The future of emerging technologies

0:00This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host Russ Altman. I thought it would be good to revisit the original intent of this show. In 2017, when we started, we wanted to create a forum to dive into and discuss the motivations and the research that my colleagues do across the campus in science, technology, engineering, medicine, and other topics. Stanford University and all universities, for the most part, have a long history of doing important work that impacts the world. and it's a joy to share with you how this work is motivated by humans who are working hard to create a better future for everybody.

0:37In that spirit, I hope you will walk away from every episode with a deeper understanding of the work that's in progress here and that you'll share it with your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers as well. We want to take advantage of these technologies to make life better. Herbert Hoover said to improve the human condition. But my view is that we're also in a race against time. And so I'm in the run hard and run fast category. There will be some issues, there will be some mistakes. But I would rather have those mistakes take place in a democracy, where we will have congressional hearings, we will have investigative reporting.

1:19the Chinese will do what they did with COVID. They'll hide it. They'll lie about it. We won't know what's going on. So if they're going to be any surprises, I want them to take place in a democracy, not in an authoritarian regime. And that's one of the reasons that I'm in the light touch on the regulation side.

1:41This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If you're enjoying the show or if it's helped you in any way, Please consider rating and reviewing it to share your thoughts. We like to get a 5.0 if you feel we deserve it. Your input is extremely valuable and will help others discover what this show is all about. Today, Secretary Condoleezza Rice will tell us that for many technologies, the U.S. is in a race, and we have to run fast and hard to make sure we win. It's the future of emerging technologies. Today, we're continuing our new feature, The Future in a Minute.

2:14At the end of our discussion, I'm going to ask Secretary Rice a few quick questions, and she's going to give me a few quick answers. So stay tuned for that at the end. Before we get started, another reminder to please rate and review the podcast. We love those reviews, and we love those ratings.

2:36It hardly needs to be stressed that technology has become a key element of the U.S. economy and U.S. competitiveness around the world. When I talk about these technologies, I'm thinking of things like AI, biology, space, and energy. Many technologies arise from academic labs and academic research, but increasingly, industrial labs are the leaders in some areas of technology. Many people think of AI as being centered in the industry. The government is also involved in this. They have to watch technology develop, and they have to think, is it going the way we want, and are we controlling and enabling it at an appropriate mix?

3:16We can use regulation, but that might stifle innovation. We can let the innovators run free, but that may lead to violation of guardrails and boundaries. So there's a balance between regulation and laissez-faire management, and this is a critical balance that we need to get right because other countries and people in the world are also trying to win these technology races. Well, we could hardly have a better expert at these issues than Condoleezza Rice. She's the former Secretary of State of the United States. She's a professor of political science and political economy at Stanford University, and she's director of the Hoover Institute, a policy institute focused, among many other things, on emerging technologies.

3:59Secretary Rice, you and I have been working together for 25 years on the faculty. Is it okay if I call you Condi? It is certainly, as long as I can call you Russ. Yes. All right. It's a deal. So after your government service, your substantial government service. You had many options, I'm sure. You elected to come back to academia, higher education, and Stanford. How did you make that decision? Well, the decision was really easy. This has always been my home. I've been at Stanford since I was 25 years old. And so people would ask me, so what are you going to do after Secretary of State? I said, well, I'm going back to Stanford, of course, because in my core, I'm really an academic.

4:36I'm a professor. I love research. I I love ideas and I love Stanford where we have this wonderful mix of the humanities and the sciences and we sit in the Silicon Valley. So, Russ, there was never any doubt in my mind that I was coming back to Stanford. It is great to hear. So, however, as you know, higher education is having a moment right now, perhaps a moment of reckoning. There are people who say that we, because I'm one too, are out of touch with the real world. We're not serving the world in the way we should. We are on a federal funding gravy train. And these are serious and that we're elitist.

5:12How do you think about that? And I'm sure you were thinking about all of these things even as you were making these kinds of decisions. Right. Well, I have thought a lot about it because I often say that a lot is not known about us. People just don't understand a lot about us. But unfortunately, some of the things that they understand they don't like. And so I think we do have to work to address the gulf that's beginning to develop between institutions like ours. and the broader public. And the way that I think we address that is, first of all, we say that the notion of elite doesn't mean that we are elite in terms of the students that we serve.

5:45When we look at our student body, and I'm sure you experience this, you'll stand in front of a class and you've got a fourth generation Stanford student, but you've also got the child of an itinerant worker because we do have a very high proportion of first gen students. And so we have to let that be known, that we still are a place of upward mobility. We're still a place where you can recognize your dreams even if you didn't come from a family that was privileged. So that's the first thing. I do think we have to worry some about the cost of that. Now at Stanford, we have need-blind admission.

6:22So you admit the student and then you find a way for that student to be able to afford Stanford. And because we're able to do a lot of financial assistance for students, they don't leave with huge debt, at least from the undergraduate side. But the cost of education is becoming an issue. And then finally, we really do have to be a place where we have a contestation of ideas, where we accept that people can disagree, where we don't have an institutional orthodoxy that if you're outside of that orthodoxy, you feel that you don't have a place. And I have to say, I think we've done a lot better over the last few years.

6:59But there was a time when I had conservative students who came and said, I don't think I can say what I think in class. That's not where we want to be. We want to tell our students that you have to be able to listen to people who think differently. You have to take them seriously. You have to engage their arguments. And I think that's one of the things that we're getting better through a number of initiatives, a lot of them led by our great dean Deborah Satz over in humanities and sciences, to disagree agreeably is one of the bedrocks of democracy. Yeah, and I really like how you put it that there's a certain communication challenge we have to do, but there's also some self-introspection and maybe repair or update upgrades to the university cultures.

7:43Absolutely. And even in the research side of it, I tell people all the time, we made this decision as a country 80 years ago with Vannevar Bush that universities were going to be the place that fundamental research was done. And it has worked brilliantly because as much as it's great to have research in commercial entities, particularly these days, the hyperscalers who are really at the frontier of, for instance, AI research, you don't want everything to be driven. I'm a capitalist, but you don't want everything to be driven by the profit motive. I still want the kind of research where somebody gets up in the morning and says, why does that do that?

8:21And that leads, for instance, to research that may not pay off for a long time. You know very well that the whole AI revolution would not have been possible without the work on neural networks going all the way back into 1960 and 1970 when it wasn't paying off. I first heard about it when I was young and promising, neither of which am I now. Yeah, I know what you mean by that. But at that time, we didn't know whether this was going to pay off. But with the compute power that came along, now it pays off. And so universities are really, research universities are really important. And it's not just Stanford and Harvard and MIT.

9:01It's Purdue. And it's the University of Alabama, Birmingham, which is a medical research giant. So there's a lot that we need to explain about why this is the place to continue to support, with taxpayer dollars, federally funded research. and to get to the frontiers of the technological revolution with, by the way, an adversary standing right there in China that's doing an awful lot in scientific research. So this is where I wanted to go next. Thank you. It's almost like we agreed upon these topics. So you have focused at Hoover on technology and emerging technologies a lot. You have a policy accelerator program, which is a variety of activities.

9:45and you have a tangible product, which I had the pleasure of reading, the Stanford Emerging Technology Review. And you identified key areas of technology where policy needs to be considered. Tell me about where that came from. And it's so relevant to not only Stanford Mission, but all the other places you just mentioned. What are the challenges and what is the competitive landscape about how to do policy without like throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Well, if you think about the comparative advantage of a place like the Hoover Institution and the synergies, it's being a part of Stanford University.

10:19It's being able to walk 15 minutes from where we are to the best computer scientist in the world or to cross the street practically and be with the best bioengineers or the best roboticist. And there's not a think tank in the country that has that advantage. So we thought, how can we provide synergies for Stanford and Hoover in this extremely important area of how do we think about policy on the technological frontier? And so Jennifer Widom, the dean of engineering, and I co-chair this effort. We have a team of scientists, a kind of faculty council, people like Fei-Fei Li and Mark Horitz and people like Allison Okamura, who's a great roboticist.

11:02And we say to them, so what is on the frontier? Now, Fei-Fei says to me sometimes, you mean the six-week frontier? Because that's where we are in AI. But then we try to step back at Hoover and we say, what are the national security implications? What are the implications for economic productivity? What are the implications for education, for drug discovery? Because we want to take advantage of these technologies to make life better. Herbert Hoover said to improve the human condition. But my view is that we're also in a race against time. And so I'm in the run hard and run fast category. There will be some issues.

11:44There will be some mistakes. But I would rather have those mistakes take place in a democracy where we will have congressional hearings. We will have investigative reporting. The Chinese will do what they did with COVID. They'll hide it. They'll lie about it. We won't know what's going on. So if they're going to be any surprises, I want them to take place in a democracy, not in an authoritarian regime. And that's one of the reasons that I'm in the light touch on the regulation side. Great. And I want to talk about AI. But before we go to AI, I want to ask you about what it's like to introduce policy to a bunch of academics.

12:17Because I had exactly zero training on policy for my entire career. And so it is a great thing to have policy experts at Hoover right next door. But what kind of responses do you get from the technologists who may not have thought and frankly may not want to think about these issues? I was surprised, actually. Jennifer and I did a series of lunches, and it was just kind of open. If you are interested in making your work accessible for policymakers, making your work understood by the more general public, come to this lunch. And we had lots and lots of people who came. And now our faculty council are people who are dedicated to that proposition.

12:58So I really have found that the scientists, the engineers want their work to be understood, both for self-preservation. The last thing that you want is regulation that is going to impede your progress, but also because they're good citizens. And they know how important this moment is for humankind in terms of the technological frontiers. They want to be asked and probed about ethical considerations. They want to think about the national security implications of that particular research and where it might end up. And so I think it's been a really wonderful experience of watching how responsive people have been.

13:41So the first issue, I think it's the first issue, or let's just say the latest issue of the Emerging Technology Review, had such a great list. I'm just going to read it off because it's just great. AI, synthetic biology, cryptography, lasers, material science. By the way, these are in alphabetical order, which I thought was beautiful. Neuroscience, robotics, semiconductors, space technologies, and sustainable energy. I mean, this is the future of everything. It's the future of everything. So let me ask, are there higher level trends that emerge? One that you just identified is that many of these are a race.

14:13So maybe we should talk about this race. When you're thinking about the policies and when you're thinking about winning a race, which is pretty high stakes, and what you said about let's have democracies be ahead, what does that translate? Are there overall emerging themes that kind of transcend the individual areas? Yes. Well, you first of all have to win what I'll call the enabling race. So everybody's concerned about what will be the energy requirements for some of these technologies, AI in particular. So the United States is not in a great position here because we have a grid that's old, it's dispersed.

14:49And you see the hyperscalers actually trying to find their own sources of energy. So what are the enablers? I would say that one of the enablers, it's one point that I make in Washington all the time, is to keep places like Stanford and MIT and University of Alabama, Birmingham, doing the research because you want to be on the frontier and the frontier keeps moving. So that's another enabler. Even a six-month break can have you do devastating effects on a research trajectory. Devastating effects. And it also means you want to keep training PhDs. You want to keep bringing the best students. So I think there are immigration aspects of this.

15:28So enablers, that's number one to winning a race. Secondly is try not to be surprised. And the only way that you're not surprised is to rapidly innovate because your adversaries are not going to stop. The technology is not going to stop. Then there are certain foreign policy implications as well. One of the things that I know people worry a lot about in this administration, which is the right thing to worry about, is where are Chinese models showing up in other parts of the world? And right now, they're less expensive. They take less energy. And they're showing up in a lot of places that we're not.

16:07You know, it's not just the, quote, Western world and US allies. But what about what some people call the global south? What's happening in other places? And then finally, I think the big issue is that we want also to make sure that we're harvesting the technologies for good purposes. And the one that I keep putting on the table is what are we doing about the possibilities in education for these technologies? And Russ, for one, they interact. So one reason that that list is in alphabetical order and not some effort to prioritize. Prioritize, right. That was what I was wondering when I looked at the order.

16:47Right. Because we think all of these technologies are important, but they're also interacting with one another. And so keeping an eye on how you're doing across the broad set of technologies. In Washington, they've all learned to spell AI now. So everybody's AI, AI. But so much of it's AI and. And so we want also to keep focused on that. So I think if we do that, I'm going to bet on the United States. We've got this distributed innovation. As we speak, somebody is discovering something new, either at Stanford or some other university or out in the private sector. And I might just mention that's one other thing that's different about this technological moment.

17:30A lot of it is really being driven by the private sector. And I've had conversations with my colleagues in engineering and the sciences. Universities are having a little trouble keeping up. We're having trouble keeping up in what we pay people. We're having trouble keeping up in the compute power available to us. I think it's going to challenge us as a university and as universities to think about new models of interaction that are not just federal funding. How do we relate to industry? How do we relate to the fact that the quantum revolution is probably more advanced in the private sector than in universities?

18:09So it's challenging some of those models that have been so successful for us over the last 80 years. This is the Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Condoleezza Rice next.

18:35Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Professor Condoleezza Rice from Stanford University. In the last segment, we discussed emerging technologies and the policy implications that they present, especially in the setting of a competitive world and the U.S. economy and its opportunities. In this segment, I'm going to ask Secretary Rice about AI in particular and what to do about this new situation where industry may be leading academia and the government in some of the technologies such as AI. Don't forget at the end of this segment, we're going to have our new segment called The Future in a Minute, where I'll ask Secretary Rice a few quick questions, and she's going to give me a few quick answers.

19:16And I wanted to talk a little bit about the last point that we made at the end of the session, which is we have this new phenomenon where industry is leading. Industry has always been a partner with academia and government, But now it's a leading partner, whereas in the olden days, I think back about the history of World War II and other critical times in the nation. They were following the lead of the government and they were taking advantage of academic discoveries. What do you make of this new – it does create an oligopoly of sorts. In AI, we know that there's four or five companies that have the majority of the power.

19:49We're glad that they're on our land in the U.S., but we only control them both through government and through academia, whatever charming features we have, a little bit. So how do you think about that with respect to policymaking? Well, in terms of policymaking, this is a new day because the private sector is, as you said, in the lead. And so the first thing is to just make sure that we're in constant conversation about what's going on and how to enable – if the hyperscalers want to be the ones who are in the lead, I'm okay with that. It's just how are we then harvesting the fruits of what they're doing for broader societal purposes.

20:28And I think they will be. I know a lot of these people, as you do too. They're also good citizens who want to be on the right side of history, if I can put it that way. But I think where it's really going to have an impact is the federal government will continue to fund, I hope. And you will see things like the investment in Intel by the federal government, which is a kind of new concept for us. But I also think you're going to start to see the government asking those companies to invest more in the American economy, in the American progress. And they have to think about how they want to do that.

21:06I think we're a great middle person, middleman, if you will. So having those hyperscalers, having those companies invest in what universities are doing, taking from time to time some of their best people and having them be in our labs, having our best people be in industry for periods of time. Stanford pioneered, really, the idea that you take something out of the lab, you'd get venture capital for it, you'd find out it was commercializable, and you'd start a company. It may work in reverse a little bit now. And we're going to have to be pretty smart about doing that because even though this is a moment for industry, there are no Bell Labs anymore either where they became cost centers.

21:51And a lot of those great Bell Labs scientists escaped to universities where they won multiple Nobel laureates. So I think we can – let's reverse the flow a little bit as well. Yeah. So as I think about this, and I'm sure you've been involved in these conversations, one of the challenges, although these are U.S.-based companies for the most part, not entirely, they do have global business models. And they want to get the whole world as their customer. And it's for the usual understandable reasons. But that can raise then conflicts that are, are you fully acting in the best interest of the U.S., not the government, the U.S.

22:28generally? Or are you kind of splitting your activities because of these desire to enter as many markets as possible? When you have these conversations with the leaders, how are they thinking about it? And do you like how they're thinking about it? And how should our government think about it? Because I could imagine this would be one of the places where the policy – I don't want to say invasive, but where the policy is a little bit more aggressive to protect American interests. Well, the biggest issue with the government and the technological revolution is how do you use restraint on technology?

22:59So how do you think about – people like me love export controls because I'm a national security person. That's about all I can do is export control. But in fact, export controls are only good for a little while when you're dealing with a China. I think – I'll give you an example. So when DeepSeek came out, the national security people were floored. How did that happen? We had controls on the NVIDIA chip. How did that happen? There wasn't a computer scientist who was surprised about DeepSync. So let's not over control. Let's control what we can and what we must. But let's not assume that that's the way to deal with the future.

23:37That's why I said run hard and run fast. I want the diffusion of American technology and American models all over the world. That's better from my point of view than China owning that. We made this mistake, by the way, in the 5G revolution where Huawei, we were able to keep Huawei, their big telecommunications giant, out of the, let's call it the American security core. So Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, India was never going there. But you go to the rest of the world and it's Huawei. And if you've got a heads up on, if you've got a heads up on 5G, you're probably going to have it on 6G as well.

24:16So let's not make that mistake again. Let's have American diffusion. And I do think that's one of the ways that the folks in the administration are thinking. So yes, I think we want the companies to do what the companies do and not ask them to be arms of the U.S. government. That won't work. So AI, it is first on the list because it begins with an A. And it's something that I know you've thought about and written about quite a bit. What do you make of this AI race? And specifically, you mentioned DeepSeek, which was really quite remarkable. And it actually was a kick in the pants to some degree in a healthy way because competition, no matter where it's from, is usually good.