I’d like to start with two of my favorite quotes. Arthur C. Clark said, ​“Any suf­fi­cient­ly advanced tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic.” And Gibson said, ​“The future is already here—it’s just not very even­ly dis­trib­uted.” And when I syn­the­size those two quotes, my take­away is that there are magi­cians amongst us.

So, what does mag­ic look like today? It looks like me being able to put an elec­trode on my fore­head, con­trolled by an iPhone in my right hand. And then three min­utes into the pro­gram, where that iPhone is con­trol­ling elec­tri­cal impuls­es into my skull to relax me, I had so much trou­ble putting words togeth­er that I felt like I was about a six pack deep into drinking.

But this is about the future of war. I want you to imag­ine the abil­i­ty to take a few drops of some­one’s blood, to com­bine that with some cog­ni­tive and some phys­i­cal test­ing, and to be able to fig­ure out where that per­son is going to be most effec­tive in your mil­i­tary. And by most effec­tive I don’t just mean how good they are at per­form­ing. I mean they’re going to be hap­pi­er there, too. Because if they’re not hap­py and they leave you lose a lot of effec­tive­ness. And then once you’ve put that per­son in a place where their skill set is opti­mal, you’re going to be able to enhance that beyond what they come in with.

So why do I believe this? Here’s data that shows the cor­re­la­tion between the ratio of two phys­i­o­log­i­cal vari­ables, DHEA sul­fate, which is a steroid hor­mone pre­cur­sor, and cor­ti­sol, which is a stress hor­mone. And the ratio between those two phys­i­o­log­i­cal fac­tors alone allows you to pick up 37% of the vari­abil­i­ty in per­for­mance dur­ing a spe­cial oper­a­tions task.

And that same tech­nol­o­gy that I was using in the first pic­ture, here is now on an air­man. And what you see from the graph on the left side is that peo­ple using tran­scra­nial direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion (AKA elec­tric­i­ty at a very low lev­el going through your skull and chang­ing the acti­va­tion pat­tern of the neu­rons in your brain) were able to focus on a fair­ly chal­leng­ing task of watch­ing and track­ing air­craft on a screen with­out los­ing any per­for­mance for forty min­utes, when peo­ple with the place­bo lost 5% of their per­for­mance every ten min­utes. What would that mean for some­one dri­ving down a street try­ing to scan for IEDs?

But today we only think about some­one sleep­ing a lit­tle less, some­body run­ning a lit­tle longer with­out fatigue. I want to take this a lot fur­ther. And I’m think­ing about the abil­i­ty to use phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and elec­tro­ceu­ti­cals (so elec­tric­i­ty, like I was tak­ing about before) to enhance learn­ing to such a degree, and to enable unit cohe­sion to come togeth­er to such a degree, you could train a mil­i­tary force to high lev­els of capa­bil­i­ty with­in weeks or months instead of years or decades. What would that do for strate­gic surprise?

I’m think­ing a lot about research in autism in oth­er areas. And autism, by the way, is a dis­or­der where peo­ple have tremen­dous dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing why oth­ers think and act the way they do. Now imag­ine if we were able to use that same type research, or one of our adver­saries did, to enhance the abil­i­ty to think like your adver­sary. What would that do for psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions, for decep­tion, for influence?

And I’m think­ing a lot today about how you could improve the gen­er­al pur­pose force to match soft lev­els of per­for­mance. But if you just use the gen­er­al pur­pose force that was bet­ter in the same way, I don’t think it would get you that far. But if you add new CONOPS and orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures, break it into small­er units, swarm­ing tac­tics, I think you might end up with some­thing like an order of mag­ni­tude improve­ment in performance.

And General [Mark] Milley this morn­ing men­tioned that it’s not just the size of a force, but a small­er force could smoke a big­ger force if they’re better-equipped or better-trained. Well, part of the corol­lary to that may be a ques­tion of what they’re smoking.

And I’m think­ing about direct brain-to-brain com­mu­ni­ca­tion. There are cur­rent DARPA pro­grams using brain/machine inter­face tech­nol­o­gy try­ing to replace the mem­o­ry of our injured war fight­ers, which is a tremen­dous goal and undertaking.

But if you can replace some­one’s mem­o­ry, that means you can store ideas and trans­mit them into their brain. That means I can take those ideas and trans­mit them into some­one else’s brain. Imagine tak­ing a plan and being able to give it whole hog to some­one else to be able to think through it, to iter­ate on it, and to send it back to me. What would that do to the rate of innovation?

But I think any­body should ask, why should we believe that any of this is going to come, if for the last twen­ty years peo­ple have been say­ing human enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies are going to real­ly mat­ter? I think there’s three trends that mean we need to take a seri­ous look about what’s going to hap­pen in the next two to three decades.

So on the bot­tom there, neu­ro­science. Our sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge in the past ten years alone has taught us that there [is a] new field, epi­ge­net­ics. Something that chem­i­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tions on your DNA that don’t change the let­ters in the code, can not only change the way you think and act but also can affect your chil­dren. We also have new tools, stay­ing on the neu­ro­science theme we’ve devel­oped tools that allow you to enable brain cells in ani­mals to be acti­vat­ed or deac­ti­vat­ed using light, opto­ge­net­ics. We have new scan­ning and imag­ine technologies. 

And then move up to the top there. This is two sort of fake street signs that are in a start­up in Boston that has tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in fund­ing that’s devel­op­ing human enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies for com­mer­cial appli­ca­tions, and not for med­i­cine. So mon­ey’s flow­ing in, too. 

So, I want to take you to an anal­o­gy with Moore’s Law, which we’ve heard men­tioned a cou­ple times today. In the first two decades of real micro­proces­sor and solid-state tran­sis­tor devel­op­ment, we saw about a 1000x improve­ment in the num­ber of tran­sis­tors you could get on a chip. But frankly, the impact on soci­ety was rel­a­tive­ly small from that advance. But in the sec­ond twen­ty years here, you only had about a 1000x greater improve­ment from where you start­ed in the mid­dle there, but of course it changed the world. Microprocessors drove the Internet, in this con­text C4ISR, etc. Precision strike complex. 

So I think what we need to take is that not only is tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment non­lin­ear, but it can be fur­ther non­lin­ear when you’re look­ing at impact. What might this mean when we think about human enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies? Well, one of the oth­er things that hap­pened as those tran­sis­tor counts increased is the cost of each of those chips decreased. So here’s the rate of decrease in the cost to sequence a human genome, sequence all about three bil­lion base pairs. And you see it’s drop­ping faster than Moore’s Law.

But now I’m going put that on the same forty-year x axis I showed you before, and we’ll start at 2003, which was the the end of the Human Genome Project, the first sequenced human genome. And if you take that date as a start, we’re not even thir­teen years into that first twen­ty years.

But why should the time­line be sim­i­lar to com­put­ers? Well, I’d sug­gest that biol­o­gy is a lot more com­plex than computing…but now we have com­put­ers to help. I think the scale is about rel­a­tive­ly sim­i­lar. So I’m will­ing to make up fair­ly fal­si­fi­able pro­jec­tion and put my name on it. I think by 2043 (and this is my con­ser­v­a­tive fore­cast), human enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies are going to have about the same lev­el of impact as com­put­ers did five years ago. And frankly I think it’s com­ing in the 2030s.

Of course, the sec­ond corol­lary is why should we believe it? But also, will we mat­ter? Well, in this case I want to take you back to the last time humans were obso­lete. The F‑4 fight­er was built with­out an inter­nal gun because we were in the mis­sile age. And in the mis­sile age, humans could­n’t dog­fight well enough for it to mat­ter. They were just going to use sen­sors to see the oth­er air­craft and fire a mis­sile and would be done.

Well, we went into the Vietnam War and its amaz­ing exper­i­ment that the Air Force and the Navy both fly­ing the F‑4. In the first two to three years of the air war over North Vietnam, both have about a 2:1 exchange ratio. So, they’re killing, shoot­ing down two north Vietnamese air­craft for every­one we lose.

And this was a real sur­prise. We expect­ed to do a lot bet­ter. And so the Air Force goes back to draw­ing board and says the mis­siles are track­ing prop­er­ly, and they work on them. And the Navy goes back to the draw­ing board and says the mis­siles are track­ing prop­er­ly, but about part-way through that study, about halfway through that study, a gen­tle­man named Captain Ault says, ​“Actually, a huge part of the prob­lem is that our pilots don’t know how to use them effec­tive­ly.” Because we’d stopped real­is­tic air com­bat train­ing because mis­siles were going to do it all for us and humans did­n’t matter.

So, the Air Force goes back to the air war in 1970 after about a year’s break when we’re in nego­ti­a­tions with North Vietnam, and they only are able to main­tain their 2:1 exchange ratio. But with the imple­men­ta­tion of TOPGUN in ​’69 and ​’70, and this real­is­tic air com­bat train­ing and send­ing two peo­ple per unit for­ward to then train their units, the Navy goes to 12.5:1, almost an order of mag­ni­tude improve­ment in tac­ti­cal out­comes, because of human per­for­mance. And Anyone who does­n’t think train­ing is a true human per­for­mance tech­nol­o­gy, I sug­gest look­ing to the research on neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty show­ing that train­ing train­ing changes the struc­ture your brain.

This field is often dis­cussed with a lot of con­cern in venues like this because of the eth­i­cal issues, and this fear that God for­bid some­body would force our mil­i­tary per­son­nel to use these tech­nolo­gies, what hap­pens if some­one gets hurt? Well, let me tell you some­thing. They want these tech­nolo­gies. My clients in Silicon Valley, in Boston, pay good mon­ey for enhance­ment because they see it as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. And when I give these talks in envi­ron­ments with a lot of junior mil­i­tary per­son­nel, the typ­i­cal respons is that some­body comes up to me at the end and says, ​“If you ever need a research sub­ject, I promise I won’t tell any­one.” Now, that’s not how we do it. The mil­i­tary actu­al­ly has the strictest eth­i­cal and bureau­crat­ic restric­tions on doing this type of research any­where in the United States. It is hard­er to do this research in the mil­i­tary than any­where else.

This is data on Army per­son­nel tak­ing sup­ple­ments. And you can see that more than 50% of Army per­son­nel in this data were tak­ing at least one or more sup­ple­ments per week. And what’s real­ly inter­est­ing here is you’d expect that to drop off and have few­er and few­er as you see peo­ple tak­ing more and more. But actu­al­ly more peo­ple take five sup­ple­ments a week then take two to four. Which tells you you have a supe­ruser group. And any­one who spends time round mil­i­tary per­son­nel knows who these peo­ple are.

And on the eth­i­cal issue, I would sug­gest we con­sid­er refram­ing it. We require our mil­i­tary per­son­nel to go on the bat­tle­field with thir­ty, maybe even forty pounds of body armor. And we don’t just think or wor­ry, we know that it’s dam­ag­ing their knees and their back severe­ly, and these are life-long injuries. And at the same time, it’s decreas­ing their mobil­i­ty and there­fore parts of their oper­a­tional per­for­mance. But we have human enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies that range from drugs to stim­u­la­tion that are safer and enhance their oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ty. So I think any­one who says that we should­n’t give those to peo­ple, I would say that’s a PR issue not an ethics issue. Thank you very much.