Q-A: 1

Q: 1

Byron Reese: So people often say, “We don’t know what consciousness is,” but that’s not really true. We know exactly what it is. The debate is around how it comes about, correct?

Christof Koch: Correct.

Q: 2

So, what is it?

It’s my experience, it’s the feeling of life itself, it’s my pain my pleasure my hopes, my aspirations, my fears, all of that is consciousness.

Q: 3

And it’s described as the last major scientific question that we know neither how to ask nor what the answer would look like, but I assume you disagree with that?

I disagree with some of that, it’s one of the two or three big questions, being: Why is there anything at all? What’s the origin of life, and yes how does consciousness arrive out of matter?

Q: 4

And what would that answer look like, because people often point to some part of the brain or some aspect of it and say, “that’s where it comes from,” but how would you put into words why it comes about?

It’s a very good question. So, having the answer to which bits and pieces of the brain are important for consciousness is critical to understand what happens in the emergency room when you have a patient who is heavily brain damaged, but you have no idea whether she is actually there, was anybody home.

It’s going to be of immense practical importance and clinical importance for babies or for anencephalic babies, or at the end of life, but of course, that doesn’t answer the question.

What is it about this particular bit, piece of the brain that gives rise to consciousness, and so finding what we need, we need a fundamental theory of consciousness that tells us what type of physical system, whether evolved or artificial, what type of physical system under what conditions can give rise to feelings because those feelings aren’t there?

If you look at the fundamental theories of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, there’s no consciousness there. If you look at the periodic table of chemistry, there’s no consciousness there.

If you look at the endless ATGC chart of our genes, there’s no consciousness there. Yet every morning we wake up to a world full of sounds and sights and smells and pains and pleasures. So that’s the challenge: how physics ultimately gives rise to conscious sensations.

Q: 5

Or, some might say, “whether physics give rise to it?”

Well, physics does give rise to it in the sense that my brain is a piece of furniture of the universe. It’s subject to the same physical laws as everything else. There isn’t a magical type of law that only applies to brains but doesn’t apply to anything else, so somehow physical systems or at least a subset of physical system gives rise to consciousness.

The classical answer, at least in the West, was forever, for a very very long time, there’s a special substance, the thinking substance, res cognitions, or people today call it the soul, and only certain types of systems have it and only humans have the soul, and the soul somehow mediates the mind.

But of course we [say], sort of logically, that’s not very coherent, there’s no empirical evidence for it… how would this soul interact with the brain, where’s the soul supposed to be, where does it come from, where’s it going to, it’s all incoherent, although of course the majority of people still believe in some version of this.

But as scientists, as philosophers, we know better. There isn’t any such soul, so it comes back to the question, “What is it about the physics of the world that gives rise to feelings, to sensations, to experience?”

Q: 6

Well, I want to tackle that head-on in just a moment, but, let’s start with you, because you’ve been dealing with this question for a long time, and it’s fair to say, your understanding of it has evolved over time.

Can you walk through, like the very first time you thought about this? As far back as you remember, and then what you thought and what the early theories you offered up, and how you have evolved those over time?

Sure, so I grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family, and I was devout and then, of course, you grow up to believe there’s this soul, the real Christof, is sort of this spirit that’s hovering over the waters of my brain, and every now and then, that soul touches the waters of my brain, makes me do things, and then when I’m thinking about, for instance, whether I should sin or not, this absolute freedom to choose one or the other and then my soul does one thing or the other, but then, this was on Sundays.

Then during the day and the rest of the week, I taught science, I thought about the world in scientific terms, and then you’re left… well wait a minute, you begin to think about more detail and that just can’t work. Because, most importantly, where is the soul?

How does it interact with a brain, and so then you begin to think about scientific solutions? And then I encountered, years later, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, and he and I started up this very fruitful collaboration, where we wanted to take the problem of consciousness away from pure philosophy where it’s vested over the past 2,000 years, which is great you’ve had some of the smartest people of humanity, but they haven’t really advanced the field that much, to take it into an empirical operation that we scientists can work on.

And so we came up with this idea of the neuronal colleagues of consciousness. It’s a fairly obvious thing; it’s the idea is that, whenever I’m conscious of something, whether it’s your face, for instance, I see your face or hear your voice, or I have a pain or I have a memory, there must be some mechanism in my brain, we know it’s not the heart, we know it’s in the brain, there must be some mechanism in the brain that’s responsible for that.

And it’s a 2-way communication between this mechanism and my feelings in the sense that I artificially activate this neuronal colleague of consciousness or abbreviated as NCC. If I trigger it for example, by an electrode that I put into the brain, and say doing brain surgery, I should get that person, even though there isn’t anybody out there, but I still see a face.

Or conversely, if this part of the brain gets removed by a stroke or a virus or a bullet or something, I shouldn’t be able to have this person anymore.

Now also this is a big scientific empirical program that’s going on in many places throughout the world, where people are trying to look for these neural colleagues of consciousness in the brain.

But then, of course, somebody pointed out to me, he asked me a very simple question, said, “Well in principle, if your program has run its course and then 50 years later we know exactly that every time you activate these neurons in this particular model, projecting to this other part of the brain, you become conscious.”

How’s that different from the cards cranial gland, because famously 80 years ago, they said well the place where the brain needs to have this spooky stuff, this cognitive stuff, is the cranial gland, and today we all laugh at it, right?

Well, how is that different from saying, “well it’s made up of 5 neons that oscillate at 40 hertz?” It’s just much more detailed because ultimately it seems like magic.

Why should activity in these neurons give rise to conscious sensation, and at that point, I really thought, well what we need, we need a fundamental theory that tells us, independent of which mechanism, tells us what is it about anyone mechanism that can give rise to consciousness? And so here we are, 20 years later.

Q: 7

And so talk about IIT?

So the most promising theory of consciousness in my personal opinion, and in the opinion of many of the observers of the field, is this integrated information theory, due to this Italian-American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi.

And it starts by saying, “Well what is a conscious experience? A conscious experience exists for itself – in other words, it doesn’t depend on anybody else, doesn’t depend on my parents or you or any observer – it just exists for itself. It has particular properties, it’s very definite, either I have a conscious experience or I don’t have a conscious experience.

It’s one, it’s only one at any given point in time, and it has parts, like, if I look out at the world, I can see you over here, over there something else, and there’s an above and below and a close by and a far away, and all those notions of space and other sensory qualities.

And so then let’s look for a physical mechanism, or first an abstract mathematical formulation of such a magnitude that instantiates these key properties of consciousness. And so the theory says that ultimately, consciousness is its causal power of the system upon itself.

So let me unpack that a little bit. Well firstly, let me repeat it. So the idea is that consciousness ultimately is the ability of any system, like my brain, to influence its immediate future, and to be influenced by its imminent past, it has causal power.

Not upon others, that’s what physics has. If I have an electric charge, I’ve attraction or repulsion of other things, but it’s power upon itself. The brain’s a very complex system, and its current state, influences its previous state and its past state influences its current state.

And the claim is that any system that has internal causal power, feels like something from the inside. Physics tells us how objects appear from the outside, and this thing, intrinsic cause-effect power, tells us what it feels to be that system from the inside.

So physics describes the world from the outside perspective, from the third-person perspective of an observer.

Integrated information cause and effect power tell me what it is to be a system from the inside, and the theory has this number called phi, that tells you how conscious the system is, how much intrinsic cause and effect power it has, how irreducible it is, that’s another way of looking at it.

Consciousness is a property of a whole, and how much that whole is a whole, how much it is reducible, that’s quantified by this number phi.

If phi is zero, you don’t exist, there’s no consciousness, the system doesn’t exist as a whole. The bigger the phi, the more conscious the system is, and the theory delivers, at least in principle for any system, whether it’s a brain or computer chip or a molehill, an ant, anything else, it says, in principle, you can determine, it gives a recipe algorithm, how you can determine for a particular system, in a particular state, whether it’s conscious and how much it’s conscious by computing the phi. So that’s where we are today.

Q: 8

So it’s a form of panpsychism?

One of the consequences of integrated information is, that it says consciousness is much more widespread than we’d like to believe.

It is probably present in most the metazoa, most animals, it may even be present even a very simple system like a bacterium may feel like something, that’s what it says, that a single paramecium for instance, right, single protozoa, single bacteria is already a very complicated system, vastly more complicated than anybody’s every simulated, right?

We don’t have a single simulation today, in the world, of a single cell at the molecular level, but it’s way too complex for us to do right now, but the theory says yes, even this simple system feels like a tiny bit…

Q: 9

What about non-biological systems though?

In principle the theory is agnostic. It just talks about causal power, so any system that has causal power upon itself, is in principle, conscious.

Q: 10

So is the sun conscious?

Well, okay so that’s a very good question. The sun is not conscious I believe, at the level of the sun, because, so consciousness really requires… It says that the system has to be integrated and highly differentiated as a whole; so the system has to be able to influence its whole.

The sun is so big that it’s very difficult to understand how propagations within the sun would exceed any time more than a few millimeters, given the magnetic hypo dynamics of the corona atmosphere of the sun.

So any system, you can always ask the question, is that as a whole conscious, as many people have asked in the West and in Eastern tradition. The sun is unlikely to be conscious, just like, for example, a sandhill, is very unlikely to be conscious, because if you look at the individual sand particles, they only interact with each other over very, very short distances.

You don’t have two sand particles that ever, let’s say, an inch apart, they don’t interact anymore, only very, very weakly.

Just like, for instance, you and me, you’re conscious, I’m conscious, there isn’t something that’s right now, that feels to be a Byron-Christof, although we do interact, right, we clearly talk to each other, your brain has a particular amount of integrated information.

My brain has a particular amount of integrated information. There is a tiny bit of integrated information among us, but the theory says, the only systems that are conscious, are local maximum.

It’s like many physical systems, it has this extreme on principle, it said, “only a system that has maximum cause-effect power is conscious.”

Therefore, the integrated information within my brain is much more tightly integrated given the massive interconnection within my brain, and the very few bits that we exchange sort of every second, given the speed of verbal communication.

So that’s why you’re conscious, I’m conscious, but there isn’t an uber consciousness, there isn’t a gestalt that sort of consists of you and me.

Q: 11

But, do you have a sense, if you were a betting man, that while you extend this order of consciousness to all of these systems, are humans somehow more conscious than an ant?

Yes, there’s no question…

Q: 12

So what is it about humans, in fact, could you name something that hypothetically could be more conscious than a human?

Yes, in principle you can imagine other physical systems…

Q: 13

No, I mean something in the real world? And what is it about us, back to this, “What’s special about us that gives us supercharged consciousness? Because our brain isn’t that much different than an ape brain…

But it’s bigger.

Q: 14

Right, but only by percent.

Well by a factor of three. But just size… in terms of local interactions, we haven’t done enough microanatomy, to be able to see… is a little grain of ape brain really fundamentally different from a little bit and piece of the human brain? Certainly by size…

Q: 15

But then the Beluga whale would be more conscious than us?

Well, so that is one of the challenges, we look at brains of some mammalian, that made it back to the sea, their brain is indeed bigger than us and it may be, it’s very difficult to know right now, but it may be that at some sense, they may be more conscious of their environment than us, but they haven’t developed the ability to talk about it in the way we have, so it’s very difficult for us to test that right now.

But that’s not impossible. But it’s an important question, ultimately you can test.

Q: 16

It just feels like you have a world full of all these objects…

These conscious entities, yes indeed. The universe is partly filled with conscious entities.

Q: 17

But somehow we appear, and I understand your caveat that that might not actually be the case, but we appear to be the most conscious thing.

Well because we are eloquent.

Right.

And other animals, by and large, are not nearly as eloquent. My dog, I can communicate with my dog, but only in a limited way, you know I know the position of his back, how he wags his tail, his ears, etc., but it’s low grade… and also my dog doesn’t have an affect representation of Charles Darwin, or evolution or god or something like that.

So yes, by and large, it appears to be, at least on planet earth, that it’s not unlikely that we are the most, homo sapiens is the most conscious creature around. We live in a world with other conscious entities.

Now, this is not the usual belief. The majority of the planet’s population believes that there are lots of other conscious minds.

It’s only really in the West, that we have this belief in human exceptionalism, and somehow we are radically different from anything else in nature. It’s not a universal belief.

Q: 18

No, but I guess one would say, if you compare our DNA to an ape, as an example, the amount that’s different is very small.

Correct.

Q: 19

And of the stuff that’s different, a bunch of that may not manifest itself. It may not do anything, and that the amount of code different between us and an ape is trivially small, and yet, an ape isn’t 99% as conscious as I am, or at least it doesn’t feel that way to me.

We remember the code that’s in our DNA, which is only 30 MBs, if you compress it, not a lot, and as you pointed out, it’s more or less the same in an ape, in fact, it’s more or less the same in some mammals.

But let’s not totally confuse the amount of information in the blueprint, with the actual information in the final organism as a whole.

Q: 20

I’ve heard an older interview of yours where you were asked if the internet was conscious. And you said, “it may have some amount of consciousness,” would you update that answer?

Well, in the meantime, the internet has got a whole lot more complex of course, I don’t see any behavioral evidence of consciousness.

So, it has a very different architecture, it’s no point to point, it has packet switching, so it’s quite different from the way our brain is, so it’s not easy to actually estimate how conscious it is. Right now, I’d probably say it’s not very, based on what I know about it today, but I may be wrong, and it certainly could change in the future.

Because if you think about it, certainly in terms of its component, the internet has vastly more transistors, the internet taken as a whole, it has 10 billion nodes… each of those nodes has 10 to 11 transistors, so if you look at it as a whole, it’s bigger than a single human brain, but it’s wired up and interconnected on many different ways, and connectivity, — this is what integrated information tells us: the way components are wired up really makes all the difference, so if you take the same components, but you wire them up randomly or even the wrong ways you might get very little consciousness, it really matters.

Q: 21

What about the Gaia hypothesis, do you think that the Earth and all of its systems, if they function as a whole, if they are self-regulating to some degree, then it’s influencing itself and so could the Earth as a whole be conscious, and all of its living systems?

Unlikely, for the same reason, integrated information says always consciousness, it’s a local maximum of intrinsic cause and effect power. In fact, this criticism has been made by the American philosopher John Searle.

He said, “Well, IT seems to predict that all Americans, that America is conscious as a whole, there are 310 million Americans, each one of them is conscious, at least when they’re not sleeping, etc.

And therefore, how do you rule out that there isn’t America as a conscious entity? Well, the theory has a very simple principle, local cause-effect maximum, you’re conscious, I’m conscious, but unless I do some interesting technology, we can return to that point in a little bit, there isn’t anything that it is like to be unique, right now there isn’t…

There are four of us in this room, there isn’t a group consciousness, there isn’t anything that feels like to be the group of the four of us sitting around here, nor is there anything like to be America.

Q: 22

So, what would be your criticism of the old Chinese nation problem, where it says, “you take a country like China, one billion-plus people and you give everybody a phone book, and they can call each other and relay messages to each other, and that eventually…”

Okay, let’s get to something much more concrete, I find it more interesting… Let’s take a technology, let’s call it bridging, brain bridging, okay? Let’s say brain bridging allows me directly with some future technology to wire up some of my neurons to some of your neurons.

Okay, so let’s do that in the visual thing. So now my visual brain has access to some of what you see, so for instance I now see a ghostly image of what I see across the usual world, and now I sort of ghostly super-impose, I see a little bit of what you see, right now you’re looking at me, so I see me ghostly reflected.

However, the theory says, until the integrated information between the system or your brain/my brain, and the spring bridging, increase the above-integrated information with my brain or within your brain.

There’s still you, and there’s still me. You are still a conscious entity with your own memory and I’m still a conscious entity, Christof. Now, I keep on increasing the bandwidth of this brain bridge.

At some point the theory makes a very clear prediction: when the integrated information in this new system, that has now 2 brains exceeds the integrated information in either your or my brain, at that point I will die, Christof will die, Byron will die and there will be a new entity, a new single entity that consists of you and me.

It’ll be a single thing, it’ll be a single mind that has some of your memories and some of my memories, it’ll have 2 brains, 4 hemispheres, 4 eyes, 4 ears.

And you know what, the inverse has happened in surgery, it’s called split-brain, because in split-brain what I do, I take a normal brain, I mean they’re not normal, they’re not healthy, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s a normal brain, I cut it in the midline where there are 200 million fibers across the corpus callosum that link the 200 million fibers that link the left brain with the right brain, I cut it, and what’s the empirical evidence?

I have two minds inside one skull, so here I’m just saying, “Well let’s just do it using technology, we built a sort of artificial corpus callosum between your brain and my brain.”

And so, in principle, there will be this technology, that allows us, maybe even in large groups, to merge, we can take all these four people here, we can interconnect us using this brain bridging, and then there will truly be a single mind.

Now that’s a cool prediction. And you can probably start doing that in mice in the next 10 years or so. It’s a very specific prediction of the theory.

That’s the advantage, once you go from philosophy to very concrete theories, you can test them and then you can think about technology to implement and test them.

Think about two lovers, think about Tristan and Isolde, right? Who sings in Tristan and Isolde opera… they don’t want to be Tristan/ Isolde anymore, they want to be this single entity, right, so in the act of love-making, you’re still, that’s the tragedy of our life, you’re still always you, and she’s always she, no matter how close you are, even though your bodies interpenetrate, you’re still you and she’s still here, but with this technology, you would overcome that, there would be only a single mind.

Now I don’t know how it would feel, you might also get all sorts of pathologies because your brain has always been your brain, and my brain is always my brain and suddenly there’s this new thing, you could probably get what you get in split-brain, that one body does something different from the other body, these conflicts that you see in split-brain, after the operation, this so-called “alien hand syndrome”…

But at least conceptually, this is what the theory predicts.

Q: 23

I’ll ask you one more hypothetical on things whether they’re conscious or not, what about plants, how would you apply IIT to a tree?

It’s a very good question. I don’t know the answer. I’ve thought a little bit about it, of course, there are now people who claim that plants, flowers, and trees have much more complex information processing going on, at a slower scale.

They clearly didn’t evolve to move around, they clearly don’t act on the timescale of seconds. It may well be possible that at least some non-animal organisms like plants, also that it feels like something to be them, that’s what consciousness is, it feels like something to be you, we can’t rule it out.

Now our intuition says, “Well that’s ridiculous,” but our intuition also says, “The planet can’t be round, because people obviously would fall off,” people have used this argument for hundreds of years, but the person on the antipode is going to fall off the planet.

So we know planets can’t be round, “we know whales are fish, they smell like fish, they’re in the water, they’re not mammals.” So we’ve all sorts of intuition that then science tells us, well actually these intuitions are wrong.

Q: 24

So let’s think through the ethical implications of that, if people are conscious, and because people are conscious they can feel pain, and because they can feel pain, we deem that they have certain rights.

You can’t abuse animals because, of course up until recently people didn’t believe animals necessarily could feel pain, up until the nineties. And so, we say “no, no,” you can’t abuse animals, because animals can feel pain.

Well according to you, everything can… well not everything, but almost everything can feel pain.

Does that (a) imply everything has some right not to be hurt, does a tree have some right not to be cut down; and part (b), does it not undermine the very notion of human rights, because if we’re just another conscious thing, and everything else, and whales may be more so and fish may be, and this may be and that may be, then there really isn’t anything wrong with torturing people or what have you, because everything’s conscious, of course, everything.

Okay, the first point, I don’t know, having consciousness doesn’t automatically imply that you have the capability to feel pain, to experience pain.

Consciousness just, could maybe be all they have are pleasure centers, for them, the entire life is just a ride of pleasures, just one orgasm after the other, so our theory of having consciousness is not the same as having a conscious experience of pain. Pain is a subset of conscious experience.

Second of all, even as humans, we have rights, but then of course, very often those rights clash. “Thou shall not kill.” But there’s capital punishment, and there’s abortion, and then there is homicide, and then there is war, where I can legally kill other people, right?

So, these rights are always a tradeoff, as are other rights, and the same thing with consciousness yes. It’s no question that certainly all mammals are conscious, right?

Birds are conscious, most of the complex fish are conscious, and so one consequence is maybe we shouldn’t eat it.

So ever since I had this realization, I don’t eat the flesh of creatures anymore, for that very reason. Now once again, it’s a tradeoff, okay, I’m not going to starve to death if there’s a piece of dead flesh, of steak that I could eat to survive, and so it is a trade-off.

But given that we have choices, I think we should act on those choices, and yes, if it’s true, the moral circle becomes larger, but this has happened over the last 2,000 years.

The moral circle of life, the people accorded special privileges, first only used to be Greek men, alright, and then we extended it to some other men around the periphery of the Mediterranean, and then we thought about women, and then we thought about African Americans, and Africans and people who look, at least superficially, very different from us.

Right now, as you may well know, there’s a movement to accord at least great apes certain rights, because, yes they are our cousins, our distant cousins. And yes we shouldn’t hunt them and eat them for bushmeat.

Q: 25

That’s maybe addressing a slightly different question I’m asking. I’m saying, if the circle eventually becomes everything, then the circle becomes meaningless right? If it’s like, “no, no, you can’t eat plants either, and then you can’t cut a sheet of paper or…”

No, no, because the theory says, not every object is conscious, most certainly not. A sheet of paper for example, the interactions…

Q: 26

Not a sheet of paper, I shouldn’t have said that one, but you extended it to plants…

A big question is, it’s the difference between having one cell that’s highly complex and conscious, versus is the plant a whole?

That’s a question you have to ask. Is the tree, the oak tree, as a whole, is it conscious as a whole, or are there bits and pieces of it? That makes a big difference, I assume we don’t know, I haven’t looked at the structure, I don’t know.

Q: 27

Fair enough, but the argument is, you speed up the plant growing and finding sunlight, and it sure looks like animal movement…

Yeah but a movement by itself, we know in patients, we know when you’re sleepwalking you can do all sorts of complex behavior, without the patient necessarily being conscious, so it’s a complicated question.

Q: 28

You made a really sweeping statement just a second ago, you said, “all mammals are conscious, and birds and fish.” How do you know that, or how do you have a high degree of confidence in that?

Very good question, so, two things have happened, historically over the last hundred years, (a) we’ve realized, the continuity of all brain structures, we believe it’s a brain that gives rise to consciousness, not the heart.

If you look at the brains of all mammals, I mean I’ve done this at my institute, my institute has 330 people that are experts in the neuron anatomy of the mouse brain and human brain, I’ve shown them, one after the other, cells, brain cells, they’ve come from a human brain and a mouse brain, each one a slide on the screen.

And I asked them, I moved the scale bar because the human brain is roughly 3 times bigger in width than the mouse brain, I remove the scale, each one I asked, “tell me, guess.” And they had this photo app, they had this app on their phone, “is it human or mouse?”

People were entranced. Why? Because the individual components are so similar across whether it’s a mouse, a dog, or monkey, or a human, it all looks the same, we have more of it, but as you point out, a whale has even more of it.

So the hardware’s very similar. [Secondly,] behavior with the exception of speech, (but of course not all humans speak, there are people who are mute, there are babies, and early childhood that doesn’t speak, there are people in faith that don’t speak.

But speech at least in normal human adults is different from other creatures). But there are all these other complex behaviors: empathy, lying, there are higher-order theories, there are complex bees for example, who’ve been shown to recognize individual beehive owners.

Bees have this very complicated way how they choose their hybrid, you think how long it takes you to choose a house, you can look at how a bee colony sends out these scouts and they have this very complicated dance to try to find an agreement, so we realize there’s lots of complex behavior out there in the world.

Thirdly, we’ve decided, at least scientists and philosophers have, that consciousness is probably not just at the apex of information processing.

So it’s not just what it used to be, so high-level awareness that I know I’m going to die and I can talk about it, but consciousness is also those low-level things like seeing, like feeling, like having pain.

And those state that the associated behavior and the associated underlying neural hardware that we find in many many many other creatures.

And therefore today, most people who think about questions of consciousness, believe consciousness is much more widespread than we used to think.

Q: 29

Let’s talk a little bit about the brain and work that way. So let’s talk straight with the nematode worm… 302 neurons in its brain.

We’ve spent 20 years trying to build a model of it, and even the people involved in it, say that that may not… they don’t know if they can do it. Do you think…

Embarrassing isn’t it?

Well is it, or is it not beautiful? That life, so my question to you is this, you just chose to say, “because our neuron looks like a mouse neuron, ergo, mice are conscious.”

No, no, no, it’s not quite that. Our brain is very similar to a mouse brain, our behavior is rather similar, and therefore it’s much more likely that they also have similar states, not identical, much less complex, but similar states of pain and pleasure and seeing and hearing that I have.

I find no reason to… there’s no objective reason to think otherwise, because otherwise, you have to say, “Well we have something special, but I don’t know what that special is. I don’t find it in the underlying hardware.”

So, and this of course what Rene Descartes did famously, he said, “When your carriage hits a dog and the dog yells, it’s just a machine acting out, there’s no conscious sensation.” Clearly, he wasn’t a dog owner, right?

We believe, I mean, I don’t know a single dog owner who doesn’t believe his dog can be happy or excited or sad or depressed or in pain. Well, those are all conscious sensations. Why do we say that?

Well, because we interact with them, we live with them, we realize they have very complex behavior that’s not so different from ours.

They can be jealous, they can be happy, the same thing that your kids are jealous of each other sometimes, or happy, so we see the great similarities of cause and divide across species. We’re all nature’s children.

Q: 30

So, back to the nematode worm, our understanding of how 300, and I think 2 of them float off on their own, so how 300 neurons come together and form complex behavior, such as finding food, finding a mate. I mean they’re the most successful creatures on the planet. 70% of all animals are nematode worms.

They out survive us.

Yeah, so my question is to you, first of all, could a neuron actually be as complicated as a supercomputer?  Could it be operating on the Planck scale, with such incredible nuance to say… well I’ll leave the question there?

Why is the nematode worm so intractable so far, and why do we not understand better how neurons operate, and could a neuron be as complicated as a supercomputer?

Right, okay so three very different questions, let’s start with neurons, any cell. As I mentioned before, right now we do not have a molecular-level model of an entire cell.

There’s not a single group that has such a model, just of a single cell, no matter what cell that is, nematode cell, human cell, some people are trying to do that. The Allen Institute for Cell Science is trying to do that, but we aren’t there yet, right? Why?

Because we still don’t have the knowledge and the raw computational ability, but more importantly, the knowledge to try and model all of that, right? That’s just a practical limitation. We’re making progress, but it’s slow.

You’re right very unbalancing for my science, brain science. We do not have a general-purpose model of a creature that only has 1000 cells, 302 of which are neurons. We’re getting there, I mean we understand many many things about the nematode, but we’re still not there yet, so, my science still has a long way to go.

So it’s difficult, what else is new about the world, research is difficult. Look, per unit, per gram or pound, the brain is the most complex organ in the known universe. It’s the most complex piece of highly organized matter in the universe, right?

And I think that’s related to the fact it’s also conscious because it is so complex, it is also conscious, so yes it is a challenge to our current methods, we’re making progress but it is, and remains the biggest challenge we have in science.

Q: 31

It’s interesting though because in the argument I heard earlier, you said, “People used to say there’s something special about humans.”

We don’t know what that is, dualism breaks down because of this problem. Therefore, there isn’t anything. Let’s look for a purely scientific answer… you come to some theory, but, and I’m in with all of that, but then, you say, “We look at a cell, we don’t understand how the cell works…”

In detail…

Right, and therefore, and we’re fine knowing there are just certain things we don’t know about it.

Right now.

But we didn’t take that about the specialness of humans. Look, there’s something special about us, everybody knows that, everybody knows that there’s a difference between a person and a paramecium, everybody knows.

And we just don’t know what it is yet, and we’re fine with that for now, but you say, “No, no, we have now concluded there is nothing special about us, let’s go figure out an alternate explanation.”

Well depends on what you mean “special” about us. Clearly, there are many things that are special about us. As I said, we’re the only ones who are eloquent. I’ve never had a conversation with my dog, nor with a worm.

We have, for example, a capability of language, that’s enabled us to build these cultures and to build everything around us. So there’s no question we’re special.

What you’re saying, we are special, or what people want to hear, that we are special, we somehow avoid the laws of science or we have something going above and beyond the laws of science.

Anybody else in the universe has to follow the laws of physics, but somehow humans are exempt from them, they’re this special deal, they have this special deal called a soul.

We don’t know what it is, we don’t know how it interacts with the rest of the world; but somehow, and that’s what makes us unique. Sure I can believe that, that’s a great belief, makes me special, but I don’t see any particular evidence for it.

No, we are different in all sorts of ways, but we’re not different in that way, we are subject to the same laws of physics as any other thing inside the universe.

Q: 32

So you mention language. I’m just curious, this is a one-off question. You think it’s interesting that of all the animals that have learned to sign, that none have ever asked a question, does that have any meaning to it?

I don’t know.

Because that would imply perhaps, they’re not conscious, because they can’t conceive that there’s something that knows something that they don’t.

Well, you say this as a fact. So, you’re sure that no gorilla has ever asked a question to another gorilla?

Q: 33

Correct, the one potential exception is, Alex the grey parrot may have asked what color he was, maybe. Other than that, no gorilla has ever asked.

I’m not sure I would take that at face value, but even if it’s true, so let’s just say for the sake of argument, yes. We seem to have vastly more self-consciousness than other creatures.

You know if the other creatures do have some simple level of self-consciousness, a dog has simple self-consciousness, my dog never smells his own poop, but he always spends a lot of time smelling other dog’s poop, so clearly, he can make the difference, between self and somebody else.

But yeah, my dog isn’t going to sit there and ask questions, because his brain just doesn’t have that sort of complexity.

Q: 34

Back to the notion “You and I don’t have anything between us that makes us one entity.”  Do you think that a beehive, or an anthill that exhibits complex behavior in excess in any of them, do they have an emergent consciousness as a whole?

So that’s a very good question. I don’t know. Again you have to compare the complexity within a bee brain, so a bee is roughly one million neurons, their circuit density is 10 times higher than our circuit density because they evolved to fly, so they have to be on very tight weight mass constraints of the sorts that we aren’t as terrestrial animals, and nobody’s fully reconstructed a bee brain yet, although they’re doing it for flying.

So question is, given the complexity of what’s in the bee strain and the communication, the wiggle dance they do to communicate, what’s the tradeoff there? I mean it’s a purely empirical question that can be asked. Right now my feeling is probably not, but I may well be wrong.

Q: 35

Do you know the wasps that do the shimmering thing, they make this big spinning pinwheel, and they spin so quickly there’s no wasp who says “oh he just flared his wings, therefore it’s my turn, and then the next one, that somehow…?

Look you have these beautiful, what are they called ruminations, there’s these beautiful, you can see it on the web, these movies of birds, and flocks of birds that execute these incredible flight maneuvers, highly synchronized.

Are they one conscious entity? Again, you have to look at the brains and you have to look at the amount of communication among the individual organs. You can look at North Korean military parades, right?

It’s amazing the precision with which you get 100,000 Koreans to do these highly choreographed [maneuvers]. But they’re not conscious as a whole because the information they exchange is much much lower than the massive information.

Once again, you have 200 million fibers just between your left brain and your right brain, but those are all good questions that you could ask and that have answers once you have a fundamental theory of consciousness.

Q: 36

So let’s go from the brain to the mind. So, I’ve looked hard to find the definition of the mind that everybody can kind of agree on. And my working definition will be: it’s the set of attributes that we have, some abilities that we have, that don’t seem, at first glance, to be something that mere matter could do.

Like, I have a sense of humor, my liver may not have a sense of humor, my liver may not be conscious of the way my brain is. So, where do you think the mind, under that definition, where do you think all these abilities come from?

Do you think they’re inherently emergent properties? Or are they just things we haven’t kind of sort through? Where does a sense of humor come from when no individual cell has a sense of humor?

It’s a property of the whole, it’s the property of your brain as a whole, it’s not a property of individual cells, we know this is true of many… I take a car, I look at the many individual components of a car, they don’t drive, they don’t do the same what a car does, but you put all these things together as a whole, and then the whole can do things that the individual parts can’t.

Q: 37

Emergence, so do you believe that strong emergence exists? Do you believe you can always derive the behavior from like if you studied cells long enough, you would say “I understand where a sense of humor comes from now?”

No, for that you need a theory of consciousness if you’re really referring to the conscious mind, to the mind, as many aspects are unconscious. I think about the maiden name of my grandmother.

I have no idea, how my brain, how my mind comes up with the name Shaw. I don’t know how it works, so that’s all unconscious.

The conscious mind you need a theory of consciousness, you, not just a theory of cells, not just the physics of it, but you also need to explain how the conscious mind has a sense of humor because that’s the property of a conscious mind.

Or maybe doesn’t have a sense of humor, depending on who it is, emerges from. Yeah, so it’s what you refer to as strong emergence.

And so strong emergence…

But it’s not magical you understand that?

Well, that’s a word you’ve used a few times. And it’s because as you said at the very beginning, there’s nothing magic about us. But I think people who believe that strong emergence is possible to believe it’s a scientific process.

But, a lot of people say, “No, you can’t say that for something to take on properties that none of its components have, and you cannot derive those properties. Until eternity passes away, you can study those individual components and not figure out how that comes about.

Yes, you need to solve a problem that Aristotle was one of the first who wrote about it, the parts, the relations among the parts, and the whole. Yes, you need a theory that describes what a whole is, the whole system.

An integrated information theory is an example of such a theory that thinks about parts and how the parts come together to define a whole. Without such a theory, yes you would be lost, I agree with you, but it’s not magical.

What I meant was that, once you have such a theory, then you can understand it step-by-step. You can understand… you can predict which systems are whole and which systems are not whole.

You can predict which system properties are essential for wholeness and which ones are not. So in that sense, it’s a physical theory. It’s a lawful set of rules.

Q: 38

Well how can IIT be disprove it?

It can be disproved in a number of ways. So it says that the neural colleague of consciousness is the maxim of cause and effect. In principle, it gives you a way exactly how to test it, how to measure it.

In fact, now there was this recent series of articles in neurological journals where people tested one implication of information theory and built a conscious meter, built a simple device where you probe the brain with these magnetic pulses when you are asleep or anesthetized or you go to an emergency room, critical care facility where you have people who may be in a vegetative state, or maybe in a more conscious state, maybe there’s a little bit of consciousness there, or maybe they are conscious but they can’t tell you because they’re so grievously injured.

So integrated information derived a simple measure called perturbational complexity index, where you look at the EEG in response to these magnetic pulses where you can tell this patient is probably unconscious based on the response of his brain, and this person probably is likely to be conscious, so it’s one of the consequences.

So there are ways you can test it. It is a scientific theory; it may be wrong. It is a scientific theory.

Q: 39

Did you read about the man in South Africa who was in a coma for some amount of time, then he woke up and he was still locked in, but he was completely awake? And the thing is that every day he was left at this facility, they assumed he wasn’t conscious.

And so they played Barney all day long, and he came to abhor Barney so much he used all of his mental energy just to figure out what time it was every day, just so he would know when Barney was going to be over.

And he said even to this day, he can look at a shadow on a wall and tell what time it is. So you believe that we’ll soon be able to put a device on somebody like that, saying “No, he’s fully awake, he’s fully abhorring Barney as we speak right now.”

I just came back the last two days I attended a meeting of emergency room medicine, coma, and consciousness, and there we were for 2 days, we heard what is the current criteria, how can we judge these patients?

They are very very difficult patients to treat because ultimately you’re never fully sure given the state of technology today. But yes in principle, and it looks like even in practice, at least according to these papers, the last test was 211 patients, that we might soon have such a conscious meter.

There are several larger-scale clinical trials trying to test this across a large clinical population. There are thousands of these patients worldwide like Terry Schiavo was one of them, where it was controversial because there was this dispute between the parents and the then-husband.

Q: 40

So, I’m curious about whether all these things are conscious, for two reasons. One we discussed, because it has, as you’ve said, implications for how you treat them.

But the other one is, because if you don’t know if a tree’s conscious, you may not be able to know if a computer’s conscious, and so being able to figure out something as alien as the sun or Gaia or a tree or a porpoise is conscious, how would we know if a computer was?

That’s the penultimate question I want to ask, how would you know if a computer was conscious?

Very good question, so first we need to make it perfectly clear because people always get this wrong: there is artificial intelligence, narrow or broad, and we’re slowly getting there, that is totally separate from the question of artificial consciousness.

In other words, you can perfectly well imagine a supercomputer, superhuman intelligence, but it absolutely feels like nothing. And so most of all the computers today are of that ilk, and most will agree with that statement.

So, we have to dissociate intelligence from consciousness. Historically, until this unique moment in time, we’ve always lived in a situation where if you wanted something done, you wanted a ditch done, you wanted a war fought, you wanted your tax to be done, you employed a person and the person was conscious.

But now we are living in this world where you might have things that dig ditches, fight wars and do taxes that are just algorithms. They’re not conscious. However, of course, this does raise the question, under what conditions can you create artificial feelings.

When is your iPhone actually going to feel like something? When is your iPhone actually going to see, as compared to taking a picture and putting a box around it and saying, “This is mum’s face,” which it can do today?

So once again you need a theory of that. You can’t just go by the behavior because there’s no question, in the fullness of time, we will get all the movies and all the TV shows, Westworld, etc.

We’re going to live in a world where things behave like us. We will experience the world in 10 or 20 years where Siri talks to you in a voice that you cannot distinguish at all anymore from a human secretary.

Instead, he or she will have perfect poise, be perfectly calm, laugh at every one of your jokes. So how do we know she’s conscious? For that, you need a fundamental theory, and this particular fundamental theory of integrated information says you cannot compute consciousness.

Consciousness is not a special property of an algorithm, because your brain isn’t an algorithm. Your brain is a physical machine: it has an exterior, it has cognitive powers, both on the outside, it can talk, it can move things about and it has intrinsic cause-effect power, and that’s what consciousness is.

So if you want human-level consciousness, you have to build a machine in the likeness of man. You have to build what’s called a neuromorphic computer. You have to build a computer whose architecture at the level of the metal, at the level of the gate, mimics the architecture of the brain, and some people are trying to do that.

Q: 41

The Human Brain Project in Europe

For instance, let me give you an example that’s very easy for scientists. So I have a friend, she’s an astrophysicist, so she writes down the Einstein equations of general relativity, and she can predict on her laptop, on her computer, there’s a black hole at the center of our galaxy.

It’s a big black hole with a billion solar masses that sucks up all the… it bends gravity so much that not even light can escape. But funny enough, she doesn’t get sucked into her laptop that runs that, why not?

Why it’s simulating all correctly, all the effects of gravity, yet it doesn’t have any effect on its environment. Well isn’t that funny, why not? Because it doesn’t have the causal power of gravity.

It can simulate, it can compute the effect the gravity has, but it can’t emulate it, can’t physically instantiate the cause and effect of gravity (same thing).

Consciousness ultimately isn’t about the causal power, it’s not about simulation, it’s not about computation, and so unless you do that, you can build a zombie; you will be able to build zombies that claim they’re conscious, but they don’t feel like anything.

Q: 42

Well, that is a great place to leave it. What a fascinating discussion and I want to thank you for sharing your time.

Thank you very much, Byron. That was most enjoyable, and this is part of the IEEE Tech Fisherman series at South by Southwest.

QA: 1

Byron Reese: I want to start off by saying this show is about artificial intelligence. Let’s just start with that piece of technology.

When people say, “Well what is it?” or “How should I feel about it?” What would you say?

Dean Kamen: I think the first thing people should do is not be afraid of putting those words together. The word ‘artificial’ to some people sounds bad. You don’t want to have artificial stuff in your food. You don’t want artificial stuff elsewhere.

And the word ‘intelligence’ means very different things to very different people. So, putting those two words together makes a mess of language and thought.

But I would say to maybe make it a more constructive conversation, we can say that people, for the first few thousand years after we climbed out of the primordial ooze, would try to build things with their hands, which would get pretty tough I guess.

And then somebody invented the first tool: a hammer or a shovel. Ok, those were artificial muscles. Then we, through the industrial revolution, created things substantially more capable than the shovel, like a bulldozer.

And it eliminated all those jobs of those ditch diggers — because one bulldozer could do the job of a thousand ditch diggers. I’d call a bulldozer artificial muscle. And it probably gave you a thousand to one — or more — leverage over what you could do with your back-breaking work.

But it didn’t eliminate jobs, because when you didn’t have a bulldozer, you might spend a whole life digging a hole big enough to make a house. Once you had a bulldozer, you didn’t eliminate the careers for a thousand people that might dig a hole.

You created the plausible possibility of paving, for instance, North America with a superhighway system.

So as we developed more artificial muscle, we built more and more things because we could, from roads to skyscrapers.

And those people that somehow believe that as we use computers or computing technologies to eliminate the work that people used to do that’s drudgery or boring work, the idea that we’re going to eliminate jobs is equally silly as saying the bulldozer eliminated a career.

No, it eliminated the horrible work that nobody wanted to do and gave people time to do way more magnificent things.

So I will call out artificial intelligence as the ability of the engineering community to move its capability to amplify not what your muscles used to do by building us the industrial revolution, but by amplifying what your thinking and problem-solving capabilities are because you’ve added the equivalent of an electronic bulldozer to eliminate the bulldozer, did something to the shovel, and the computer did something to the adding machine.

In each case, it opens up new opportunities to do more and more great stuff and to more and more young people, especially if they develop the skill sets to use these tools. And I hope they do it through my first robotics competition.

I hope that more and more young people see “artificial intelligence” as nothing more than saying, I don’t do back-breaking physical work due to the industrial revolution, I won’t be doing boring mental work due to artificial intelligence. I’ll leverage these technologies to build a better future and more capable career for myself. And that’s what it is.

QA: 2

Anybody who listens to the Voices in AI show knows I agree with every word you’ve just said. But the arguments that are sometimes brought against that viewpoint, believe me, I hear them a lot.

The first one is that, well, the change that is coming is going to come so fast, that it’s going to be severely disrupting. Do you think that there’s any merit to that?

I think every major change that has been wrought by technology permeates two things through the culture that’s experiencing it. To the pessimist, it brings fear, because people don’t like change. To the optimists, it brings excitement.

I’m sure when those first machines were made that could knit so quickly that all the people that knew how to make cloth by hand were terrified by the textile industry. I am again sure that the industrial revolution and steam engines and locomotives terrified all the people that were doing things that existed without the leverage of those technologies.

And I’m sure equally that other people saw those technologies as opportunities to do more and better things for themselves and their community in the world. So, I think you are right.

There are certainly lots of people that are appropriately concerned that the skill sets they now have are going to be displaced by more efficient, more cost-effective, maybe more accurate, more reliable, more stable systems, all lumped into something we call artificial intelligence.

But those very same people ought to say, if I learn about these systems, I learn how to use them, design them, develop them, deploy them, it will give me opportunities to advance my career and my sights about the future, and be part of something that’s bigger and better than the past. That’s called innovation, that’s called progress.

I think it comes down in every generation to the fact that as the world changes, you have a choice. You can be on that bus, or you could be off that bus, and if you embrace technology, you have the opportunity to be on a bus that’s moving further and moving faster.

Now having said that, by the way, you get on to a bus that’s bigger, heavier, and faster-moving than the one that you used to have and the scale of the impact of the accidents that can be caused are terrifying. But, again, this is not a new problem.

I’m sure the first tools that we made, using a rock as a hammer, can help you build something. Using the first hammer, you could break your thumb. Figuring out how to control fire, gave us the capability to stay warm and cook our food, and have light at night. It also gave us the capability to burn down our houses.

So, there is no technology that has only upside. In fact, I’d argue that the more potential upside that any new technology has, the more it can amplify what we do, by definition, it is just an amplifier. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s not immoral, it’s amoral. It’s an amplifier. It can help us do more good better; it can help people with nefarious goals do worse, or better.

And we need to deal with that. I think one way we deal with that is when we start teaching kids at an ever-earlier age about the power of technology, they also have to be taught not to use it as a weapon but to use it as a tool and not to simply do what you can do with technology, but to focus our efforts and do what we should with technology.

And to kids that are lucky enough, that have the privilege to have access to advanced technologies, they should understand that with every privilege comes responsibility.

I know in this country everybody runs around, saying “I’ve got my rights because of the Bill of Rights.” Well, maybe the founding fathers should have put right next to the Bill of Rights, the bill of responsibilities. Those people with capability need to use it wisely and prudently and help the rest.

So to those people that now claim the next big evolution in technology, which isn’t about amplifying muscles, it’s amplifying brains, it is going to be terrifying. I’m sure they were terrified by the locomotive, by the sewing machine.

I think smart people have to recognize that there’s always a risk when things change, and we need to continue to make sure that the changes net us all out to be in a better place, and we use those changes responsibly.

QA: 3

And then the second concern people have, and I think it’s one you share as well, is, do people have the education to do the jobs of the future?  Talk a little bit about that, and what you’re doing in that regard.

So, now you hit one where I think there is a problem, but again, in any rapidly changing environment, where you displace the status quo, some people fall out of the bottom. I think we now have the changes happening not at what was typically the worker base in most industries, but these are changes that affect everything.

And what is called white collared jobs or professional jobs are going to be potentially hugely impacted, and for some people in a negative way by ‘artificial intelligence’ because it was those white-collar or professional jobs that required a lot of sophisticated thinking that now might be displaced by programs that can get to better results more quickly than the manual process of thinking was capable of doing, even a decade ago.

So I started this program called FIRST, for inspiration and recognition of Science and Technology, a few decades ago recognizing that the jobs of the future are going to need kids that have a much more sophisticated skillset as they get through even their junior high school and high school years to be ready for these career options.

And the rate of change in the skill sets that will be necessary to have really interesting, exciting career opportunities over the next decade or two, is going to require a major change in our education system.

Keeping kids lined up in rows, having them memorize facts that used to be important, because if you didn’t know it, where were you going to find it? [is an obsolete approach].

Now, every kid in the country is carrying around on his or her belt every fact known to man, in a very well-organized way to find those facts.

So, education should no longer be giving you the disciplines and the toolsets that you used to need to go become a factory worker, learn how to follow instructions, learn how to do the same repetitive thing over and over again.

Education has to now be a much more sophisticated process of giving kids the toolsets and the understanding of how, for instance, to use ‘artificial intelligence,’ how to leverage the fact that information is now virtually free and what they need is to learn how to be systems innovators that add innovative ways for taking all this information and creating new opportunities to solve old problems.

And that’s what I tried to do in the FIRST community and that’s what I think schools need to quickly embrace so that school, as we knew it, can remain relevant to kids and it could be worth them spending so much of their lives in these locations.

QA: 4

Well, put a little flesh on the bones. How would you do schools?

Well, one of the things I’ve urged every school in this country to do, is incorporate the FIRST program. I mean, we’ve known now for decades that kids will sit in class and for 45 minutes once a week do phonics or spelling, but then every day during the season, every day after school, for three hours they practice [sports], whether it’s the football season, or the baseball season, or the basketball season, or soccer.

Kids, in a free country, you get the best of what you celebrate, and we have great programs that turn kids into great athletes because they put more time and effort and passion into that than they do in ‘academic’ stuff.

We justify all of that, by the way, putting so much into our physical school environment, whether it’s the parquet floors on the basketball court or the side lawns for the football and baseball.

We justify sports even though kids run the risk of being physically hurt. We justify it, almost exclusively by saying it’s critical that kids at an early age learn teamwork, and learn how to work together, compete in a positive way.

Well, really, if teamwork is all that important, why when they do it in the classroom, do we still call it cheating?

So I said look, we have a model that works, that gets kids inspired. It’s called sports. What if we could take that kind of model, that kind of essentially…a program that’s an interactive project base like building a sports team, what if we could take that model, but make the content not bouncing a ball or kicking a ball or throwing.

What if we could make the content developing the muscle hanging between their ears? What if we could create an opportunity within the school environment where kids could all participate in something where unlike in the other sport, every kid on a first-team could turn pro.

There simply aren’t millions of jobs in the NBA, the NFL, or Hollywood.

There are millions of not just jobs, but there are millions of career opportunities to create whole new industries that you and I haven’t even conceived of yet, that will be created by, and available to the next generation of kids that understand technology, that understands how to work together, that understand how to stand on the shoulders of the giants that have delivered, e.g., microprocessors that have essentially now made computation free and memory are essentially free, and the speed and the power of these devices have now turned them all into commodities.

We need kids that know how to leverage those commodities to solve the world’s problems, to create the new industries, and I think schools should be giving kids the toolset and the environment to do that, and I think rather than line them up with twenty, or thirty-year-old textbooks were science to them is putting pins in a frog, I think FIRST has the real potential to change the environment and the culture in schools to turn them into places where kids are excited to participate and come away with opportunities to create careers that they wouldn’t have imagined without FIRST.

QA: 5

So, take a step back just for the readers who may not be familiar with it. Describe what FIRST is.

FIRST, well the name stands for, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Notice the word ‘education’ isn’t in there.

The same way as the word ‘education’ isn’t in little league baseball. I said look, let’s create an institution that we can offer to schools, that will give kids kits and parts, cutting edge technologies, almost exclusively donated by massive, fantastic corporate supporters we have across the country, across every industry, to give kids access to the most cutting-edge technologies, and software development tools.

Let them take those kits or parts into their school and in a very exciting competitive short intense season, like any other sporting season, the schools will have these FIRST kits working between the kids, the teachers, the parents and the magic is the outside mentors from my 3700 corporate sponsors, pretty much every high tech company in this country and in the world now, embraces us because they need these kids more than these kids need them.

So, it’s a win, win, win for everybody.

The kids win, the teachers win, the parents win, the companies win, but basically FIRST is a program that brings together all of these different entities and says, we’re going to not give you quizzes and tests, but we’re going to give you this aspirational, extracurricular activity during which you learn how to do programming, how do you do electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, systems, controls, teamwork, build your company, build your little team, get it out there, go compete in these tournaments.

And again, you could say it’s all about teaching kids how to build robots, but I’ve been saying for years, we have never started FIRST… the goal was never to figure out how to get to use robots as the output product that we measure.

What we’ve now shortened it out to, is hey, everybody, we are not using kids to build robots. That would be slave labor. We are not using kids to build robots. We are using robots to build kids.

We are using these robots as an example to kids of what happens when you give people a sophisticated tactical challenge of an open-ended set of tools and inspire them to just try to do it.

There are no answers in the back of the book, there’s no one right way to do it. We’re not asking you to recall what we told you yesterday, that you took notes on when you were sitting in your classroom.

We’re saying, there is this problem. And every different school is going to get the same kit of parts, and you’re all going to have six or eight weeks to turn that kit of parts into an operating system.

And you’re going to put it out on that playing field, our playing fields are smaller than a basketball court, and you’re going to go head-on in battles in a double-elimination tournament against other kids and other schools that had other ideas on what’s the best way to accomplish this goal.

And in the end, again, [there are] no quizzes, no tests. It brings the school band, brings the mascots, brings the cheerleaders, let’s go celebrate what we’ve all accomplished.

Let’s go celebrate the creativity we’ve demonstrated, let’s go celebrate what we’ve learned about science and technology and engineering and problem-solving.

It went from twenty-three teams the first year we did it, to this year, we have over 61,000 schools from 83 countries, will be represented back here in Texas at the end of next month at the World Championship and then a couple of days later, because it was so big, we couldn’t get everybody here, a couple of days later we will do the second half of our World Championship, in Detroit, with thousands of these teams.

The passion that you see in these kids lets you know that despite all the crummy news we’re always hearing about technology — we’re running out of water and food, and the polar caps are melting and the environment is being… You know, news typically loves to make a spotlight around big problems — these kids just beam when you talk to them about these problems.

They are showing self-confidence and their ability to innovate and their ability to deal with these issues in a positive way, and it renews your confidence, that, while the world has gotten better and better at being negative and pessimistic if you give kids the right tools and the right mentorship, and first, if you inspire them, to recognize science and technology, you can walk away from our events believing that the future is going to be better than the past.

QA: 6

And how much of your time does all of that take?

Well, if I’m awake I’m working, so I probably work a normal forty or fifty or sixty-hour week in my day job. I have 500 engineers and in our day job, we design lots of critical systems for medical needs.

Let’s talk about DEKA. Let’s do that. You started it in 1982, it’s in New Hampshire, it’s focused on R & D.

Yeah, DEKA mostly does the front-end development of what we’d like to do, which takes advanced technologies as they get developed and come to scale, and then figure out how to apply them into a world where most people don’t apply them.

As processors got better and better, and faster and faster, you had ever more realistic violence on video games. Well, that’s great because we can do it, it’s easy.

But, once these big processors and faster processors and lower power processors got developed, we said, could we use those to make a better dialysis machine, one that might actually be so capable of monitoring itself through artificial intelligence that patients could do life support at home in their own bedroom.

It’s more comfortable, there’s more dignity, it’s lower cost,  it’s better outcomes. So, we didn’t invent microprocessors or sensors, or lithium batteries or solid-state gyros, or things like iBots and Segways.

We are a company of systems integrators.

We’re always looking at the world and saying, what new technologies have been developed, because some industry sees a need for huge amounts of them, whether it’s the gaming industry, or the defense industry, or the automotive industry, and we look at those technologies and say, now that they exist, could we system integrate them to make a better, simpler, smaller wearable drug delivery system, so somebody isn’t tied to a hospital.

Or, can we make an iBot so that a paraplegic or a quadriplegic who hasn’t been able to look somebody in the eye, or go up a curb or a flight of stairs since their accident, or whatever [has mobility again].

Can we give them back that capability by bringing these technologies to the field of human health? And I now have 500 engineers working on various projects to do that. Just a couple of weeks ago, we put a pair of prosthetic arms on a guy that had lost both of his arms. This guy was bilateral without arms.

QA: 7

Is this the Luke?

This is the Luke Arm.

Do you hold it above your head?

Yes, you sure can. And each one of the Luke Arms gives somebody substantially more capability than they had frankly with a plastic stick with the hook on the end of it, that they’d been using now for decades.

But as I said a couple of weeks ago, with a lot of support from the Veterans Administration and DARPA and the military, we ended up putting onto a guy for the first time ever a pair of our prosthetic arms, and within a very short time, this guy stands up in front of frankly our Senator, they had to see it in New Hampshire, and he spreads both of his arms and looks at her and says, I’m ambidextrous now.

And it was a great moment. So, I have a lot of engineers, as I said about 500 technical people in Manchester. We work mostly on systems to improve health care.

QA: 8

So, how does that work? In a way, you’ve done a fantastic job of systematizing the productization of technology through innovation. How do you go all the way from “we know how to do this really cool thing,” to “and there’s a business here?”

How do you do that, because usually things get handed off multiple times and different people have different skillsets, but you kind of do both ends of it, and how have you managed to do that?

So, I mean technically I guess it was specifically, I’m really not an engineer. I studied physics, I love mathematics and logic. I have, I think some of the best engineers in the world in each of the disciplines you need to do these very multi-disciplinary projects that we do.

We need mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, and systems engineers and controls engineers, but to your point, in most companies, they’re very vertical, and then they hand it off to a manufacturing group and then they hand it off to sales and marketing.

And at DEKA, we’re a little bit different from that, and we look at the whole problem from end to end, and say, “Look, let’s be good systems integrators and let’s figure out how to take all the stuff that really did take, in many cases, decades to develop core technologies, but now that they’re here and they’re ready, let’s figure out how we can,– across all the engineering disciplines that would be necessary to do it, — create a new class of solution to an old problem.”

The most exciting one we’re doing right now and hopefully we’re going to get a lot of support from IEEE for this one is we were just given at the end of the last administration, $80 million by the Department of Defense with the specific goal of, ok let’s take all those miracles happening in med schools and research labs, called regenerative medicine, let’s take those Petri dishes and roller bottles which have these little miracles in them and bring it to scale were 400,000 people that are right now waiting for a liver or a kidney or a lung are going to get one before, frankly, they die waiting.

And the researchers that have literally broken down the problem of understanding life, how does a liver be a liver, how does a kidney do what it does, how does a pancreas make insulin.

They know the answers to these questions, but they’re doing it in laboratory-scale environments and we said, I am as unlikely tomorrow to wake up and suddenly understand all the cellular biologies as they are unlikely tomorrow to wake up and say, oh, verification, validation, process control, regulatory standards.

These things aren’t going to jump out of these roller bottles and Petri dishes and suddenly become an industry themselves.  We need standards. We need the expertise and scale of companies that know how to make a prototype and make lots and lots of them, and if what we’re making lots and lots of are human organs, and human tissue, man you better get it right, because you’re putting it in somebody.

So, we said, look, as systems integrators, we think we can bring together probably dozens of them. We ended up bringing more than 80 companies: engineering companies, and manufacturing companies. In fact, there’s only one giant company I know who has the name ‘automation’ in their name, Rockwell Automation.

Well, we went to Rockwell and their Chairman, Blake Moret, said, “Dean, I’ll not only support you, but I’ll also join [your] board” of this new entity called Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute.

He kind of sat there and said, we, like anybody else, don’t know a whole lot about manufacturing whole human organs, because nobody has ever done it, but Dean, if you can bring the medical community and these researchers, and these guys that have or will win the Nobel Prize for their contributions to medicine if you can bring those guys to the table, and you at that table can bring your systems integrators and the rest of the engineering industry.

And people that understand artificial intelligence and robotics, and if we can bring, for instance, IEEE and ASME, and NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology all together, so that when we show up at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and say, trust us, this is a real organ, it needs a standard; we know what the quality is, we can make these things, and make them safe, and we can make them in volume and we can make them affordable, that’s what Army is going to do.

And if it succeeds we will create a new industry, and that industry will be able to start supplying spare parts to humans and assure them of a higher quality of life than we now can offer people who find out their kidneys failed and we put them on dialysis.

I built a lot of dialysis equipment. We are very proud that we’re helping to keep these people alive while they wait for a cure, but you wouldn’t want to be on dialysis, trust me.

We make lots of stuff to keep people going, but how much better could it be, if instead of keeping them alive with chronic treatment, how much better would it be if we could cure their condition.

Somebody suffering from Macular Degeneration and they’re sitting there saying, I see less and less, and soon I’m not going to see at all. And maybe it’s your Mom or your Dad, what would it be like to say, oh, we’ll go to this place and they’ll give you a new eye.

What would it be like to see that little kid that has to take insulin three times a day and say, oh, we’re going to give you a new pancreas?

Imagine a world where you can safely and reliably replace organs that have stopped working in people and give them a new way to start. That’s what Army’s going to do.

QA: 9

You say “if” it works, but it isn’t going to be a binary outcome, right? Some things will work, and some things won’t.

Fair enough. When I said, “if it works,” I didn’t mean that there is any chance whatsoever that we won’t eventually do it.

Right.

I should have said, “We’re doing this now, going down this path that we’ve created, and what I’ve promised a whole lot of people, is that within five years there’ll be at least some evidence of some of these things that have gotten far enough that they’re actually now meeting realistic clinical needs.”

Certainly, we’re not going to wake up one day and be able to do double click and say, send me a liver, send me a kidney. That’s not going to happen digitally, instantly.

We’ll start with simple things. Maybe it won’t be whole organs. It’ll be cells, it’ll be pieces of tissue, it’ll be cartilage, it’ll be skin, it’ll be bone, and then it will grow, no pun intended, into full organs, and in some cases those full organs, we will integrate the process again, not that we invented, but we know very well now that in a laboratory environment, we can take cells from an individual and through a very, very elegant process, turn them into what are called IPSCs, Induced pluripotent stem cells.

We could take a cell from your body because all the cells in your body have the same information, [but] then why did one of them become an eyeball and one of them become a toenail? Well, they got differentiated.

But what if we could get a cell out of you and say, we’re going to put it back to what it looked like when you were an embryo. And what if we could take that cell from you and put it into a structure that would manufacture on a 3D printer that wants to be a kidney or a liver.

And what if I could make these IPSC cells from you and that cell essentially can grow up to be whatever it wants. It could be a liver cell, it could be a hepatocyte, it could be an Islet cell, and it could make insulin.

What if we could, through the engineering capabilities, grow the physical structure and at the same time, develop a scalable process to take your cells and at just the right moment, coming down a ‘manufacturing line,’ take those cells from you, put them into this organ that we just grew, have those cells become a fully operating organ of that type, a liver, a lung, or a kidney, have it in a sterile environment, essentially delivered to the surgical suite, where the first time a human touched this manufactured product, it gets taken and it’s assembled back into you replacing the defective one, in the same way, you take your car to the dealership and they take the old noisy cracked muffler off and put on a new muffler or a new started motor, or a new generator.

You’ve got this whole beautiful car, but if those spark plugs don’t work, the car is useless. If that starter motor won’t crank, the car is useless. Well, you’ve got this whole beautiful car, we have learned a long time ago to figure out how to replace the one or two parts that needed to be replaced to make the whole car work again.

What if we could do that for you, and if we did it by putting an organ back in you that was built from your own cells, and it won’t be rejected? You won’t need to spend the rest of your life taking immunosuppressive drugs to prevent it from being rejected, which gives you a higher quality of life, a lower-cost medical system. Everybody wins.

So, my “if,” was not if that could be done. My if, as if our plan and the support we’re getting from the government, from researchers, from the engineering community, from the standards community, from NIST, from IEEE, from the FDA…if all of those things come together to create what might be the most sophisticated, vertically integrated, manufacturing process the world has ever seen, we could transform medicine in two ways.

We could give people a way better quality of life, and we will dramatically lower the costs that right now look like they’re going to bankrupt this country unless we come up with some great innovations.

QA: 10

Another thing I guess DEKA’s been working on that we’re interested in, is computer vision.

Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. As an example of two places where we’re in desperate need of better computer vision, in this Army advanced regenerative manufacturing, we’re trying to manufacture organs, but those organs have had some of their sub-components, cells, literally cells, we’ve got to be able to see where they are, how are they moving, how are they duplicated, where are they putting themselves.

So, if we could create an environment in which some of the systems we’re developing to bring these things out of the laboratory don’t need a postdoc sitting glued to a microscope and manually doing things.

What if we could automate through vision systems, some of the processes of monitoring and controlling the manufacture of things that have components that are literally smaller than human cells? That would be a huge win for us and we’re working on that.

And another place we want great vision systems is, I’m excited to say, we just got our next generation of iBot approved through the Food and Drug Administration and we’ve proven that’s it’s a very safe, reliable system to keep a person standing up.

But just like anybody that stands up, you and I, if we’re not paying attention, we could trip, we can slip, we can step into that pothole, we miss that curb, and then we fall down.

Well, what if we could add to our iBot systems that allow us to do the local mapping to make sure that the device is even safer when the person that’s using it isn’t paying attention.

What if we could help prevent some of those slips and trips? So, now the computer vision has gotten to where the actual cameras are so small and so inexpensive and require so little power consumption. I mean everybody is walking around, and now on their smartphone they have a camera that has a super high resolution, can operate in very low light, it’s very small, it’s very low powered.

What if we now integrate that with again, some of the very sophisticated software that can look at images coming through these cameras and help us map the environment and make sure that what we’re doing is safe?

So, I think vision systems, because the hardware has gotten so much better and smaller and cheaper, and because the algorithms to take the data coming out of these cameras has gotten so much better, whether it’s a simple camera or a lidar system or an ultrasonic system, or some combination of all sorts of others, giving machines the capability to interact with the outside world that they’re in, and gather data in real-time without physical locations and things are going hugely improve the capability of machines to do things we’d like them to do.

Hence, the self-driving car.

QA: 11

And last question. You’re clearly an optimistic person about the future in a world that is full of people who aren’t. How are you seeing things differently than people who are more down on the future?

Well, I just think the world works like this: you never solve a problem until you can identify and define it. So naturally as we’ve gotten better and better with technology, we’re able to define more and more problems. That could be depressing to people. To me, it’s just a transition stage. Now that we’ve identified that problem, let’s go about solving it.

So there are those people that look at the world, and now ironically through technology, through those satellite images, we can see that, wow, we’re impacting the environment, we can prove to ourselves the polar caps are melting.

We can take tests now that say, “Wow, you’re predisposed that you will have Parkinson’s disease” or “You will have Alzheimer’s,” and we develop more and more tools to help define problems. That’s always the first step.

So people see those tools, and they get obsessed with…oh my gosh, I’m going to have this disease or that disease. But an optimist says, oh, now that I’ve defined that problem, I’ll put some grey matter to it; I’m going to solve that problem.

I’m sure sixty or seventy or eighty years ago, when they figured out, oh my gosh, Polio, this virus, it’s gone through the country and it’s just wreaking havoc. My grandparents were terrified that this disease would come and what if their kids got Polio.

And then somebody figured out how to invent the iron lung so that if the Polio extended past your legs it would get up to your lungs which normally killed you.

Then people, those pessimists, those guys that know how to extrapolate into the future are probably the same guys that are telling us that our health care system is going to bankrupt the country.

They probably sat there and said, wait a minute, what if a few million kids next year get Polio and it gets so bad they need an iron lung.

Well, it used to be as tragic as that; they would just die. But now, I’m sure they would have extrapolated in the next ten years, half the population of America is going to be kept alive lying in an iron lung and the other half of the population is going to be stuck to take care of them and we’ll all be bankrupt.

Because they looked at the current state of data, the current state of what we knew, the current state of the problem. But they didn’t say, oh, don’t worry, in about ten years this visionary guy named Jonas Salk is going to come along, he’s going to realize that if you take the virus, kill it and then scratch it under somebody’s skin, they not only will not need an iron lung, they won’t even need the little things on the…they’ll never get Polio.

And kids today are not only not afraid of Polio, but they also don’t know Polio, it’s gone, it’s over. And it didn’t bankrupt the country. It’s about the cheapest thing you can do. Kids are born; they get a bunch of vaccines, Smallpox, Polio.

So I think the people today that are similar to the ones that must have been worried back then about that problem, will always see the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

They will always see this insurmountable set of problems and I’ve heard as a very young person that phrase, well every problem represents an opportunity.

I think we are surrounded by merely insurmountable opportunities and I think smart people will dice up those problems, those opportunities into different pieces and if we can create an army, a large enough army of young kids…

Back to FIRST, if we can create millions of kids that can spread themselves across all these opportunities, the generation of people alive today as the pessimists about health care, global warming, you name it, that generation of pessimists is going to see the next generation of smart, passionate kids, one by one, say, oh, well we’ve eliminated this problem on the global warming, we’ve eliminated this health care problem, we’ve now just created a vaccine against this cancer or Alzheimer’s or that.

Or, we’ve just figured out a way to make new organs for this, so you won’t need dialysis. I think the smart optimistic kids with the right toolsets will always stay one step ahead and in this constant race that we have in our society between the fear of catastrophe and the opportunity of success, the kids that are focused, that are optimistic, that work hard, that embrace technology will be the kids that make sure in that race between catastrophe and success we will succeed.

And we will succeed if we invest in these kids and if we have policies that allow us to embrace innovation, and I’m hoping that our government leaders, our industry leaders, our parents, our schools, and most of all our kids will embrace innovation, will embrace hard work, will take reasonable risks and create a better world in the future, as has happened in every generation since we climbed out of the primordial ooze.

QA: 12