Then, I think we need to take some stand from an ethical point of view about those kinds of uses.

I am always an optimist. I live and breathe the world of technology. I always think that we try to develop technology for good purposes, but we do have to be wary of uses that we perhaps didn’t anticipate.

That’s the first step. I think the US do not have a GDPR, but the companies that are US-based but global have all have to implement EU GDPR for good. I think that’s for good. That’s the first step.

I do think that the EU GDPR is beautiful the way you said. It’s about a long-term relationship and not so transactional.

On the other hand, I don’t really want the government joining all the data they have on my tax records, my health, and so on. That’s how I feel as an American. I think if I were in a different country where there was less of those kinds of values, ...

Can’t there just be one place where my medical history is and all doctors I personally give access to see that, can see? We don’t even have that in the US, so I think that’s frustrating.

I actually would like it if there were some kind of single system for healthcare where every time I move to a different city I don’t have to start all over again and fill out on paper my medical history.

I think every government is different, so there’s going to be a different answer in terms of her country what kind of regulation there might be or should be or could be or won’t be, given the kind of information that citizens already give the government.

Anytime when there’s a fairly complicated process with lots of different parties that are supposed to coordinate, communicate, and collaborate, but you want a verifiable ledger and you don’t want a central authority so everyone writes into some SQL database at the same time, that’s where that kind of blockchain ...

Or a supply chain in terms of, say, in their case they have a wonderful example of the shipping industry, where you’re loading some goods at one port and the ship is going around the world and you’re unloading them at some other port. You want to make sure that ...

There are a lot of parts that go into that and you want to account for every single step in that supply chain to make sure that everything by the end will go in the airplane goes right.

The kind of application area they are particularly interested in and they already see a lot of interest from their customers is in supply chain. If you think about, let’s say, building a Boeing 787 or whatever it is.

As you know, Columbia University just entered a partnership with IBM on blockchain and data transparency. IBM’s interest in blockchain, besides that they have a business on that, is actually to light up a lot of different applications using distributed ledger technology with those different properties I mentioned.

I think also the combination of distributed consensus protocols, which were invented in the ’80s, plus the cryptographic protocols, is really what’s bringing distributed ledgers these properties that I was just mentioning and that Minister Tang was saying is used.

I think it’s those properties of that technology...and by the way, that technology’s been around since the ’80s, so it’s not new.

I just want to say that I think we are agreeing so much today. I also prefer to say what blockchain is and call it for what it is, which is a distributed ledger with certain properties, like verifiability, tamper-proof auditability, and so on.

Because it’s supposed to give everyone a voice. It’s supposed to be democratizing the world. That’s the conflict.

I think we’ve already seen evidence of Twitter and social media -- the Arab Spring and all these sorts of uprisings, if you will. That’s a new phenomenon, which is why the companies don’t want their stuff regulated.

Twitter data is publicly available. In some way it’s actually allowing us to study the society. But your question was more of how can social media...?

All these big companies have a lot of information about our preferences, our behavior, our tastes, our daily lives that is actually their asset.

Now, not a lot of that social media data is available to the public. The big company...Facebook has a lot more social media data than any of us will ever have.

She’s using social media to actually understand this very issue of why people start feeling pro or con towards their government or pro or con towards a particular philosophy. That is tip of the iceberg. There’s so much we could be doing with social media data.

She has done some phenomenal work looking at Twitter data to understand how people are influenced by terrorist organizations like ISIS. She’s looking to see, how is it that people get radicalized?

I wanted to tell especially the SIPA crowd here, there’s a brand new faculty member here at SIPA. Her name is Tamar Mitts. How many of you have heard of her?

Oh, oh. Social media and democracy, social media and dictatorship.

That conversation is just starting and different companies are at different stages in that conversation. In terms of the question of...What was that second question?

I think now partly because of all of what’s been happening in the public’s eye as well as external constraints like EU GDPR, these companies are recognizing that maybe we need to have a dialogue with the government agencies and understand best what makes sense to regulate, how should these ...

As the stories have played out, whether it’s hacking elections or the loss of privacy or surprises that the lay public are now encountering because they were unaware of how much data is being collected about them and how that data is being used, I think that the companies, their ...

I wanted to address the two questions. The first had to do with government regulation and AI. I think this is a conversation that’s being had right now. The IT companies in the beginning certainly were taking the stand that you didn’t want a government to regulate what they do.

I like your answer about social norms, because as everyone understands, social norms continue to change over the years. We have to adapt. Technology has to adapt, and social norms have to adapt to technology.

We know we can do some things pretty well. We can also still do, still do, some things better than machines. Of course, machines are catching up in certain tasks, but the Holy Grail of AI is what’s called general AI. We don’t know how to build one of those, ...

In fact, computers of today are combinations of humans and machines. What is interesting about thinking about a computer as being a human or including humans is that we actually do not know the computational capability of humans.

Let me interject because Minister Tang referred to computational thinking and picked up on the word "effective," which is very keen on your part. I have always viewed a computer could be a human or a machine.

We already know how to put some molecules together to do some very simple functions. This clearly has a lot of implications in terms of synthetic drugs, in terms of personalized therapy and all sorts of positive consequences for healthcare.

I’ve talked about quantum computing, but another area that I think is quite intriguing to me is what I would call biological computing, building computers out of molecules, building computers out of natural, not-engineered systems, but actually natural systems.

I don’t know, but I can say that the cryptography community and the security community are certainly planning for that, trying to work on the mathematics to ensure that the kind of e-commerce that we’re so used to, the secure communication that we’re become so dependent on will continue to ...

[snaps fingers] My industry works like this, every 18 months there’s something new. We didn’t know about it 18 months before. 50 years, all I can say is maybe we will have a quantum computer.

Now on the flip side, you asked what technologies are going to come out in 10 or 50 years. I think no one in my industry ever predicts the 50-year thing.

Just a small example of that issue is the concern and the fear that the public has in terms of will all of this AI -- robots and so on -- take over a lot of our jobs? The future of work is clearly interesting.

I think it’s important for people like you and people who are interested in both technology and policy to really talk through those kinds of issues.

If you talk about inequality or reversing inequality as a sustainable goal, then are we in the technology industry exacerbating the problem or actually can we help address that problem?

The other worry I have is...actually don’t know how to think about this and I would love to hear people’s opinion about this. There’s a lot of concern about AI and technology innovation and so on will increase the, I would say, income gap, if you will.

Will we in academia be ready when industry hits that wall? That’s one worry I have. I think it’s not just a US worry.

What I worry is that because industry’s a bit ahead right now with this technology -- academia doesn’t even have the capability to be running the kinds of experiments, doing the kinds of projects that industry has -- we can be understanding, trying to understand the science.

Eventually, the technology will hit a wall. That’s usually when you can then turn to academia and say, "Well, what’s next? Please help us move beyond this wall."

One is that because the competition is so stiff right now in the industry, they do not have the time to take that step back and understand the scientific underpinnings of the successful applications of the technology.

Industry to me in some areas of AI, data science, machine learning, computer science, is actually ahead of academia. There are two implications for that.

Partly that’s the worry that the federal government is not really speaking up to support science and engineering in general. Along those lines, a concern I have is that industry, because they own the data, they have a lot of data, they have these techniques, they have the computing. They ...

I think depending on what hat I’m wearing I worry about different things. As a scientist in this country what I worry about is sufficient support for basic research in science and engineering to support the academic enterprise.

How can we account for these decisions? New York City set up this task force. I think it’s the only one in the world, so that it shows leadership by the city to really address this very hard technical problem.