Authors@Google: Peter Nowak

Male #1: Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming. We are very pleased to have a 63-minute or less talk by Peter Nowak. We have that much HD space currently. Um, renowned CBC tech, blogger, tweetist, and now, author. And thank you very much for agreeing to come and talk about your book, and we look forward to your talk. [Applause] Peter Nowak: All right, uh… can you hear me okay? All right, well, thanks. First of all, thanks very much for having me, this is a, this is a considerable honor for me. I understand I'm one of a handful of few Canadian authors, to actually get to do this. So that's, that's, that's really great. And I also think it's fantastic that Google, not just Google, but any company does this sort of thing. Because I think, it's fantastic not just for authors to be able to come in and talk about what they've done, but also to, for, for employees to actually get company time to actually hear interesting new perspectives, which I hope I can bring to you today. So, I guess what I'm going to do is I made a little presentation on keynotes; my first ever presentation. I thought it was, it was a little project that I undertook and I had a blast doing it. So I figured I'd do this so you wouldn't just have to look at me; you would have something else look at, because I'm just not that interesting. So okay, so this is "Sex, Bombs, and And Burgers". This is my new book. It just came out last week. So I'll give you a bit of an overview as to what I'm going to try run-through here. So, I'll quickly tell you about who I am, how the book came to be, and I'll tell you about what I call the shameful Trinity, which are kind of 3 base instincts at the root of this book. And of course, those are food... fast food/food processing, war, and ***. And because this is Google, I'll tell you a little bit about some of Google's relevance to all of this stuff. And of course, I'll try to give a little bit of a look of the future. So, okay, so, quickly who am I? I've been writing about technology for about 13 years. I'm currently the Senior Science and Technology Reporter at CBC news. We don't actually have a [Inaudible] Beep Junior-technology reporter so; it's kind of an interesting title. Beep I've also… What is that? [Inaudible] Beep [Inaudible] [laughter] Um, right, so, I've also worked for the National Post, I lived abroad a couple years in China and New Zealand. I was the Technology Reporter for the New Zealand Herald. I used to write about software for The Globe and Mail many, many years ago. And when I was in China I freelanced for a lot of newspapers so some of them are listed there. Okay, so, I often get asked, where did you think of or what was your idea or what was your inspiration for this book? And sadly it was Paris Hilton. [laughter] If you will remember a few years ago, she is obviously famous for being famous. Actually, the way she became famous was this infamous sex tape that was circulating on the Internet a few years ago. [video shows new slide titled "Origins of the book" with a bulleted list and picture of Paris Hilton] And if you, I don't know if you've seen it but essentially the crux of the video was her having sex with her then boyfriend and it was all green. So, you know, and being a nerd that I am, I was not really paying attention to what was going on I was just looking at it thinking, wow where have I seen the green thing before? So I thought back, and it finally clicked that it was actually going back to 1991, when the United States helped to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. I remember the CNN footage that was going on at the time. It was all green tinged; it was all in night vision. So that really got me thinking, all right, so here's an example of military developed technology passed into the consumer's space, and interestingly enough, here's, here's a great example of it being used in a *** way. Of course, Paris Hilton's video is essentially amateur ***. So the more I started reading up on it, started looking into it, and I started finding lots and lots of examples of technologies that have been developed by the military eventually found their way into the consumer's space. And I'll talk about those in a minute. The more I looked into it, the more I found links between the military technology and *** technology as well, and see Paris was a good example. So, now where does the food part come into it? Well, around the same time, sort of, two things were happening, I was reading a book called "Fast Food Nation", I don't know if anybody's read it. It's a very good book. And there's one chapter in there that really stood out for me. It was the author Eric Schlosser, he visited a chemical factory in New Jersey where he sampled a whole bunch of artificial flavors. And I read that and I was like, "Wow that's crazy. I'd never thought about that before." At the same time, I was kinda starting to get into my 30s and getting older, and starting to slow down, feel sluggish, and I started reading labels on foods in grocery stores, and seeing all the crazy stuff that goes into them. So it really made me realize, how much technology goes into the food that we eat. Even a simple banana, you know, has genetic, has genetically, there's genetic engineering in the banana. There's gas applied to the banana to make it ripen, and all this crazy stuff. Um, so the more I looked at a few technologies again I found incredible links to the military, and those links are kind of, they come in two different ways. And I will talk about those as well. [Long pause video shows new slide showing images of monkeys] Okay, so I call this the shameful Trinity. So this is essentially our three base instincts which is the need to fight or compete, the need to reproduce and/or titillate ourselves, and the need to eat as much as we possibly can or amass as much as we can. So the image on the left, I'll talk about that in a second. That's actually a drawing from Science Magazine of the oldest human skeleton found. I'll talk about that in a second. The image on the right, which I like to call angry Wimpy eating burger... it was drawn by a friend of mine named Stefan, and it's in the book... and it kind of illustrates the whole shameful Trinity. So, going back to the skeleton, which is, scientists have named Arthur, Ardipithecus ramidus. [video shows new slide titled " Ardipithecus ramidus" with a bulleted points] I think I'm saying that correctly. So the skeleton is over 4.4 million years old, they only discovered it last year, and some of the theories that have been published about the skeleton are in National Geographic and in Science are really interesting. Because researchers at Kent State University have figured that that shameful Trinity of food, sex, and eating are actually responsible for humans getting up off of all fours and walking on two feet. And the rationale is the way that men use to compete for women, and this is back in caveman days, I guess you could say, is they would obviously fight it out, and the guy with the biggest muscles and biggest teeth would usually get the woman. So, the lesser males, the beta males, I guess, they had to kind of improvise to try to get some action themselves. So we know that they figured out another way to get a female's interests is to give gifts. And what was the only gifts back then that really mattered? Well, it was food. So as the theory goes, these guys would go out and get food for women and bring it back to them, but in order to do so they have to be able to carry it. So they eventually have developed the ability to stand up and carrying their food. So I think that's kind of an interesting illustration of where this is going. [Long pause] So, nearly 5 million years later, nothing has changed. We still compete; we still, we still, despite centuries and despite millions of years of trying to overcome this; these base instincts, we have not gotten any closer to that. As I think this Burger King ad shows, I think this is from Malaysia. Uh, so these three base needs over time have translated into serious, serious industries. Now if we look at the military industry. [video shows new slide titled " Really big business" with a bulleted points] The military industry is one of the biggest in the world last year, and I'm sorry, in 2008 we were spending globally $1.4 trillion, which is about two and half percent of global GDP. The United States has been the big driver of that and they have spent about 42% of that. China, as you can see it is number two, but they are only, basically, it's a drop, but what they are spending is a drop in the bucket compared to what the US is. And just for an interesting Canadian fact is, I thought was kind of neat, is that the Pentagon's black budgets, this is the money that they don't really talk about that they are spending, it is estimated to be about $50 billion which is about triple what Canada spends on our entire military. So the last 10 years has seen a major increase in spending to about 35%. Getting into the *** business, the *** business is a lot harder to measure because there's not; it's primarily dominated by small private companies that are not required to report what they make. So it's really, there's only really a best estimate figures here, but even taken with a grain of salt, $97 billion is a really big global industry. So, as you can see, it's more than a lot of the major technology companies put together. [video shows slide titled " Really big business" with new bulleted points]And China, South Korea, Japan are apparently the biggest spenders. The United States is up their fourth with about $14 billion. So, the number there that's pretty whopping is that more than $3,000 is spent every second on ***. And of course, the amount spent in the US is more than all of the three mainstream networks put together. So, getting into food, the food is the biggest industry in the world. It is about $4.8 trillion, about 10% of the entire output. There's no coincidence that, and this is what I'm talking about a little bit when I go further in the food industry, is food is essential to everything else we have. You know, until we secure our food supply nothing else really matters, you know, if you don't have enough to eat we don't have iPods, we don't have flat screen TVs. So it's no surprise that the most prosperous countries in the world are also the biggest food producers. So, as you can see the top three food producers are all G8 countries. And McDonald's, obviously you'll see, is a very big part of that. I think Google surpassed McDonald's in ready revenue in the last year or two. So, good job. [laughter; video shows slide titled "Food" with image of a Whopper with seven patties and Chinese writing] So I'll start with food, because like I said that's kind of... this is actually real too, I can't actually off the top my head remember whether it's in Japan or Korea, I think it was Japan. It was just a monstrosity. So as I said food is kind of the real basic. Until you have your food supply secured, nothing else really matters. So in recent years, there has been a lot of almost a cottage industry developed, that criticizes the sort of industrialized food system. [video shows slide with image from movie Food, Inc. and cover of book "The Omnivore's Dilemma"] So I come in documentary food movies like "Food Inc." which was nominated for an Oscar or of course the "Omnivore's Dilemma" one of the sort of premises of these books and the movies is that industrialized food is bad, but the fact is without it we'd be starving. [video shows new slide with title "Food tech isn't all bad" with bulleted points] And I'll tell you a bit more about why that is. The way that technology develops is if you look at the way developed in the United States was. Start before I get to that let me tell you a little bit about the whole issue out there is a very strong movement right now for organic food, producing organic food, and local farming, and that sort of thing. That stuff is all great and I think they are luxuries. And I do think that they are luxuries that we can kind of enjoy here and in the developed world, but the fact is if we all converted to, if we converted all of our food system to organic and locally grown, I think there would be rampant starvation in not too long of a time, because ah, farming is still very much at the mercy of mother nature so if you get too much rain one year and too little rain one year you are screwed either way. So, now we'll move on to the three of what I like to call the three epochs of food. And these are sort of the three major areas or the three major times that food technology was developed. So we start with World War II this was really when mass food processing was born. That's when, it was kind of the first real situation where United States had to send a bunch of their soldiers overseas, and find some way to feed them. So, they had to come up with ways to make the food last longer, not spoil. And when you're talking about things like milk and eggs it's not, it's not easy to do. So a lot of money and a lot of research and development went into things like dehydration or flash freezing. And spray drying which is a process where you, it's like dehydrating except you do it with hot air. So, things like the aftereffects of this after the war were things like coffee, Maxwell House coffee, for example. You know they basically powderize beans, and then they dehydrate them, and once you add water, and then you have coffee again. And they did this with eggs and stuff like that. And if you've ever had Quick, and you drink Quick when you were kids that was the process that was kind of the direct byproduct of World War II. One of the big things that came out of the war too was something called the mass spectrometer. [video shows new slide with title "Three epochs of food" with bulleted points and a picture of a mass spectrometer] It was, it's, it could possibly be one of the dullest instruments, dullest scientific instruments ever invented but it's also perhaps the most important, because it allowed scientists to study matter on a, on an atomic level. So, it analyzed, they used it in developing the atomic bomb they isolated isotopes, and all that fun stuff. But food companies really took to it after the war because it was a fantastic way for them to look at, one good example was Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is always very sort of jealously guarded its formula. Well, somebody could put Coca-Cola into this mass spectrometer and figure out exactly what is going on in there and replicate it. Now of course you will get into trademark and intellectual property issues, but the bottom line is that it allowed food processors to really drill down into the very essence of food. And that of course led to, going back "Fast Food Nation", and led to the development of the flavor industry. So all of this kind of came together after the war in the 50s and 60s, because one of the big byproducts of food processing whether it is dehydration or whatever it is that it strips food of its nutrients, it strips it of its tastes, so you know, it's not healthy for you. It doesn't taste good; but with the mass spectrometer chemical, the food processors can now develop chemicals to put all of that stuff back in. So, they could really do anything they wanted to food and then basically chemically make it taste good to some extent a little bit better for you. So. The second major epoch of food was the space race and the fast food revolution, which kind of happened during the Cold War. Now NASA has probably helped develop some of the, more technology than just about any organization you can think of. I'll talk a bit more about what they've done in other areas. But in terms of food one of the things, John Glenn, the first American astronauts that went into space, I am sorry the first astronaut that actually ate in space. Because they sent him around the world and he took up this tube of applesauce. Basically, he was only up there for I think five hours, but they just wanted to do an experiment. They said, we wanted to see if you could swallow in space. So he squeezes applesauce into his mouth, and he swallowed it, and said Yep! Okay! Good. [mumbles] We can eat in space. So NASA then basically turned the Pillsbury and said well we're going to the moon so we're gonna have to send people out there for a bunch of days at a time. So they're going to need something so Pillsbury can you make some croissants or something. [video shows slide with new bulleted points and a picture of Pillsbury doughboy] And Pillsbury found, NASA had such high standards, that Pillsbury found their entire food system, the entire way that they produce food for you and I was deplorable. So, they completely revamped their entire quality control system and over the decades, it led to some system called "Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points" which is basically food testing at every single point. So, you know at the farm, to harvesting of it, to the packaging of it, to the processing of it, etc. etc. In this system, HACCP is now used in every single developed country, by every single food, every single food company in the world. And that's , it's hard to overstate the importance of NASA's contributions in this area because this system basically has prevented so much tainted food from getting out there, I mean it's hard to estimate how much it could be. So, McDonald's on the other hand, was also growing at the same time. McDonald's has really put a lot of development into small things and into big things. You know, from humble things like automated ketchup dispensers, but then going on to bigger things like frozen fries and frozen burgers. Frozen foods were around before McDonald's, but McDonald's because it grew into such a big huge powerhouse so quickly it very quickly developed power or influence over the food industry; kind of similar to Google not in terms of industry but in terms of influence. So any sort of innovations that McDonald's came up with soon translated into the larger food industry. So one other thing they also did was that they pioneered, you know a Wal-Mart or Dell often get credit a lot of credit for really developing the just-in-time delivery supply chain system, but McDonald's was actually there first. In the 60s they had something like a couple of hundred beef suppliers. And they figured, this is problematic because it is hard to keep track of so many beef companies. So what we need to do is pair them down. And what they did was, this happened about the same time they started instituting frozen burgers. By doing that, I think they lessened it down to about five suppliers, and so they basically limited their points of, you know, problems, problems arising. So the third epoch of food, which I think we are currently in, started in late 70s and early 80s. And this is where we start getting into genetically modified foods. [video shows slide with new bulleted points and a picture a man standing with African children] There is a fine line, there actually the line is difficult to tell where we got from hybrid seeds and hybrid foods to genetically modified foods because it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of food scientists don't believe there is a clear division between the two. But in the early days, Monsanto was one of the first to jump on this. Monsanto was a chemical company, that started just over a hundred years ago and they have been hated since their inception. Little-known fact that they are actually the company that introduced Coca-Cola to caffeine. And they have also been busted the world over for illegal dumping and all sorts of stuff like that. They're like the environmental movement's public enemy number one. So it is no surprise that we now have books and movies that are really critical of the Monsanto. But what Monsanto did was they came up with the fertilizer. I'll tell you briefly about the green revolution in an unfamiliar. The fellow in the picture there is actually Norman Borlaug, who's possibly the greatest humanitarian that has ever lived. He was the father the green revolution, which after World War II, and there is a nice link to the war here. After World War II, the United States and the rest of the free world were very concerned about spread of Communism. So they supported developing nations and in a number of ways, one of which was they supplied them with arms, another way would be that they supplied them with financing and that's sort of thing, but another I think far more ingenious approach was trying to give these developing countries that means to become prosperous themselves. And like I said before the only way to do that is to take care of your food supply first. So Mexico was where this all started. Mexico, right after World War II was kind of, they had food supply problems and the people were starting to think 'hey maybe Communism is the answer.' So they sent not Norman Borlaug, who is a biologist down there, and he came up with this new kind of wheat. It was a hybrid strain that resistance a lot of the climate problems that they had in Mexico. And what happened was over very short period of time, the wheat yields in Mexico just exploded. And after a few years the people of Mexico had more than enough food and they became exporters. This is part of what was called the "Mexican miracle" which was, I think about 20 years of steady economic growth in Mexico. So it worked wonders in Mexico and thoughts of Communism fell by the wayside, so they exported this idea to a number of other countries. They did it in India was next and same effect in India, and Pakistan their food was secured. Within a very short period of time they became exporters of food. And eventually economically prosperous. So, Monsanto, part of the green revolution was, a need for chemical fertilizers, so Monsanto was very quick in there and that was one of the criticisms of both the green revolution and Mosanto is that it makes farmers dependant on these chemical fertilizers. But anyhow, so they came out with this weed killer called Roundup, and it was the number-one weed killer in the world until the 80s. But their patent was running out. So what they did was they came up with something rather ingenious, or sinister, depending how your perspective. They decided' hey let's genetically engineer some seeds, which when they grow the plants, they will actually be resistant to Roundup. So that means that a farmer can go out, buy Roundup, spray it on his fields, and the weed killer will kill all the weeds, but the plants, which are naturally resistant to this weed killer will resist it. And um, so essentially, in technological terms they created a light list, basically only the plants that they deemed worthy would survive their killer spray. And so that is where we are at now. And that is a lot of the recent criticism because also a source of intellectual property issues both in regards to this killer into the seeds themselves. Now in the 90s, just as these genetically modified seeds were starting to take off, there was a big outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK and that really cast a chill over the whole industry. And mad cow's cause, they found mad cow was caused by cows eating basically junk food, eating chemically treated plants and all that stuff. So Europe got very scared of genetically modified seeds and any foods that basically were created from genetically modified seeds and that kind of spread to African as well, and that is kind of where we are at now. It has been the situation where people are not sure what the long-term effects of these genetically modified seeds are going to be. The other main criticism is that again, Monsanto and a few other companies control the patents to these seeds. So there is concern that really it's all profit motivated. But the fact is, humanitarian aids of genetically modified, humanitarian uses of genetically modified foods are coming. There is something called Golden Rice created about 10 years ago by a Swiss scientist. And it was created; he did it in the universities so it was free from any sort of corporate funding or patenting or anything like that. He did run into intellectual property issues but that is a side story. It is now going through regulatory process. Things have are really slow down this area because people really nervous about it. Golden Rice is something; it is rice, it is kind of yellow or orangey colored it has been genetically modified to have a higher vitamin A content. Vitamin A deficiency is a serious problem in developing countries. It leads to blindness in children and even death. So the first place they are looking to roll it out is the Philippines. And it looks like it is going to happen in the next year or two. And this is great because it is going to be really the first rollout of genetically modified plants, that are not be done, you know, on a purely profit driven basis. [Long pause] Okay, so the last thing, I think this is a last thing I'm going to say about food today. The other link between food and war is that a lack of food usually means war, or it usually creates the conditions for war. These quotes here, [video shows slide with title No Food= War and has three quotes in a bulleted list] these are from one of the folks I spoke to from one of my books a fellow named Peter Singer. He has written a number of books. His latest is called "Wired for War". It is all about robots and war. It is an awesome book; you should check it out. These quotes here are from a previous book of his called "Children at War", which is about children at war. And these are actually three quotes from children between the ages of 12 and 14 who were recruited in Africa I think all of them are in the Congo or somewhere around there. They were recruited by local warlords into their armies. And as you can see, the common denominator in all of them is the need for food.29.06 So bottom line there is if we can feed the world, we can eliminate a lot of the causing causes, causal issues for why people actually enlist to fight, to become soldiers, to become terrorists. [Long pause, video shows the word 'War' with images of war with the words "War=Death and suffering, but we all benefit from it" scrolling across slide] [Clears throat]So war, the military is probably the biggest development of technologies and I am sure that probably is not a surprise to many people. I think the major point in my book is the negatives of these base instincts of ours: wars, ***, and fast food. We see them every day, and we are very much aware of them. As these pictures illustrate, but I guess, what I've tried to point out is that a lot of these negatives actually provide us with a lot of comforts and conveniences that we never think of. So war is definitely horrific, it causes death and destruction and suffering, but the fact is that in some, in many, many ways all of us have benefited from. It is kind of unfortunate but it is true. [video shows new slide titled "Less Killing, not more" with bulleted points listed] So the reasons that military forces spend money on developing new technologies, some of them are fairly obvious, having an advantage over your enemy, of course, is a big motivator. But also, believe it or not, trying to come up with stuff that actually results in less people dying is a very big motivator of military forces particularly their own people. Of course, there are positive economic byproducts. World War II is probably the best example. The world was in a depression before the war came along and all of a sudden industry is pumping out everything from shoes to submarines, and so the global economic situation rebounds. So universities which are a lot of research comes from, and development comes from research in the US. There are estimates that a third of all faculty since 1945have somehow been funded by, and somehow benefited from military funding. So even Sergey Brin and Larry they even benefited in a way, some of the computers that they used at Stanford were supplied by DARPA which is one of the US military's main technology labs. So, again there is three epochs of war. World War II of course, was the big one; there were large inventions everyone knows about. Like the Jets, the good powers of digital computers. But some of the smaller ones I focused a lot on some of the smaller ones in my book not too many people know about that probably has a huge effect on us. Things like the microwave oven which originated as radar and plastics a lot of plastics such as Teflon and the plastic Coke bottles are made of. I cannot think of it off the top of my head. A lot of these plastics were developed during the war kind of by accident. So, what did all these things do, they contributed towards transforming society into a very much consumer driven society after the war. So there is a magazine as, a famous magazine ad in the 40s the late 40s that basically said "after total war comes total living." [video shows new slide titled "Thee three epochs of War" with bulleted points listed] And you have time to put yourself in the shoes of the people that were living at the time. First, they had a depression to deal with, and then they have the World War II to deal with. That was two decades of absolute depravation. So when the war ends, of course you know, basically that uncorks a whole bunch of pent up [inaudible ] and people want to just live it up. There comes a huge wave of consumer products that came out after the war it, that were developed for more technologies. [video shows new bulleted points on the slide titled "The three epochs of war" and picture of space shuttle during lift off] The second epoch was the Cold War and the space race, which was kind of an offshoot of the Cold War. Again today, when you think of space exploration and the international space station which I believe there is 18 countries that have taken part in the international space station. We think of it as the utmost and international cooperation and whatnot, but in the 50s, the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it totally was not. It was not about who can create the rockets that could lift the satellites in orbit or people into orbit. It was all about who can create the rockets that could launch, lob nukes over the ocean at your enemy. So the space race was very much military influence. And that is why we are worried about rocket testing by countries like North Korea and Iran today. So I mentioned some of the NASA innovations in food, but, I mean, it's just countless, you could fill a book with the things that NASA has come up with that has translated into everyday life. I just listed a few there. You know, stronger tires, they came up with safety grading and concrete so that you know, the roads would have better traction, and these are all over the place. Even in the jet propulsion Lab in California, they came up with the Super Soaker. I cannot remember the story behind that one, but it was crazy. So DARPA which I mentioned is the "Defense advanced research project agency". DARPA was created same time that NASA was this is just like the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik. . [video shows new slide titled "DARPA" with bulleted points listed and picture of Vint Cerf]It's kind of funny, after World War II, the Americans were really and dare I say cocky, which is unusual for Americans. [laughter] Um, they were like' oh we have all the technological might in the world, we're awesome etc'. And then of course the Soviet Union beat them in the face with the first satellite; Sputnik. So there was kind of a panic not just because Americans realized hey we lost our technological edge, but also because, as I said with the previous slide, the Soviet Union just proved that 'hey we have the missiles launched nukes at you.' So they were really scared. So the government formed NASA and DARPA to sort of make sure this never happens again. And DARPA just like NASA, is also another just fountain of things, of technologies that first started as military and eventually came to the commercial realm and of course the best example is the Internet's which Vint Cerf there, he was probably the key one of the key figures in designing. I had to find that picture [video shows picture of Vint Cerf wearing a shirt that says "I P on everything"] because I remember saying it. You know he did a speech here a couple years ago at the University of Waterloo and he showed it, I remember I and my full nerdness I thought it was hilarious. So into the third epoch of war, [video shows new bulleted points on the slide titled "The three epochs of war" and picture of rain on the sea] the Middle East is a, deep chapter I've got to in the book is called Operation Desert Lab. One of the unfortunate things about the way that military technology tends to unfold is that it's got to be tested. And you can test it in labs all you want but there is no better way to test than in actual warfare. And for the past 20 years or so, basically that meant Iraq and Afghanistan. So the first liberation of Kuwait, as I mentioned with Paris Hilton and the night vision, that was an opportunity for the US to test out a lot of technology they had sitting on the shelves basically since the Vietnam War. They didn't really know if they worked or not. So some examples that are the laser-guided smart bombs. These are now, the laser-guidance signals on the smart bombs is now finding its way into cars like the new Lexus. They use lasers to detect how far in front of them another car is, and they can adjust their speed accordingly. GPS of course was first rolled out for operation Desert Storm, and now it's in basically every phone. Norman Schwarzkopf who was the American General that basically led the liberation, he kind of summed it all up. He called it. He called that war the technology war. And he said 'I could not have done it all without the computers.' Now that was in '91 which was right around when Windows 3 I think it was, and I believe that was the first real version of Windows that took off, because it was the first one that was easy to use. Uh, the US military was buying something like $3 billion dollars worth of computers and software at the time. So they were a major clients a major buyer of Windows. I'm not to say that Microsoft's success is largely dependent on those sales, but it certainly contributed. So coming into today, the so-called War on Terror, one of the serious side effects we are going to see from that is our robots. I'm sure you've heard about this elsewhere. The robots are, there is major, major money going into robotic deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. had to start with something like 120 and they're up to something close to 10,000 now. In this area, we start them with bomb disposal robots, but now we've got to these flying reapers that launch missiles and all sorts of stuff like that. So the companies that are designing the robots for Iraq and Afghanistan they are different than Japanese companies. Japanese companies who grew like Toyota, they have created robots that play the violin and play soccer in the process. But who really wants a robot to do that? And also these robots cost millions of dollars, so they are pretty much completely impractical. The military robots on the other side, on the other hand, are being designed with cost-effectiveness and actual usefulness in mind. So that's why you take a company like IRobots down in Boston, they designed a lot of the bomb disposal robots, but they also build the Roomba vacuum cleaner. And basically when talking with the company, the lessons they learned in war, they've applied to their home robots, which is basically make it cheap, make it useful otherwise it won't sell. So for the next 5-10 years this is going to have a huge effect on us. One of the' way out their' technologies that is being worked on is invisibility. Which sounds like a crackpots talk but scientists have actually succeeded in making things invisible. And they're doing it using something called meta-materials, which are materials that are constructed at microscopic levels. And somehow, I'm not a scientist so I can't explain it; this allows them to conduct electromagnetism in ways that are not naturally found. So actually, I have a short video here. Certainly the godfather of invisibility is a fellow named Sir John Pendry, British, and I visited him and he explained how invisibility works. So hopefully this will work. [shows video "How does an invisible cloak work?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnV1PSNJiK8] [background music from Sir John Pendry video] >>Sir John Pendry: Now, um, the the way that the cloak works is that it is very simple actually. You know, it surprised me that people were surprised because the principle was so simple. So you would have to imagine that lights flowing like water, imagine it's a fluid, and not, not really light. And if it were fluid and you put an obstacle in its way and of course the light would either bounce off an obstacle, or be absorbed by it if it was blank, but fluid doesn't do that. Fluid goes round, okay? And kind of closes up the other side. And so, when you are a bit downstream, you don't know there's an obstacle is there. Of course the fluid is flowing smoothly again like a stick in a stream, or something like that. And that's the trick that you want light to move like a fluid. It doesn't normally, but you gotta make it do that. And if you can, the light does a kind of chicane around the object you are trying to hide. Never hits it, otherwise it would scatter and you would see the object. It goes around it. But then, if it just went off anyplace, you'd actually see a shadow. And you don't want to see that. So to close out the flow, it's got to come back to its original trajectory. >> Male #1: Right. >>Sir John: And so it's got to do this, like, chicane around round thing, and that's, that's the principle of the cloak. Very, very simple. There's nothing clever about that. Where the clever bit comes in, is going from saying, that you want the light to flow like this to saying how can you arrange that? [background music from Sir John Pendry video] Peter: Um, right. And how that happens is in meta-material that conduct electromagnet magnetism in many strange bizarre ways. We're just starting to look into these things so the effects of meta-materials can only be guessed at right now. But it can lead to some pretty amazing stuff. [video shows new slide titled "***" and picture of a woman clothed in a revealing dress] So that brings us to *** of course, [pause while video shows slide with a picture of a woman, and image of Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Playboy Magazine with the caption "***=Infidelity and Objectification on bottom of slide] so again the negatives of *** are numerous and all around us and we hear about them every day. It is seen as a cause for everything from marital infidelity to objective, object, objects, I can't even say it. That word there. those negatives are definitely true. Um, picture on the left is actually not a real person is something called a real doll, which is a company in California sells. They are basically sex dolls. They have steel skeletons with latex skin and it's apparently very lifelike, I don't know. [laughter] And anyway they sell for like $7,000 but anyways, that was the first issue of Playboy. So the way that the *** industry can tributes to technological innovation is a little bit different than the military or the food industry. [video shows new slide titled "The early adopters" with bulleted points listed] They don't really have labs with engineers working on stuff. But they are very much an early adopter. They often are able to provide people who do you create the technology with some much-needed dollars to basically develop their ideas. Further taking them to a much much larger mainstream audience. And the reason they are able to innovate is because they are small companies they don't have shareholders to worry about, they don't have to worry about quarterly targets and all that stuff. And of course the last reason they generally have tons and tons of money. [video shows slide titled "The early adopters" with new bulleted points listed and a picture of Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert] So again in keeping with the theme, there is kind of three eras of *** and technological development. The first was the second World War comment during the war the military, again than American military had a very strong need to film footage. Whether it was for training, whether it was for newsreels back home etc.. So they trained a lot of soldiers in how to basically become amateur moviemakers but they couldn't use standard cameras that were being used in Hollywood because they were just giant huge monstrosities that just didn't move. So they needed small portable cameras. So they put a lot of effort into developing 16mm and 8mm small cameras, and they standardized these things and made them really easy to use. And by doing all that they effectively make them cheaper. So what happened after the war is that all these thousands of soldiers go off into their daily lives and some of them took their camera skills and filmed basically some backyard barbecues or children's birthday parties etc.. But others decided 'hey I am going to try to go pro.' And one of the most important guys to do that is the fellow in that left in that picture, Russ Meyer. So he was a combat photographer that was actually part of General George Patton's brigade. And the fellow to his right, I don't know if you can recognize him, but that is Roger Ebert. They were good buddies. Ebert actually wrote a few of Russ Meyer's early movies. And what Meyer did was he kind of started in 1959 with a movie called "The Immoral Mr. Tease." He basically redefined what was permissible in mainstream film. That film is basically about a door-to-door salesman who goes around and has this uncanny knack of running into naked women. So a lot of Russ Meyer's early films were basically soft-core ***, and it really kind of led to this whole craze called sexploitation. Which basically be, were just films that the only point in them was to actually have sex in them? So, and of course, interestingly before Russ Meyer went off to do films, so in between George Patton and *** he was a photographer for Playboy. So he's kind of the film equivalent to Hugh Hefner. [Long pause, video shows new slide titled "Three epochs ***" with bulleted points listed and an image of the VCR box for the movie "Debbie Does Dallas"] Um, so that of course, that whole market developed. And that is how we got to the home entertainment era, which kind of started with PT BN, the VCR. The VCR is probably the best example in the history of *** technology. It is not *** technology. In the history of technology is probably the one thing that is most famous for the *** industry's involvement because when the VCR came out there was a lot of, Hollywood was very nervous about VCRs. They said they were generally to piracy and they actually went out and sued Sony. And so the lawsuit went on for a number of years. It is kind of an argument that sounds eerily similar to downloading today. So who, the *** companies, saw this and stepped in to the void. They saw this and they thought, hey this is a way to get our products to the consumer rather than making the consumer come to us. Which in the late 70s and early 80s was these shady peep show being next to the tattoo parlors in the crack part of town. So they again, this is a case where they would be early adopters. If you look at a top 10 rental list in the late 70s and early 80s, it was dominated by *** movies such as "Debbie does Dallas." So the DVD was kind of a repeat. Hollywood was very nervous about getting into DVDs because previous similar technologies such as CD-ROM and video discs flopped. So they were kind of gun shy about it, but the *** companies said "Hey this fantastic; look the picture quality on this thing." So they went into it and again provided an early market for DVD makers. [video shows slide titled "Three epochs ***" with new bulleted points listed and images of a woman.] And then of course we come to the Internet. So the Internet, really in the early days when it was just text based, and you had the usenets. In '95 there is a stat there, that four of the most popular boards were sex related. Playboy claims that it was the first magazine that had a web site in '94. And of course, it was getting 5 million visits by '97. Which in '97 how many internet users were there? Not that many so if you had 5 million in a day, that is pretty impressive. Um, and since you guys all work for an internet company, I am sure I do not really need to tell you much more about what kind of numbers *** usually develops or drives on the internet. And you know about streaming. One thing that isn't well known is the whole idea of affiliate marketing, which the *** companies came up with in the 90s. So, it's a bit of a convoluted description here but basically if you have one site over here and the other site over here. And this site advertised, though no sorry, and this site you put a link on this site over here, and somebody clicked on the link to go to this site; this site here would pay this site some money. Which sounds kind of familiar. [video shows slide titled "Three epochs ***" with new bulleted points listed and images DVD cover.] So there's this fellow by the name Scott Coffman he's the founder of the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network one of the most successful *** companies out there. They say they're one of the most successful pay-per-view companies in or outside of *** because what they did was… a lot of *** sites would ask people to sign up and pay a monthly membership. They basically did the same thing that they charge people by the minute rather than by the month. And it became huge, huge doing this. And as he says there, "We didn't just show the way technology, but also in economics." Of course, the Internet has come around just like every other major media industry, it has come around to bite the *** guys in the butt, because they are suffering from piracy, and free content, and freely available amateur content. And the downside for them is unlike, let's say the music business or the movie business, they don't have sort of a live component to fall back on. The music industry you know bands make a lot of their money from touring, movies make a lot of money from box office, *** they don't have anything like that so they're running scared right now. So that brings us to Google and I apologize for that. [video shows new slide titled "Google" with image of woman in bikini top spelling the word "Google" with some of her body parts] I apologize for the image. But when I saw it, I thought… [Laughter] …completely demonic. So In working on my book I went down to Mountain View and I talk to a couple of key folks [video shows new slide titled "Google Earth" with new bulleted points listed and images of John Hanke] because Google links particularly to the military in some areas are pretty fascinating I think. Google Earth is of course one of them. It arose from something called, if you really go back in its history, it arose from something called the Corona project. Which was basically early spy satellites that was in a satellites and it would take pictures and they would eject film canisters on parachutes and then they would fall gently to Earth, and jets would fly by and grab them. Which seems like a roadrunner cartoon or something. They eventually discontinued because they thought this is actually really stupid. And actually they lost with one of their film canisters, and they detected a Soviet sub waiting below the drops zone. And so that was the end of that. The satellites are used in the program were called Keyhole. So the replacement for Corona was Landsat. A program called Landsat. And that program started to make satellite imagery programming commercially available. Coincidentally one of the first companies to actually buy satellite photography was McDonald's. But 2001 Keyhole was started and it was funded by a number of companies and the CIA it has a venture capital company called In-Q-Tel, and that company is one of the main investors in Keyhole. Now Keyhole of course was acquired by Google and then eventually turned into Google Earth and Maps. And that is John Hanke with Google Earth and Maps in the photo. So he had a couple of interesting things to say in terms of links between military funding and mainstream technology companies. I won't read those to you can see it there. [video shows new slide titled "Keyhole Funding" with quote] [Pause] There are a couple of other things there on the topic. [pause while video shows new slide titled "Military Investment" with new bulleted points listed] Okay, so one of the other key links and this is where we venture into a little bit of silliness. Does anybody know who these two are? [video shows new with two pictures of men, Franz Och and Daniel Greystone] No? Okay, the guy on the left is Franz Och so he is ahead of Google Translate. [video shows new slide titled "Franz Och" with new bulleted points listed and picture of Franz Och] And before he came to he won a DARPA contest. DARPA sometimes sponsors these crazy contests, and so he came up with the algorithm that basically powers Google translate and it's something called statistical machine translation. Which basically what it does, it analyzes patterns in language. Previous attempts at translation, you would just program the computer with say, English and French and the computer would try to compare the grammatical rules. It didn't work very well. So, the statistical machine translation compares patterns of the two languages, and it actually gets pretty good results. I use Translate all the time. It's pretty cool. So the other guy, a guy named Daniel Greystone, [video shows new slide titled "Daniel Greystone" with new bulleted points listed and picture of Daniel Greystone] he is the main character in Caprica, which is the prequel to Battle Star Galactica. The greatest show ever. And it's kind of funny, because while I was working on the book, I watched the pilot of Caprica. And so the character's daughter, a girl named Zoe, she comes up with this algorithm. That basically takes all of a person's personal data so credit card records, e-mails, face book updates, whatever; and it analyzes patterns in nodes. And basically it can predict a personality pattern, which I thought the similarities between how Google translate works and how this supposed artificial intelligence on the show work. I thought they were pretty close. So I asked Franz about it. [video shows new slide titled "Killer cylon robots" with new bulleted points listed] Whether Google is going to create killer cylon robots? And that's what he had to say. He in a nutshell, he wasn't sure if it would create crazy robots that he did agree that it would definitely create smarter software. Interestingly, DARPA is using some of the same techniques now. [sneeze] All right so, the last couple of things about the future. I actually noticed after the slide together. [video shows new slide titled "The Future" with a picture of a man reading a red communist manifesto book with a bomb blowing up in the background] The picture on this book on the left side actually looks a lot like the CBC logo. [laughter] So ultimately, and one of the things I tried to point out in the book is, again, we see the negatives of war, ***, and that's the around us every day. I tried to point out a lot of our comforts and conveniences also come from these three areas. Ultimately, technology is really in control, and I'm sure everybody here agrees; what you do with it is what matters. Now the things to take away from this is that over the last century it has really been the United States that has driven a lot of this stuff, because the United States is pretty, it's undisputed that it has been the technology center of the world. But things are changing, and the rest of the world is developing, and these base instincts that we've been talking about are universal. It doesn't matter what country you live in. People want these three things, and are governed by these three things. [video shows new slide titled "What does it all mean" with new bulleted points listed] So, if they're going to continue... Male #2: In contrast, like, Japan went to a bad [inaudible]. It was a very different world. If you look at things like Star Trek, where technology lead you to a utopian future compared to the Manga in Japan where technology is seen as evil. So is, like, is war the contrast between like winning and losing in all it affects it will? Or… [inaudible]. Peter: Yeah, I didn't look too much on that side of things, but I think what I tried to do is I try to stay focused on the technology. I did actually in an earlier draft have a lot more, you know, is this stuff good or bad for us. But I think. as I went through my editors and I decided, let's keep this on technology. I've asked a few times like, so are war, ***, and fast food good for us? But who in their right mind is going to say war is good? I don't know, you can't possibly say it's good, but it's not that black or white in question. Again the point I try to stress is that positives do come out of it, but that's an excellent idea. And I forgot to repeat your question. [Laughter] Male #3: [inaudible] In connection with the local food movement, I'm on the board of directors for a food link will the region but it's. We're now finding [inaudible] that we are really interested in really putting the market back in to the farmer's hands. What happened years ago, well the last 30 years the marketing boards [inaudible] allow big grocery retailers to start looking further afield and to the fields and farmers starting to get [inaudible]. And so I'm hopeful that it isn't just a luxury, and that's we can all start eating locally and more healthily. If that's a word. And you know, in years to come. Peter: So that roughly summarize that. You're hopeful that we can all start the organically and locally grown. More of that in the years to come. Male #3: Yeah, I think you know, not every farmer is using, buys into Monsanto. Peter: Right Male #3: Man I may know they show this stuff. When I used to go to agricultural conferences they would say here, if you drop a bit of this yr. that tree in the center of that field, it will die. Peter: Yeah Male #3: And it did. It is remarkable. Peter: Yeah Male #3: Hopefully we'll be able to modify foods even if it's strange to protect themselves from certain things without the use of Monsanto's chemicals. I think some of the breeding of plants and animals [inaudible] should improve better food as long as we don't use you know things from the feed company that Peter: Right Male #3: promotes growth unnaturally. Peter: I guess I can reply to that in two ways. I don't know how many people saw Food Inc. [inaudible] have you seen it? Male #3: I didn't. Peter: Well, you should it is probably of interest to you. One of the most interesting parts of that movie I found was when he talked Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart and strangely you wouldn't think this but they're actually starting to get into a lot of organic food. They've got possibly one of the largest organic food sections, I don't know if that's the case in Canada, but apparently it is in the US. But they're doing this, not to be a market purist, but because there's demand for it, right? And Wal-Mart getting into it can only be a positive thing, because that will create far more demand for organic farmers and performers to create organically grown foods and use locally grown foods. And that is going to bring it down from being a luxury you because Wal-Mart has a certain business client to and they don't want to sell expensive foods so they will want to bring down the cost and they do that by increasing volume, right? So, yeah I think, part of your hope I think is likely to come true. Male #3: It's the farmer's hope that says man I hope [inaudible] Peter: Exactly. Yeah, the other thing I'd say about that thought is people always equates the technology was bad negative, making food worse. But there are scientists, the food scientists that are very aware of this. And they are working on it. One of the things I didn't mention one of the developments of NASA and the US military jointly developed was something called the retort pouch. And if you can picture military rations in your head, they come in sort of aluminum pouches and these pouches are actually a major development in food, because what they do is they put the food in the pouch, and they seal the pouch and then they cook it. But because the pouches are a lot thinner than a can, that is what they do with cans previously, but because the pouch is a lot thinner than a can, they don't have to cook the food for as long, which means that it retains more of its natural the food. And it is also a win for the food producer because the pouches are a hell of a lot cheaper and lighter so therefore cheaper to ship. So really that is the case where everybody is winning Male4: That's a long way from sardines [inaudible]. Peter: Exactly. Any other questions? Male #5: I wanted to ask, have you had the chance to review the forces that tried combating these tendencies for your book. For example, there is more and more people who would like to eat healthier food and who shop for healthy food. There is more and more people that want to stop wars to minimize it. There is more and more parents in the world that want to protect their children from going to *** sites and related content. So, what are their ongoing efforts? Who undertakes them? What is their result and outcome in trying to change that? It's evident that it's not possible to, to, to completely remove it because they're our instincts. But there is moderation and there is control. So, is there anyone doing, trying to implement control to make internet safer and healthier? Peter: And that's a very excellent question. And I'll try to answer in all three areas as briefly as I can. In the area of war, I am not saying this to suck up, but I think actually Google is doing a lot. In the realm of translation, the translation is incredibly important because once people can communicate with each other in real time across languages. The Internet opened up communication to peoples from all over the world, right? The language is still a barrier. Once that barrier falls, once you can communicate in real-time and you start getting friends requests on Facebook from China, if it is hard now for democratic country to go to war, it will be a lot more difficult when its own people are actually speaking to and understand the people in the country they might want to go to war against. So that is a very positive development I think. The development of communications technologies of which Translate is one of them is a serious and major force, antiwar forces and I think that that is great. In ***, one of the interesting, I don't think I put this in the slide show; one of the interesting motivators for *** companies to jump on new technology is because they are almost always unregulated. So if you look at now with the Internet, governments are only just starting to get to regulate the Internet and saying okay we need controls on this, this sort of content is not acceptable, etc. etc. And that's about; we've been using the Internet now for about 15 years or so, maybe a little longer. But, so unfortunately in the *** side of things, it's a cat and mouse thing. Once the government and regulators start to prevent or start to take steps to blocking *** on the Internet their going to move on to the next technology. What can that be? It maybe robots, sex robots. [laughter] As for food, and yes I think there's quite a bit in the book about, there's a whole chapter about genetically modified foods, and the controversy over them. And there are a lot of people who, Prince Charles's is probably the biggest name that opposes genetically modified foods and his weight in the argument has largely determined where we're at with genetically modified food people. A lot of the resistance in Europe and Africa to those seeds is thanks to people like Prince Charles and also Greenpeace is a very big protester of them as well. I do mention that. I think, I don't want to be fatalistic about it, but I think if you boil down the argument of my book, is that these forces are kind of inevitable and so even going back to the issue of war, stronger communication between people of the world is going to result in less war .it also might mean it's going to be a different kind of war. So I think one nifty idea is obviously the US has a lot of military robots now, right? What if we get to a point in time that where war basically equals one country's robots against another country's robots? That's actually kind of not a bad war. So, does that answer your question? [video shows new slide of cover of book "Sex, Bombs, and Burgers" with website listed] Male# 6: [Inaudible] so too, pretty much related questions [inaudible] one is that the title of your book, it makes it seem like all three factors are in equal footing. Is this true? Or do you think that there is a specific way that this is [inaudible] say war is a greater driver of technology than the others? And a related question is , on observation, that overall sex and food are ends to themselves, and war is more of a means to an end does that correlate with your [inaudible]? Peter: Yes, so the question was, essentially of Sex, Bombs, and Burgers, are they all on equal footing in terms of their influence or is one more important than the other? And the second part was? Male #6: Like, I would imagine that war would be somehow a second class citizen because it's only a means to an end… Peter: Right Male #6: where the other ones are direct instincts. Peter: so direct instincts versus means to an end. Okay, the first part is easier to answer. Yeah, pretty clearly war is, the military is much, much larger influence than the other two. Because it's also the common denominator to the other two as well. As is found in the book, links between *** and war are pretty strong. Links between food and war are pretty strong. You don't find too many links between food and sex, strangely…except, for you know, movies like 9 and half weeks, I don't know if you've seen it. Anyways, so yeah, the military definitely does drive, the military is a very strong or very serious creator of technology. The *** industry is very much an early adopter of technologies. The food industry doesn't spend that much on R& D, every time they put out a small change, a small innovation; it has massive, massive repercussions. And it's so now the second part of it… Male #6: Well, you mentioned about how war there seems to be like the dominate path or so… Peter: Yes, Yes, in terms of the title, you sometimes have to have a catchy title. [laughter] Male #6: It's catchy. Male #7: [inaudible] It's really, but war isn't but, is it but[inaudible] Sex, [inaudible] sex and war with the genocide that happens going into villages [inaudible] raping and killing, there is a very real, you know, at that point[inaudible] or together there evil partners. And then the food. Just like there are starving children, [inaudible]and that's why we work [inaudible]. Peter: Thank you. Male 8: Okay, thanks everyone for coming. Let's thank peter for his great talk. [Clapping]