“We are liable to see a very changed humanity as we look to the future. And so I’m very interested in a humanity that is, if you will, that is good for humans, not just one in which we sort of become the subjects of our technologies.”   – Dan Gerstein

Over the course of the summer and fall, we are revisiting the OODAcast archive to generate transcripts from the podcast conversations, related links and a reading list curated from the discussion – all in an effort to identify long term subject matter areas and follow-on topics which inform the future of the OODALoop.com core thematic research agenda.

We start at the beginning:  OODAcast Episode #1.  An overview of the podcast, related links, reading list and transcript of the podcast can be found below.

Episode 1:  A conversation with Dan Gerstein

Overview

Released in late March of 2020, as the world began to assess the severity of the “current crisis” (the emergent Covid-19 pandemic), OODA CTO Bob Gourley spoke with Dan Gerstein about how we can all learn from the history of technology to better understand the situation today and forecast what will come tomorrow.

They discuss approaches leaders can take to prepare for the future, the role of education and writing, the approach that agile/learning organizations take to career development, advice for those seeking to educate themselves for the future, how people can shape the future of technology, the role of governments in the future of technology, the concept of a patent system where it takes 18 months to get a patent but innovation and creation occurs much faster, the need for law enforcement access to encrypted data and the long running DoJ/Apple debate, the exponential growth of the pandemic in its early March 2020 timeframe, personal behavior to stay safe from the virus, what governments can do in a pandemic, the role of technology in spreading misinformation and countering it, and the “technology wars” as they are currently waged  – and humanities place in this new warfare.

Dr. Daniel Gerstein is a national security professional who has served as a senior government civilian, in uniform, in industry, in think tanks and in academia. As a senior government civilian, he served in the Department of Homeland Security as Under Secretary (Acting) and Deputy Under Secretary in the Science and Technology Directorate where he directed over a $1 billion DHS S&T annual budget. During his service in the U.S. Army, he served on four continents while participating in combat, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and homeland security and served for more than a decade in the Pentagon in various high-level staff assignments. Dr. Gerstein also has extensive experience in international negotiations having served on the Holbrooke Delegation that negotiated the peace settlement in Bosnia. He is a frequent national security contributor and has published numerous books, articles and commentaries on a wide variety of national and homeland security issues. He serves as a member of several corporate boards and advisory committees.  Dan is also the author of the recently released book The Story of Technology.

Related Links

Science and Technology | Homeland Security (dhs.gov)

Home | Schar School of Policy and Government (gmu.edu)

PhD in Biodefense | Schar School of Policy and Government (gmu.edu)

Biocontainment Laboratory—George Mason University National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases | NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Center for Infectious Disease Research (gmu.edu)

Daniel M. Gerstein – Profile | RAND

Faculty Profile: Daniel Gerstein (american.edu)

Daniel M. Gerstein – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (thebulletin.org)

Reading List

Assignment: Pentagon:  How to Excel in a Bureaucracy (Fifth Edition)
by Perry M. Smith and Daniel M. Gerstein

The Story of Technology: How We Got Here and What the Future Holds
by Daniel M. Gerstein

Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life
by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich

Transcript

Announcer:

Oodacast: informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight. Brought to you by the team at OODALoop.com.

Bob Gourley:

Hello and welcome on this OODA cast. We have Dan Gerstein. Dan is a, noted technologist, author of multiple books, PhD in biodefense, very, timely for this point in our collective history. he’s currently a senior researcher with RAND, but has spent a career in technology leadership and organizational leadership, including, after graduating from West Point a career in the army where he served on multiple continents, supporting multiple missions from humanitarian ops to combat, to preventing weapons of mass destruction, proliferation to policymaking. And after a career in the army spent some time in industry returned to government as a senior executive leading department defense policy for countering weapons of mass destruction, and then senior leadership positions in the Department of Homeland Security, where he led the approach of DHS towards S&T science, science and technology research, not just for that department, but for the nation, in these key DHS S&T mission areas, and then was acting under secretary for a while. And, it’s a real honor to talk with you today, Dan.

Dan Gerstein:

Well, thanks Bob. Thanks for having me.

Bob Gourley:

I really appreciate it. And one of the first questions I wanted to ask Dan is what did I miss from your bio? And did I get any of that wrong? I did I should say in looking over your bio, a lot of education self-education and writing, you have three master’s degrees, including a master’s degree in engineering along with that PhD.

Dan Gerstein:

Well, as you pointed out, I come from a military background and one of the things about the U.S. Army is that they really do believe in education. And so they sent me to get three of those master’s degrees and that’s been that’s been a great experience and they also set me in different curricula, which is also, which is very interesting. So, you know, I think that you know, I put myself through a PhD program after I retired from the Army, but, you know, I’m a firm believer in lifelong learning and trying to continue to understand this very complex world that we live in.

Bob Gourley:

That’s cool. And I also noticed I assume you are a firm believer in lifelong writing, just because you have been so prolific. How much of that did you do while you were in uniform in the army? Were you writing back then as well?

Dan Gerstein:

So I was very fortunate. The army sent me to go to the council on foreign relations as a military fellow, after my brigade command. And in that year I had the opportunity to think and write, and I actually did my first book while I was on active duty. I followed it up with two other books before leaving active duty. One of them happens to be called Assignment Pentagon, which I was you know, at least qualified by time in the Pentagon to write. But so I had three books done before I left the active duty.

Bob Gourley:

That’s great. That’s fantastic. We were talking a little bit about you know, my service was Navy, yours was army, but I was very privileged to be extremely joint and got to work with some great leaders from the army, some of my best bosses. I did run into one boss, however, who was Army, who told me you know, I wanted to write also, and I wrote a few articles and I had a couple published in this crusty old army Colonel intelligence officer looked at me and said, if you’ve got time enough to write, you must not be doing your job and okay, there’s two different kinds of leaders you run into, and that’s not the one I aspire to be. Well,

Dan Gerstein:

Well, there’s a funny thing about writing and I’ll just very quickly share this with you. And that is that you know, when I get a topic that I’m really interested in you know, I sort of put myself on a schedule. And so I normally wake up at four in the morning on Saturday and Sunday. And I will devote myself to kind of working the morning hours and, you know, pretty soon once you’ve kind of done this and put pen to paper you have a book. And so it really, it’s a matter of sitting down and forcing yourself to put your ideas on paper.

Bob Gourley:

Do you find that writing also forces you to think and learn new things?

Dan Gerstein:

Oh, it absolutely does. You know, for each of the books and in particular, the most recent one is The Story of Technology: how we got here and what the future holds. I did, you know, just a tremendous amount of learning through that process, trying to come up with examples that would cause the reader to better understand the technology systems of today and how important they are to humanity. So, yeah, I think it really is. It’s very much a learning process.

Bob Gourley:

That’s cool. And I sure learned reading your book and there’s, I have a couple of other questions I think will flow from that. And of course I want to get to the current crisis too. You’re very well positioned to give us some context on that. But one of the things that jumped out at me early on in the book is the way you described yourself. I think you said something like you’re a bit of an “accidental technologist” and when I read that and how you are reading it – I thought, hey, wait, maybe he’s talking about me too. I didn’t come into this to be a computer scientist. I was an operator and Intel guy and an enthusiast. And so maybe I’m going to start using that phrase myself, accidental technologist.

Dan Gerstein:

Well, for me you know, I was an operator I spent many years in the army. I was you know, in forward deployed positions. And you know, my time was trying to put communications networks in very austere places around the world. So it was by its very nature, highly technical, but over time you know, I wound up not only just thinking about the communications networks, but also big data. And how do you make sense of all the information that’s coming at you? And so little by little I went from being a user of technology to managing lower level technology systems to, you know, running a billion dollar organization. We had laboratories that did high containment for biological and chemical components and agents. So it, you know, it sort of grew into this and that’s why I call myself the accidental technologist.

Bob Gourley:

Cool. Yeah. I love the way you put that. Another kind of key theme that I noticed from the book. First of all, it’s an exciting and fast book. It moves about as fast as the pace of technology, frankly. So it’s a very good read. And also you don’t have to have a PhD to learn from this book. It was all to me written in plain English and very understandable. So I liked that about it, but another theme I noticed just woven throughout it is how everything has become so connected and you know, benefits and progress in one area cause benefits and progress in another area. And it’s not just little niches or stovepipes of separate technologies anymore. It’s really all interconnected. Did I take the right thing away from the book?

Dan Gerstein:

Oh, absolutely. You know, we call it convergence of course. And you know, there, you can take just about any system and look at the lineage of these systems and find the smallest of technologies embedded in all of them. The stick aircraft, for example, today’s aircraft use exactly the same physical properties as the Wright brothers used and understanding the lift that they needed to generate and therefore the speed over the wings that would cause the plane to become airborne. And we use the same kinds of concepts you know, they had a steering control, which was actually their first patent. And what’s interesting about that is that while it’s very rudimentary by today’s standards, the same physical principles apply. And so, you know, there is this DNA of technology and we see it in all of our different technologies.

Bob Gourley:

Yeah, that’s neat. Well so this leads to the next kind of question. Now another thing that you’ve noted in the book and we have all observed, it used to be U.S government R and D and needs in demand generation. We’re a driving force, not just in national security technology, but all technology. It was the government spending money to really accelerate stuff. And now of course it’s no longer the case and hasn’t been the case for 20 years and it’s even harder now for the government to really steer what corporate worlds are doing in their R and D spending. So I want to talk about this dynamic of how can governments influence the future of technology, or you tell me, please, if that’s the wrong question, how can citizens steer the future of technology? It used to be that citizens would do that through their government. There’s, you know, regulations and taxation and spending of R and D budgets. But now what are our options? If the government has far less influence on the development of technology, what do we as citizens do to make sure we get the outcomes? Any thoughts on that, Dan?

Dan Gerstein:

Yeah. If I can, let me go back to a little bit of, you know, the R and D system that we built, the research and development system. And, you know, if you go back to the end of World War II, we started this system based on the lessons that we’ve learned. And it grew to 1960, the government spent 65% of all research and development dollars leaving industry and academia spending 35%. Now, today it’s completely inverted. Today, academia plus industry now spend about 75% of all R and D dollars and the government only 24%. And what that means is that the government doesn’t have the same pull that it once had. You look at a lot of the technologies that were developed, they came out of programs, space program, they came out of military programs, global positioning systems, as an example, the internet is another example.

Dan Gerstein:

And you know, today what we’re seeing is completely flipped. The R and D dollars are in different places. And the demand is actually from society. When you look at the information age, you’re seeing society pull forward information technologies. And I think is a real interesting concept. It means the government has to be a better consumer. There’s one other trend. And that is the global trend, you know, in the 1960s the U.S. spent 70% of all R and D around the world. And today the government or the U.S. still has the lead, but we are about $500 billion a year, whereas China is about $410 billion a year. And they are catching up and others around the world are catching up too. So it’s really something to think about as technology becomes more democratized, more available across the globe.

Bob Gourley:

Right. You know, another key point here, I want to ask your thoughts on, so not only is it global like this, and not only is the U.S. Government spending less on R and D and is now having less influence, but does anyone have any influence on where this technology is going? Like, let’s say somebody in a lab somewhere comes up with a better chip architecture and says, Hey, this is a better way to do compute on chips. Why would that have any influence on the direction of our current architecture? You know, those decisions are made by, you know, markets and that’s just one example. Does no one entity has control over this, o one government has control over it. No coalition of governments seems to have control over it Who is driving the future of technology.

Dan Gerstein:

So I I’d say the two big drivers are CEOs and the the shareholders. We are looking for profits corporately. And so there’s a lot of drive that comes from that. What’s also interesting is the government still tries to control technologies, things like export controls or national laws that would prohibit certain behaviors. But on the other hand, many of those are becoming antiquated because they haven’t kept up with the pace of technology. Imagine we have a patent system where we grant patents for 20 years, but yet information technologies are changing every 18 months. So does it still make sense? And I’m not, I’m not saying we should get rid of patent laws, but we should reconsider what it really means to have a patent in a system that is moving so rapidly.

Bob Gourley:

Fascinating. And, you know, I also noticed you had written about government attempts to steer encryption. For example, the FBI/Apple debates. And that is still going on today. And there are, it’s not just our government, but governments who want to be able to say, here’s what we want. We want a back door into the system as well. Other technologists are saying, that’s exactly what we don’t want. It will do more harm than good. It’s the wrong question. So these are key issues and that’s an example of thousands that we need informed people to weigh in on and help us come to the right conclusion.

Dan Gerstein:

Yeah, what’s interesting about the Apple/FBI standoff. It occurred right after the San Bernardino terrorist shootings. And it’s also been resurrected here over the last couple of months with respect to the shootings down at Pensacola Naval base. And the interesting thing about this is that you were seeing industry essentially trying to change laws that have evolved over a couple of hundred years. You know, the privacy laws, for example, we don’t have absolute privacy in anything in our daily lives. If there’s a court order, if law enforcement wants to come into your home based on legal justification, they can do so. But in the case of the Apple/FBI standoff, the Apple CEO has essentially said: “We don’t care about previous case law – we don’t want to have a back door.” And so, I think that government has to step in and really think about where the limits are. I’m not arguing one side or the other. I think it’s a valid point that Apple makes, but I also think it’s a valid point that the government under certain legal frameworks ought to be able to come in and do searches and seizures.

Bob Gourley:

Right. Fascinating. And I want to mention one other quick anecdote personally happened to me about four years ago, I’m up at a conference about two hours from home, and I get a text from my wife and she says, essentially, don’t worry, hon, Everything is okay, but there’s an escaped murderer loose in the neighborhood. And nobody knows where he is. So of course I worry. And of course I rush right home and try to get all the information I can. And by the time I get here, the neighborhood is all surrounded by police and this neighborhood where we are normally so concerned about our privacy is welcoming the police in. And we love it that a drone is flying overhead. And you know, every door is open to the police. Yes, come in and look around whatever you want to see. You just come on in.

Bob Gourley:

And then that crisis was over and it was resolved and they found the guy. And then it’s back to our you know, the walls are up, the doors are up. No police are coming in here without a warrant. And now you know, I’m thinking about this current [Covid-19 Pandemic] crisis] and I want to return to that in more detail later, but now I’m like, Hey, wait a second. Maybe we should automatically turn on the the tracking in all of our devices to understand where every human has been. And then if they were exposed to the virus, we know who they may have run into. And if they were exposed to the virus, we’ll be able to send them alert and say, you need to self quarantine for awhile. And that kind of an invasion of privacy, I never would have wanted or supported ever. And I’m thinking thoughts like this. So I guess we would appreciate your thoughts on that. Do times change? Do attitudes change? And what happens when the crisis passes? How do we get our freedoms and privacy back?

Dan Gerstein:

Yeah. Look, technology’s presenting very interesting trade-offs. So let me give you one on genomics. So if I told you that I want your genome and I’d like to be able to bring it in and put it into a database and store with 327 million other Americans genomes so that we could help you with personalized medicine. That would be interesting to you probably because we could probably find ways to be able to relate a genotype (that is the gene sequence) with a phenotype (that is the observable characteristics) what causes disease, et cetera. But if I then tell you, Hey, wait, I’m going to take that data, and I’m going to correlate it. I’m going to find out how honest you are. Maybe there are certain parts of the genome that are able to tell the likelihood that somebody may be deceptive or perhaps be able to say that they are are susceptible to this disease. So they’re not insurable. You know, those are things that I think most of us would recoil from, but yet the offer a personalized medicine is very interesting.

Bob Gourley:

Right? Yeah. So these are great challenges and topics to talk about, and before getting to the current crisis. I have one other thing I really would appreciate your input on, and that is what do we teach our kids today? That’s a broad subject and every kid is different. Every family is in a different situation. But if you’re thinking about advice that you might personally give to parents of a young child and these parents want this child to have a great future, what should they be encouraging a very young child to learn? Should it be the sciences, the arts, and then the same kind of question for an older person, maybe it’s a high school student. What would you tell her or him to consider as they select the curriculum that they’re going to study in high school and then in college, in order to be successful in this fast moving technologically-oriented world?

Dan Gerstein:

Well, we are already seeing some real challenges with respect to the mismatch between our educational needs as a society and where students are going in terms of their curriculum. And we need to really think hard about this when we talk about artificial intelligence and we think about the future of work, and we say, will there still be opportunities for work? You know, the fact is that many of the jobs, if it’s a repetitive job, if it is something that doesn’t require much higher order thinking, and it’s sort of, you go from task to task – those are jobs that we are very likely going to see automated. And if you will off-load to artificial intelligence and robots so where we need people are algorithm developers and big data scientists and people who understand biology and nanotechnology, and, you know, all of the other different areas that are beginning to mature.

Dan Gerstein:

So it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have people with a broad liberal education. In fact, I would argue that if you’re working on a scientific and technological team or technology team, that you are better served to have a combination of people, for example, you know, it’s helpful to have a biologist looking at a cybersecurity problem. There are a lot of relationships between the way an infected computer looks and an infected individual looks. And so, you know, having this cross-fertilization can be useful, it’s also useful – we talked about a case where ethics is important. So having a broad understanding of the law of ethical left and right limits can also be important when we’re doing cyber security initiatives. So I’m a real fan of broad-based education. At some point people obviously go to what they’re interested in, but I think a foundation of math and science of the STEM education is very important. And then later on, I think it’s fine to broaden out, but a broad liberal education that covers the humanities and the sciences and math is invaluable and will become even more so in the AI-enabled future.

Bob Gourley:

Thanks. I really appreciate that, especially after reading your most recent book. I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, this technology is going to keep moving faster and faster, and we’re going to need our future leaders to understand both the technology, but also the art and the beauty and how it all fits together and how it all keeps converging and, and how we can better serve humanity. So, thanks. That’s good context. And speaking of education, PhD and biodefense? Can you tell me a little bit more about that? And I would now that was after your time in the military. Meanwhile, in the military, you had also worked on some biodefense activities. I thought I’d asked this as a segue into discussions about the current crisis. So what was your PhD about?

Dan Gerstein:

Well right after the amerithrax attacks in 2001 that was right after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there was an anthrax attack allegedly perpetrated by a scientist from the army laboratory at Fort Dietrich. He committed suicide before we were able to determine whether or not he was the perpetrator, but that essentially caused an entire field to grow up and that field was biodefense. And so the curriculum that I taught was at George Mason university, it entailed hard science courses, I hadn’t taken it for almost 30 years. I took bacteriology, I took virology, I took aerobiology, emergency management, arms control courses, all of it coming together into this one course. And you know, that was a really terrific opportunity to meld, as I spoke before the sciences, and the humanities and the more technical with the more philosophical so that’s where I got my PhD from.

Bob Gourley:

Great. Thanks. That’s good context. And I think a good segue to your perspective on the current crisis. I think everybody that I know and have been interacting with is keeping themselves informed and are reading the latest from the CDC and, you know, watching the news and watching what experts are saying and tracking how serious this is. And know it’s it’s not going to go away quickly and know that we need to do things like practice good social distancing, and change our behaviors and, you know, wash your hands frequently. And and then hopefully as the government ramps up testing, we’ll see some progress in understanding what’s really happening. But I think we’re also all aware that there’s no instantaneous vaccine, even though that is being sped up incredibly – speeding it up incredibly still means perhaps a year to 18 months. And tracking treatments. It looks like you know, there’s a lot of research going on on potential treatments that can make things better, but right now, there no silver bullet and a lot of data needs to be collected and found before there’s any sort of treatment. And that seems to be kind of where we’re at. Would you agree with, is that the current situation?

Dan Gerstein:

I think it is the current situation, but I think there’s one more data point that’s worthy of consideration. And that is if you look at how fast this is moving we are in a very frightening place. It took about 67 days for the first hundred thousand cases to be identified. It took 11 days later until we had 200,000 cases. It took four days later until we had 300,000 cases. And it’s now about two or three days where we are over 400,000 cases. I would estimate by the end of today or early tomorrow, we’ll probably have half a million cases identified worldwide. And that is very frightening that says that it’s in the expoential phase. And we are nowhere near being able to control the virus at this point. We do know that the only measures that are going to work are the social distancing, the self-isolation if you’ve been exposed – quarantines if necessary. But those sorts of very difficult measures will be required so that we can stop the transmission of this virus.

Bob Gourley:

Right. Very scary, very serious and very important. And I appreciate your context on that. So there’s a things that we can do as individuals. And you’ve just mentioned several of them, the social distancing to protect yourself, your family. What else can governments do to help protect us?

Dan Gerstein:

Well, you know, this is really a two-part answer. It’s first, what should have government’s been doing to protect us? Because there are preparatory things that could have been done. And now there’s the response part of it which are things that government needs to do to better coordinate. And so I won’t spend a lot of time on the preparedness. But I think it’s important to say that if you think about technology as being more broad than just the individual piece of equipment or tool or whatever, and you think about the definition of technology really comes from the derivation that means “craft” or “craftsmanship” and that implies how one does things. And so training and exercises are extremely important, so that governments and industries and even private citizens are prepared. And we can tell that we have slipped in our preparedness. We are not giving coherent messages to the population which is also important.

Dan Gerstein:

And, you know, frankly this lack of clarity has been very much at the heart of why in United States we are almost at 60,000 infected that we have tested and confirmed today. And that’s again, very frightening. Now, what can we do in terms of response? Well, the diagnostics are key and everybody’s picking up on that and we do have diagnostics, but they’re not what is necessarily needed. These are diagnostics that have to be conducted. You take a sample, you bring it back to a lab, they take 2, 3, 4, 5 days in order to get the results back. That’s a problem. When I was in DHS, we were trying to develop real-time point of care diagnostics so that you could literally give someone the test and, almost like a pregnancy test, you would know in a very short order and that’s the kind of testing that we really needed.

Dan Gerstein:

It needs to to be cheap. It needs to be very efficient and very specific to the pathogen that we’re concerned about. And so that’s not available now. There’s another type of testing that we really need and that’s being worked on also, and that is serological testing. What this means is, whereas the first test is looking for an active infection – in other words is there active virus in the, the patient? – the serological testing is looking for a previous infection. It’s looking for antibodies that would help us determine who’s actually infected. So, who has been infected and is now immune? So those people could theoretically get back to work if they had a strong enough immune response and that would be beneficial for the economy.

Bob Gourley:

Right. Fascinating. Great context. And I do want to move on to another technological related subject, but first wanted to ask if you had other thoughts to share about the current crisis, that we didn’t cover?

Dan Gerstein:

This this crisis is unlike any that we’ve ever faced. You know, a lot of people after 9/11 looked at the terrorist threat and considered it to be existential. I have a friend who has said, “you know, I’m a counter-terrorism guy, I have looked at this problem for 20 years and consider it to be existential. I did not know what existential was until this pandemic hit.” And I think that’s a context that we all need to think about. This is probably the most significant threat that this generation will face. And we need to think very hard about our preparedness and our response capabilities for biological attacks, if they were man-made or mother nature, who is quite a bioterrorist in and of herself. We need to be prepared for either of those, and we’re seeing this play out now.

Bob Gourley:

Dan that is so very well put. Thank you. And you also made me think of my business partner, Matt Devost, who, as this started to go, you know, Matt by the way, a long-term risk management professional with deep credentials in this field. And the way he put it to me was he had long considered 9/11 to be the defining event of his life. And now he realizes that it’s not. That it is this current crisis that is the defining event of his life. And as he said that, and I realized that, yes, that applies to me, but it’s going to apply to 7 billion people around the globe. We’re all going to share this defining event of our life and get through it.

Dan Gerstein:

Which is correct.

Bob Gourley:

Which leads to something else. I really like your context on, and that is basically, could you believe, or could you imagine dealing with this, if we did not have the internet, I know you remember a time before the internet existed, but if you think of that time and now think of today where the internet connects every city in the globe, almost every person in the globe can access it and can share information. And when it comes to this crisis, we were able to see it as it evolved in China, even though they tried to restrict and censor, and we were able to see what happened there and medical researchers, even in China, with that censorship, we’re able to get information out, including information on the genetic sequence of the virus. So researchers around the globe could start working on that.

Bob Gourley:

And now that’s repeated in every other country, as people see this and start learning lessons, they can instantly share it because of the internet. And that also includes sharing best practices. We’ve all seen what Singapore did and what South Korea did and what Japan did, so we can learn best practices and we can learn worst practices, and we can see the horrible deaths that are occurring in places and learn that from the internet too. So you know, technology, especially the internet, is playing a key role in helping humanity deal with this and would love your perspective on that.

Dan Gerstein:

Well, I think you laid out the positive piece of the internet very well. I think the internet is just an extraordinary tool. I think what we are having some difficulty with today is understanding what’s real and what’s not real on the internet. So there are a lot of bad if you will solutions that have been put on the internet. And it’s not just for this crisis. I mean, we’ve seen it with respect to elections. We’ve seen it with respect to polarization in the political climate. And, you know, it, it’s something that we have to understand about the internet and we have to be able to manage it far better than we do. You know, I have been somewhat appalled, you know, like this is a little off of what you directly asked but, when Mark Zuckerberg came in and was talking about what would be pulled down off of Facebook it’s kind of interesting he had a different approach than other social media. His was much more liberal about allowing things, even if we knew they were incorrect to remain on there.

Dan Gerstein:

So I think you have to be very careful about what you consume and how you consume internet traffic, so that you go to those sites and you follow those sites that are giving you good information. Look, I use the internet tremendously. I think there are websites out there, you go to the CDC website on on biological incidents like this, and they have absolutely terrific information. But you can also find in some of the chat rooms you can find things that don’t fit very well. Like the people who are against vaccines despite years of understanding of the relationship between vaccines and holding spread of disease. So, you know, we just need to be careful about how we consume and where we consume our information.

Bob Gourley:

Right. You know, you remind me: You’re at RAND, there’s another random thought leader there who published a book. I think it was called a Truth Decay. So I know you guys have been working in this field pretty extensively and Dan, as we move to the final question I wanted to say I do have your bio online. I’m going to share that in the links to this and point people to that, which also includes a list of your many of your publications and a list of many of the articles that you’ve been writing. So I’m going to share that with our viewers. But I want to return to your book as a kind of a closing question, and that is it’s a great book. It is a very fast book that shares history what’s going on today and then projections out into the future. I wanted to ask though, in the context of this current crisis, are there things that you would have written differently or would have projected differently or that this crisis would have caused you to change in any way or does it just underscore the importance of all of us thinking through where technology can take us?

Dan Gerstein:

So, you know, I got done with the book and you know, publishing a book is a fairly long process. And in the intervening time there were things that I wanted to say that I didn’t yet put into this book. And so I’m a slow learner. I’ve got another book on technology that I’m working on which I call tech wars. And so what I’m fascinated by is that you know, I think we’re in the middle of a technology war and it’s being waged throughout the globe. It’s for having primacy in certain technologies. Some of these are just game-changing. And so what I am very interested in and focused on are these ways in which we’re going to navigate this very difficult period when humanity has never had more capacity to do harm to itself, We only see governments react once the harm has actually been seen.

Dan Gerstein:

You see it with drones in which aircraft have almost been taken out of the sky aircraft, commercial aircraft, have almost been taken out of the sky, hitting a a drone. You see drones landing in front of national leaders standing on stage giving speeches. You know, those kinds of things are harmed, but yet they weren’t regulated until we saw that harm. And I worry today that with capabilities such as biotechnology, that allows us to manipulate the genome with the internet of things, which has creeped into our daily lives and AI, with artificial intelligence. If you see the link up of these three, we’re liable to see a very changed humanity as we look to the future. And so I’m very interested in a humanity that is, if you will, that is good for humans, not just one in which we sort of become the subjects of our technologies.

Bob Gourley:

Great. Thanks Dan for that. And thanks for all its other contexts on these wide ranging technological issues. I really appreciate it.

Dan Gerstein:

Happy to do it, and thanks for having me.

Bob Gourley:

All right. Thanks Dan.

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