Julian Huxley, another Huxley. He
probably got it from Thomas but he was Darwin's bulldog which sounds like genetic
manipulation to me. And then you add all the things in the 30s and you’ve got all of these
amazing stories be told in the pulp[phonetic] magazines, not just the machine stops or that sort
of story, but the stories of people who have allowed themselves to be intellectually enhanced
so they can't walk anymore.
>> Nancy Kress: Well, the question you're raising is if we got to be happier and better what
would be the effect on society as a whole? If Winston Churchill hadn't been a depressive with a
black dog hanging on him all of the time would he have been as effective?
>> Greg Bear: Would Mark Twain have been as funny?
>> Nancy Kress: Would Mark Twain have been as funny? A lot of writers are depressive which
comes as no news to anybody. So not only do you want to keep the criminals in order to keep
us all on our toes we need to keep the crazy people to keep us>> Greg Bear: Many of you work at Microsoft. You know what I'm talking about.
>> Nancy Kress: Anybody else you think we need to keep the crazy people, the criminals?
>> Greg Bear: There's an interesting thing here. When you talk about what society is and what
it does and what you learn to love is you learn to love your defects. If we look at medieval
culture it’s nothing about the defects. And then we look at say Brave New World or a
Hollywood movie and there's no defects, there's hardly a mole in the entire cast, and you ask
yourself how do actors like Charles Laughton get along in this group of totally beautiful people,
gay and ugly and extraordinarily bright and talented? Well, of course he became a director, but
that's another issue. The whole point is that the mix of society is not under our control for
good reason. What becomes a problem is when you have these tidal surges of impassioned
social causes or political causes or whatever that are like wildfires. They just wipe us out.
Europe has done that so many times. And China of course too. The Asian nations have gone
through this so many times.
I was reading about the Spanish and the Philippines in the 16th century. There's a guy named
Yenta who is bombarding the walls of China in 1580 and he's a Mongol or at least he’s one of
the Steppes tribes. This has been going on for thousand years there. What’s China going to be
like without that? That expands into the historical perspective is how many challenges do you
need? We all would like to live peaceful lives except we don't want to be bored.
>> Nancy Kress: My first science fiction novel, which the New York Times called very too long
because Kress feels the need to say everything twice and I'm afraid they were right,
nonetheless dealt with that problem. What evolutionary advantage is violence to us? One
advantage at least that I posited in the novel is it breaks up existing groups, and when it breaks
up existing groups they become competitive, and when you become competitive new things
emerge out of there that won't happen otherwise. Countries get broken up, tribes get broken
up, civilizations get broken up, and out of that is the possibility of new things coming. But it's a
high price to pay.
>> Greg Bear: I wonder if it’s the same thing as mental illness that if you have mental illness or
depression or the broad category of things we refer to as mental illness well that gives you a
unique perspective that then allows you to put back into society when no one else could do. If
we look at Alan Turing, the incredibly sad story of his life which was also a brilliant story or of
many other great people, certainly in science we can do this, but you say in politics, absolutely
in politics and not just Churchill. Especially English politics is the most disirganized group of
depressive we've ever seen.
>> Nancy Kress: It's the weather.
>> Greg Bear: It's the weather. And we have much the same weather here so that may explain
a lot. But how much does this contribute, how much does your unhappiness contribute to your
greatness? That's a question I'm not sure I want to have answered except for the positive with
affirmations of buckets of cash. If you're going to be crazy then at least you should have a good
sports car, right?
>> Jason Pontin: We have focused on the effects of technology on terrestrial civilizations, but
science fiction has often used extraterrestrial civilizations as a mechanism to disrupt life on
earth or to do other metaphorical things. Greg wrote two joined books, the Forge of God and
the Anvil of Stars where he talked about one potential paradox to the Fermi paradox. So I think
it's fair to say that you're in agreement with Stephen Hawking that we really shouldn’t be
transmitting signals to tell everyone in the universe we're here when we don't know who's out
there.
>> Greg Bear: I was talking about this long before Mr. Hawking brought it up. But he probably
read science fiction as a kid so God knows what he was reading at the time. All you have to do
is read War of the Worlds, that's a long time ago, and you say okay I'm not sure we want the
Martians to know we are here.
>> Jason Pontin: So in the first of the novel, the Forge of God, he has a scene where Earth gets
destroyed, literally blown up in a protracted 30 page section.
>> Greg Bear: It's great. You should read it.
>> Jason Pontin: And in the second book, the Forge of God, the remaining earthlings head off
to their destroyers, Anvil of Stars, forgive me, and they kill them.
>> Greg Bear: But along the way what they have to discover, they’re kids. They’re kid survivors
of Earth and their credo is if you mess with Earth you have to face us. So it’s like a bicycle gang
given the power by an alien technology to go traveling across the stars, not faster than light
speed, they don't give them that yet, but then to exact vengeance. So if Forge of God is a
murder mystery then you've got the vengeance side of it, the law and order side of it that
comes down in Anvil of Stars. And along the way they discover okay, we have to do some
things that aren't good here because of course being bad guys the aliens have totally set
themselves up to be challenging our heroes greatly. So all of that is classic science fiction.
There's nothing particular unusual in all of that.
The whole concept of the universe as an ecosystem, however, is fairly new. The notion that
you have tides of biology spreading around the galaxy probably begins with either Wells or with
Olaf Stapleton and panspermia was nothing for these guys. Remember panspermia came out
when was it, 1900s? Swedish [indiscernible] or whoever it was, and so the ideas have been
around for a very long time; and now we are finding out maybe life didn't begin on earth.
Maybe it didn’t begin on Mars. Maybe it began in the ice moons. And if it began on the ice
moons maybe it didn’t begin there. Maybe it began in the [indiscernible] cloud and where are
we going to go to find all of these beginnings for life? And as we expand our way outward we
are getting farther out into the universe and it’s going to be really interesting to see where it all
ends. We might all be a band of brothers out there, brothers and sisters and of course the
neutrals, and it's going to be fascinating to find this all out.
But what we’re seeing now, news stories get leaked on these new websites whose journals I've
never heard of before and they usually borrow from nature or science or from other scientific
journal and make really sensationalistic headlines which I kind of love, but they're echoing the
science stories and their finding out there's life on Europa. There could be life on Europa.
Maybe it's reaching up to touch us. Who was it that was saying, it was Neil Degrasse Tyson
saying I'm waiting for something in Europa to reach up and lick the camera lens which just
happened in the Ron Paul campaign so I'm not sure [indiscernible] got life and Ron Paul’s camp
or not but certainly something from Europa was there. This is in 2010. This is Arthur C Clark's
thing. He was there at the very beginning. He grabs this and runs with it. What we do is we
listen to the scientists then we say you don't realize how cool an idea that is and I can do
something with that. I love the fact that Arthur was there first because A, you got a book out of
it, sold it for a fair hunk of change and then you got a good movie out of it. And we see the life
on Europa in the movie but people keep saying it as if it’s new over and over. If they make a
science-fiction movie out of it it's not new. It's been around as an idea for a while.
>> Jason Pontin: Now see if we met an extraterrestrial race, as we will one day, what do you
think it will be like?
>> Nancy Kress: I think it depends on what the planet is like. If the planet is fairly earthlike and
if panspermia or some version of panspermia is in fact a fact and they look a lot like a lot more
like us than we think we they do. On the other hand if the planet is something very strange or if
it's an organization of intelligence that is more electronic, for instance, that has to do with
magnetic waves, that has to do with things between the stars that we don't yet understand,
then it could be totally and completely alien to the point where we in no way ever understand
it.
>> Jason Pontin: Could we communicate with such a being?
>> Nancy Kress: I don't know. Science fiction is not really about saying this is what will happen.
It's about saying this is what could happen. Since I'm more interested in what could happen in
the next 100 years I tend to focus a lot of my fiction here and now in short term projection
rather than way out there.
>> Jason Pontin: Let's talk about short term projection. This is a question for both of you.
Technologists make a habit of predicting the future and they often get things badly wrong as
they do their speculation. One particularly famous instance happened on this campus in 1993
when Bill pronounced that 640K ought to be enough for everyone. So do you think it goes for
the science fiction faces similar scenarios? What I’m asking is does science-fiction go through
idea plateaus where there are kind of invention droughts and we cease to be particularly
productive of new ideas?
>> Greg Bear: I think we sometimes have lapses in the appreciation of the ideas that are out
there, but if you take a look at the 20th century there were no droughts. Every decade was
filled with something new and innovative, different writers coming here. Quite often they were
scientists writing, not just Julian Huxley, but you had Eric Temple Bell writing those, John Taine
writing pretty amazing science-fiction stories. HG Wells was fairly well-known, well-educated
scientifically and he would talk to scientists frequently.
So every decade in the 20th century is packed full of these things, but especially in the 20s and
30s when you have a couple writers come in who just knock the game out of the ballpark. Not
the ball, the entire game. And one of them was, I’m going to forget his name, he wrote The
World, the Flesh and the Devil and it was JD Bernal. JD Bernal wrote this book which he was 24,
25 years old and he wrote this book. It's only about 100 pages long and it's a mine. It's a Bible
for science fiction ideas. He's describing giant starships, which we are going to get later on and
people like Doc Smith and so on, he's describing all the things that could happen in technology,
computers, invasions. He’s a 25-year-old bloody science fiction genius who never wrote science
fiction. Instead he went off and pioneered in science and wrote books on science.
Olaf Stapleton was a philosophy major and English professor I believe, but he came out of Egypt
like a lot of mid Navy brats, and I'm the Navy brat, or military brats and he had an upbringing in
an alien culture, went back to England and started thinking about and writing about these
extraordinary histories of the universe and the galaxies and stuff. And one time his wife
remembers him as they’re sitting on the bluff overlooking the beach and they hear these seals
down on the rocks of the beach and the seals are starting to be washed with water. They’ve
been drying on the rocks and they're complaining about being hit by these waves coming in and
Stapleton get this look on his face and he says they sound human, don't they? And she says
they did. And at that point he says what shapes can human beings take down the road given
sufficient time and empathis[phonetic] and in Last and First Men he had 18 different species of
humans spread out over 2 billion years through the decline and heat death of the solar system
basically.
Then we've got nuclear fission and fusion come long and suddenly that ramps up the length of
time in the universe. So what Darwin was requesting was I need more time please. Please
don't just say the sun is going to burn out in a few hundred thousand years because for
evolution to work I need millions if not billions of years. The physicists gave him I think after he
died but at any rate suddenly gave biology a lot of time to mess around and Stapleton realize
that and goes oh my gosh, what we can do with this. In Star Maker he takes that and expands it
out to the universal level and he has entire galaxies acquire intelligence and evolve and talk to
each other and that's it astonishing. But ends the whole in a way that is kind of fraught for
science-fiction because he was not a believer in God per se but he couldn't get away from it.
He could not escape it. So he usually made God into the super alien or the thing he could never
quite understand. And in Star Maker at the end he takes you to the early versions of our
universe made by the adolescent Star Maker before he had figured out how to do it right.
Then, as if to say okay this rug hasn't been pulled far enough and fast enough, he gives you
visions of the later universes that are more complex and amazing and complete than ours all in
one book less than 500 pages long. It just knocks my socks off what they were doing in the
1930s.
>> Nancy Kress: When science fiction gets it right I think there's two ways you can get it right
predictively. One is what you're talking about, a mind like Stapleton’s that can just go take off
into the universe. The other is extrapolating from what's already there. Then people say oh my
God, how did you predict that? But the actual science was already there. A famous story about
this which you may already know is in 1944 Cleve Cartmill wrote a story called Deadline and it
had to do with the creation of a super weapon based on fissions of atoms. And he had gotten
all the information from the physics journals that were there, but when the story appeared
both the author and the editor John W Campbell received visits from the precursor of the FBI,
the OSS, wanting to know how he knew about the Manhattan Project. He did not know about
the Manhattan Project, but the information was there and he was able to take it and
extrapolate from it. That's one form of prediction that I think science fiction is pretty good at.
However, where we are not particularly good is at social movements. The first science fiction
book I ever read was a classic Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke which is an incredible good
place to start if you're going to read science fiction. But if you look at it now he got very
interesting ideas about the science but when they moved to the island, for instance, George
runs off to his new job to investigate what's going to be going on and Jean stays home to figure
out how the oven works because this is her role. Science fiction missed the women's
movement until after the women's movement was already going on in the real world. This has
consistently been true with the social movements in science fiction. We miss those. We miss
the things that change the underlying way that society functions.
>> Jason Pontin: Do you think science fiction is actually worse often at extrapolating social
changes from technological events than mainstream fiction?
>> Nancy Kress: I think mainstream fiction is no longer interested in technological changes.
The science fiction novel is really the inheritor, I know Greg would agree with me on this, of the
Victorian novel which looks at a broad area of society and large questions of society. Dickens
was interested in Oliver Twist in the whole question of how does the Industrial Revolution
affect people? How does affect the people at the bottom? What does this do for society as a
whole? The modern mainstream novel doesn't do that very much anymore. A couple people,
Jonathan Franzen, but a lot of modern novels are focused on very narrow small groups of
people, a marriage, a village. It’s science fiction that is looking at the inherent as an inheritor of
the Victorian novel that is looking at society in a broader way and I think that's one of the things
that we need to do and we are doing.
>> Greg Bear: Gregory Benford may have blown open the story of, and I haven't confirmed all
of this not even he can confirm it, but the whole notion of Cleve Cartmill and astounding 1940s.
In the 1930s, 1939 in fact, New York Times had published news of the fission of the atom, Otto
what’s his name and of course Leese Minor who wasn't given much credit at that point. But
then Leese says can we get through the next war or can we get through without actually
creating an atomic bomb? Well, in November of 1944 John Campbell wrote the same thing in
an editorial in which he says November 1939 Campbell says, can we give get through this
coming war without building an atomic bomb? So it was in the air. It was definitely in the air.
But he had an instrument that would go to every single scientist and probe them deeply and he
knew this. He didn't have any prejudice about how many people read Astounding. He sold 600
copies of this magazine every month at MIT in the 60s. He knew that there had been this
cluster of forwarding addresses in the Southeast and he says what's going on out there? It's
1943, things are getting started up, and Benford actually talked to Edward Teller about this
when they were hanging out in the 60s. Benford was a graduate student working with Teller
and Mr. Teller had an artificial leg and was swimming and they were swimming together and
Benford says well, did you guys get your copies of Astounding delivered out to Los Alamos?
And Teller says oh, yes, yes. We all read them and we sat around in the evenings and talked
about them he says. And I'm going Benford didn't make this drawing conclusion but I says oh
my God, they're talking about science fiction stories at night at Los Alamos with FBI agents
sitting in the corners taking notes and they said, did you read the story by this guy Cleve
Cartmill with an atom bomb in it? Do you think that's successful or not?
Now why did Campbell set this up? A, he published many stories like this, but it was in the
news he thought about it and then he says maybe if I get Cleve, and he often did this, if I give
Cleve an idea and he writes it and I get feedback I know the answer then. And when the FBI
knocked on his door and says can you tell us about this he goes to himself quite secretly and
doesn't talk about it for the rest of the war he says it’s happening. He could use his own
magazine as a social probe and that's how I put the story together, but at least we have the
facts of magazines were delivered, scientists read them, scientists talked about them.
>> Nancy Kress: Can you confirm something for me that I heard recently? I heard that Wernher
von Braun all through World War II received copies of Astounding through a dead drop in
Switzerland because he wanted to keep reading it.
>> Jason Pontin: Yep. That's a great story. I'm going to take some questions from the
audience, but I've got one last question for>> Greg Bear: Von Braun was a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft too. He loved getting the books.
>> Jason Pontin: That's strange. So I asked this question of Neal Stephenson, the first edition
of Twelve Tomorrow's and asked it to Gene Wolfe last year and they both gave very different
answers. What is a science fiction for? What does it do?
>> Nancy Kress: I think it does a lot things. One of them is we've already said is exploring what
the effect of science translated into technology will be on society as a whole as represented in
individual people that are in the stories. I also think it can take on some of the large themes
like what are we here for? Is there a reason for us to be here? Where is the race as a whole
going? I think that's what is for to be large. When I read for the first time Childhood’s End
three pages in I was just enraptured. This was a canvas big enough and I hadn't seen any
canvases big enough up till then. I think that's what science fiction is for to have a canvas big
enough to answer some of the largest questions as well of some of the very tiny ones such as
what will this piece of technology do to this particular child and this particular place? It has
enormous range.
>> Jason Pontin: Greg?
>> Greg Bear: I think science fiction is the best way train set a kid ever had. Orson Welles
talked about a movie studio that way. I feel that way about science fiction because A, if you
write science fiction often enough you have the excuse to go and talk to scientists who are
doing it. And if you're talking to them every so often you’ll spark an idea and they'll go off and
do something that you're kind of thinking of and that's fun too because you can mess around
without having to get a PhD. Although some of my friends like Benford and [indiscernible] do
have PhD's and they lord it over us poor English majors.
>> Nancy Kress: Don't I know it.
>> Greg Bear: Actually they don't which is quite astonishing. In the community of science
fiction I’ve hung out with, I think Jerry Pournelle has seven PhD’s and he still occasionally takes
advice from us liberal English majors. But I’ve met so many interesting folks and I’ve met so
many interesting monsters through science fiction. You don't know when they’re going to
become one or the other and it's like a giant zoo of human nature that's expressed writ large
and up here in the Northwest we get a slightly different slice than I did when I lived in the South
West.
In the Northwest we get the whole beginning of, at least the continuation of the computer
culture. In Los Angeles I saw the beginning of the science fiction film renaissance in the 1960s
and 70s. And we'll get to haul Ray Bradberry are around to different special effects studios and
used him as a Trojan horse so all the executives go exit over here and I can go talk to the
personal effects guys. And Ray was fabulous, but meeting the science fiction writers in Los
Angeles, getting together at Caltech. They had a big conference at Caltech, a great panel of
David Gerald, Robert Heinlein Harry Harrison, who else was there? All kinds of cool folks were
there. Jerry Pournelle was there waxing poetic about black holes and so on.
>> Nancy Kress: Can I quote you that science fiction writers are basically a zoo?
>> Greg Bear: Absolutely. Let me finish this story. The story is that as we are going through
this Jerry is pontificating about black holes and suddenly this shorter gentleman, kind of
handsome, stands up in the back row and I look around and he says well, we can’t be sure
about black holes not necessarily leading to white holes and space travel or time travel. He said
we don't know enough about them yet. And I suddenly realize, oh my God, that's Richard
Feynman and he's contradicting Jerry. Jerry goes I bow to the expertise of a Nobel Prize
winner, he says. That's the proper attitude. In that audience was Fred Hoyle, Richard Feynman,
Heinlein who they all came there to see very likely. And Heinlein was having a ball. What an
amazing confluence of culture there. And of course shortly before that we'd had Arthur C
Clarke and Heinein and so on being interviewed as the moon landing was taking place. So this
is what science fiction is. It's a great toy train.
>> Jason Pontin: We have a mike here. Give your question, say who you are and where you're
from and though short statements are accepted questions are more polite and interesting. This
guy is beating you to it.
>>: Tim Mack, formerly president of the World Future Society so a lot of you probably know
me. I think that science fiction is the place to answer and ask the unanswerable and the
unaskable questions. The biggest thing I think are unforeseen and unexpected consequences.
Technology, social impact, economic disaster, the kinds of things that people don't want to
think about but can be safely thought about in a fictional setting.
>> Jason Pontin: Like jokes.
>> Greg Bear: There's a great connection between science fiction and jokes. Having hung out
with a few comedians who are brilliant I realized okay, science fiction is difficult, dying is easy,
comedy is hard. Comedy is the science fiction brain turned on its head and quite often there
are people like Douglas Adams and so on who really can do both very, very well who never
quite believed it because you can't have funny science fiction. He did it and he was brilliant a it.
>>: I’m Charles Nelson. I'm representing [inaudible]. I've a bit of a statement but it’s really a
question. [inaudible]. I’m of the position that AI’s can only inevitably [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: it's called children.
>>: Microsoft, great institution, best money the world can buy, puts out [inaudible]. That’s one
example. The other is [inaudible] is given the ability to reason about anything it wants it's not
bounded how can it not look at mankind and say they’re the problem?
>> Greg Bear: It's called Colossus: the Forbin Project which didn't realize how buggy it was.
>>: Nancy, do you worry about AI’s?
>> Nancy Kress: No, I don't because from what I've been told we are a long way from having
one and it seems to me there are things we can worry about that are a lot closer. But when you
said we are the problem the story of mine that won a Nebula most recently is called After the
Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall and it deals with the Gaia theory which is that the Earth is a
self-regulating system not necessarily conscious that will change anything that is threatening
life on it. For instance, the seas should be a lot saltier than they are with all the silt that’s
washed down from the river but there are mechanisms in the bottom of the ocean to correct
that. The thing that's threatening the earth the most right now and life on it is us so steps are
taken by feedback mechanisms in order to correct that. Things like that worry me a lot more
than AI because they're a lot closer.
>> Greg Bear: Yeah. Well, AI is amazingly difficult. A, we have to understand ourselves, and we
are not very good at that. Especially nerds. I'm a nerd and I have a hard time understanding
what I A, need to do or what to do; and when we talk about artificial intelligence is they must
be socially integrated to work and designing the interface on any system whether it's software
or human individuals the interface is so utterly crucial and it's where everything fails. Easy to
use is hard to do. Easy to be is hard to do. So when we see people who go blithely through life
never raising a ripple of disdain behind them that's fascinating. What's going on there? Maybe
we should look to that for artificial life.
>>: This is a question mainly for Nancy. My name is Victor Mulligan and I'm [inaudible] Institute
for Protein Design. I've always been a science fiction fan too. One thing that you said kind of
struck me as surprising. You said that science fiction poorly anticipates social movements or
social change and you used the example of feminism, but one reason I've always liked science
fiction and always found it interesting is that it often anticipates or even provides a medium for
sparking social change. Examples I can think of are with the example of feminism John
Wyndham's writings in the 60s, the Trouble with Lichen, for example, Star Trek 1966 has a
multiracial cast, puts a Russian on an American starship.
>> Nancy Kress: Okay. Let's start with Star Trek. You remember the episode in which Captain
Kirk is transferred into the body of a woman and of course completely spruced up because
women can can't captain a starship? Yes, there's always a few outliers, but in general the
women's movement in the late 60s was starting to gather strength. Betty Freidan’s
groundbreaking work was what, ’63, ’65? And it was already starting to gather work before the
whole wave of feminist SF writers, Joanna Ross and James Tiptree Junior of course was Alice
Sheldon, and all of those writers began addressing feminist issues directly in science fiction.
There's a famous story about Ursula Le Guin who I think absolutely walks on water. She wrote
a story called Nine Lives which has to do with cloning. It is a wonderful story. And she sold it to
Playboy in 1969. They published a lot of science fiction, although I'm sorry they didn't like
Blood Music. She sold Nine Lives and the editor, who I think might have been Hugh Hefner
himself at that point, the fiction editor, called her up and said, I'm quoting her now, asked very
gently if she would mind if they published the story under UK Le Guin because their readers
were not comfortable with female writers. And the interesting part is that Ursula said she
agreed because, and I'm quoting her now, I didn't see in 1969 that it was important. Later on of
course she and all the rest of us would see that it was extremely important, but the women's
movement was already gearing up, and in a lot of cases science fiction has followed what has
been going on in the social movement. Yes, Lieutenant Ohura was a sort of a role model but
she's the only woman on there and notice>>: [inaudible].
>> Nancy Kress: Yeoman Rand is a glorified maid and Lieutenant Ohura is a communications
expert where women have always been assumed to be good at communicating but don’t let
her run a starship.
>> Greg Bear: So you know the story about what happened when Michelle Nichols met Martin
Luther King.
>> Nancy Kress: I do. And it was a step, but it was only a tiny step and it followed is my point.
>> Greg Bear: But the point was that what Martin Luther King was saying to her was you can't
quit Star Trek just because they're not giving you good line. My entirely family watches that
show every Saturday because it's an integrated future, it gives us hope.
>> Nancy Kress: It’s one little tiny, tiny toehold at a time when the larger women's movement
was not doing one tiny toehold. It was ready to demolish the entire damn staircase.
>>: Hello. My name is George Smith. I'm from SouthernCalifornia, loved science fiction
growing up, 42 years of writing software. That's where I'm at now.
>> Greg Bear: And you’re 44 years old, right?
>>: No. I wanted to, the question will be at the end of this little bit to address the control of the
technology that you brought up. I'm concerned that with the new Gilded Age we are in and the
potential of a market to buy that one tenth of one percent of the power and the fact that we
are constantly spewing out entertainment as bread and circuses to dull the masses how do we
address, try to keep it from turning into that, turning into the sheep and the shepherd?
>> Nancy Kress: I don't know. I wrote, the whole Beggars trilogy, there's three books,
delineates this problem. What do you do when a large portion of the population is not
economically necessary because robots or other methods have taken over what jobs they used
to hold? And yes, the usual answer is well you have to tool up skills, you have to learn new
skills, you have to ramp up to a higher level. Not everybody can do that for socioeconomic
reasons or intellectual reasons or whatever. There are going to be a lot of people who don't
have a place in the future unless we do something, and I don't know what it is we should do.
>> Greg Bear: Crowd sourcing. You get a lot of people to attack a single problem and you just
put together the compilation of everything they're suggesting and put a shepherd over it and
watch what happens. The fact is if we cut back now from say 7 billion human beings to 200,000
human beings that's severe brain damage. We have on this planet right now the greatest
potential for unused human ability, not intellect; I’m not talking just intellect, unused human
ability imaginable. We haven't developed the social structures and the political structures
necessary to take advantage of this. Why? Because we so think in medieval terms not just on
male, female principles but on the basic notion between what makes a person smart and what
makes a person rich. Now the rich have got to be smarter than people who aren't rich. I've
heard rich people say that. Why can't I have a baby? Because I'm rich. Isn't that a qualifier
evolutionary-wise? No. Look at royalty. But as we get into this we get through all of these
issues there is so much unused potential here. It's like having a mine.
>> Nancy Kress: We can't that potential until we can feed, them, until we can provide clean
water, until we can provide at least minimal education and those are the kinds of things we
have to address first and we are not.
>> Greg Bear: No, because right now we are going through a very tough time where the
Confederate states of America have risen again. And it's not just our country that's doing this.
It's a real resurgence of old-line class-based conservatism that's really astonishing to watch
because it's a historical resurgence.
>> Jason Pontin: You have the last question, sir.
>>: Hi. I'm Joe Beer, Chief Architect to Puget Sound Energy and I've been reading sci-fi since I
think I was eight years old. But a bit lighter question. So you guys know the late Terry Pratchett
and he mixes together social issues, technology, fantasy. Do you ever feel like you'd like to
change styles a bit and maybe introduce a bit of magic or fantasy to solve problems in your
stories?
>> Greg Bear: I've written ghost stories, horror stories, I’ve written science fiction horror
stories, I've written fantasy, I’ve written medieval ethics with a guy here in our audience, and
it's great fun to switch around and do stuff.
>> Nancy Kress: If you're writing fiction that is trying to focus on what Hawthorne called the
truth of the human heart then fantasy works just as well as science fiction. If you're trying to
write fiction that is looking at possible futures it is rehearsals for possible futures then fantasy
doesn't quite make the cut because we are not going to have a fairy suddenly emerge in order
to affect the way our societies are going. I'm not putting fantasy down. I'm a fantasy fan. I'm
hooked on Game of Thrones. I was extremely upset last Sunday night at the way that it went
and I wish George would write faster. I think fantasy has a place in exploring the things that
fiction explores in terms of the truth of the human heart but I don't think it’s as useful for
looking at the future especially the near future as science fiction is.
>> Jason Pontin: Ladies and Gentlemen>> Greg Bear: When I wrote my fantasy novels I kind of borrowed some ideas from Paul
Patterson who did both fantasy and science fiction both extremely well. The Broken Sword he
took elvish genetics and culture and psychology, fairy culture basically, and ran with it. I said
this is cool. What more can we do with this? So I have fairy culture come back to earth and
have severe problems interacting with human beings. Now we have urban fantasy, which takes
us as a given, but it's always been there with things like vampires and supernatural beings and
so on. And I think that if you take a look at a novel like Dracula it is very much a sociological
document not only written by an Irishman but it's about an upper-class guy who likes to suck
the blood out of all the poor people around him. And it was only until the 1970s that suddenly
we started romanticizing it. Poor Frank Langella becomes a romantic Dracula and then the
women realize oh, we can save him from that, and at that point feminism goes right out the
window. Dracula was pretty powerful social commentary.
>> Jason Pontin: Ladies and gentlemen: Greg Bear, Nancy Kress.
>> Jimmy Jia: Well, thank you very much for that wonderful talk. And as we change gears a
little bit a small rehearsal for the future ourselves. I do want to also let you know that our last
program of the year is our demo competition which will be held June 11 in Seattle at the Union
Square Boardroom, and it's where we gather six competitors of different companies and watch
their innovative pitch and we will have judges there and audience participation, etc so please
feel free to come down and take a look at that event.
Our next speaker tonight is Professor Paul Yager, Professor of Bioengineering at the University
of Washington. He holds degrees from Princeton and University of Oregon and he his field of
research is in a microfluidics, technologies that create portable, rugged, and cheap devices for
use in blood tests.
When he's not masquerading as a professor during the day, which he seems to do very well, he
satisfies his entrepreneurial urges by implementing these solutions that he's created in the
developing worlds and really put into practice what he's creating inside the labs. So, Paul.
>> Paul Yager: So I worry about point of care diagnostics and I feel like after all that huge scope
we just dealt with for the last half-hour I feel like I'm shrinking it down to a timing thing.
Hopefully there's some issues. So I've got to say I grew up in the future like it a lot of you guys.
I grew up in a public library around the corner from my house in New York City. There was a
science-fiction section where I very early on started plowing through every book they had and
eventually started begging for money but I will say, and I'll bring it back again, at age 12 Star
Trek happened for me. And Star Trek you have to just think about what it was like.
I grew up in New York City where you’d go and you look at billboards, some of them by
wonderful scientists, showing how big the blast zone was going to be and who was going to die
when the bombs dropped and how big our bombs were and how big the Russians’ bombs were.
It was a scary time. The idea that there was a future was not at all certain. It really wasn't
clear. The fiction at that time was saturated in the theme they were going to wipe ourselves
out completely off the map. And then along comes this show we’re not only going to make it
but it will be pretty cool and all those social things are going to be solved. And that was a real
breath of fresh air for a lot of us and you can't have that happen to you at age 12 and not be
interested in it. It also had things like green slave girls, and as a 12-year-old who wouldn't pay
attention to those. It also had this guy and while he wasn't necessarily my favorite character in
the show at the time there he is with that tricorder and it's become this obsession that what I'm
supposedly doing is making a tricorder. So let me look at that and terms of a tricorder and
what we are talking about here.
That medical tricorder was interesting. I would argue that if you look at the sick bay, and for
those of you who don't get it I hope most of you this is the sick bay on the Enterprise, we kind
of did that. What we did over the last 50 years is we basically built out that Star Trek sick bay in
our modern hospitals and we've got everything up to and including robots and diagnostic
things, fantastic tools; and I would say thank you bioengineers, which I am these days, because
they made all that stuff and at enormous expense I might add, but it's really, really good if you
happen to be in the hospital. It's a great place to be. It isn't however decentralized; it's very
centralized. And part of what I've been trying to deal with is what we can do to decentralize
some of that medical technology.
So you may recognize this. If you don't that is the Star Trek communicator. What happened
that we didn't really get I think the science-fiction people or anybody looking was that this
would happen. Look how close those things are guys. That isn't an accident. The answer is
that people sat and they said dammit, I want to have that thing just like Captain Kirk and now
we all do or at least something even better than that. The idea that the computation that
would be involved was even conceivable was not possible. You look at the really good science
fiction stories and as computers got better and better and they got intelligent they became the
size of stars in the 1950s and 60s science fiction. The idea that they could actually be small and
move around is a radically different idea, and I would argue that medicine really needs to catch
up and figure this out. It's happening with all of us doing stuff but it hasn't quite clicked yet and
that's a sort of space I'm working in plus the Internet that moves the data any place. It's a
whole new way of dealing with things including medical data that we are still trying to figure
out how to deal with.
So for me what I'd like to do is have decentralized disease diagnosis be something that we can
do wherever you are. I focus mostly on infectious disease, but there are other things it could
deal with. So the phone talks to your medical records which talks to the doctors, talks to the
ER, and it’s all part of an ecosystem that allows you to stay healthy wherever you are. And
thanks to the cell phones being quote, free, meaning I don't have to build that technology, we
can piggyback on top of that with things that might be cheap and disposable.
So to treat a disease you really have to know what's causing it. So if you’re thinking infectious
diseases you might have symptoms, spots, cough, temperature, those are shared by a lot of
diseases. You might also want to know about the patient history. If you had the flu two weeks
ago and you're still coughing it might be a superinfection on top of that, you can learn things
from the history and plus the environment. A problem, particularly in the developing world, is
if you look at what happens to people who get sick with a high fever, maybe a bad headache in
the tropics they say well, malaria is endemic, let’s treat you for malaria without actually figuring
out whether it was one of six or seven other things and they give you the wrong meds. So it's a
problem here; it's elsewhere.
How you actually diagnose the real cause? Well, one thing is you look at how the body
responds to the disease, antibodies, things that are generated by the body in response to that
infection and they're very, very good they’re just kind of hard to detect because it's hard to
measure them in many ways. Alternatively, we go for parts of the pathogen itself which is
really the best way to do it. You go either do it from the proteins on it or even better yet these
days the DNA and RNA of the bacteria or viruses. That's really good because it’s exquisitely
sensitive to pick up DNA and RNA.
So what we do in our lab is we are trying to identify the pathogens, bacteria, viruses, protozoa,
etc., singly or in panels of maybe up to a dozen, not thousands, not hundreds, but dozens at
this point based on the technology we are working on. We want it fast, fast enough that you
could do it quickly at home before you had to hop in your car and drive somebody to the
hospital; anytime, anywhere, which means it could be in a hospital, but it could be in a
physician’s office, laboratory, at pharmacy where you can get the drugs right away, at home, or,
as my friends like to say, under a tree in the developing world. The Gates Foundation is level 0;
by anyone meaning simple enough that we could all do it without having to read a six page
manual; and ideally that process would lead to, through the Internet, access to the best both
diagnostic and therapeutic advice by the Internet and bring that out of the laboratory and shall
we say out of the sick bay to wherever you are.
So we sort of had a rule of how simple this has to be. And this is what we call the user
experience. One of my grad students, Sam, so we have a pouch, you tear open the pouch, and
there's something inside typically, big enough that you could handle it but not so big that you
wouldn’t be afraid to have a few in your medicine cabinet. Grab, in this case a swab, and let's
say you're trying to swab your nose. In this case no noses were harmed in the making of this
particular movie, we do a little thing which we call the one hertz twirl where you actually dip
this into a liquid that sits inside the device which then you close the box and then you walk
away. Stuff happens inside the box. You don't have to do anything. You can go read the
newspaper, take a walk, things happen inside the box. And what's happening inside the box is
the stuff that would happen in the big laboratory but without the big lab, without a power cord.
Then, when you're done, what we'd like to do because those cell phones are free is use them to
pick up the information maybe in a way that you can't even interpret at all and then that image
that you take with your cell phone turns in the data you can send to any place on the planet. So
that's something all of us know how to do, it's a selfie of your health data, it should be fairly
comfortable for most of the current generation. That's all the user experience would be. At
that point that's when the healthcare providers may get involved. So we're starting inside the
box with a very simple technology. It's lateral flow paper technologies. Those of you who have
ever had or used a pregnancy test kit know what these things are like. They can be very simple
and they are simple. They're good, they're inexpensive, but then they're not very sensitive.
They're a little complex for certain types of things and they’re dumb in the sense they don't do
very many things.
So we came up with the idea a few years back of what we call two-dimensional paper networks.
Think of it as a way of programming in paper that if you have something where you have let's
say this has just got food dye on those pads, can you bring the lights on just a hair? I think I can
do it myself. Hold on. I'm doing something. Are the lights actually getting dimmer? All right.
That was half a second. It doesn’t say that they’re off there but there's a lag obviously.
So what's going to happen the wick lowers the water level, it increases the humidity, watch
here and imagine you have let's say antibodies or some other detection stuff happening there.
So we dunk this thing into water and the water moves up, it dissolves the food dye which could
be reagents store dry and then they move one at a time over that detection zone. We’ve
programmed in a physical process out of paper. It is dirt cheap to do this and we put
chemistries into it but it's a very, very simple way of thinking about how you could do all the
complicated pipetting steps or robot steps that we do in labs today without any of that and put
it in a box and make it cheap enough to give to anybody.
This is an actual one of our projects, a 6 million dollars project from NIH is actually an influenza
test to make it more sensitive. What you're seeing is a device that we've designed to make very
sensitive Immunoassays. This is a single spot, it's sort of early phase, but it does everything we
want and it’s done entirely with bits of paper, a little bit of plastic, and a sponge or two. The
sponge is a great story but it's another movie.
We are working on that project very closely with David Baker because we are not just
engineering the paper stuff we are actually engineering the molecules. David Baker, and I know
there was someone here from Institute for Protein Design, fantastic group of people designing
molecules from the ground up. This is an example of proteins being designed by David Baker's
group not only to bind to the influenza virus code proteins but actually we glue some of them
down on paper and we use it as a way to grab whole viruses or parts of the virus to actually
make the measurements. It's exquisitely sensitive and relatively fast and we can do it in
something that you could dispose of easily at home and cost a few bucks.
The harder project we are working on is actually with DARPA and DARPA only does things that
are, as they say, DARPA hard and then we have to do them DARPA fast. So what about nucleic
acids? In theory you cannot only do this, it's similar because you're grabbing part of the
pathogen, but because you're talking about DNA or RNA in theory and in practice you can look
at one single copy which means it's as insensitive as you can possibly get. So our challenge was
to take a standard lab technique and squeeze it into a box about this big. You get a little bit of
complexity but it’s not too bad. So inside we are using swab transfer again like you saw, then
we have to break open the cells whether they’re that bacteria or viruses, then we amplify and
we use a method called isothermal application that's one of several that allows you to make
lots and lots of copies or from 1, 2, 10, or a few hundred going in. When you're done you’ve
got about 10 to the 12th copies which is so many this actually easy to use the same lateral flow
thing you do in the pregnancy test and get a result.
So this is a run we did back in July. We sort of set a deadline and said okay, we've got to make
it work. So there was someone about to bring in the swab with the one hertz twirl. In a couple
of seconds Lisa is going to close the box once she’s done the twirling and then the timer will run
through the time course of the whole test. It's fortunately sped up a lot so you don’t have to sit
here for the 50 minutes it takes. But what's happening is we are lysing and we use an internal
heater that actually cooks the sample and makes sure the release the DNA, then we run the
lysed sample into an amplification zone which cooks it at 50 degrees C for about 30 minutes, in
this case we can probably do it in 15 but that's a whole other story, and when it's done another
valve opens, releases the fluid into lateral flow strips, and if you look right at those two little
lines up by the QR code you’ll actually see lines developing in the next couple of seconds, a
couple little red lines. Then we go bring out our phone and take a photograph with the phone
and that phone, which is actually conveniently in a cardboard box the size of the device, gives a
sample to result in 50 minutes.
We ended up doing just two strips. We could do probably six or eight of them at the most. So
we could run a panel of about 12 assays at once on the device. I'll skip that. It's gotten more
sensitive. This was done about two weeks ago. We got down to the point if you look over here
you'll see it’s 10 to the 2 so we are down about 100 copy sensitivity for the device split two
ways so it's 50 copies per channel. That is within an order of magnitude or two of the
theoretical sensitivity so we are pretty happy with it. It's pretty exciting. This is only DNA. RNA
is about a month behind so hopefully next month I'll show you equally good results on RNA
viruses.
Next we want to do everything we can do with the samples, so it could be nasal swabs, buccal
swabs, vaginal swabs for HIV, whole other story, or an environmental swab to see if there's
norovirus on the deck of your ship. We're interested in blood samples so we want to start to
move to blood samples and finally urine samples because that’s a great place to look for things
like STDs like gonorrhea and chlamydia.
We have two versions of this. One of them is the all electrical version that I showed you which
actually is the one we ran which uses two AA batteries and an Arduino to run it. The other one
being worked on with us in path uses the meals ready to eat heater and the whole thing uses
no electricity, no wires whatsoever, and when it's done you could put it in the fire and burn it to
ash which if you're thinking about medical waste disposal is a really, really good thing.
What can we do it? Well, there's a lot of things beyond diseases in humans. There's a lot of
agricultural uses for this if the cost is low enough, a lot of people are very interested and I will
say on the ag side one of the people that approached us at one point was Monsanto, and you
can imagine what they wanted to with it and we sort of went, no, that's the evil side; we are
not talking to them. Like I said, there's lots of ethics you can get into. Hospitals crossing
borders, you could even think about the next pandemic because one of the things if you look at
what happened with the Ebola epidemic was they couldn't get the diagnostic stuff to where the
people were and there were times when people took six days and they died on the way to
finding out whether they had Ebola or not. That's nuts in the 21st century. We've got to fix
that. And this kind of technology could bring this right to where the thing is, airdrop in a load of
1000 and you're ready to go diagnosis wherever it is and you don't need a bunch of technicians
in MOPP 4 gear.
So, yes we can do this, no it's not the medical tricorder. It's not because it doesn't have that
cute thing that you wave over and does MRI. It doesn't measure blood pressure, it doesn't do
all the cute things you can see on the screen of the medical tricorder. On the other hand, the
medical tricorder works without touching the patient, we love that it senses all medical relevant
things for parameters of humans and aliens, the ones we haven't met yet. It's got a permanent
instrument so there's no trash which I guess is good, it comes in a handy carrying case which is
always good, only McCoy, on the other hand, know how to use it. We don't know how to use
that thing and he's not telling and it only works in the Star Trek universe.
So if you look at the MAD NAAT which is the nucleic acid, again it does require moving samples
from people, swab up your nose, pee in a cup, something like that; so far it only detects
pathogens or you can imagine for DNA sequence you could be typing tumors, you could look for
birth defects, and could look for a wide range of things with it. It’s disposable; it's a lot smaller
than the actual devices. In fact, it’s exactly this big. So if you want to see it at some point later
I'll be happy to show you one of the actual widgets and this is a functional version simple
enough for all of us to use and might soon be commercially available in this universe. Fingers
crossed.
So my argument, my closing argument is perhaps this inequality is true. My hope is this could
actually be something we can bank on in the near future and by using the free thing on the left,
I still think of it as free, plus some relatively inexpensive portable technology we can do better
than even Bones. I want to say thanks to my group. They're the guys that do all the work. It's
an incredible group of people and they contributed everything you saw over there, money from
NSF, and IAD and DARPA, and finally I make lots of fun pictures and that's how I get my group
going in the same direction. Live long and prosper.
>> Jimmy Jia: It's now my pleasure to introduce Rick Rashid, Founder of Microsoft Research
and the CTO of the Application Services Division here at Microsoft. As we met last night he
mentioned that he speaks so frequently this is the third introduction that you're getting this
week, different talks. So formerly he was introduced this week at the University of Rochester
where he received an honorary doctorate from the Institute that granted him his first doctorate
in the first place but this time he didn't have to actually write a thesis for it. But he's also been
inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, has won
IEEE Awards, B. Manuel Peoria[phonetic] Awards, and a host of other different awards. So Rick,
thank you very much.
>> Rick Rashid: Thanks Jimmy. I was just getting a time check. So I just want to point out my
bonafides here. You notice we're both wearing Microsoft shirts? Microsoft red shirts. Actually
I did, this is back in the mid-1990s, I actually did an event at the Maidenbower. I did a skit on
stage with James Dunn[phonetic] who, for those of you who know, used to actually live in this
area. He had a place up on Union Hill and frequented the QFC in Redmond and so you could've
seen him walking around. It was a really fun thing although I kind of treated it like my high
school play. I memorized the whole script that they handed me a week beforehand. He was a
professional actor. He knew there was going to be a teleprompter so he just read off the
teleprompter. So I was emoting but he was just reading. So it was fine. He was great. I really
loved the time I spent with him there.
I'm also half of the character in one of Greg's books that got mentioned so I’ll just throw that up
there. This is the title I kind of wanted to use. I like this title but then I did some searching and
I realized that Steve Jobs had used this to title or at least something very close to it back in
1983. Boy, the things you find in the Internet. How would you ever find that? So I thought that
was kind of cool. I wanted to do something he had already done.
It's always charming to kind of look at the way people thought the future might be. I mean
there's obviously science fiction. You probably wish that Mars was kind of like that and
certainly the international space station would be kind of nice that way, but in fact all we got
our these little trundle marks where the Rover went through and international space station
doesn't look nearly so cool nor do the vehicles that actually go up to it when they actually make
it the whole way.
Paul was just talking a little bit about things about the Star Trek communicator, obviously
Arthur C Clarke, envisioned the communication satellite fairly early. In Star Trek you'd often
see them with these things called data crystals. People say well, we don't really have data
crystals, but we actually do. Here's memory stick, we store our data on crystals, it doesn't look
quite so cool but it's blue so there’s got to be something to be said for that.
Of course scientists are always right when they're trying to predict the future. Obviously Edison
kind of had a vested interest in the direct current so this might not have been so much a
prediction as a hope. Albert Einstein I found this quote, I don't know if it's really real or not, but
it would seem to indicate that either he wasn't really sure this was going to happen or that he
knew it was going to happen and he didn't want to be arrested by the FBI or the predecessor
agency. Of course there are all sorts of things you can predict. I mean here's Arthur C Clarke
talking about real estate trends of the future, this idea that maybe the whole communities
would be moving to have a change of scenery, and it kind of actually happens. You have all
these sunbirds that go down to Arizona or Southern California and it's pretty much like a wave
if you go down on the highways there. So this probably was a vendor thing because they're all
the same but I just try to convey that attitude.
Obviously in the computer field it's been hard to predict the kinds of changes that would go on.
This is a fairly interesting endower quote from John Von Neumann that didn't thankfully turn
out to be the case. I found this one from Popular Mechanics and I don't know how I would be
able to carry a 1.5 ton cell phone around but it would be an interesting idea to try out. Of
course this is another famous quote.
So let me give you some real examples. This was actually a slide, this particular slide was
actually created by Nathan Myhrvold, who’s the guy that hired me to Microsoft, and I used this
in a talk in 1993. It really envisioned what we call the wallet PC, a device that you could carry
around with you and you pretty much could recognize most of the characteristics of what a cell
phone would be like today. This actually led to a project at Microsoft that became, it was Win
Pad and then it became the early Windows CE efforts, eventually led to what became Windows
Phone. Now the problem is knowing that something like this was going to happen didn't
necessarily mean you were the one that won the race to get there. You knew it was happening,
you built various pieces, there are lots of things that cause things to become popular or not
popular that are not necessarily within your control.
Here's another example of a system that I built in 1994 and actually we deployed it in a suburb
of Japan in 1996. It’s a full fiber-optic to the curb interactive TV system. It actually had more
features than the kinds of things you might even see today but didn't take off. We eventually
closed down that effort and it was many years before the community kind of went back to build
those kinds of systems.
Now why is it that it sometimes seems so hard to predict what's going to happen with
technology even when you're right you're not necessarily right at the right time? And the
problem is one, technology really doesn't move in a straight line. All sorts of things happen that
make something more or less possible or more or less desirable. You look at something like the
smart phone. One of the key pieces of technology that made the iPhone work was the
capacitive display. That changed the way you interacted with that and suddenly changed the
whole mechanism you worked with. But also the power Apple had created out of the iPod gave
them an ability to create the App Store which everybody knew you needed to have but the cell
phone companies wouldn't let you have it. So Microsoft, we couldn't create one for our device.
Apple could get away with it because they had that power.
The thing I showed you with the interactive TV, one of the reasons why interactive TV didn't
take off in the mid-1990s was because of the telecom regulation that was put in place in 1996
largely at the behest of the cable industry and some of the other players which made it not
economically important to those companies to move rapidly in that space. It was 10 years
before things really happened again. And again, it was really a policy decision that changed the
way in which that technology entered. In the case of Edison, of course, it was the invention of
the step up, step down transformer that really changed the way you distributed it.
Now often technology you create it for one purpose and it has another one. Now this is a
commercial that was created in the 1990s by a graphics company, and it kind of embodies it
and it's fun so I thought I'd put it up here. Besides, I have the rights to use it so, you know.
[demo commercial]
Here we are using technology to save the planet. Our tiny chip does 100 billion operations per
second. That is power most awesome. We are using it to make a difference. Imagine clean air,
pure water, and new future. I wish my family back home could see me now. We are most
proud of that we are doing our part to help save the planet.
Attention everybody, we're going to forget that environment stuff and use a chip for computer
games. Back to work.
3-D effects, PC accelerators. So powerful it's kind of ridiculous. [inaudible].
[end demo commercial]
>> Rick Rashid: I love it when he looks down at the planet. That's my favorite part of the whole
thing. Of course this company has gone out of business they can’t take the rights for me to use
this away but they did send me a letter saying I could use it. In my own life, I think I went too
far here, I've also had this experience of creating something that then took on a life of its own.
This is from when I was at the University of Rochester where I was just back this last weekend.
Of course this Xerox Alto was created in 1973. By 1976 we had Xerox Altos at the University of
Rochester; actually we got the first ones in 1975. This is a picture of me actually programming
on an Alto. I think I still have that sweater jacket somewhere, but I'm not sure it has all the
same threads it has in it there.
But the work that I was doing back then on what was then really the world's first personal
computer led in a fairly straight intellectual line to the creation of the MACH Operating System
which I began work on at Carnegie Mellon University in 1993. Now the MACH Operating
System has had an enormous impact. In fact I was just recently informed it just won the ACM
Software System award for this year which is the highest software award that they give so it
turned out to have much more of an impact perhaps even than I expected it to. It became the
basis for Mac OS X and for iOS. It was actually a predecessor project within Microsoft. They
used some of this work and it influenced the original creation of the project that led to
Windows NT. It was Digital UNIX OSF 1 and Compaq Tru64 UNIX. They used exactly the code
that we sent them. I don't know if they changed it very much. Obviously, it was the basis for
Next Step.
Now when I was doing this work in 1983 if you had walked up to me and said hey Rick, do you
realize that the code that you’re writing right now will someday be running in hundreds of
millions of cell phones? I would've looked at you and said, what’s a cell phone? I mean in some
sense the device that has been used, the technology it has been used in the most didn't even
exist except in, there were prototypes of cell phones back then but they weren’t in heavy
commercial use.
Now there were specific features of that operating system that led to it being able to be used in
that way. One was that because, and this goes back to a lot of the work that I was doing at that
time, we anticipated, we wanted the system to be broadly deployed. We created mechanisms
for it to support Legacy Operating Systems and for as everybody else's operating system was a
Legacy Operating System. We had great dreams for ourselves. So in particular we even did
support the Mac OS. We implemented a version Mac OS running on top of the MACH
Operating System so it was something that was out there when Steve Jobs and [indiscernible]
my graduate student went back to Apple they knew that that technology was available and able
to be used, but it also supported a very flexible way of interacting with the computer's
hardware and that meant that it could be adapted to lots of different kinds of devices which
again allowed it to be used on even was relatively less powerful devices like the cell phones and
the early iPhone.
I’m just during this in here because I just wanted to put this in here, this is a game I did, one of
the very first network computer games also on the Xerox Alto. So they call it Alto Trek. When I
first came to Microsoft the article in the New York Times that said I was coming to Microsoft
talked a little bit about my operating systems work but it also mentioned that I did one of these
early computer games. What was interesting is in April of 2000 Microsoft released a game that
I did based on that original Alto Treking. It had actual code from that original game in it
although that wasn't really the majority of the code that was left, and so this became
Microsoft's first online only game and I’ll just point out it got really good reviews. Amusingly
enough we open sourced this game about three years after it was out commercially and it's still
being played. I still meet people all around the world that play this game on the Internet. You
go out to freeallegiance.org and it’s still out there. So again, kind of unintended. It would
never have occurred to me that this game I was doing on this Alto back in those days was going
to have a life even to this day.
Now I started Microsoft Research here in 1991 and it grew to about 850 PhD researchers, and
when you build a basic researcher organization you clearly you want to have an impact on
products, and Microsoft Research has had a tremendous impact on pretty much every product
that Microsoft has produced and that's great. But the more interesting thing for me is always
the sense of it’s not so much about the fact that you come up with ideas that create products
it’s that you're also creating in some sense a treasure chest of ideas and technologies and
people that can allow you, as a company or as a country or as a world or entity, to survive when
something happens or when there's something going on in the world whether it's eight new
technology, a new competitor, a new business climate, you can adapt and I'm going to give you
an example.
This is a chart of a computer memory storage and pricing, and so it gives you a sense of the
decline and the cost associated with memories over the years, but hidden in this chart is a
several hundred million dollar dilemma for Microsoft. So in 1992 we created a piece of
technology that we were very proud of that allowed us to dramatically reduce the working set
size of 32-bit programs. And by working set size it’s just the amount of memory at runtime that
the program needed. It was a lot of math. It was basically just a math problem, but we were
very proud of that result. We went to the product teams at Microsoft and we said hey, we've
got this great thing, we can make your programs take up a lot less space, it's going to be great,
and there were great meetings, there were very smart people on the product teams here, they
interacted with us but at the end of every meeting it basically was the same story. They’d look
me in the eye and say you know, you guys are just smart. All those symbols that you put on the
blackboard you guys are just smart but we don't have that problem. First off it's 1992. We
don't have 32-bit code. We have 16 bit code so this really isn't going to help us very much. And
we know we're going to have 32-bit code because we are starting to work on that for our next
releases but by then you're going to have lots of memory so it isn't going to be a problem. So
basically it was like you guys go back to work, you're smart, I'm sure you'll figure out something
that's of use to us and get back to us.
But the interesting thing is what happened is that this plateau right here from 1992 to 1995,
which coincidentally Windows 95 was supposed to be coming out, the memory prices really
didn't change. There were some trade issues between the US and Asia, all sorts of other things
going on, so what happened is we are getting in close to 1995 Microsoft then had 32-bit
versions of Office, 32-bit versions of Windows, but surprisingly they took up to twice as much
space because this is 32-bit code instead of 16. This was a problem because memories hadn't
changed. So you had corporate PCs with four and eight megabytes of memory and that was not
mistake, I said megabytes. That's what we had back then. I know now it seems like everything
is a gigabyte or a terabyte or is a zeta byte, but back then it was megabytes so we couldn't
really run our software on those machines, our 32-bit software, and have decent performance.
So this was this terrible problem because we were getting into the ship cycle for Windows 95
and Office 95 and what do we do?
Well luckily we had that technology, we'd actually been refining it, we made it available to the
product teams, we worked closely with them to put that technology into place, and we got back
that factor of two that we'd lost because that's what the technology was capable of doing at
that point. So one idea basically, a bunch of mathematics, allowed Microsoft to ship Windows
95 and Office 95 when we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do so and have decent
performance. By itself that was worth several hundred million dollars to Microsoft when that
was a lot of money. Back then you could take your family out to a movie with a few hundred
million dollars. They didn't have 3-D movies back then but you get the idea. You would stoop
down; you’d pick it up if you saw it on the ground. Especially in Silicon Valley. I'm not sure all
the startups they wouldn't even bother with a few hundred million dollars.
The point here is that there was the product groups were actually right when we talked
originally. They were right that they didn't have that problem. But then they did and because
we had that sort of treasure trove of technology and people who knew how to use it it meant
that we could basically allow them to ship when they otherwise couldn't. Even more to the
point Lotus and WordPerfect they didn't have that technology, they couldn't ship their 32-bit
projects until quite a bit later, and when they did they were fat and slow compared to ours.
You could ask Ray Ozzie. He knew we had something, we've had this conversation actually, he
knew we something; he didn't know exactly what it was but he knew it was killing them. So this
looks like a very boring slide. Lots of money here not to mention positioning within the industry
all based on an idea coming out of the research group.
I'm going to run through a few things that have come up within research and give you kind of
sense of where some of the ideas come from and how do they turn into products. So back in
around 1996 or so Jim Gray came to me, and is one of the foremost database people in the
world, he came to me and said that he really believed we could put a terabyte database on the
Internet and make it available. He didn't even know exactly what kind of terabyte database he
wanted to put on. We talked about it a bit and he settled on the idea of saying well, what if I
could get a whole bunch of images of the Earth and put them in a database and make them
available for anyone to get access to. So that led to the original TerraServer and for the first
time we had images ironically from, we had them from the US Geological Service, but we
actually had a huge number of images from the Russian Space Agency. Jim and his associate
actually went to Moscow to negotiate getting these images from the Russian Space Agency
which they gave us because they were hoping that people would see the images and want to
buy them so that's where it came from.
Now that led in turn to things like Virtual Earth, obviously Google came out and bought Keyhole
and introduced their own product during that period of time, it led to what became Bing Maps,
but it also led to something which is in a way in my mind even a little bit cooler especially for
this audience which is the original SkyServer. And Jim’s idea was if we could get all the images
of the earth why not the images of the sky? Why not get all the great data from the great
telescopes and make that available 24 by 7 not just to astronomers for whom it would be super
useful but also for everyone, for anyone, for kids, for students, for amateur astronomers. And
so that became the SkyServer, and we worked with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we worked
with a number of major telescopes to put that together, and that became a resource for the
community. Yes, we made this available to people and it became very exciting to them, but it
became a resource for the astronomy community. That also led in turn to what has become a
much more popular product which is the Worldwide Telescope. You can go out there today
and used the Worldwide Telescope. We work with NASA to not only get images from all the
great telescopes but also images from satellites around some of the planets that they have so
those can be integrated into the database as well.
Let's see if I can make this work. We'll hope so. I just want to show you a real quick snippet.
This was from a [indiscernible] X talk that I gave to give you a sense of what you can get out of
this kind of data.
[demo]
So this is a visualization of the visible universe. There’s 1 million and galaxies in this image that
represent all of the galaxies that have been recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Each
point there is about 100 billion to 200 billion stars. We're not just a speck here; we are not
even a speck in a speck. We are a speck in a speck in a speck. Basically it's as though you were
standing outside the universe looking in and that’s what you're seeing. So this is the kind of
thing, this is using data not just from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey but also from the
galaxyzoo.org, which is a crowd sourcing site. Now there's the Milky Way, which by the way
isn’t really a spiral galaxy, it’s a bar spiral galaxy and the Spitzer infrared telescope has been
able to verify that. In fact the central bar is more peanut-shaped than anything else.
Now we're going into our solar system and what’s interesting here is, you're going to see that’s
Mars, by the way, the red outline; as we pull away what you're going to see is those two
blotches of yellow. Those are the asteroids that are actually clustered at the Lagrange points of
Jupiter in that solar system. By the way, in this representation every object about the size of a
school bus or greater is represented. It gives you a sense of what's possible and what's visible.
Now a new feature that we’re just bringing online and will be available later this year allows
you to import data from[end demo]
>> Rick Rashid: I’m going to stop it there but I just wanted to give you a sense; you could go out
and do this yourself. If you want to see what the world universe looks like from the outside go
to the Worldwide Telescope, wwt.org, you can get this on your own and it's pretty exciting
stuff. Let me see if I can go back to my, it’s a little hard to do from a distance here.
Now we were talking earlier about artificial intelligence is destroying the universe and overlords
and so forth or our robot Ping-Pong buddies which is sort of what we have here. The real
question is we have had in the computer science community a question for a long time of how
do we get computers to actually be able to program themselves? So it isn't just a question of
what we write code for them. How do we let them write code for themselves in some fashion?
And a few years ago we actually began making a tremendous breakthrough in this area and the
first instance of it, the first use of this technology is in Excel, it’s in Excel 2013. It's in a feature
called Flash Fill. And what this feature does is it allows you, let's say I've got some columns of
data then I want to create a column where I'm now taking data from other columns and maybe
rearranging it, doing something to it, manipulating it. Well, all I have to do with Flash Fill is put
in one or two examples and then it will figure out the rest. So I'm going to show you a little
video clip here to give you a sense of what that looks like.
Here you’re just typing in a little bit and poof it figures out the rest of it. I'm looking for last
name and what it’s doing is it's effectively writing a program that's extracting that information
from the data in the other column. Now here's another example. This is a little bit more
complicated where basically it’s trying to pick out the first letters of the words to create the
acronym. What's interesting here is that the way this is really working is that what the
computer is doing is it's taking the input that it sees and the outputs that you give it, it is then
creating every program that has those inputs and that output and then it is optimizing to say
what is the optimal program that would do that, the simplest, easiest program that would do
that from all of those programs? It turns out that almost always that's exactly the right answer.
It isn't always. Sometimes it will make a mistake. You then correct the one example of the
mistake, it now takes that as a new input and it does that again. So effectively it's sort of
programmed by example, but in this case it's write a program that fits the examples. And you
can apply this in a lot of different ways. In fact, in Office 2016 which is just coming out in a
number of our new Azure products, this technology is being expanded upon. But it is the first
instance I'm aware of actual automatic programming. Maybe not for robot overlords, but
nevertheless it can satisfy that problem.
I'll talk about another thing. Amusingly enough we were talking about my PhD at the University
of Rochester earlier. My PhD was not in operating systems; it was actually in computer vision. I
did one of the earliest PhDs in the area of this is called moving light displacement. Basically it's
extracting a 3-D structure from moving images. So it was one of the seminal works in the area.
At Microsoft over the years we developed a lot of different technologies looking at ways in
which we could build systems that would do real-time 3-D computer vision. That obviously
then, at the time we didn't have a specific purpose for that, but ultimately that led to things like
the Connect which sold 10 minute million units in its first year, and other technologies; and in
fact more recently the same kinds of technologies that were developed that led to Connect
have also come down to create what's now the HoloLens that will be coming out and here's
sort of a visualization of what it looks like to have a HoloLens on. So this is really driving this
notion of being able to do real-time 3-D computer graphics that you can superimpose on the
world and see. So again, basic research technology, in this case my work went back 40 years
being translated over time into the products that you see companies like Microsoft doing.
The last thing I really want to talk about, I’m going to back up for just a second. Around 2008,
2009 I put out a challenge to my research organization. In some sense you could view it as a
selfishness challenge. I give speeches of China to thousands of Chinese students every year. I
want to be able to go out on stage, give my speech in English, have it be translated into Chinese
in real-time, so you guys go work, get back to me. I believe the technologies were getting to
the point where that was not irrational, but I'll tell you some our researchers thought I was just
nuts. I remember having lunch with the speech research team a couple of days after I sent that
memo out and one of the young researchers he was just beating me up. He was saying, you
just don't understand. We've been working on this problem for 25 years, this is all the progress
we've made, we haven't been able to really crack this nut, it’s probably going to be another 25
years and this isn’t going to happen. I know you're like our corporate vice president and
everything but don't hold your breath, man. It's always bad when the young people are telling
old people that.
Here I am in China in 2012, and I think I need to, there we go.
[demo]
To introduce a text to speech system that takes Chinese text and converts it into Chinese
language.
>> Rick Rashid: So you can see the speech recognition part here you can see the translation
part happening over there.
[demo]
The standard set of speech system so it would sound like me. So what you see now is the result
of that change. I'm speaking in English and hopefully you'll hear me speak in Chinese in my own
voice.
>> Rick Rashid: I'm waiting for it to start.
[demo]
Again, the results are not perfect; there are in fact quite a few errors. There is much work to be
done in this area. This technology is very promising, and we hope in a few years that we'll be
able to break down the language barriers between people. Personally I believe this is going to
lead to a better world. I hope you enjoy the rest of the presentations today. Thank you.
[end demo]
>> Rick Rashid: So this was the first time, I've got to move on here. I will say just offhand it
takes a little bit of guts to stand on stage for a speech demo, especially when the room is
echoing, when you've got 4000 students in an auditorium and you’re kind of hoping it's all
going to work out okay. We had of course practiced, but that doesn't mean that I was
completely certain what was going to happen. It was a tremendous experience. Literally there
were students in the audience crying because they’d never expected to see something like this
happened, and it was really moving I think to be part of that and to be part of that
environment.
Now what was interesting, and I mentioned before the young researcher that was explaining
to me that this was never going to work, well, this is the reason why it worked. For the longest
time the word error rates on the major tests in speech recognition had not budged. No one
had made any progress for something like 10 or 11 years in this space so that's why this
particular individual was very, very pessimistic.
What happened though is that starting in 2009 and then accelerating to the point where I
actually did my presentation we made a tremendous breakthrough in speech recognition using
what's called deep neural networks. So it was a complete seat change in the way the
underlying technology worked. It changed the whole curve of the problem and it's took the
word error rates to a point that's not that different than human. Human error rates would be
right around here about three percent. This was sitting right around six or seven percent. So it
gives you a sense of how much of a change happened, and then this has led to being able to
actually turn this into a product. So you can go out, it just was recently opened up to anyone,
use Skype Translator. Currently I think the languages are Spanish, Mandarin, and I think Italian.
There are more going to be coming online. You can talk to someone in real-time in another
language. It would translate what you're saying into a voice on the other side.
I've even heard examples of people using this in communicating with the deaf because of
course it also puts up a transcript of what you're saying. The error rates, it’s not obviously a
perfect system, but the error rates are actually very, very, very good. Since we're running a
little short on time I'm not going to show you a video of that, but you can go online and see
that.
Now you can go even farther. So one of the cool things is that as we discovered the deep
neural networks could be used for speech recognition and create a tremendous improvement
in the error rates we also began experimenting with using it, and the [indiscernible] community
did as well, in using it for all sorts of other AI problems.
Here is a particularly cool example where we built a cell phone app that could recognize pretty
much any breed of dog from its picture. So it knows that that's a Pembroke Corgi. I don't even
know what a Pembroke Corgi looks like. It knows it's a Shetland Sheep Dog. It actually is better
at picking out dog breeds then humans are so that's pretty cool.
We've even taken it farther and this is some work that has recently come out. We can now sort
of decompose scenes and recognize what's happening in a scene. So this is an automatically
generated description of that picture, and we've shown that for a number of image recognition
tasks you can now do better with a computer than a human will do. That's an amazing
statement. We didn't think that was going to happen for many, many years. It's beginning to
happen. Not on all tasks but on certain very specific tasks.
So again, these are all examples of basic research pushing the boundaries in a particular area, in
some cases being pushed by the researchers, and sometimes unreasonably to see what could
happen and having that then translate into a significant result and change. And I think some of
the technologies like the automatic programming work, the deep neural networks are going to
have an huge impact on what we think computers are capable of doing over the next 5 to 10
years.
I will leave you with one thought here. This was earlier in the discussion. Fundamentally I
don't think scientists are any better than science fiction writers in figuring out societal trends.
We basically just provide the raw material that society uses to create whatever it wants or
needs for its purposes and to solve its problems. So thank you very much.
>> Jimmy Jia: Well, thank you so much for coming to this event is tonight. Please spend a
couple more minutes to ask questions to the panelists and speakers and we'll see you next
year. Take care.