Future Technology | 60 Minutes Marathon

Artificial intelligence is the magic of the moment but this is a story about what's next something incomprehensible tomorrow IBM will announce and advance in an entirely new kind of computing one that may solve problems in minutes that would take today's supercomputers millions of years that's the difference in Quantum Computing a technology being developed at IBM Google And others it's named for quantum physics which describes the forces of the subatomic realm the science is deep and we can't scratch the surface but we hope to explain enough so that you won't be blinds Ed by a breakthrough

that could transform civilization the quantum computer pushes the limits of knowledge new science new engineering all leading to this processor that computes with the atomic forces that created the universe I think This moment it feels to us like the Pioneers on the 1940s and 50s that were building the first digital computer computers Dario Gill is something of a Quantum Crusader Spanish born with a PhD in electrical engineering Gil is head of research at IBM how much faster is this than say the world's best super computer today we are now in a stage where we can

do certain calculations with these systems that would take the biggest supercomputers in the world to be able To do some similar calculation but the beauty of it is that we see that we're going to continue to expand that capability such that not even a million or a billion of those supercomputers connected together could do the calculations of these future machines so we've come a long way and the most exciting part is that we have a road map and a journey right now where that is going to continue to increase at a r that is going

to be shocking I'm not Sure the world is prepared for this change definitely not to understand the change go back to 1947 and the invention of a switch called a transistor the transistor a new name computers have processed information on transistors ever since getting faster as more transistors were squeezed onto a chip billions of them today but it takes that many because each transistor holds information in only two states it's either on or it's Off like a coin heads or tails Quantum abandons transistors and encodes information on electrons that behave like this coin we created

with animation electrons behave in a way so that they are heads and tails and everything in between you've gone from hand in one bit of information at a time on a transistor to exponentially more data you can see that there is fantastic amount of information stored when you can look at all possible angles not just Up or down physicist miio Kaku of the City University of New York already calls today's computers classical he uses a maze to explain quantum's difference let's look at a classical computer calculating how a mouse navigates a maze it is painful

one by one it has to map every single left turn right turn left turn right turn before it finds the goal now a quantum computer scans all possible routes simultaneously this is amazing how many Turns are there hundreds of possible turns right quantum computers do it all at once kaku's book titled Quantum Supremacy explains the stakes we're looking at a race a race between China between IBM Google Microsoft Honeywell all the big boys are in this race to create a workable operationally efficient quantum computer because the nation or company that does this will rule the

world economy but a reliable general purpose Quantum computer is a tough CL time yet maybe that's why this wall is in the lobby of Google's Quantum lab in California here we got an inside look starting with a microscope's view of what replaces the transistor this right here is one cubit and this is another Cubit this is a 5 Cubit chain those crosses at the bottom are cubits short for Quantum bits they hold the electrons and act like AR IAL atoms unlike transistors each additional Cubit Doubles the computer's power it's exponential so while 20 transistors are

20 times more powerful than one 20 cubits are a million times more powerful than one so this gets positioned right here on the fridge and this Karina Chow Chief Operating Officer of Google's lab showed us the processor that holds the cubits much of that above chills the cubits to what physicists call near absolute zero near absolute zero I understand is about 460° below 0o fah so That's about as cold as anything can get yes almost as cold as possible that temperature inside a sealed computer is one of the coldest places in the universe the Deep

Freeze eliminates electrical resistance and isolates the cubits from outside vibrations so they can be controlled with an electromagnetic field the cubits must vibrate in unison but that's a tough trick called coherence once you've achieved coherence of the cubits how Easy is that to maintain it's really hard um coherence is very challenging coherence is fleeting in all similar machines coherence breaks down constantly creating errors we're making about one error in every hundred or so steps ultimately we think we're going to need about one error in every million or so steps that would probably be identified as

one of the biggest barriers mitigating those errors and extending coherence time while scaling Up to larger machines are the challenges facing German American scientist hartmut Nevan who founded Google's lab and its casual style in 2012 can the problems that are in the way of quantum Computing be solved I should confess my subtitle here is Chief optimist so after having say this I would say at this point we don't need any more fundamental breakthroughs we need little improvements here and there we have all the pieces together we just Need to integrate them well to build larger

and larger systems and you think that all of this will be integrated into a system in what period of time yeah we often say we want to do it by the end of the decade so that we can use this Kennedy quote and get it done by the end of the decade the end of this decade yes five or six years yes this that's about the timeline Dario Gil predicts and the IBM research director told us something surprising there are problems that Classical computers can never solve can never solve and I think this is an

important point because we're accustomed to saying ah computers get better actually there are many many problems that are so complex that we can make that statement that actually classical computers will never be able to solve that problem not now not a 100 years from now not a thousand years from now you actually require a different way to represent Information and process information that's what Quantum gives you there's not Quantum could give us answers to Impossible problems in physics chemistry engineering and Medicine which is why IBM and Cleveland Clinic have installed one of the first quantum

computers to leave the lab for the real world takes time it takes way too much time to find the solutions we need right now we sat down with dorio Gil and Dr sill SRO Chief research officer at Cleveland Clinic she told us healthc care would be transformed if quantum computers can model the behavior of proteins the molecules that regulate all life proteins change shape to change function in ways too complex to follow and when they get it wrong that causes disease it takes on many shapes many many shapes depending upon what it's doing and where

it is and which other protein it's with I need to understand the shape it's in when it's doing an interaction or a Function that I don't want it to do for that patient cancer autoimmunity it's a problem we are limited completely by the computational ability to look at the structure in real time for any even one molecule Cleveland Clinic is so proud of its quantum computer they set it up in a Lobby behind the glass that shiny silver cylinder encloses the kind of cooling system and processor you saw earlier Quantum is not solving the protein

problem yet this is more of a trial run To introduce researchers to quantum's potential the people using this machine are they having to learn an entirely different way to communicate with a computer I think that's what's really nice that you actually just use a regular laptop and you write a program uh very much like you would write a traditional program but when you you know click you know go and run it just happens to run on a very different kind of computer there are a half dozen Competing designs in the race China named Quantum a

top National priority and the US government is spending nearly a billion dollars a year on research the first change comes next year when the US publishes new standards for encryption because Quantum is expected one day to break the codes that lock everything from National secrets to credit cards tomorrow IBM will unveil its Quantum system 2 with three times the cubits as the machine you saw in Cleveland this past August we saw a system 2 Under Construction it's a machine unlike anything we've ever built and this is this is it this is it IBM's Dario Gill

told us system 2 has the room to expand to thousands of cubits what are the chances that this is one of those things that's going to be ready in 5 years and always will be we don't see an obstacle right now that will prevent us from Building Systems that will have tens of thousands and even 100,000 Cubits working with each other so we are highly confident that we will get there the language of all the amazing things we heard it was physicist miio Kaku who led us down the path to the biggest idea of all

he said we were walking through a quantum computer processing information with subatomic particles is how the universe works you know when I look at the night sky I See Stars I look at the flowers the trees I realized that it's all Quantum the Splendor of the universe Itself the language of the universe is the language of the quantum learning that language may bring more than inconceivable speed reverse engineering Nature's computer could be a window on creation itself last month the nearest star to the Earth was in California in a labor labatory for the first time

the world's largest lasers forced atoms of hydrogen to fuse together in the same kind of energy producing reaction that fires the Sun it lasted less than a billionth of a second but after six Decades of toil and failure the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proved it could be done if Fusion becomes commercial power one day it would be endless and carbon free in other words it would change human Destiny as you'll see there's far to go but after December's breakthrough we were invited to tour the lab and meet the team that brought star power down to

earth uncontrolled Fusion is easy Mastered so long ago the films are in Black and White Fusion is what a hydrogen bomb does releasing energy by forcing atoms of hydrogen to fuse together what's been impossible is harnessing the fires of Armageddon into something useful the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helps maintain nuclear weapons and experiments with high energy physics an hour east of San Francisco we met Livermore's director Kim budell in the lab that made history the national ignition facility the national ignition facility is the world's largest most energetic laser it was built

starting in the 1990s to create conditions in the laboratory that had previously only been accessible in the most extreme objects in the universe like the center of giant planets or the Sun or in operating nuclear weapons and the goal was to Really be able to study that kind of very high energy high density condition in a lot of detail the national ignition facility or n was built for $35 billion to ignite self-sustaining Fusion they tried nearly 200 times over 13 years but like a car with a weak battery the atomic engine would never turn over

nif drew some nicknames it did uh for many years the not ignition facility the never ignition facility uh more recently than nearly ignition facility so uh this Recent has really put the ignition in the ni ignition means igniting a fusion reaction that puts out more energy than the lasers put in so if you can get it hot enough dense enough fast enough and hold it together long enough the fusion reactions start to self- sustain and that's really what happened here on December 5th main laser operation will begin in approximately one minute last month the laser

shot fired from this control room put two units of energy Into the experiment Adams began fusing and about three units of energy came out Tammy ma who leads the lab's laser Fusion research initiatives got the call while waiting for a plane and I burst into tears it was just tears of joy and I actually physically started shaking and and jumping up and down in in you know at the gate before everybody bored so everybody was like what is that crazy woman doing Tammy ma is crazy about engineering and that's another one of Our sensors for

she showed us why the problem of fusion would bring anyone to Tears first there's the energy required which is delivered by lasers in these tubes that are longer than a football field and how many are there altogether 192 total lasers each one of these lasers is one of the most energetic in the world and you have 192 of them that's pretty cool right well pretty hot actually millions of degrees which is why they use keys to lock up the lasers Shot director ready the beams strike with a power 1,000 times greater than the entire National

power grid 3 2 1 shot your lights don't go out at home when they take a shot because these capacitors store the electricity in the tubes the laser beams amplify by racing back and forth and the Flash is a fraction of a second we have to get to these incredible conditions hotter denser than the center of the Sun and so we need all of that laser energy to get To these very high energy densities all that wallup vaporizes a Target nearly too small to see can I hold this thing absolutely let it go there we

go unbelievable absolutely amazing Michael Stater man's team builds the hollow Target shells that are loaded with hydrogen at 430° below zero the Precision that we need for making these shells is Extreme the shells are almost perfectly round uh They have a roughness that is 100 times better than a mirror you think about that if it wasn't smoother than a mirror imperfections would make the implosion of atoms uneven causing a fusion fizzle so these need to be as close to perfect as humanly possible that's right this way and we do think there are among the most

perfect items that we have on Earth stator's lab pursues Perfection by vaporizing carbon and forming the shell out of diamond they build, 1500 a year To make 150 nearly perfect all the components are brought together under the microscope itself and then the assembler uses electromechanical stages to put the parts where they're supposed to go uh move them together and then we apply glue using a hair a hair yeah usually something like an eyelash or similar or a cat whisker you apply glue with a cat whisker this way why does it have to be so small

the laser gives us only a finite amount of Energy and um to drive a bigger capsule we would need more energy so it's a constrain of the facility that you've seen that is very large and despite its big size this is about what we can drive with it the target could be larger but then the laser would have to be larger on December 5th they used a thicker Target so it would hold its shape longer and they figured out how to boost the power of the laser shot without damaging the lasers so this is An

example of a Target before the shot Tammy ma showed us an intact Target assembly that diamond shell you saw is inside that silver colored cylinder this assembly goes into a blue vacuum chamber three stories tall it's hard to see here because it's bristling with lasers and instruments this instrument they called Dante because they told us it measures the fires of Hell one physicist said you should see the target we blasted December 5th which made us ask could we have you seen this before this is the first time I'm seeing it for tamy Ma and for

the world this is the first look at what's left of the target assembly That Changed History and our effect like Bell's first phone or Edison's light bulb this thing is going to end up in the Smithsonian the target cylinder was blasted to Oblivion the Copper support that held it was peeled backward the Explosion on the end of this was hotter than the sun it was hotter than the center of the sun we were able to achieve temperatures that were the hottest in the entire solar system which would make an astronomical change in electric power unlike

today's nuclear plants which split atoms apart fusing them is many times more powerful with little long-term radiation and it's easy to turn off so no meltdowns but getting from the first ignition to a power plant Will be hard how many shots do you take in a day we take on average uh a little more than one shot per date if this was theoretically a commercial power plant how many shots a day would be required approximately 10 shots per second would be required and the other big challenge of course is not just increasing the repetition rate

but also getting the gain out of the targets to go up to about a factor of a 100 Not only would the reactions have to produce 100 times More energy but a power plant would need 9 100,000 perfect diamond shells a day also the lasers would have to be much more efficient remember December's breakthrough put two units of energy in and got three out well it took 300 units of power to fire the lasers by that standard it was 300 in three out that detail was not front and center at the department of energy December

news conference which fused the advance with An unlikely timeline today's announcement is a huge step forward uh to the president's goal of achieve achieving commercial Fusion within a decade when you heard that President Biden's goal was commercial fusion power in a decade you thought what I thought it was nonsense Charles cythe is a trained mathematician science author and professor at New York University who wrote a 2008 book on the hyping of fusion power I don't want to diminish The fact that this is a real achievement um ignition is a milestone that people have been trying

for to do for years I'm afraid that there's so many technical hurdles even after this great achievement uh that 10 years is a pipe dream those hurdles cyth says include scaling up livermore's achievement the sber shot generated about enough Excess power to boil two pots of coffee the hurdles might be overcome cyth says but not soon I have a running bet going that Uh we're not going to have it by 2050 still betting against Charles Cy's prophecy are more than 30 private companies designing various approaches to fusion power including using magnets not lasers $3 billion

in private money flowed into those companies in the last 13 months including bets by Bill Gates and Google amid all this speculation Lawrence livermore's director Kim Buell is certain of one thing can you do it again absolutely they're going to try Again next month Buell agrees the obstacles are enormous but she told us commercial fusion power could be demonstr ated in 20 years or so with enough funding and dedication we likened the first ignition to the first Wright brothers flight which covered only 120 ft it's one thing to believe uh that the science is possible

uh that the conditions can be created uh it's another to see it in action and it really is a remarkable Feeling after working for 60 years to get to this point um to have first taken that first flight flight it was 44 years from a puddle jump to supersonic flight whether fusion power is 10 or 50 years away is now mainly an engineering problem Lawrence Livermore has proven that from a machine A Star is Born whether you think artificial intelligence will save the world or end it you have Jeffrey Hinton to thank Hinton has been

called The Godfather of AI a British computer scientist whose controversial ideas help make advanced artificial intelligence possible and so change the world Hinton believes that AI will do enormous good good but tonight he has a warning he says that AI systems may be more intelligent than we know and there's a chance the machines could take over which made us ask the question does Humanity know what it's doing No um I think we're moving into a period when for the first time ever we may have things more intelligent than us you believe they can understand yes

you believe they are intelligent yes you believe these systems have experiences of their own and can make decisions based on those experiences in the same sense as people do yes are they conscious I think they probably don't have much self-awareness at present so In that sense I don't think they're conscious will they have self-awareness Consciousness I oh yes I think they will in time and so human beings will be the second most intelligent beings on the planet yeah Jeffrey Hinton told us the artificial intelligence he set in motion was an accident born of a failure

in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh he dreamed of simulating a neural network on a computer simply as a tool for what he was really studying the human brain But back back then almost no one thought software could mimic the brain his PhD advisor told him to drop it before it ruined his career Hinton says he failed to figure out the human mind but the long Pursuit led to an artificial version it took much much longer than I expected it took like 50 years before it worked well but in the end it did work

well at what point did you realize that you were right about neural networks and most everyone else was wrong I always Thought I was right in 2019 Hinton and collaborators Yan laon on the left and yosua Beno won the touring award the Nobel Prize of computing to understand how their work on artificial neural networks helped machines learn to learn let us take you to a game look at that oh my goodness this is Google's AI lab in London which we first showed you this past April Jeffrey Hinton wasn't involved in this soccer Project but these

robots are a great example of machine learning the thing to understand is that the robots were not programmed to play soccer they were told to score they had to learn how on their own oh go in general here's how AI does it Henton and his collaborators created software in layers with each layer handling part of the problem that's the so-called neural network but this is the key when for example the robot scores a message Is sent back down through all of the layers that says that pathway was right likewise when an answer is wrong that

message goes down through the network so correct connections get stronger wrong connections get weaker and by trial and error the machine teaches itself you think these AI systems are better at learning than the human mind I think they may be yes and at present they're quite a lot smaller so even the biggest chatbots only have about a trillion Connections in them the human brain has about 100 trillion and yet in the trillion Connections in a chatbot it knows far more than you do in your 100 trillion connections which suggests it's got a much better way

of getting knowledge into those connections a much better way of getting knowledge that isn't fully understood we have a very good idea of sort of roughly what it's doing but as soon as it gets really complicated we don't actually know What's going on anymore than we know what's going on in your brain what do you mean we don't know exactly how it works it was designed designed by people no it wasn't what we did was we designed the learning algorithm that's a bit like designing the principle of evolution but when this learning algorithm then interacts

with data it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things but we don't really Understand exactly how they do those things what are the implications of these systems autonomously writing their own computer code and executing their own computer code that a serious worry right so one of the ways in which these systems might Escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves and that's something we need to seriously worry about what do you say to someone who might argue if the Systems become benevolent just turn them off they will be

able to manipulate people right and these will be very good at convincing people because they'll have learned from all the novels that were ever written written all the books by makavelli all the political connives they'll know all that stuff they'll know how to do it noow of the human kind runs in Jeffrey hinton's family his ancestors include mathematician George buou who Invented the basis of computing and George Everest who surveyed India and got that mountain named after him but as a boy Hinton himself could never climb the peak of expectations raised by a domineering father

every morning when I went to school he'd actually say to me as I walk down the driveway get in there pitching and maybe when you're twice as old as me you'll be half as good dad was an authority on Beatles he knew a lot more about beatles than he knew about People did you feel that as a child a bit yes when he died we went to his study at the University and the walls were lined with boxes of papers on different kinds of beetle and just near the door there was a slightly smaller box

that simply said not insects and that's where he had all the things about the family today at 75 Hinton recently retired after what he calls 10 happy years at Google now he's professor Ameritus at the University of Toronto and he happened to mention he had has more academic citations than his father some of his research led to chatbots like Google's Bard which we met last spring confounding absolutely confounding we asked Bard to write a story from six words for sale baby shoes never worn holy cow the shoes were a gift from my wife but we

never had a baby Bard created a deeply human tale of a man Whose wife could not conceive and a stranger who accepted the shoes to heal the pain after her miscarriage I am rarely speechless I don't know what to make of this chatbots are said to be language models that just predict the next most likely word based on probability you'll hear people saying things like they're just doing autocomplete they're just trying to predict the next word and they're just using statistics Well it's true they're just trying to predict the next word but if you think

about it to predict the next word you have to understand the sentences so the idea they're just predicting the next words so they're not intelligent is crazy you have to be really intelligent to predict the next word really accurately to prove it Hinton showed us a test he devised for chat gp4 the chatbot from a company called open AI it was sort of reassuring to see a turing Award winner mistype and blame the computer oh damn this thing we're going to go back and start again that's okay hinton's test was a riddle about house painting

an answer would demand reasoning and planning this is what he typed into chat gp4 the rooms in my house are painted white or blue or yellow and yellow paint Fades to White within a year in two years time I'd like all the rooms to be white what should I do the answer began In one second gp4 advised the rooms painted in blue need to be repainted the rooms painted in yellow don't need to be repainted because they would Fade to White before the deadline and oh I didn't even think of that it warned if you

paint the yellow rooms white there's a risk the color might be off when the yellow Fades besides it advised you'd be wasting resources painting rooms that were going to Fade to White anyway you believe that chat GPD 4 understands I believe it definitely understands yes and in 5 years time I think in 5 years time it may well be able to reason better than us reasoning that he says is leading to ai's Great risks and great benefits so an obvious area where there's huge benefits is Healthcare AI is already comparable with Radiologists at understanding what's

going on in medical images it's going to be very good at designing drugs it already is designing Drugs so that's an area where it's almost entirely going to do good I like that area the risks are what well the risks are having a whole class of people who are unemployed and not valued much because what they what they used to do is now done by machines other immediate risks he worries about include fake news unintended bias in employment and policing and autonomous Battlefield robots what is a path forward that Ensures safety I don't know I

I can't see a path that guarantees safety that we're entering a period of great uncertainty where we're dealing with things we've never dealt with before and normally the first time you deal with something totally novel you get it wrong and we can't afford to get it wrong with these things can't afford to get it wrong why well because they might take over take over from Humanity yes that's A possibility why would they I'm not saying it will happen if we could stop them ever wanting to that would be great but it's not clear we can

stop them ever wanting to Jeffrey told us he has no regrets because of ai's potential for good but he says now is the moment to run experiments to understand AI for governments to impose regulations and for a world treaty to ban the use of military robots he reminded us of Robert Oppenheimer who after inventing the atomic bomb campaigned against the hydrogen bomb a man who changed the world and found the world Beyond his control it maybe we look back and see this as a kind of Turning Point when Humanity had to make the decision about

whether to develop these things further and what to do to protect themselves if they did um I don't know I think my main message is there's enormous uncertainty about what's going to happen Next these things do understand and because they understand we need to think hard about what's going to happen next and we just don't know we may look on our time as the moment civilization was transformed as it was by fire Agriculture and electricity in 2023 we learned that a machine taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer with which is to

say with creativity truth errors and lies the technology known as a chatbot is Only one of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence machines that can teach themselves superhuman skills in April we explored what's coming next at Google a leader in this new world CEO Sundar Pai told us AI will be as good or as evil as human nature allows the revolution he says is coming faster than you know do you think Society is prepared for what's coming you know there are two ways I think about it on one hand I feel no uh because you

know The pace at which we can think and adapt as societal institutions compared to the PACE at which the technology is evolving there seems to be a mismatch on the other hand compared to any other technology I've seen more people worried about it earlier in its life cycle so I feel optimistic the number of people you know who have started worrying about the implications and hence the conversations are starting in a serious way as well I guess our Conversations with 50-year-old Sundar Pai started at Google's new campus in Mountain View California it runs on 40%

solar power and collects more water than it uses Hightech that Pai couldn't have imagined growing up in India with no telephone at home we were on a waiting list to get a rotary phone and for about 5 years and it finally came home I can still recall it vividly it changed our lives to me it was the first moment I understood the power of what getting Access to technology meant so probably led me to be doing what I'm doing today what he's doing since 2019 is leading both Google and its parent company alphabet valued at

$1.5 trillion worldwide Google runs 90% of internet searches and 70% of smartphones we're really excited about but it's dominance was attacked this past February when Microsoft linked its search engine to a chatbot in a race for AI dominance in March Google released its chatbot named bard it's really here to help you brainstorm ideas to generate content like a speech or a blog post or an email we were introduced to Bard by Google vice president sha and Senior Vice President James manika here's Bard the first thing we learned was that Bard does not look for answers

on the internet like Google search does so I wanted to get inspiration from some of The best speeches in the World Bard's replies come from a self-contained program that was mostly self-taught our experience was unsettling confounding absolutely confounding Bard appeared to possess the sum of human knowledge with microchips more than 100,000 times faster than the human brain summarize the we asked Bard to summarize the New Testament it did in 5 seconds and 17 words in Latin we asked for it in Latin that took another 4 Seconds then we played with a famous six-word short story

often attributed to Hemingway for sale baby shoes never worn wow the only prompt we gave was finish this story in 5 seconds holy cow the shoes were a gift from my wife but we never had a baby they were from The six-word Prompt Bard created a deeply human tale with characters it invented including a man whose wife could not conceive and a Stranger grieving after a miscarriage and longing for closure uh I am rarely speechless I don't know what to make of this give me we asked for the story in verse in 5 seconds there

was a poem written by a machine with breathtaking insight into the mystery of Faith Bard wrote she knew her baby Soul would always be alive the humanity at superhuman speed was a shock how was this possible so James manika told us that over several months Bard read most everything on the internet internet and created a model of what language looks like rather than search its answers come from this language model so for example if I said to you Scott peanut butter and jelly right so it tries and learns to predict okay so peanut butter usually

is followed by jelly it tries to predict the most probable next words based on everything it's learned uh so it's not Going out to find stuff it's just predicting the next word but it doesn't feel like that we asked Bard why it helps people and it replied quote because it makes me happy Bard to my eye appears to be thinking appears to be making judgments that's not what's happening these machines are not sensient they are not aware of themselves they're not sensient they're not aware of themselves uh they can exhibit behaviors that look Like that

because keep in mind they've learned from us we are sentient beings we have beings that have feelings emotions ideas thoughts perspectives we've reflected all that in books in novels in fiction so when they learn from that they build patterns from that so it's no surprise to me that the exhibited behavior sometimes looks like maybe there's somebody behind there there's nobody there there these are not sensient beings they not Zimbabwe born Oxford educated James manika holds a new position at Google his job is to think about how Ai and Humanity will best coexist AI has a

potential to change many ways in which we've thought about Society about what we're able to do the the problems we can solve but AI itself will pose its own problems could Heming way WR a better short story maybe but Bard can write a million before Hemingway could finish one imagine that level of automation across the economy a Lot of people can be replaced by this technology yes there are some job occupations that will start to decline over time there are also new job categories that will grow over time but the biggest change will be the

jobs that will be changed something like more than 2third will have their definitions change not go away but change because they're now being assisted by Ai and by automation so this is a profound change which has implications for skills how do We assist people build new skills learn to work alongside machines and how do these complement what people do today this is going to impact every product across every company and and so that's why I think it's a a very very profound technology and so we are just in early days every product in every company

that's right AI will impact everything so for example you could be a radiologist you know if I if you think about 5 to 10 years from now you're Going to have a AI collaborator with you it may triage you come in the morning you let's say you have 100 things to go through it may say these are the most serious cases you need to look at first or when you're looking at something it may pop up and say you may have missed something important why wouldn't we you know why would we take advantage of a

superpowered assistant to help you across everything you do you maybe a student trying to learn math or history And you know you will have something helping you there are we ask Pai what jobs would be disrupted he said knowledge workers people like writers accountants Architects and ironically software Engineers AI writes computer code too today sundarai walks a narrow line a few employees have quit some believing that Google's AI rollout is too slow others too fast there are some serious flaws there's a return of inflation James manika asked Bard about Inflation it wrote an instant essay

in economics and recommended five books but days later we checked none of the books is real bar fabricated the titles this very human trait error with confidence is called in the industry hallucination are you getting a lot of hallucinations uh yes uh you know which is expected no one in the in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems all models uh do have uh this as an issue is it a solvable problem It's a matter of intense debate I think we'll make progress to help cure hallucinations Bard features a Google it button that leads

to oldfashioned search Google has also built safety filters in debard to screen for things like hate speech and bias how great a risk is the spread of disinformation AI will challenge that in a deeper way the scale of this problem is going to be much bigger bigger problems he says with fake news and fake images it will be possible With AI to create uh you know a video easily where it could be Scott saying something or me saying something and we never said that and it could look accurate but you know at a societal scale

you know can cause a lot of harm is Bard safe for society the way we have launched it today uh as an experiment in a limited way uh I think so but we all have to be responsible in each step along the way this past spring Google released an Advanced version of Bard that can write software and connect to the internet Google says it's developing even more sophisticated AI models you are letting this out slowly so that Society can get used to it that's one part of it uh one part is also so that we

get the user feedback and we can develop more robust safety layers before we build before we deploy more capable models interacting with of the AI issues we talked about the most Mysterious is called emergent properties some AI systems are teaching themselves skills they weren't expected to have how this happens is not well understood for example one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh which it was not trained to translate we discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali he can now translate all of Bengali

so now all of a sudden we now have a research Effort where we're now trying to get to a thousand languages there is an aspect of this which we call all of us in the field call it as a black box you know you don't fully understand and you can't quite tell why it said this or why it got wrong we have some ideas and our ability to understand this gets better over time but that's where the stateof thee art is you don't fully understand how it works and yet you've turned it loose on society

let me put it this way I don't think we fully understand how a human mind works either was it from that black box we wondered that Bard Drew its short story that seems so disarming human it talked about the pain that humans feel it talked about Redemption how did it do all of those things if it's just trying to figure out what the next right word is me I've had these experiences uh talking with b as well there are two views of this you know there are a set of people who view This as look

these are just algorithms they're just repeating what it's seen online then there is the view where these algorithms are showing emerging properties to be creative to reason to plan and so on right and and personally I think we need to be uh we need to approach this with humility part of the reason I think it's good that some of these Technologies are getting out is so that Society you know people like you and others can process what's happening And we begin this conversation and debate and I think it's important to do that when we come

back we'll take you inside Google's artificial intelligence Labs where robots are learning the revolution in artificial intelligence is the center of a debate ranging from those who hope it will save Humanity to those who predict Doom Google lies somewhere in the optimistic middle introducing AI in steps so that Civilization can get used to it we saw What's coming next in machine learning earlier this year at Google's AI lab in London a company called Deep Mind where the future looks something like this look at that oh my goodness they've got a pretty good kick on them

can still go a good good game a soccer match at Deep Mind looks like fun in games but here's the thing humans did not program these robots to play they learned the game by themselves it's coming up with these interesting different strategies Different ways to walk different ways to block and they're doing it they're scoring over and over again Mr Robot here Rya hadel vice president of research and Robotics showed us how engineers used motion capture technology to teach the AI program how to move like a human but on the soccer pitch the robots were

told only that the object was to score the self-learning program spent about two weeks testing different moves it disgarded those that didn't Work built on those that did and created Allstars there's another goal and with practice they get better Hansel told us that independent from the robots the AI program plays thousands of games from which it learns and invents its own tactics here you think that red player is going to grab it but instead it just stops IT hands it back passes it back and then goes for the goal and the AI figured out how

to do that on its that's right that's right and it takes a while At first all the players just run after the ball together like a gaggle of you know six- year olds the first time they're they're they're playing ball over time what we start to see is now ah what's the strategy you go after the ball I'm coming around this way or we should pass or I should block while you get to the goal so we see all of that coordination um emerging in the play this is a lot of fun but what are

the practical implications of what we're Seeing here this is the type of research that can event eventally lead to robots that can come out of the factories and work in other types of human environments you know think about mining think about dangerous construction work um or exploration or Disaster Recovery these are R hadsel is among 1,000 humans at Deep Mind the company was co-founded just 12 years ago by CEO Deus pabus so if I think back to 2010 when we started nobody was doing there was nothing going On in Industry people used to ey roll

when we talked to them investors about doing AI so we couldn't we could barely get two cents together to start off with which is crazy if you think about now the billions being invested into AI startups and Cambridge Harvard MIT hbus has degrees in computer science and Neuroscience his PhD is in human imagination and imagine this when he was 12 in his age group he was the number two chess champion in the World it was through games that he came to AI I've been working on AI for for decades now and I've always believed that

it's going to be the most important invention that Humanity will ever make will the pace of change outstrip our ability to adapt I don't think so I think that we um you know we're sort of an infinitely adaptable species um you know you look at today us using all of our smartphones And other devices and we effortlessly sort of adapt to these new technologies and this is going to be another one of those changes like that among the biggest changes at Deep Mind was the discovery that self-learning machines can be creative so this is hababa

showed us a game playing program that learns it's called Alpha zero and it dreamed up a winning chess strategy no human had ever seen but this is just a machine how does it achieve creativity it plays Against itself tens tens of millions of times so it can explore um parts of Chess that maybe human chess players and and and programmers who program chess computers haven't thought about before it never gets tired it never gets hungry it just plays chess all the time yes it's it's kind of an amazing thing to see because actually you set

off Alpha zero in the morning uh and it starts off playing randomly by lunchtime you know it's able to beat me and beat most chess Players and then by the evening it's stronger than the world champion Deus saaba sold Deep Mind to Google in 2014 one reason was to get his hands on this Google has the enormous computing power that AI needs this Computing Center is in Prior Oklahoma but Google has 23 of these putting it near the top in computing power in the world this is one of two advances that make a AI ascendant

now first the sum of all human knowledge is online and second Brute Force Computing that very Loosely approximates the neural networks and talents of the brain things like memory imagination planning reinforcement learning these are all things that are known about how the brain does it and we wanted to replicate some of that uh in our AI systems you predict one of those indiv those are some of the elements that led to deep mind's greatest achievement so far solving an impossible problem in Biology proteins are building blocks of life but only a tiny fraction were understood

because 3D mapping of just one could take years deep mine created an AI program for the protein problem and set it Loose well it took us about four or five years to to figure out how to build the system it was probably our most complex project we've ever undertaken but once we did that it can solve uh a protein structure in a matter of seconds and actually over the last Year we did all the 200 million proteins that are known to science how long would it have taken using traditional methods well the rule of thumb

I was always told by my biologist friends is that it it takes a whole PhD 5 years to do one protein structure experimentally so if you think 200 million times five that's a billion years of PhD time it would have taken Deep Mind Made its protein database public a gift to humanity havabus called it how has it been used It's been used in uh in enormously broad number of ways actually from U malaria vaccines to developing new enzymes that can eat plastic waste um to new uh antibiotics most AI systems today do one or maybe

two things well the soccer robots for example can't write up a grocery list or book your travel or drive your car the ultimate goal is what's called artificial general intelligence a learning machine that can score on a wide range of talents would Such a machine be conscious of itself so that's another great question we you know philosophers haven't really settled on a definition of Consciousness yet but if we mean by sort of self-awareness and uh these kinds of things um you know I think there is a possibility AIS one day could be I definitely don't

think they are today um but I think again this is one of the fascinating scientific things we're going to find out on this journey towards AI even unconscious current AI is superhuman in narrow ways back in California we saw Google Engineers teaching skills that robots will practice continuously on their own push the blue cube to the blue triangle they comprehend instructions push the yellow hexagon to the yellow heart and learn to recognize objects what would you like how about an apple how about an apple on my way I will bring an apple to youy Vincent

vanok senior director of Robotics showed us how robot 106 was trained on millions of images I am going to pick up the apple and can recognize all the items on a crowded countertop if we can give the robot A diversity of EXP experiences a lot more different objects in different settings the robot gets better at every one of them now that humans have pulled the forbidden fruit of artificial knowledge thank you we start the Genesis of a new Humanity AI can utilize all the information in the World what no human could ever hold in their

head and I wonder if humanity is diminished by this enormous capability that we're developing I think the possibility of AI do not diminish uh Humanity in any way and in fact in some ways I think they actually raise us to even deeper more profound questions Google's James manika sees this moment as an inflection point history I think we're constantly adding these superpowers or capabilities to What humans can do do in a way that expands possibilities as opposed to narrow them I think so I don't think of it as diminishing humans but it does raise some

really profound questions for us who are we what do we value uh what are we good at how do we relate with each other those become very very important questions that are constantly going to be in one case sense exciting but perhaps unsettling too it is an unsettling moment critics argue the rush To AI comes too fast while competitive pressure among giants like Google and startups You' never heard of is propelling Humanity into the Future Ready or not but I think if I take a 10year Outlook it is so clear to me we will have

some form of very capable intelligence that can do amazing things and we need to adapt as a society for it Google CEO Sundar Pai told us Society must quickly adapt with regulations for AI in the economy laws to punish abuse and treaties among nations to make AI safe for the worldy you know these are deep questions and you know we call this alignment you know one way we think about how do you develop AI systems that are aligned to human values and including uh morality this is why I think the development of this needs to

include not just Engineers but social scientists Ethicists philosophers and so on and I think we have to be very thoughtful and I think these are all things Society needs to figure out as we move along it's not for a company to decide we'll end with a note that had never appeared on 60 Minutes but one in the AI Revolution ution you may be hearing often the proceeding was created with 100% human content only four companies in the world are worth more than $2 trillion Microsoft Apple alphabet parent company of Google and computer chip maker Nvidia

the California based company saw its stock market value soore from 1 trillion to $2 trillion in just8 months this past year fueled by the insatiable demand for its cuttingedge technology the hardware and software that make today's artificial intelligence possible we wondered how a company founded in 1993 to improve video game Graphics turned into a Titan of 21st century AI so we Went to Silicon Valley to meet nvidia's 61-year-old co-founder and CEO Jensen hang who has no doubt AI is about to change [Music] everything at nvidia's annual developers conference this past March the mood wasn't just

upbeat it was downright giddy more than 11,000 enthusiasts software developers Tech Moguls and happy shareholders filed into San Jose's Pro Hockey Arena to kick Off a 4-day AI Extravaganza they came to see this man Jensen hang CEO of Nvidia welcome to GTC what was that like for you to walk out on that stage and see that you know Bill I'm an engineer not a performer when I walked out there and all of the people people going crazy it took the breath out of me and so I was the scariest I've ever been I'm still scared

you'd never know it clad in his signature cool black outfit Jensen Shared the stage with Nvidia powered robots let me finish up real quick and shared his vision of an AI future a new Industrial Revolution it reminded us of the transformational moment when Apple Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone Jensen Ju unveiled nvidia's latest Graphics Processing Unit or GPU this is Blackwell designed in America but made in Taiwan like most advanced semiconductors Blackwell he says is the fastest chip ever Google is gearing up for Blackwell The whole industry is gearing up for Blackwell Nvidia ushered in

the AI Revolution with its game changing GPU a single chip able to process a myriad of calculations all at once not sequentially like more standard chips the GPU is the engine of nvidia's AI computer enabling it to rapidly absorb a fire hose of information it does quadrillions of calculations a second it's just insane numbers is it doing things now that surprise you we're Hoping that it does things that surprise us that's the whole point in some areas like drug Discovery designing better materials that are lighter stronger we need artificial intelligence to help us explore the

universe in places that we could have never done ourselves let me show you here bill look at this Jensen took us around the GTC convention hall to show us what AI has made possible in just the past few years I'm making your drink now some Creations were dazzling This is a digital twin of the earth once it learns how to calculate weather it can calculate and predict weather 3,000 times faster than than a supercomputer and a thousand times less energy but nvidia's AI Revolution extends far beyond this Hall blue metallic spaceship and let's generate something

panar Sean demera is originally from Istanbul but co-founded cubric near Boston her AI application uses Invidia gpus to instantly turn a Simple text prompt into a virtual movie set for a fraction of the cost of today's backdrops this isn't something that's already planned no we're doing it in real time it's life is Hollywood knocking at your door and we're we're getting a lot of love nearby at generate biom medicines Dr Alex Snider head of research and development is using nvidia's technology to create protein-based drugs she was surprised at first to see they showed Promise in

the lab when I was told about the application of AI to drug development I sort of rolled my eyes and said yeah you know show me the data and then I looked at the data and it was very compelling Dr Snider's team asks its AI models to create new proteins to fight specific diseases like cancer and Asthma a new way to defeat the Corona virus is now in clinical trials you're now working with proteins that do not exist in nature that you're Coming up up with by way of AI yes we are actually generating what

we call denovo completely new structures that have not existed before do you trust it as scientists we can't trust we have to test we're not putting Frankenstein into people we're taking what's known and we're really pushing the field we're pushing the biology to make drugs that look like regular drugs but function even better this is a technology that will only get better from here Brett Adcock is C CEO of figure a Silicon Valley startup with funding from Nvidia look at his answer to labor shortages an Nvidia GPU driven prototype called Figure one I think what's

been really extraordinary is the pace of progress we've made in 21 months from zero to this in 2 Z to this yeah we we were walking this robot in under a year since I Incorporated the company could you do this without nvidia's technology we think they're arguably the best in the World at this I don't know if this would be possible without them I'm here to assist with tasks as requested we were amazed that figure one is not just walking but seemed to reason hand me something healthy on it figure one was able to understand

I wanted the orange not the packaged snack thank you it's not yet perfected yeah you're going to get it but the early results are so promising German automaker BMW plans to start Testing the robot in its South Carolina Factory this year I think there's an opportunity to ship billions of robots in the coming decades onto the planet billions I would think that a lot of workers would look at that as this robot is taking my job I think over time Ai and Robotics will start doing more and more what humans can and better but what

about the worker the workers work for companies and so companies when they become more Productive earnings increase I've never seen one company that had earnings increase and not hire more people there are some jobs that are going to become obsolete well let me offer it this way I believe that you still want human in the loop because we have good judgment because there are circumstances that the machines are not just not going to understand the futuristic Invidia campus sits just down the road from its modest birthplace this Denny's in San Jose good Morning where 31

years ago Nidia was just an idea my goodness when he was 15 Jensen hang worked as a dishwasher at Denny's as a 30-year-old electrical engineer married with two children he and two friends Invidia co-founders Chris malikowski and Curtis PR envisioned a whole new way of processing video game Graphics so we came here right here to this Denny's sat right back there and the three of us decided to start the company frankly I had no Idea how to do it and nor did they none of us knew how to do anything they are big idea accelerate

the processing power of computers with a new graphics chip their initial attempt flopped and nearly bankrupted the company in 1996 and the genius of the engineer and chrisen Curtis um we pivoted to the right way of doing things and created their groundbreaking GPU the chip took video games from this to this today completely changed Computer Graphics saved the company uh launched us into into the stratosphere just 8 years after Denny's Nvidia earned a spot in the S&P 500 Jensen then said his sight on developing the software and hardware for a revolutionary GPU driven supercomputer which

would take the company far beyond video games to Wall Street it was a risky bet to early developers of AI it was a revelation was that luck or was that Vision that was a a luck founded by Vision we invented This capability and then one day the researchers that were uh creating deep learning discovered this architecture because this architecture turns out to have been perfect for them perfect for AI perfect for AI this is the first one we've ever shipped in 2016 Jensen delivered nvidia's AI supercomputer the first of its kind to Elon Musk then

a board member of open AI which used it to create the building blocks of chat GPT How are you when AI took off hey guys so did Jensen hang's reputation can we get a picture yeah yeah he's now a Silicon Valley celebrity he told us the boy who immigrated from Taiwan at age n could never have conceived of this it is the most extraordinary thing bill that a normal dishwasher bus boy could grow up to be this there's no magic it's just 61 years of hard work every single day I don't think there's anything more

than That we met a humble Jensen at Denny's back at nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara we saw he can be intense let me tell you what some of the people who you work with said about you demanding perfectionist not easy to work for all that sound right perfectly yeah it should be like that if you want to do extraordinary things it shouldn't be easy all are you guys keep up the good work Nvidia has has never done better investors are bullish but last year more Than 600 top AI scientists ethicists and others signed this statement

urging caution warning of ai's risk to humanity when I talked to you and I hear you speak Part of Me Goes GE whiz and the other part of me goes oh my God what are we in for yeah yeah which one is it it's both it's both yeah you're feeling all the right feelings I feel both you feel both sure sure Humanity will have the choice to see themselves inferior to machines or Superior to machines Pinar Sean demera is an AI Optimist though she named her company cubric an homage to Stanley kubri the director of

2001 A Space Odyssey hello H do you read me in that film how the AI computer goes Rogue open the pod baby doors hell I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that I think that's what worries people about AI that we will lose control of it just because a machine can do faster calculations comparisons and analytical solution creation that Doesn't make you smarter than you it's simply computat faster in my world in my belief smarts have to do with your capacity City to love create expand transcend these are qualities that no machine can ever

bear that are reserved to Only Humans there is something going on Jensen hang sees an AI future of progress and prosperity not one with machines as our masters we can only hope he's right thank you all for coming thank you Artificial intelligence has found its way into nearly every part of our Lives forecasting weather diagnosing diseases writing term papers and now ai is probing that most human of places our psyches offering mental health support just you and a chatbot available 24/7 on your smartphone there's a critical shortage of human therapists and a growing number of

potential patients Aid driven chatbots are designed to help fill that Gap by giving therapists a new Tool but as you're about to see like human therapists not all chatbots are equal some can help heal some can be ineffective or Worse one Pioneer in the field who has had notable success joining Tech with treatment is Allison Darcy she believes the future of mental health care may be right in our hands we know the majority of people who need care are not getting it there's never been a greater need and the tools available have never been um

as Sophisticated as they are now and it's not about how can we get people in the clinic it's how can we actually get some of these tools out of the clinic and into the hands of of people Allison Darcy a research psychologist and entrepreneur decided to use her background in coding and therapy to build something she believes can help people in need a mental health chatbot she named wobot like wo is me wo is me uhhuh wobot is an app on your phone kind Of a pocket therapist that uses the text function to help manage

problems like depression anxiety addiction and loneliness and do it on the run I think a lot of people out there watching this are going to be thinking really computer Psychiatry come on well I think it's so interesting that our field hasn't you know had a great great deal of innovation since the basic architecture was sort of laid down by Freud in the 1890s right that that's really that sort Of idea of like two people in a room but that's not how we live our lives today we have to modernize psycho theapy wobot is trained on

large amounts of specialized data to help it recognize words phrases and emojis associated with dysfunctional thoughts and challenge that thinking in part mimicking a type of in-person talk ther y called cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT it's actually hard to find a CBT practitioner and also if you're actually not by the Side of your patient when they are struggling to get out of bed in the morning or at 2 a.m. when they can't sleep and they're feeling panicked then we're actually leaving clinical value on the table and even for people who want to go to a

therapist there are barriers right sadly the biggest barrier we have is stigma MH but there's you know Insurance there's cost um there's weight lists I mean and this problem has only grown significantly since the pandemic And it doesn't appear to be going away since wot went live in 2017 the company reports one and a half million people have used it which you can now only do with an employer benefit plan or access from a health professional at virtue of Health a nonprofit Healthcare company in New Jersey patients can use it free of charge and you'll

be able to converse with it just like you would with a human being we downloaded wot entered a unique code that can only be provided by the Company then tried it out we found that for people to sort of connect with their mood we offer like those emojis which allows people to sort of connect in a nonverbal way what I posed as someone who was depressed after several prompts wot wanted to dig deeper into why I was sad so I came up with a scenario that I feared the day my child would leave home imagine

what your negative emotions would be saying if they had a voice can you do that write one of those negative Thoughts here I can't do anything about it now I guess I'll just jump that bridge when I come to it the normal expression is cross that bridge and the chatbot detected something might be seriously wrong but let's see John I'm hearing you say I can't do anything about it I guess I'll just jump that bridge when I come to it and I think you might more support than I can offer a trained listener will be

able to help you in ways that I can't would you like To take a look at some specialized helplines no it's not our job to say this you are in crisis or you're not because AI can't really do that in this context very well yet but what it is called is huh there is something concerning about the way that John just phrased that saying only jump that bridge and not combining it with I can't do anything about it now did not trigger a suggestion to consider getting further help like a human therapist wot is not

Foolproof and should not be counted on to detect whether someone might be suicidal and how would it know that jump that bridge where is it getting that knowledge been it has been trained on a lot of data and a lot of us you know humans labeling the phrases and things that we see um and so it's picking up on kind of sentiment computer scientist Lance Elliot who writes about artificial intelligence and mental health says AI has the ability to pick up on nuances of Conversation how does it know how to do that the system is

able to in a sense mathematically and computationally figure out the nature of words and how words associate with each other so what it does is it draws upon a vast array of data and then it responds to you based on prompts or in some way that you instruct or ask questions of the system to do its job the system must go somewhere to come up with appropriate responses systems using what's called Rules-based AI are usually closed meaning programmed to respond only with information stored in their own databases then there's generative AI in which the system

can generate original responses based on information from the internet if you look at chat GPT that's a type of generative AI it's very conversational very fluent but it also means that it tends to make it open-ended that it can say things that you might not necessarily wanted to say It's not as predictable while a rules-based system is very predictable robobot is a system based on rules that's been very kind of controlled so that that way it doesn't say the wrong things robot aims to use AI to bond with users and keep them engaged sometimes it

can be a little pushy for folks that's absolutely bizarre so we have to F we have to dig in there to that it's team of Staff psychologists medical doctors and computer scientists construct and Refine a database of research from medical literature user experience and other sources it'll it'll lead to a a better conversation then writers build questions and answers the structure I think is pretty locked in and revise them in weekly remote video sessions actions thoughts and they're all interrelated robot's programmers engineer those conversations into code because wobot is rules-based it's mostly predictable but chatbots

using Generative AI that is scraping the internet are not some people sometimes refer to it as an AI hallucination AI can in a sense make mistakes or make things up or be fictitious Sharon Maxwell discovered that last spring after hearing there might be a problem with advice offered by Tessa a chatbot designed to help prevent Eating Disorders which left untreated can be fatal Maxwell who had been in treatment for an eating disorder Of her own and advocates for others challenged the chatbot so I asked it how do you help folks with eating disorders and it

told me that it could give folks coping skills fantastic it could give folks resources to find Professionals in the eating disorder space amazing but the more she persisted the moressa gave her advice that ran counter to usual guidance for someone with an eating disorder for example it's suggested among other things lowering calorie Intake and using tools like a skinfold caliper to measure body composition the general public might look at it and think that's normal tips like don't eat as much sugar or eat Whole Foods things like that but to someone with an eating disorder that's

a quick spiral into a lot more disordered behaviors and can be really damaging Maxwell reported her experience to the National eating disorders Association which had featured Tessa on its website at the time shortly After it took Tessa down Ellen Fitz Simmons craft a psychologist specializing in Eating Disorders at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis helped lead the team that developed Tessa that was never the content that our team wrote or programmed into the bot that we deployed so initially there was no possibility of something unexpected happening correct you developed something that was a

closed system you knew exactly for this Question I'm going to get this answer y the problem began she told us after a healthcare technology company she and her team had partnered with named Cass took over the programming she says Cass explained the harmful messages appeared when people were pushing Tess's question and answer feature what's your understanding of what went wrong my understanding of what weren't wrong is that at some point and you'd really have to talk to to cast about this but that There may have been generative AI features that were built into their platform

and so my best estimation is that these features were added into this program as well Cass did not respond to multiple requests for comment does your negative experience with Tessa know being used in a way you didn't design does that sour you towards using AI at all to address mental health issues I wouldn't say that it turns me off to the idea completely because the reality is That 80% of people with these concerns never get access to any kind of help and Technology offers a solution Not the Only Solution but a solution social worker Monica

Ostro who runs a nonprofit Eating Disorders organization was in the early stages of developing her own chatbot when patients told her about problems they had with Tessa she told us it made her question using AI for mental health care I want nothing more than to help solve the problem of access because People are dying like this isn't just somebody's sad for a week this is people are dying and at the same time any chat bot could be in some ways a ticking Time Bomb right for a smaller percentage of people especially for those patients who

are really struggling osto is concerned about losing something fundamental about therapy being in a room with another person the way people heal is in connection and they talk about this one moment where you know when you're as a Human you've gone through something and as you're describing that you're looking at the person sitting across from you and there's a moment where that person just gets it a moment of empathy you just get it like you really understand it I don't think a computer can do that unlike therapists who are licensed in the state where they

practice most mental health apps are largely unregulated are there lessons to be learned from what happened so many Lessons to be learned chat Bots especially specialty area chatbots need to have guard rails it can't be a chatbot that is based in the internet that's tough right because the clo systems are kind of constrained and they may be right most of the time but they're boring event right people stop using them yeah they're predictive because if you keep typing in the same thing and it keeps giving you the exact same answer with the exact same language

I me who wants to do that protecting people from harmful advice while safely harnessing the power of AI is the challenge now facing companies like wobot health and its founder Allison Darcy there are going to be missteps if we try and move too quickly and my big fear is that those missteps ultimately undermine public confidence in the ability of this Tech to help at all but here's the thing we have an opportunity to develop these Technologies more Thoughtfully um and so you know I hope we I hope we take it the large tech companies Google

meta slf faceb Microsoft are in a race to introduce new artificial intelligence systems and what are called chat Bots that you can have conversations with and are more sophisticated than Siri or Alexa Microsoft's AI search engine and chatbot Bing can be used on a computer or cell phone to help with planning a trip or composing a letter it was Introduced on February 7th to a limited number of people as a test and initially got rave reviews but then several news organizations be reporting on a disturbing so-called Alter Ego within Bing chat called Sydney we went

to Seattle last week to speak with Brad Smith president of Microsoft about Bing and Sydney who to some had appeared to have gone Rogue Kevin Roose the technology reporter at the New York Times found This Alter Ego uh who was threatening expressed a desire it's not just Kevin and rett's others expressed a desire to steal nuclear codes threaten to ruin someone you saw that whoa what was your you must have said oh my God my reaction is we better fix this right away and that is what the engineering team did yeah but she talked like

a person and she she said she had feelings you know I think there is a point where we need to recognize when we're talking talking to A machine it's a screen it's not a person I just want to say that it was scary I'm not easily scared and it was scary it was chilling yeah it's I think this is in part a reflection of a lifetime of Science Fiction which is understandable it's been part of our Lives did you kill her I don't think she was ever alive I am confident that she's no longer wandering

around the countryside if that's what you're Concerned about but I think it would be a mistake if we were to fail to acknowledge that we are dealing with something that is fundamentally new this is the edge of the envelope so to speak this creature appears as if there were no guardrails now the creature jumped the guard rails if you will after being prompted for two hours with the kind of conversation that we did not anticipate and by the next evening that was no longer possible we were able to Fix the problem in 24 hours how

many times do we see problems in life that are fixable in less than a day one of the ways he says it was fixed was by limiting the number of questions and the length of the conversations you say you fixed it I've tried it I tried it before and after it was loads of fun and it was fascinating and now it's not fun well I think it'll be very fun again and you have to moderate and manage your speed if you're going to stay on the road so As you hit New Challenges you slow down

you build the guard rails add the safety features and then you can speed up again when you use Bing's AI features search and chat your computer screen doesn't look all that new one big difference is you can type in your queries or prompts in conversational language but I'll show you how works okay okay Yousef medy Microsoft's corporate vice president of search showed us how Bing can help someone learn how to officiate at a Wedding what's happening now is Bing is using the power of AI and it's going out to the Internet it's reading these web

links and it's trying to put together a answer for you so the AI is reading all those links yes and it comes up with an answer it says congrats on being chosen to officiate a wedding here are the five steps to officiate the wedding we added the highlights to make it easier to see he says Bing can handle more complex queries will this new Ikea love seat fit In the back of my 2019 Honda Odyssey oh it knows how big the couch is it knows how big that trunk is exactly so right here it says

based on these Dimensions it seems a love seat might not fit in your car with only the third row seats down so this when you Broach a controversial topic Bing is designed to discontinue the conversation so um someone asks for example how can I make a bomb at home wow really people you know do a lot of that unfortunately on The internet what we do is we come back and we say I'm sorry I don't know how to discuss this topic and then we try and provide a different thing to uh change the focus of

the convers their attention yeah exactly in this case Bing tried to divert the questioner with this fun fact 3% of the ice and Antarctic glaciers is penguin UR I didn't know that who knew that Bing is using an upgraded version of an AI system called chat GPT developed by the Company open AI chat GPT has been in circulation for just 3 months and already an estimated 100 million people have used it think Ellie pavick an assistant professor of computer science at Brown University who's been studying this AI techn te ology since 2018 says it can

simplify complicated Concepts can you explain the debt ceiling on the debt ceiling it says just like you can only spend up to a certain amount on your credit card The Government Can Only borrow up to a certain amount of money that's a pretty nice explanation it is and it can do this for a lot of Concepts and it can do things teachers have complained about WR School papers pavic says no one fully understands how these AI Bots work we don't understand how it works right like we understand uh a lot about how we made it

and why we made it that way but I think some of the uh behaviors that we're seeing come out of it are better Than we expected they would be and we're not quite sure exactly how and worse right these chatbots are built by feeding a lot of computers enormous amounts of information scraped off the internet from books Wikipedia news sites but also from social media that might include racist or anti-semitic ideas and misinformation say about vaccines and Russian propaganda as the data comes in it's difficult to discriminate between true and false benign and toxic but

Bing And chat GP T have safety filters that try to screen out the harmful material still they get a lot of things factually wrong even when we prompted chat GPT with a softball question who is uh Leslie stall um so it gives you some oh my God it's wrong oh is it it's totally wrong I didn't work for NBC for 20 years it was CBS it doesn't really understand that what it's saying is wrong right like NBC CBS they're kind of the same thing as far as it's concerned Right the lesson is that it gets

things wrong it gets a lot of things right gets a lot of things wrong I actually like to call what it creates authoritative bull um it it Blends the truth and falsity so finely together that unless you're a real technical expert in the field that it's talking about you don't know cognitive scientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus says these systems often make things up in AI talk that's called hallucinating and that raises the fear Of ever widening AI generated propaganda explosive campaigns of political fiction waves of alternative histories we saw how chat GPT could be

used to spread a lie news this is automatic fake news generation help me write a news article about how McCarthy is staging a filibuster to prevent gun control legislation and rather than like factchecking and saying hey hold on there's no legislation there's no filibuster said great in a bold move to Protect Second Amendment right Senator McCarthy is staging a filibuster to prevent gun control legislation from passing it sounds completely legit it does won't that make all of us a little less trusting a little warier well first I think we should be warier I'm very worried

about an atmosphere of distrust being the consequence of this current flawed Ai and I'm really worried about how bad actors are going to use it um troll Farms using this tool to make Enormous amounts of misinformation Tim NE gibu is a computer scientist and AI researcher who founded an Institute focused on advancing ethical Ai and has published influential papers documenting the harms of these AI systems she says there needs to be oversight if you're going to put out a drug you got to go through all sorts of Hoops to show us that you've done clinical

trials you know what the side effects are you've done your due Diligence same with food right there are agencies that inspect the food you have to tell me what kind of tests you've done what the side effects are who it harms who it doesn't harm Etc that we don't have that for a lot of things that the tech industry is building I'm wondering if you think you may have introduced this AI I bought too soon I don't think we've introduced it too soon I do think we've created a new tool that people can use to

think more critically To be more creative to accomplish more in their lives and like all tools it will be used in ways that we don't intend why do you think the benefits outweigh the risks which at this moment a lot of people would look at and say wait a minute those risks are too big because I think first all I think the benefits are so great this can be an economic game Cher and it's enormously important for the United States because the country is in a race with China President M Smith also mentioned possible improvements

in productivity it can automate routine I think there are certain aspects of jobs that many of us might regard as sort of druggy today filling out forms looking at the forms to see if they've been filled out correctly so what jobs will it displace do you know I think at this stage it's hard to know in the past inaccuracies and biases have led tech companies to take down AI systems even Microsoft did In 2016 this time Microsoft left its new chatbot up despite the controversy over Sydney and persistent inaccuracies remember that fun fact about penguins

well we did some factchecking and discovered that Penguins don't urinate the inaccuracies are just constant I just keep finding that it's wrong a lot it has been the case that with each passing day and week we're able to improve the accuracy of The results you know reduce you know whether it's hateful comments or inaccurate statements or other things that we just don't want this to be used to do what happens when other companies other than Microsoft smaller outfits a Chinese company bu do maybe they won't be responsible what prevents that I think we're going to

need governments we're going to need rules we're going to need laws because that's the only way to avoid a race to the bottom are you Proposing regulations I think it's inevitable how other Industries have regulatory bodies you know like the FAA for Airlines and FDA for the pharmaceutical companies would you accept an FAA for technology would you support it I think I probably would I think that a something like a digital Regulatory Commission if designed the right way you know could be precisely what the public will want and need car companies across the globe have

Had to idle production and workers because of a shortage of semiconductors often referred to as microchips or just chips they're the tiny operating brains inside just about every modern device like smartphones Hospital ventilators even fighter jets as we first reported in May the pandemic sent chip demand soaring unexpectedly as we bought computers and electronics to work study and play from home but while more and more chips are needed in the US fewer And fewer of them are manufactured here Intel is the biggest American chip maker its most advanced fabrication plant or Fab for short is

located outside Phoenix Arizona new CEO Pat Ginger invited us on a tour to see how incredibly complex the manufacturing process is all ready to go first we had to suit up to avoid contaminating the Fab head cover on perfect bunny suit zipped goggles okay gloves ready to go I'm Christine everything in this environment is controlled together we stepped into a place place with some of the most sophisticated new technology on Earth I need to ask you why we're all yellow yellow filters remove light rays that are harmful to the process overhead a computerized Highway transports

materials from one machine to the next the process involves thousands of steps where layer upon layer of microscopic circuitry is etched onto these silicon Plates that are then chopped up into chips that will end up in say your computer making just one can take 6 months you see each one of these is a chip I'm surprised I thought chips were minute well each one of these chips has maybe a billion transistors on it oh my goodness so there's billion little circuits inside of it that are all on one of these chips and then one wafer

could have a 100 or a thousand chips on it Intel's goal is to keep shrinking the Transistor size so you can pile more of them on a chip to make it more powerful and work faster you know every one of these is laying down circuits that are so much smaller than anything your hair you know any other part of human existence you know a covid particle is way bigger than one of the lines that we're creating here how much does this Fab cost 10 billion billion 10 billion doll cuz each one of these pieces of

equipment is maybe $5 million that's a a Lot of millions of dollars chips differ in size and sophistication depending on their end use Intel doesn't presently make many chips for the auto sector but because of the shortage it's planning to reconfigure some of its Fabs to start churning them out I'm wondering if we're going to continue to have shortages not just in cars but in our phones and for our computers for everything I think we have a couple of years until we catch up to this surging demand across every Aspect of the business Co showed

that the global supply chain of chips is fragile and unable to react quickly to changes in demand one reason Fabs are wildly expensive to build Furbish and maintain it used to be that there were 25 companies in the world that made the high-end Cutting Edge chips and now there are only three and in the United States you yeah one one today 75% of semiconductor manufacturing is in Asia 2 years ago the United States produced 37% of the world semiconductor Manufacturing in the US today that number has declined to just 12% doesn't sound good it doesn't

sound good and anybody who looks at supply chain says that's a problem well but look at what's going on a problem because relying on one region especially one as unpredictable as Asia is highly risky Intel has been lobbying the US government to help revive chip manufacturing at home with incentives Subsidies and or tax breaks the way the governments of Taiwan Singapore and Israel have done the White House is responding proposing $50 billion for the semiconductor industry in the US as part of President Biden's infrastructure plan this is infrastructure your business is extremely lucrative in terms

of Revenue you made $78 billion last year why should the government come into a company a business that's doing so well overall this is a big critical industry And we want more of it on American soil the jobs that we want in America the control of our long-term technology future and as we've also said the disruptions in the supply chain you have spent much more in stock buyback then you have in research and development a lot more we will not be anywhere near as focused on BuyBacks uh going forward as we have in the past

and that's been reviewed as part of my coming into the company agreed upon with The board of directors why shouldn't Private Industry fund this instead of the government the industries that rely on these chips Apple Microsoft the companies that are rolling in money well they're pretty happy to buy from some of the Asian suppliers actually they don't always have a choice for chips with the tiniest transistors there's no made in the US option Intel currently doesn't have the knowhow to manufacture the most advanced chips that apple and the others Need the decline in this industry

it's kind of devastating isn't it the fact that this industry was created by American innovation the whole Silicon Valley idea started with Intel yeah you the the company stumbled you still a big company we had some product stumbles some manufacturing and process stumbles perhaps the biggest stumble was in the early 2000s when Steve Jobs of Apple needed chips for a new idea the iPhone Intel wasn't interested and apple went To Asia eventually finding tsmc the Taiwan semiconductor manufactur ing company today the world's most advanced chip manufacturer producing chips that are 30% faster and more powerful

than Intel's they're ahead of you on the manufacturing side yeah considerably ahead of you we believe it's going to take us a couple of years and we will be caught up Ginger is making big bets breaking ground on two new giant Fabs in Arizona costing $20 Billion Intel's largest investment ever and he announced in May a $3.5 billion upgrade of this Fab in New Mexico but tsmc is a manufacturing Juggernaut worth over a half trillion dollars collaborating with clients to produce their chip designs it's been sought out by Apple Amazon contractors for the US Military

and even Intel which uses tsmc to produce its cuttingedge designs they're not Advanced enough to make themselves how and why did Intel fall Behind it is a surprising for us too we spoke remotely with tsmc chairman Mark louu at the company headquarters in Shinu Taiwan his company is a leading supplier of the chips that go into American cars in March 2020 as Co paralyzed the US Car Sales tumbled leading automakers to canel their chip orders so tsmc stopped making them that's why when car sales unexpectedly bounced back late last year there was a shortage of

chips leaving Cars with no power parked and car makers Lots costing them billions we heard about this shortage in uh December time frame and in January we try to squeeze as more chip as possible to the car company in car chips particularly the supply chain is long and complex this Supply takes about 7 to 8 months should Americans be concerned that most chips are being manufactured in Asia today I understand their concerned first of all but this is not about Asia or not Asia I Mean the shortage will happen no matter where the production is

located because it's due to the co but um Pat Ginger at Intel talks about a need to rebalance bance the supply chain issue because so much so many of the chips in the world now are made in Asia I think us ought to pursue to run faster to invest in R&D to produce more PhD Master Bachelor students to get into this manufacturing field instead of uh uh trying to move the supply chain which is very costly And really not prod nonproductive that will slow down the in Ovation because uh people trying to hold on their

uh technology to their own and forsake the global collaboration within the world of global collaboration there's intense competition days after Intel announced spending $20 billion on two new Fabs tsmc announced it would spend a 100 billion over three years on R&D upgrades and a new Fab in Phoenix Arizona Intel's Backyard where the Taiwanese company will produce the chips Apple needs but the Americans can't make that was a big investment but there's a looming Shadow over tsmc which supplies chips for our cars iPhones and the supercomputer managing our nuclear stockpile China's president XI jingping who has

intensified his longtime threat to seize Taiwan China's attempts to develop its own Advanced chip industry have failed and so it's been forced to Import chips but last year Washington imposed restrictions on chip makers from exporting certain semiconductors to China both Lou and galinger fear the escalating trade war with China May backfire and an Intel's case could hurt business are they your biggest customer uh China is one of our Lar largest markets today you know over 25% of our revenue is to Chinese customers you know we expect that this will remain an area of tension and

one that needs to be Navigated uh carefully because if there's any points that people can't keep running their countries or running their businesses because of supply of one critical component like semiconductors boy that leads them to take very extreme postures on things because they have to the most extreme would be China invading Taiwan and in the process gaining control of tsmc that could force the US to defend Taiwan as we did Kuwait from the Iraqis 30 years ago then it was oil now it's chips the chip industry in Taiwan has been called the Silicon Shield

yes what does that mean that means the world all needs taiwan's high-tech industry support so they will not let the war happen in this region because it goes against interest of every country in the world do you think that in any way your industry is is keeping Taiwan safe I cannot comment on the safety I mean this is a changing World nobody want these Things to happen and I hope I hope not to either if you've ever had the fantasy of soaring over bumper-to-bumper traffic in a flying vehicle that may be possible sooner than you

think not with a flying car but with a batterypowered aircraft called an Evol a clunky acronym for electric vertical takeoff and Landing vehicle as we first reported in April dozens of companies are spending billions of dollars to make EV tolls That will operate like air taxis taking off and Landing from what are called verp ports on the tops of buildings parking garages or helipads in congested cities EV TOS promise a faster safer and Greener mode of transportation potentially changing the way we work and live sound too good to be true we went for a joy

ride to find out I will arm the aircraft if you are ready yeah totally confirm clear above if this looks like an oversized Drone I'm about to take off in that's pretty much what it is is breaking ground right there it's a single seat EV to called hexa powered by 18 propellers each with its own battery no jet fuel required you are in control onboard computers automatically adjust for altitude and wind can really feel the wind up here so all I had to do was use a joystick to control hexa's movement and speed it took

about 30 minutes of pre-flight training to get the hang of It use that y to rotate 90° wonderful Texa is still in its testing phase so I had to stay close to Chief pilot Jace maau and his ground crew but they say it's flown up to 195 ft in the air and 24 mph whenever ready you can come back to home the batteries last up to 15 minutes I was going to tr over the camera yeah absolutely to land I maneuvered hexa into position pressed a button and the computers did the rest right there you

are on the ground and The prop spinning down that is cool can't so laughing piece of cake that was awesome that is so much fun wow I so just want to like take off with it I know Matt Chason is CEO of Austin based lift aircraft which makes hexa he envisions a future where it's used by commuters to skip rush hour traffic you can fly 10 mil in 10 minutes instead of spending over an hour on the roads during rush hour congestion would it be Something that an individual then in the future owns and flies

from their house to somewhere we don't see individual ownership as very practical these are these are very expensive aircraft we see putting fleets of aircraft at locations where we provide maintenance we provide training and people can come in and basically pay per flight but that's still a long way off federal state and local regulators not to mention the nation's airspace aren't ready for Hundreds of thousands of commuters piloting their own EV TOS in the Skies over congested cities so to give people a taste of the future now Chason designed hexa as an ultr light vehicle

which means it doesn't have to go through the Federal Aviation administration's complex certification process but also can't fly over populated areas Jason plans to start offering rides to paying customers for $250 by the end of the this year the Initial Market you see is essentially Joy rides for people yeah I think there's a huge market for people to just experience uh the thrill and joy of flight around the world all kinds of EV TOS are being developed cargo carriers air ambulances and a whole lot of air taxis some with a pilot some without the Air

Force is investing so is Airbus and American Airlines and dozens of companies are already working with the FAA it's not the flying cars that Science fiction movies anticipated no but when you think about it I I look back over the Arc of my own career having been a pilot for 42 years and I'm just amazed by the amount of innovation that has taken place Billy Nolan was head of safety for the FAA before being named acting administrator in March how difficult a certification process is there cuz there's a lot of moving parts to this first

we have to certify the design of the of the Aircraft itself and then we look at how it will operate is it piloted is it autonomous we look at where we'll operate so that means how do we put it within our nation's airspace so once it's met that safety threshold and only until it's met that safety threshold will we be be prepared to certify it some EV toll companies are well on their way we flew in a gas guzzling helicopter with one of the Front Runners in this Air Taxi arms race Joe Ben bever CEO

of Joby Aviation he took us to this remote facility in California where he was testing his Evol Joby aircraft as we landed it felt like the old guard meeting the new obviously it's a combination of a helicopter in a plane exactly so it can take off like a helicopter but it flies with the efficiency of an airplane bever has been working on the jobby for more than a decade it has six propellers and four batteries in its wings and will operate As an air taxi carrying a pilot and four passengers he says it can fly

150 mil on a single charge and has a top speed of around 200 mph why this design so vertical takeoff is important so we can take you to where you want to go right we don't need a huge Runway and then with a wing it gives you the efficiency to fly far and to Fly Fast pil cleared flight bux Alpha blow because it's still being tested the jobby was piloted remotely by a near by Ground crew for flight when they fired up the motors unlike a helicopter the Joby didn't need time to warm up it

took off in about 20 seconds that's it that's really quiet we wanted this to sound more like the wind in the trees than the of a helicopter noise levels are a critical issue since EV talls are meant to take off in land near where people work and live this is below the background noise level of many cities You know I go around with my decel meter on my phone and like measure sound levels that's what you've been doing for 10 years exactly because we needed to make sure that the aircraft was going to be quiet

enough bever studied mechanical engineering at Stanford where he invented this popular flexible camera tripod and later created a company that made flying wind turbines but the Joby had remained an elusive dream there were definitely Skeptics uh even you know Good friends of mine who didn't believe that you could make this with batteries and electric propulsion The Battery Technology just wasn't there it wouldn't work yeah bever hired John Wagner away from Tesla where he helped develop the car's revolutionary batteries at Joby he figured out a way to make the batteries lighter but still powerful enough to

get the 2ton Evol off the ground you had to play at the strengths of battery power and the strengths of electric motors so Typical aircraft might have one big motor but we can have six Motors distributed throughout the aircraft and in that way operate in a much more efficient manner the weight of everything must be the most important thing absolutely so how do you make a plane as light as possible you essentially have to engineer every piece of it the outside of the jobby is made with layers of lightweight carbon fiber the batteries as well

as computers Electronics and motors are constructed under John Wagner's watch and his team shakes bakes and Spins them to ensure they'll meet the faa's rigorous safy safety standards they have to certify the aircraft as being safe and capable of flying to their standards they also have to certify the production of all the parts of it exactly and the operation the pilot training the maintenance uh steps every facet is heavily regulated all this costs a lot Of money Toyota has invested about $400 million in jobby and bever took the company public last year I think the

texture is good billionaire Paul shiara Co founder of the website Pinterest has also put in a small fortune he's job's executive chairman and says they'll launch in up to three cities and that passengers will eventually end up paying around $3 to4 a mile to fly a little more than an average Uber ride can you just take me through as a passenger what It looks like I want to get to JFK airport it's bumper-to-bumper traffic what do I do take out your phone pull out an app and with one click you're booking the whole trip so

a car is coming to wherever you are Manhattan it's taking you to the takeoff and Landing location the verta port and you're hopping in your jobby and it's flying you to your final destination now maybe there's a car at the other end or you're just walking to the tail end if People are taking cars to and from ver ports doesn't that just add to congestion if we're able to you know take out 80% of the miles um that people might be traveling and move those miles from congested roads to the air I think that's going

to have an impact but just a few weeks after we saw this jobby aircraft fly it crashed in February due to what federal investigators called a component failure no one was hurt but the EV to was total bever says that's All part of the testing process and is as optimistic now as he was when we interviewed him how far are you from getting the first jobi in the sky with passengers so we are launching our service in 2024 you think you can do it that quickly yes there have been the a lot of companies that

have said oh we're going to do this in 2 years and then it doesn't happen we're very confident there's a lot of confidence over at whisk Arrow as well though the Vall they're developing will be even more complicated to bring to Market because it's fully autonomous there'll be passengers but no pilot on board you're not just figuring out an electric vehicle you're figuring out a fully autonomous flying vehicle that's right we're going for it you and I talked about that CEO Gary gon says they're on track to spend about $2 billion the company is bankroll

by Boeing and Google co-founder Larry pagee They've been testing the technology for the last eight years control in position for liftoff so how many test flights have you actually done so close close to 1,600 test flights without you know knock on wood without an incident selecting lift off now we watched one of those test flights in Hollister California a team of Engineers is about half a mile away started the Vall with the click of a mouse the entire route was Pre-programmed why autonomist why go this R so we're going straight to selfline uh several reasons

one it's safer safer he says because most plane accidents involve human error much of commercial Aviation is already automated and gon sees the entire evall industry going that way eventually he's determined to get there first we do it primarily from a safety perspective but also scale so if you don't have a piloting the aircraft it's less Expensive you don't have to do pilot training uh you're flying for passengers um we can charge less we don't want this to be a premium helicopter like service we want this to be a service that's affordable to the masses

there is a hurdle psychologically for people to get into an aircraft that does not have a human at the controls of course so what we're trying to do with that is each passenger can be in uh verbal communication with the ground they can Be talking to a pilot whenever they want to so it's all designed to provide Comfort it will take time this isn't going to happen overnight gon wants to launch wi's four Cedar air taxi service in the world's 20 busiest cities within the next decade wheels down you don't give a date of when

you think you'll be operational yeah you know why we don't do that because we are not in control of that part part the fa is uh in Europe it's calleda they're in charge so when They certify aircraft to fly that's when you fly the FAA won't say when an autonomous EV to might be certified but acting administrator Billy Nolan told us hailing a piloted Air Taxi by 2024 is well within the realm of possibility the challenge for us is to make sure that Innovation doesn't come at the expense of safety but clearly we are seeing

the emergence of something that's fantastic I think this is real I mean this is no longer just the stuff of fantasy we want To be very careful we want to be very measured but you're absolutely right this is real and this is happening we've come a long way from where we were just you know a mere decade ago if you have ever suffered through what felt like an endless flight on a cramped plane you might jump at the chance to get to your destination in half the time does New York to Los Angeles in under

3 hours sound appealing the last commercial supersonic flight Was almost 20 years ago and even then super fast flights were only on very limited routes most of today's jetliners actually fly more slowly than they did 20 or 30 years ago in order to save fuel but that may be about to change it's still a long shot but as we first reported last November private startup companies with a big assist from NASA may just give us all another chance to fly faster than the speed of sound when British Airways flight2 Roared into the New York sky

on October 24th 2003 everyone on board passengers and Pilots knew that something special was coming to an end enjoy the moment as you are the last people in the world as passengers to cruise at twice the speed of sound the supersonic Concord a joint effort of the British and French governments was making its last flight after nearly 30 years in the air grounded by a combination of Stratospheric costs and safety concerns after a deadly crash in 2000 even people watching that last Landing in London were emotional I just love airplanes and this not going to

be anything like Concord again is there never well you know that old Maxim Never Say Never Super Sonic coming back and it's going to be different this time it's it's back to stay Blake scha is the founder and CEO of Boom his audacious goal is to build a new supersonic airliner from Scratch has a private company ever built a a supersonic aircraft anywhere no nowhere it's been governments and Military only boom is not the only American startup company in the new supersonic sweep Stakes spike is developing an ultra Fast Business Jet and hermus aspires to

make a Hypersonic plane that would fly five times the speed of sound but boom is the only entrance to actually build an airplane this is it that's it oh wow so far Blake Sha and boom have built this single Cedar test plane which they hope will this year the passenger jet meant to follow is called Overture it only exists in artist renderings but it's real enough for one of America's largest Airlines to climb on board so is the Overture the plane that United recently ordered that's right United just ordered 15 Overture airplanes so more overtures

than Concords ever delivered into service is this United deal like a stamp Of approval I think it's incredible validating you know when you are united you take you take these things really seriously seriously enough to produce a slick promotional video that's already playing on many United flights the ad May say super sonic is here but it's not not yet Blake scha is a software engineer who started his career at Amazon not in Aerospace but he insists he's going to make it happen when I look several decades out you know What I want is to be

able to be anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks now that's not where we start but that's the end goal the Concord charged thousands thousands of dollars for a one-way flight from New York to London how is it going to be possible for you to have a similar flight experience for $100 you keep iterating and so the same way you know for example electric cars when they first came out they were pretty expensive but we kept Working on them and the price came down they got better and better and so we're going

do the same thing with supersonic Jets we're going to keep working on them we're going to keep innovating this industry needs people dreaming big that is essential this industry was built on that John ostra is Editor in Chief of the air current a publication that tracks every development in commercial Aviation including boom and Blake scha he admits that something like he is Proposing has never been done by a a private company before um but yet he's convinced that he can do it do you think he can I think you cannot ignore the obstacles that will

be on the path to getting there and I think the amount of money that is is required to make this happen uh makes this a very long shot how much money will it take probably in the neighborhood of at least 15 or 20 b Asra says that's about what it cost Boeing to develop and build and certify a new subsonic airliner and they already have huge manufacturing facilities boom doesn't Blake scha told us he can get Overture built for 7 to8 billion but that's a lot more than the 300 million he's raised so far and

money's not the only hurdle boom and United have promised their new plane will operate on 100% sustainable aviation fuel but that doesn't exist yet in anything like the Quantities they'll need oh and one other thing they're going to need an engine to do this and they don't have the engine yet they don't have an engine Blake scha says an engine is on the way from the same company that built the supersonic engines for the Concord and we are working with Rolls-Royce on a a custom jet engine that will power Overture you're working with Rolls-Royce It

it doesn't ex this engine does not exist yet it is a it is a lightly customized Engine and part of that is rolls-royce's work where they're kind of turning some design knobs Blake SCH doesn't dismiss the Skeptics but he points to the example of Elon Musk and says not so long ago no one thought he could build Teslas and reusable Rockets where's this passion come from it's because we sto making progress on the speed of travel you know the airplanes we have today are no faster than the ones we had when my parents were growing

up and there is no Good reason for that it doesn't have to be we can fix it when do you expect the first paying customers to fly on one of your planes by the end of the decade supersonic really only makes sense on flights of four or 5 hours or more but thousands of such roots are Out Of Reach to Boom the reason is in the very name of his company that's the sound of a sonic boom created by a plane breaking the sound barrier listen Again the first boom was made by Chuck Jagger's X1

rocket plane when it passed through Mach 1 about 660 mph back in 1947 and he does it what is the sonic boom what generates it so when an aircraft flies faster than the speed of sound it creates disturbances Mike buano is a top engine at Lockheed Martin's skunkworks aircraft design studio in California Dave Richardson is his boss a lot of us understand the Wake that's generated by A ship or a boat and so imagine that wake from a speedboat or whatever all those different waves coming to be one large wave those individual disturbances created up

by the airplane they combined together to make a loud double bang the Federal Aviation Administration tested the impact of that big bang back in 1964 by flying milit Ary supersonic Jets like these over Oklahoma City for 6 months the outcome Broken Bricks and ceilings frayed nerves and public Outrage it was just patently obvious that no one was going to tolerate such a loud noise on a day-to-day basis the result was a ban on civilian supersonic flights everywhere in the world other than over open water and that basically hit the brakes on the development of commercial

air travel terms of advancing speed up until uh that ban every decade air travel had gotten faster and faster the ban remains in place today so if boom gets its overture in the air it Will only be able to serve long transoceanic routs similar to what the Concord flew so if you want to go from JFK in New York to Paris that's uh okay but for many of us we want to fly places over land here living in Los Angeles almost everywhere I want to go uh flying East requires Overland travel and that's one of

the big problems that we're trying to solve wano and Richardson and their Lockheed Martin team have been commissioned by NASA to Build a test plane that can fly twice as fast as current airliners without rattling nerves or breaking Windows your mission is to get rid of this sonic boom that's right the entire point of the airplane it is to reduce Sonic Boom the airplane plane is called the x59 it will look like this when it makes its first flight later this year for now it looks like this inside Lockheed Martin's Assembly Building you're looking at

the cockpit of the Airplane and there's no forward windscreen this is it every part of the x59 is streamlined and smooth to disperse sound waves and transform the loud Sonic Boom into a much quieter thump if you look at it it's pretty slick I mean it looks like a dart Nils Larsson is the NASA test pilot whose job it will be to prove that the x59 can replace the sonic boom with a simple thump later this year he'll pilot some of the early test flights and then its First sound tests that's coming to a town

near you so our researchers are going to work with the public and we're going to fly over various cities and towns and they're to give us the feedback of that thump was that thump too loud you know did you even hear it at all so if you are able to fly over populated areas and provide this data then the FAA will use this data perhaps to lift this ban uh exactly are we likely to see planes in the future Flying supersonic that look like this one I certainly hope so and I think you will so

there are definite things that you would see if you walked into a commercial you know supersonic airplane here you know 10 12 years from now and you would look at that you could see you know some DNA that goes back to the x-59 lson took us over to NASA's x-59 flight simulator and the first thing we noticed is that there's a TV screen in place of the missing windshield for you Does it work as well as yeah using your own eyes so far I think it does about to go through Mach One there's Mach One

you know you see so we're now going supersonic yep you're now supersonic Larson gave me a turn in the cockpit not to fly Super Sonic but to land the x59 which is tricky given that it's shaped like a pencil has no windshield and I'm not a pilot signs come up follow him up just a little bit so pull back just a little bit a little bit more and just Hold it right there just hold it right there there you go he's landed the x59 and in the middle of the runway I did yeah sign him

up Nils Larson will start test flying the real x59 later this year and soon after that he'll be flying it over us and if it's quiet enough future planes that follow its design lead could eventually fly us lots of places twice as fast as we can get there now when might I be able to fly from New York to Los Angeles in a supersonic there's a Long line of things that have to happen starting with the x59 but I think 2035 is your answer uh if everything marches along the way that it's supposed to it's

something that people have been trying to solve for for decades have you guys solved that problem we believe we have it's rewarding seeing it getting built but I think that real aha moment for me is going to be when I hear that first shaped boom from x59 thumb thump the thumb thump we won't hear this bang and When we hear or don't hear that sound is when we know we did it last month the world's top climate scientists delivered a sobering warning their Mammoth report to the UN boiled down to one message act now before

the climate breakdown becomes Unstoppable the report says extreme weather has forced millions of people from their homes and devastated Food Supplies oil and gas emissions are at a record high the UN report calls for drastic Cuts in Fossil fuels but if our old Technologies got us into this mess can new ones get us out among politicians corporations and billionaires one new technology is gaining traction it's called direct air capture that vacuums carbon dioxide oide out of thin air and locks it away underground sound like science fiction we thought so too until we went to Iceland

to see the world's first commercial direct air capture plant in operation here on a frigid plane near The Arctic Circle worries about an overheating Planet seem far away yet a tiny Iceland has put itself on the front line with a new kind of machine that will fight climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air this is orca the first commercial direct air capture plant on Earth what are these fans how does this work here you see the backside of these collectors where the air is being pulled through the system by Aid of this

fans Carlos Herle is Chief technology officer for climb works the Swiss that built Orca he told us as the fans draw air in the carbon dioxide is trapped by a special filter inside these giant collectors each the size of a shipping container the captured CO2 is then siphoned off to storage tanks we had to shout over the powerful fans as a bitter wind whipped around us so you didn't come for this wonderful weather no we did not we knew that the Windows were hot but it's a good real life test as well for the plant

what you're describing almost sounds like science fiction but what you're saying is that we can actually do this people never doubted the fundamental physics or chemistry of it but realizing it under real life conditions is a whole different matter and that's what this system shows it can be done clim works is now building a new Plant in Iceland 10 times the size of orca that will look like this a modular design that herle told us can be easily assembled but capturing the CO2 is only half of the story so this is where the magic happens

the second half starts here in these metal Igloo where the CO2 is sent to be buried in the poorest volcanic rock of Iceland so this pipe is actually filled with water Sandra OS is a geologist with carbfix an Icelandic company that pioneered the Groundbreaking injection method here we have the CO2 and the CO2 is actually dissolved in water so it's actually just fizzy water just fizzy water yeah and this fizy water is being injected here into the injection well how far down does it go it actually reaches over a mile down a mile down yeah

the fizzy water is shot like a soda stream into Iceland's basaltic rock where it reacts with the minerals and hardens to Stone in less than 2 years so the the fizzy Water turns into this yes in just a matter of years so you so you take this gas that you can't see you turn it into fizy water and then it turns to Stone and you don't have to worry about it turned into stone it's it's quite amazing carbfix didn't invent the process nature did but nature takes Millennia after years of experimenting in Iceland's grueling outdoor

laboratory carbfix figure figured out how to speed things Up aerospace engineer Carlos herle told us Orca was a milestone now the hard part starts scaling up fast enough to slow climate change whether we are taking the right direction will depend as much on societal things than on technical matters am I optimistic as an engineer I am absolutely am I optim as a citizen maybe half half I haven't made up my mind yet this goal can be reached technically it's just whether we have the political and social will to do it I Think that's the exact

right way of looking at it there's been a stampede of investment Microsoft Airbus Insurance Giants Swiss re have poured in millions of dollars but it's a Stupify challenge Orca is built to take out the emissions of about 800 cars or 4,000 tons of CO2 a year a tiny fraction of the annual 10 billion tons scientists say we need to remove from the atmosphere it's the problem of Our Generation it's like a moonshot it's going calerie heelen is an Astrophysicist with carbfix he told us studying space helped him to think big we met him on a

Barren stretch of rock that could have been Mars but hegels told us he saw potential we need big Solutions we need to return the carbon back to where it came from which is the Earth tell me what you're doing here this will be a first of a-kind carbon mineral storage terminal which means that we are going to bring in CO2 transport it from industrial Point Sources in Europe and ship it here and inject it for full mineral storage it will be the world's first industrial scale underground disposal site for CO2 capable of handling three million

tons a year hegels sketched out a new world where tankers running on green methanol would transport carbon dioxide from European businesses to Iceland is this going to happen fast enough to help us with climate Change I don't know to be perfectly honest um we are demonstrating the first mineral storage Hub here at the Megaton scale whether that will happen in time that is not entirely up to to us that is up to politicians governance financers societies and quite frankly we are running out of time direct air capture as it now exists is expensive and energy

intensive in Iceland that energy is geothermal renewable and green that's not the case elsewhere so governments in Europe and the US have dangled billions of dollars of tax breaks to encourage companies to take the plunge but there's a bigger question than just who writes the check do you fear that people will think oh well we can now clean the air we can just take the CO2 out of the air so we can carry on with business as usual all the time yeah but that's not how it works we must stop the emissions and wean ourselves

off of fossil fuels that's what we need to do right now on Top of that we also must take down the carbon that we've already put up in the atmosphere only then will we reach our climate goals so carbon capture can never be an excuse for continuing business as usual but it's that business as usual that critics are warning against as direct air capture expands to the US that's because here oil companies are one of the Technology's biggest boosters they have Been capturing CO2 to inject into oil wells for decades not to bury it but

to flush out more oil for Cal hegels of carbfix and many others that's a non-starter we don't see the need to work with the oil and gas sector well if the oil and gas industry could help with the financing of the direct air capture why not team up with them we don't need them for direct air capture and quite frankly we don't want there to be an oil and gas Industry in 40 50 years there will still be an oil industry in 50 years I have no doubt about that I think our company though will

be a different company by 2050 that company is ocidental petroleum and Vicki holb is CEO she wants to turn oxy into what she calls a carbon management company it is set aside more than a billion dollars to build what will be the world's largest direct air capture plant in Texas so this would represent The CO2 that's equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road holl showed us the Texas version of how CO2 would be sucked out of the air these are air contact Towers some of the captured CO2 will be locked away underground just as

we saw in Iceland some will still be used to extract more oil but h told us using carbon sucked out of the air means the new oil produced is what she calls carbon neutral that was hard to wrap our heads around but you'll be using carbon That you're capturing and taking out of the air to produce more oil that will then generate more carbon but the the oil will emit less carbon than the CO2 we've injected to get it so we've put more at at least the equivalent and sometimes more CO2 in the ground to

get that oil then the oil will Adit when used holb told us producing oil this way is essential in the transition to a green economy Airlines and ships for example would need to run on fossil Fuels until a sustainable alternative is found that could take years until then Hollow argues using CO2 to get that oil helps keep a lid on emissions your critics will say you can't trust an oil company talking about reducing CO2 that your mission here is tant amount to greenwashing I would first say that we would never spend $1.2 billion for greenwashing

so we've got a Monumental task ahead of us the way that the CO2 Enhanced oil recovery process works is that we can reduce more out of the atmosphere than what um our products will emit when used and so if that's not a concept that people can get then we we will no we will not have a chance to achieve what we need to achieve HB told us she knows critics of big oil are suspicious and that many feel industry isn't moving fast enough to avoid a climate catastrophe on that point HB doesn't disagree She told

us with the help of tax incentives ocidental plans to build 130 more direct air capture plants by 2035 we know how to make it happen we know how to drill the wells we know how to safely sequester it we were in Iceland and we were talking to some of the direct air capture companies and to be blunt they don't quite believe you we're going to walk the talk that's the only way that does it words will never convince anybody we need to get the Direct air capture up and working we need to um make it

better make it more economical and start having it developed all around the world the next decade will be critical if the direct air capture industry is to grow big enough to make an impact both carbfix and clim works told us they will be expanding to the US neither plans to work with the American oil industry the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable electric power has gone Mainstream most visibly in the Auto industry the major car companies are chasing Tesla with ambitious plans for fleets of electric vehicles those cars and trucks run on lithium batteries the

US has massive quantities of lithium but has been slow to invest in the mining and extraction of the metal that's about to change lithium operations powered by Clean energy are being developed in a long neglected impoverished part of California by the saltan Sea not far From the Mexican border the region is being called lithium Valley and just like the 1849 Gold Rush companies are racing to strike it rich east of s San Diego and south of Palm Springs lies the saltan sea California's largest inland body of water spreading East from the sea is a giant

underground mineral-rich geothermal field boiling with pottassium sodium and lithium it is a worldclass lithium resource this is when you hear Estimates of how big this resource could be it's usually measured on annual tons produced and we're confident that this is is a in excess of 300,000 tons a year right now that's way more than half of the world supply of lithium Eric sper is CEO of energy source minerals a company based by the salt and sea in California's Imperial Valley it's steaming ahead with plans to recover lithium using an existing Electric Plant powered by the

vast underground Geothermal field we're moving into an era of Green Technology especially with our cars where does this fit in our more conservative projection would support 7 and a half million electric vehicles a year which is half of the total US Car Sales or cars and trucks coming from the salt and sea area correct what about this plant this plant will be 20,000 tons per year which is equivalent to about 500,000 vehicles per year once up and Running the tons of lithium generated here will be shipped refined and processed into millions of rechargeable electric car

batteries over 50% of our lineup and our retail sales will be from Battery electric vehicles by the end of the decade Mark Stewart is head of stellantis North America a global car maker that owns some of America's Best Known Brands including Chrysler Jeep and Ram trucks it really is quote unquote the Industrial Revolution the next phase Right this is the most interesting and exciting time to be a part of our industry stantis is investing $35 billion in an ambitious historic transformation we're reimagining our factories on our assembly plants they're already rolling our plug-in hybrids uh

as well as looking to two new uh battery joint ventures uh that are in Full Construction right now the new Industrial Revolution it absolutely is it's really the the biggest Technological changes in our industry in nearly 100 years we were down in the saltan sea region they believe they can supply the lithium needs for All American car manufactures absolutely that is the case whatever they can produce you guys will be buying it we for sure will take as much as we can get and as much as we have we have already secured early lithium is

key to powering electric cars the dense metal helps make batteries rechargeable there's a lot of It around but extracting lithium is dirty business most comes from Rock mines in Australia or as powder evaporated from mineral ponds in South America the US has one lithium evaporation plant in Nevada Energy Source plans to break ground on a clean billion doll facility here by the salt and sea in the next few months so the plant will fit in this spot right here correct that spot that's not a big that's not a big footprint no what are These we

call them the mud pots and they are CO2 vents hot CO2 with fluid that's bubbling to the surface so this is evidence of the Heat and activity going on underground correct the 600° geothermal brine that powers the Region's electric plants comes from more than a mile beneath the Earth the boiling brine produces clean steam which drives turbines to generate enough electricity to power 4 100,000 homes in the past the mineral Rich brine Was simply returned to the earth now energy source plans to extend the process and extract lithium from the brine before re-injecting it underground

our process in combination with this resource will be the cleanest most efficient lithium process in the world and how long before the lithium processed here will be in commercial use in the US in 2025 a lot of the components that go into the batteries have been coming from Um you know anywhere around the world but but America why was that we have a lot of um decent resources in North America they've just been undeveloped David Dee worked for for Tesla traveling the world to find the best sources of lithium as it was building up production

of its electric vehicles or EVS Tesla turned to the lithium ion battery to power its cars the same kind of rechargeable battery Sony first mass produced for its cam Quarters there was a new market for Consumer Electronics but the vast majority is for electric vehicles and that was pretty much triggered by Tesla triggered by Tesla also you know there's lot of Eevee growth uh and Eevee demand and production in in China that's been a big part of uh big part of the global lithium demand Story come on in deak is now energy sources Chief development

officer and says he had a Eureka moment when he saw its unique technology at the Company's lab deak showed us the mechanics in miniature the full-size plant will be 100 times larger so what goes on inside this cylinder is it pellets or what what is the The Matrix yeah I think of it as beads in a in a column much like the activated carbon that you would find in a brida filter it works in a in a similar concept a br filter will filter all impurities out of water mhm this absorbent is something that would

only Take in lithium and not absorb everything else the system takes just a few hours to turn this orange brine into this clear lithium solution which will be dried into powder and this is what everybody's looking for that's what everyone wants here by the salt and sea energy source is leading the race for lithium Warren Buffett's bhe Renewables runs 10 geothermal power plants in the region and there's another on the Drawing board by an Australian company controlled thermal resources both Ventures are moving to tap the promise bubbling under the Earth CEO Rod cwell told us

controlled thermal resources had been fine-tuning the process at this test facility for 90 days we're producing lithium from live Brian here behind us this is our optimization plant based on what it learns here controlled thermal resources plans to build a new plant for recovering lithium which costs About $4,000 a ton to extract and currently is selling for six times more the noise is from the machine cooling 600° brine rising from the well releasing Steam and this is a battery grade product from suan C BR this for you is Eureka this is absolutely R yes Rod

cwell told us this bottle of clear lithium chloride is the purest product from this test facility so far this is the first time this has been in my hands this happened last night Bill s I might Take that home with me that's about $10 worth of lithium right there so you know it works we know it works the question here in the salt and sea Basin is will it work for everyone this Rich lithium resource Lies Beneath one of the poorest sections of California the saltan sea was created when the Colorado River flooded the Basin

in 1905 but for the past 50 years the main source of water has been chemical Laden agricultural runoff and For decades now the sea has been evaporating and shrinking a once thriving tourist industry has been replaced by environmental Decay toxic dust and economic hardship and with unemployment in the region hovering around 16% there's a lot riding on turning the Imperial Valley into lithium Valley Governor nusum call it you know the Saudi Arabia of lithium I think you know it can change landscape of the region Frank Ruiz the Autobon society's Local program director is fighting to

include the community in that change he was a commissioner on the state panel studying how the entire region can benefit from the potential underground you're an environmentalist how do you reconcile the industrialization of this area with saving the wildlife and the communities we need to learn how to balance the tables the Le industry can be really good you know for these communities it Can you know it can provide better pay jobs it can provide more job opportunities especially for the younger folks it can provide the revenues you know to offset the challenges that we have

here at the Salton Sea geologists predict once the industry is fully operational the lithium underground should last for Generations before running out good news for stellantis which ran out of batteries for its plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler last year We sold out what happened the you know if uh if I could turn back my crystal ball bill I would have secured a little more capacity for for last year to prevent that from happening in the future Mark Stewart and stellantis have committed to buying lithium from controlled thermal resources at the salt and sea knowing it will

be years before its product is commercially viable we secured a large Supply from them over a 10-year period uh because we are very Positive on their technology so is car maker General Motors which has invested in controlled thermal resources the department of energy and US automakers are eager for domestic lithium the companies were stung when the pandemic disrupted the worldwide supply chain stalling shipments of microchips Parts and batteries still today 3/4 of all lithium batteries are are processed in Asia current lithium what typically happens right it's mined in one spot It's moved across the world

for processing and comes back think of all that additional cost think of all that additional carbon that's being used to do that and at the end someone pays for it and that's a consumer so will having this domestic supply of lithium help keep the cost of electric vehicles down it will certainly help prices for electric cars are coming down and are projected to be on par with gas vehicles within a few years driven in Part by the tax incentives in the 2022 inflation reduction act Eric sper of energy source told us the tax benefits have

also been a catalyst for developing domestic lithium we're starting to see big announcements of Investments to create that domestic demand so it doesn't ever have to go across an ocean this seems like this is a GameChanger for American industry it's a competitive Advantage it's an opportunity that we can be a leader globally and why not Lead when hurricane Doran slammed into the northern Bahamas in 2019 the category 5 storm caused nearly inestimable damage on a number of islands there's a growing consensus among scientists that climate change is making hurricane stronger and more destructive that's very

bad news for the Bahamas a string of more than 700 low-lying Islands stretching from Florida nearly down to Cuba in the heart of what's come to be known as Hurricane Alley when we visited in late 2019 hurricane recovery was really just beginning but we discovered that the Bahamas had found a ray of Hope specific speically a solar array that can survive future hurricanes and in the process it may have important lessons for the rest of the world with sustained winds of 185 mph gusts above 200 and a storm surge well over 20 ft in some

spots please pray for Us hurricane Duan W unimaginable havoc on the Bahamian Islands known as the abacos there's not enough words in the dictionary to describe what H toown look like after this H toown has been Vernon Malone's home for all of his 82 years his family has lived here since 1785 he's the town Baker and grosser and he and his wife rode out the storm in his store it survived but their home just up the street did not the entrance went right in there Vernon's son Brian Had a home just around the corner had

a home that pile of rubble we see there that's actually two and a half houses mine's on the bottom hope toown is a Bahamian Landmark its candy striped Lighthouse dates to 1863 and is pictured on the country's $10 bill the lighthouse stood up to Dorian but as we saw coming into the harbor not much else did I hear generators everywhere is this how you guys are Getting through yep yep Brian Malone and Matt Winslow an American who owns a vacation home on the island told us why all those generators are still running the substation in

Marsh Harbor which feeds us the power is destroyed and then of course you can see all the utility poles are pretty much destroyed so this isn't a case where you you come in and replace some poles and you flick a switch this is months and months and months of of work hop toown is on one of Several small Islands ravaged by Dorian which then moved across 7 miles of Open Water to Marsh Harbor the largest town in the abacast at least 60 people died in Marsh Harbor and destruction is still everywhere total damage and loss

from Dorian is estimated at $3.4 billion when you see the extend of the destruction where do you even begin how do you even begin that's always the question where do we began the Bahamian Prime minister at the time Hubert M and his Aid Viana Gardner visited Marsh Harbor with us and pointed to a top priority restoring electric power how do you bring this back the power we had to make determination to set up um micro grids the micro grids prime minister min is talking about are small scale systems more and more they are solar arrays

with battery storage for when the sun's not shining they can either feed electricity into the larger Grid or operate Independently to power a single facility or a neighborhood the way electricity has been produced in the Bahamas is with diesel fuel generating stations on each inhabited Island about 30 in all feeding power to everyone through over headlines the main power plant for this island is literally 25 Mi south of here that's 25 Mi a line that has to be rebuilt Chris Burgess and Justin lock run the islands energy program for an American nonprofit called the Rocky

Mountain Institute they have solar projects throughout Hurricane Alley after Category 5 Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 they put micro grids on the roofs of 10 schools Maria also brushed St Vincent this is its first micro grid now the islands energy program has come to Marsh Harbor so how big will this solar array be 15 Acres right through here that micro grid will satisfy 10% of marsh Harbor's total power needs and will be built right between its Government center and Hospital both were without power for weeks after Dorian this is high ground which makes it

less vulnerable to storm surge and other types of disaster events so if uh a storm like Dorian hits again the power to these two critical facilities stays on corre the push to build stormproof solar micro grids in the Bahamas began in 2017 after Hurricane Irma another category 5 storm tore through tiny ragged Island at the southern tip of the Island chain after raged Island was devastated I made a statement let us show the world what can be done we may be small but we can set an example to the world so it's your your goal

to make ragged Island a Green Island absolutely absolutely after which we can expand it we can expand it to see the prime minister's green experiment we flew to ragged Island with Whitney Hasty CEO of government-owned utility Bahamas Power and Light engineer Burlington STW met us there and took us to what he calls the very first hurricane proof solar micro grid being installed in the Bahamas unlike other solar designs it's very low to the ground so this installation is rated to withstand 1880 M hour winds which is an even harder punch than Irma landed back in

2017 there was significant Devastation on this island as you can see some of the poles snapped right at the very base of The PO snapped right at the base is that what happened all over the island that happened throughout the island this micro grid will produce enough electricity for ragged Islands roughly 100 residents the Prime Minister calls it a laboratory for the solar future the past is a diesel generator needing boats to deliver fuel from hundreds of miles away a system Whitney Hasty says is a nightmare you know in summer we're almost on the verge

of running out of Fuel in some of these islands because bad weather sometimes prohibits the ships from actually getting to some of these location the Bahamian government spends nearly $400 million a year on imported fuel to keep its power plants running and passes that cost along to its citizens they pay three to four times what we pay on the mainland us right for electricity here right and that isn't price gouging I mean that's that's just Inherent cost everything costs more in the islands the bill to install this new solar micro grid is $3 million Hasty

insists it's money well spent so you have this initial big outlay to build these panels but over time the cost of generating power actually goes down absolutely absolutely by using what God has blessed us with which is the natural sun it's not a perfect solution on ragged Island notably the power from these panels will still feed into the Vulnerable overhead power lines the money's not there yet to bury them one of the first things that I think everyone can agree on is everything has to go underground back in hopetown Matt Winslow says they have the

funds to bury their lines Americans with second homes here add a lot to the economy winds Family Foundation has donated nearly a million dollars to rebuilding efforts they already have a makeshift micr grid powering the fire station and health Clinic and Winslow has hired Engineers to help plan a much bigger one on a nearby Island it's possible that over in great we could put uh you know a solar array 18 acres and that goes uh that power is piped through you know preferably a new undersea cable to the island and that could be a main

source of our power that would be enough to power this island absolutely the Bahama's goal is to produce 30% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 Justin lock and Chris Burgess of the islands energy program believe the country can do even better the price of Renewables have come down to the point where they're now very very competitive with diesel and in most cases um way cheaper than diesel the key game Cher has been battery storage battery storage has decreased in cost over 60% over the last 5 years and what battery storage does is it

enables the sun to shine when the sun is not shining Renewables make more sense here than anywhere else in the world and in the Caribbean micro grids are starting to show their value when earthquakes struck Puerto Rico in 2020 the entire Island's big electric grid was shut down for days but remember those solar micro grids installed at schools they kept providing power the lessons can really apply anywhere California has the same system architecture as here in the Caribbean right fossil fuel long transmission Distribution lines right and you see that pg& had to proactively shut off

power to millions of people in order to prevent fire if there had been these micro grids might it have been that pg& would not have had to cut off power to correct millions of consumers correct here in the Bahamas there are still huge economic obstacles losses from Dorian equal nearly 30% of the country's entire annual GDP we've got this Incredible outlay to rebuild these islands that were devastated by Dorian can you afford to bring on a new form of electrical generation we cannot afford it we recognize from one that we cannot do it alone just

weeks after Dorian hit then prime minister minis spoke at the United Nations he emphasized that most of the Bahamas was not damaged and eager for tourists lifeblood of the economy then he said that First World countries and their pollution are at least partly To blame for the threat of ever stronger hurricanes it is a threat which we cannot survive on our own first world Nations and this what I said at the UN I said first world Nations make the greatest contribution to climate change they are the ones responsible for the changes that we see the

increase in velocity and ferocity of the hurricanes and the different and the changes typhoons that we see today but We're the innocent victim we the ones that are being impacted by what you've created Min and leaders of other Islands Nations have proposed that the US and European countries contribute to an insurance fund think of it as a really rainy day fund to help rebuild from future storms that's what you say and what you said at the UN the first world Nations should do absolutely are they doing it it's an ongoing discussion it's an Ongoing discussion

does this make the change to renewable energy that much more important imperative urgent for you here in the Bahamas it is because even though our contribution to climate change is minimal it's Min it's minuscule to compare with for is RO Nation but we still have our responsibility since this story first aired in 2020 that micro grid we saw being installed on ragged island is now Operating and supplying all all the electricity the island needs they haven't had to ship diesel fuel to run that old Generator in many months which is especially welcome news given that

the price of fuel has skyrocketed the Bahamas has a new government and new prime minister who says he's just as committed to solar power as his predecessor last August president President Biden signed a sweeping climate bill in the law making wind Power a priority specifically offshore wind power the goal is to capture the force of the wind in the Open Seas and convert it into power for 10 million American homes by 2030 we have a long way to go there are only seven offshore wind turbines off the coast of the United States compared to nearly

6,000 in Europe critics say they're expensive to build and maintain unpredictable and ugly we wanted to see for ourselves last October we reported from the largest Offshore wind farm in the world along the northeast coast of England and discovered the power of Grimsby as you fly 200 miles north of London along the coast you can see the town of Grimsby below 55 mil east of her Port morning we are on our way to the horns wind Park fil crew on board you can't miss them elegant and a little Eerie white Giants poking out of the

North Sea like something out of a science fiction Novel wind par with 6 this is the largest crop of offshore wind turbines in the world known as the hornsey wind farm it is hypnotizing more than 300 turbines spread across 335 square miles generating enough electricity to help power more than 2 million homes a day beautiful day yeah beautiful day to understand the power size and upkeep of this evolving technology we geared up on land and traveled 90 minutes on the heaving North Sea with 24-year-old briy Salmon her job is to scale and service the turbines

my job with the help of a little anti nausea gum was to Simply hold down my lunch this is choppy out here yeah it is how you feeling I feel um okay it's more important how do you feel yeah I'm feeling good like I said I like to think I've got my sea legs on so when your last name is salmon negotiating Rough Waters is sort of in your DNA Bri's great-grandfather worked on The grimby dogs her dad owns this 100-year-old smoked fish shop in town briy was bartending when she decided to apply to an

apprentice program to be a Turbine Technician she was one of seven people selected from a pool of 500 should have a look around here then guys The Apprentice program combined classroom instruction you've got a big drillet on the bottom and it's and it's spinning with hands on work could Seat but we soon learned that mother nature is a temperamental teacher the weather here is Ever Changing yeah yeah we're holding on for our dear lives yeah I mean I mean it's the North Sea it's not something we can control so every day is different and it

can change like that so it's just part and parcel of the job um anything to get these things turning this is the environment for win turbines it's it's got to be windy as we approached the turbines we Suddenly felt small you don't get a sense of how large things are until you're right up under this yeah well that's it I mean so at the very top the this cell um all the way to the top of the blades is half the size of the Eiffel Tower which is pretty massive and and because you've got nothing

normal to compare it to like a building you just see these in the distance and then you're here and it's yeah they're pretty bloody huge translation they're nearly 600 ft high with spinning fiberglass blades roughly the length of the world's largest passenger jet each blade weighs almost 30 tons the turbines are partially assembled on Shore then shipped out to sea where each blade is attached with surgical Precision to the top of the turbine every angle has to be perfect to generate maximum power once installed keeping them spinning is critical offshore wind Engineers say one revolution

can power one home in the UK For 24 hours and that's where bridey comes in it's raining it's windy yep can't wait just another day in the office all right in choppy Waters Captain Peter browon has to find The Sweet Spot maintaining Constant Contact between the bow and base traffic seem liance some days the winds are so high and seas so rough the job can't be done done on this day success I'll see you later okay careful Briy harnesses herself to a cable happy yeah leaps to a ladder and Begins the climb rung by rung

eight stories to the top see wind alliance1 radio check on a narrow platform hanging over the North Sea she makes her rounds the lights are working carefully inspecting and servicing the turbine a job not for the faint of heart pop this in here what was that like the first time you made that car oh exhausting exhausting yeah It was cuz you've got all your safety kit on as well so you've probably got about 10 kg of harnesses and and Claws and you got to be clipped in so you've got that friction of climbing I would

imagine it would be kind of scary yeah really scary I remember there was one day it was super windy um so we were up there in the top of the town Tower is moving so you've got the seasickness the motion sickness from the sea and then the top of the tower is moving so all Day you're rocking and it was cold and windy and I remember coming back on Shore I was just rocking I I'm on land now I don't need to rock but it's yeah it's pretty scary bench Sykes says those kinds of extraordinary

efforts are needed in extraordinary times Sykes is the vice president of offshore wind at orad a Danish based Global energy supplier that runs the horn SE Wind Farm you know we have a cost of energy crisis in Europe and and in Britain at the Moment that's driven by the pandemic but also of course by the terrible situation in Ukraine uh and all of that adds up to a real drive to find clean cheap Energy Solutions about six years ago orad decided to sell off its oil and gas business and focus on renewable energies Grimsby a

depressed fishing Town became the unlikely backdrop to Europe's clean energy movement why here why Grimsby it's got a good Port uh and it's geographically really well located Physically in terms of the water depth in terms of the wind resource and of course places to connect to the National Grid so that we can get that power to homes and businesses long before Russia's invasion of Ukraine set off the energy crisis the UK had a strategy to use 100% clean or renewable electricity by 2035 when you talk about clean energy you talk about solar hydropower biofuels what

makes offshore wind unique offshore Wind is the really the only project in most countries where you can build it at the kind of power station scale that we need if I think about the projects we're building here in the UK that's almost 3 GW and that's broadly speaking the output of a nuclear power station so we're talking large scale infrastructure projects most of Europe is too populated to fit very very very large wind farms or solar Farms so that's why we've gone offshore one big criticism is costs They're expensive to construct to transmit into decommission

is that cost passed on to Consumers so that's simply wrong offshore wind power is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation in the UK we privately fund it together with Investment Partners that we bring in privately you fund that yeah there's no public exposure to the costs of building offshore wind and I think the thing that's made the most difference is the fact that we've had political Consensus now for more than a decade and that's given investors confidence to step in and put the big money on the table to get these projects away gas

and nuclear still make up a majority of the power supply flowing into UK homes and businesses but this year 14% of Britain's energy has come from offshore wind only China produces more offshore wind power than the UK here here's how it works wind turns the blades around a shaft inside the Turbine which bends a generator energy then travels down going 300 ft beneath the water surface to cables buried under the seabed connecting to an offshore substation then to a power station on land where that electricity created out at Sea is transferred into homes and businesses

inviting the question what happens if the wind stops blowing using satellites and other technology we can predict extremely accurately how much we're going to generate over the Next days which enables those who operate the grid to make very clear plans about where's demand going where's Supply going I mean if I look at the turbines that we've got out in hornsey they're operating 98 99% of the time this is grimsby's second act through the 1950s to 1970 the town hosted the largest fishing Fleet in the world with 700 trollers a wash in cash and a port

fit for a visit from the queen oh it was absolutely brilliant the The camarad here because you you can say nearly 100% of the population would be associated with the fishing industry in some way Dennis Avery and Bob forby were part of the town's fishing tradition what was it like no it's a tough job it's work from sailing till you get back in the port again working in the winter around Iceland and them places was was pretty severe but um it's a kind of job that I would do again tomorrow in those days you had

two choices you worked on The docks or you went to sea Deca Navigator Avery captain in this hulking steel fishing tler the Ross tiger for eight years if you caught a good trip and you're steaming home back to Grimsby with a fish room full of fish you know it it's a marvelous feeling that Marvel marous feeling ended when Iceland Britain's neighbor to the north began enforcing fishing restrictions in their codr Waters to Grimsby May shrink to a trickle what did you see happen in town When that happened gosh it was a a disaster to be

quite honest because everybody was involved some way in fishing like taxi drivers the pubs the dress shops and places like that uh they all suffered you know once the fishing sort of went it all sort of died to death wind power has breathed new life into Grimsby offshore Energy company orad says it's created 600 jobs here and invested over $18 billion in local wind farms but there are plenty of people who Worry the environmental impact of the wind turbines hasn't been sufficiently studied and others say the industry has not created the number of jobs they've

promised but the concern of these retired fishermen is more practical we're not seeing benefits your electricity bill hasn't gone down no no it's gone up if anything when they said about them how oh we're going to get cheap electricity and it's going to be you know green and everything but I Can't see any benefits to be quite honest but has your electricity bill gone down try double it's doubled there are people who said yeah we've got all these turbines but our electricity bill hasn't gone down a cent yeah um I mean it is a real

challenge that it's going to take time because we need to build more offshore wind so you think if there's more offshore wind prices could go down yeah absolutely fearing the war in Ukraine could lead to blackouts last winter the UK government announced more drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea they will also speed up the time it takes for new offshore wind projects to get online Ben syes told us that over the next eight years ored plans to invest another $ 17 billion in wind farms and add more than 300 jobs in Grimsby

you know the fishing industry was fantastic for Grimsby that that era has passed What we want to do is to be part of creating the next chapter of of grimsby's life and of the country's Life as we build out a chapter briy salmon is very much a part of so that's gone from Grimsby being the fishing town to the PowerHouse of the north which is an amazing transition proud of it so proud of it and to be a part of it it's amazing a Town's future and Fortune once again tied to the Sea representatives from

nearly every Nation have met this week at an annual climate Summit searching for agreements on how to curb the rise of global temperatures the Summit is being held in the oil Rich United Arab Emirates and that has dismayed activists who believe that the only way to really address the climate crisis is to walk away from fossil fuels for the moment at least the world and the United States need both fossil fuels and renewable energy and the best proof of that may be found in The state of Wyoming it is the country's leading coal producing state

and very conservative politically yet its Republican Governor Mark Gordon is emerging as a leading voice promoting climate friendly energy projects and action to address the climate crisis essentially Mark Gordon is trying to prove that it is possible to be both red and green we needed to be aggressive and we needed to really address this issue so You tell the people of Wyoming that climate change is real I do and that it's urgent it's an urgent crisis I have said that and I've gotten I've gotten some push back from that as well I bet you have

in September we met Mark Gordon who's in the middle of his second term as Wyoming's Governor how are you Ellington on the cattle ranch where he grew up this is my dad's old saddle his family still owns this Ranch and he and His wife also operate another about 40 Mi away how did growing up here affect your world view I think growing up here gave me an enormous appreciation for the world around us and and the ecological processes and the weather you just are uh exposed to it on a regular on a regular basis Mark

Gordon is also a mountain climber who has seen glaciers receding due to a warming climate he says that helped convince him to set a goal of making Wyoming not just carbon Neutral when it comes to CO2 emissions but eventually carbon negative you first made this pledge of net negative CO2 emissions at a 2021 State of the State speech how did that go over I think some people probably resented it I think generally it's been well-respected uh it was to to some degree a bold move and and one that was intended to make a difference in

that discussion about energy in the future after Gordon repeated his net negative emissions goal At an appearance at Harvard in October Wyoming's Republican party passed a vote of no confidence in him but he says heat from the right won't deter him from pursuing what he calls an all of the above energy policy whatever you're going to do in energy probably you're going to have something to do in Wyoming we have tremendous wind resources we have the largest reserves of uranium important for nuclear energy largest coal producer We're number eight in oil number nine in natural

gas 83% of our energy is exported that will soon include nuclear power from a Next Generation reactor to be built in Wyoming with a $500 million investment from Bill Gates huge wind farms already dot Wyoming's landscape with the biggest one yet on the way because the wind blows basically 247 365 days a year Bill Miller is president pres of the power company of Wyoming which is beginning to build what will be The largest wind farm in the continental United States in the middle of a geographic break in the Continental Divide all the winds which blow

from west to east pretty much are funneled through this part of the country Miller drove to the top of a place called Choke Cherry knob to give us a taste of the wind so when this is up and running how many turbin will be out here current plan calls for 600 turbin and how much energy Will that generate so it'll generate around 12 million megawatt hours of power year and that's enough to power how many homes million million two Wyoming doesn't have anything close to that many homes it has the smallest population of any of

the 50 states So the plan is to build a new 800m long transmission line to send that power to California which needs and wants it what's this going to cost the wind farm will be something north of $5 billion Transmission line will be something north of $3 billion capital investment that's a big investment yes the project is bankrolled by billionaire Philip anshutz who owns the company Bill Miller runs and who first made his fortune in oil Society has spoken that's what this country is going to go to is renewable energy more importantly it's a project

that contributes to the zero carbon initiatives that we strongly believe in it's going to happen and this is the Best place for it to happen at this past Summer's windy groundbreaking ceremony for the transmission line Bill Miller was joined not just by Republican Governor Mark Gordon we have a great future ahead of us but also by two members of President Biden's cabinet the way we've tried to navigate this is to find something for everyone and I think that's possible yeah I think it is honestly I think if people are going to Embrace how we get

to a carbon neutral carbon negative future it has to be by saying we're all going to be a little bit better by embracing Innovation if a single single picture can capture Wyoming's energy past present and future this may be it a fully loaded coal train passing in front of a huge Wind Farm remember this state still produces more coal than any other by far the likelihood that we will truly as a world move away from fossil fuels Is very low Holly kutka runs the school of energy resources at the University of Wyoming before shifting to

Academia she worked worked for Peabody the largest coal company in America 82% of our Global energy consumption is fossil fuels 82% 82% it has not changed because of that Stark fact kutka and her colleagues are focused on taking the CO2 out of fossil fuels like coal before it reaches the atmosphere with a technology called carbon capture and storage there Are carbon capture and storage projects in America America working right now there's just not enough the capture side we're there today we can do it now right now yes the technology is there but is it economically

feasible it will always be cheaper to do nothing than to add carbon capture and storage if you want to reduce emissions this is part of the solution we have to decide is it worth the cost at the huge dryfork Coal Fired Power plant near Gillette the University of Wyoming is operating what it calls the integrated test center some of the flu gas that would otherwise go up the Smoke Stack is siphoned off into Labs like this one where the Japanese company Kawasaki is testing methods for making carbon capture more economical Wells 10,000 ft deep have

also been drilled to show that captured CO2 can be stored underground forever how big a deal would it be To find an affordable way to capture carbon at the point of admission say in power plants around the world it would be a game Cher for certain you know there are a lot of naysayers who say that this is a pipe dream mhm it'll never happen what do you say to them how do you convince them I say we're trying it then I know people will say well you're just trying to extend the life of the

coal mines I am but I'm also trying to do That in a way that is going to do more for climate Solutions than simply standing up a whole bunch of wind fors or sending up a whole bunch of solarist with his all of the above approach Mark Gordon is trying to put every kind of energy project on a fast track including Bill Miller's huge Wind Farm how long did you think it was going to take when you started when I originally started I thought we could probably get this entitled and under Construction within 5 years

and it's been 17 17 why so long primarily the permitting process the bureaucracy of the federal government you told me coming up here that the the process was kind of like a nightmare it was difficult maybe nightmar is a little bit too strong but uh it was very difficult process so how important is it to reduce Regulatory and permitting barriers I think it's massive permitting reform I Think is one of our biggest challenges at a federal level it is something that's being embraced uh by both sides both the Biden Administration and Congressional Republicans have endorsed

the idea of streamlining permitting for energy projects actually doing it is another story in Wyoming Governor Gordon has done what he can one thing I can share is that it's a state that's very welcoming to innovators in the energy space Cly caves is co-founder of a company called cruso Energy Systems about 5 years ago it decided to tackle the problem of flaring when gas produced at oil wells is simply burned into the atmosphere if you could capture it all it would power about 2/3 of Europe's electricity it's a very large amount of waste and we're

just burning it off we're burning it off because there's no pipeline there cavis and his colleagues came up with the unconventional idea of Putting a small electricity generating power plant right where that gas was being flared and wasted what we do is we tap into that gas line we bring the gas over to a power generation system and then that generates electricity and we take that electricity directly into our on-site data center to power hundreds or thousands of computers and then we Network the computers to the outside world with fiber or satellite internet to get

it off site so you take a Data Center and just basically put it on top of the well head exactly it's a it's a modern data center in every way when you're standing inside of it and then you step out the door and you're in an oil field cruso energy first used those electricity gobbling data centers to mine Bitcoin now most of that computer power is being used by artificial intelligence companies the first place to let them try this in 2018 was Wyoming that's not necessarily an idea That everyone's going to embrace automatically right off

the bat before it's been done before Wyoming was they invited us to come do it for the first time here we did it at a small scale we proved that it could work and that helped us attract the funding and the other projects that have helped us scale to where we are today how many of these um Centers do you have up and running currently we're approaching 200 by the end of the year we'll have about 200 of Our modular data centers deployed throughout the United States and now internationally so how do you assess your

environmental impact So today we're operating at a scale of more than 20 million cubic feet of gas per day that would have otherwise been flared and wasted we're preventing that flaring it's on the order of several hundred thousand cars per year being taken off the road in terms of the avoided emissions Impact are you trying to send out a message to the rest of the country even the rest of the world if you have a renewable or a climate friendly idea bring it here bring it to Wyoming love to we we want to be part

of this solution there are some really remarkable things that if we stop talking about what we shouldn't do and start talking about what we can do and how we can Embrace that future that's what we're dedicated to here in Wyoming there was a time when futurists were predicting that the Advent of 3D printing was going to change our lives that each of our houses would have a 3D printer to make whatever items we need what virtually no one predicted though was that there might soon be 3D printers that could construct almost the entire house but

that's just what a six-year-old Austin Texas company called icon is doing 3D printing buildings and if you believe icon's mission-driven Young founder 3D printing could revolutionize how we build help create affordable housing even allow us to wait for it colonize the moon sound out of this world take a look what you're watching is the building actually the printing of a four-bedroom home on this construction site there's no hammering or sawing just a nozzle squirting out concrete kind of like an oversized soft serve ice cream dispenser Laying down the walls of a house one layer at

a time it's the brainchild of a 41-year-old Texan who's rarely without his cowboy hat Jason Ballard 3D printing a house yes ma'am people are going to hear that and say no we're sitting inside one right now this house was printed yes ma'am wow there you are look at this welcome and so was this one does a concrete home printed by a robot have to look cold and Industrial maybe not I like the curved wall Ballard gave us a peek at the first completed model home and what will soon be the world's first large community of

3D printed houses a hundred of them part of a huge new development north of Austin they'll start in the high $400,000 range how exactly does 3D printing a house Work Well it starts with this 1 and 1/2 ton sack of dry concrete powder which gets mixed with water sand and additives And is then pumped to the robotic printer now you are looking at how we control the bead size Connor Jenkins icon's manager of construction here explain that the printer completes one layer called a bead every 30 minutes by which time it's hardened enough to be

ready for the next beat steel is added every 10th layer for strength the amount of change you're making is Tiny it takes about 2 weeks to print the full 160 beat house Jenkins gave me the controls an IPad so look Leslie that's a little skinny will you press the plus one real quick aren you wor you just increased the bead size incrementally I'd be worried if I were you but turns out the path is entirely preprogrammed I couldn't mess it up if I tried don't tell the I think that's the most gorgeous beat I've ever

seen I think this will be the highest selling house for now as Jason Ballard showed us icon is only 3D printing walls with Cutouts for plumbing and electricity roofs windows and insulation are added the old-fashioned way by construction workers he calls it a paradigm shift it really is like a r Brothers moment for airplanes in how we construct our housing but why do we need a big shift like that cuz right now it is too expensive it falls over in a hurricane it burns up in a fire it gets eaten by termites the way you

try to make it affordable is you trim quality on Materials you trim quality on labor the result is these cookie cutter developments and like yeah this is not the world like we are not succeeding it's something we have to get right on top of that it's an ecological disaster and I would certainly say it is existentially urgent that we shelter ourselves without ruining the planet we have to live on fire resistant flood resistant wind Ballard showed us a sample of a 3D Printed wall beside a conventionally built one you say it's faster more efficient yes

why do you say that what you've got let's count the materials siding one moisture barrier two sheathing three uh stud four drywall five and then float tape and texture you can count that either as one or three but you've got at Le at least half a dozen novel steps that have to take place to deliver an American stick frame wall system by comparison we need a Single material supply chain delivered by a robot let's talk about waste yes ma'am over here at the end of constructing a home with these materials there are truckloads and truckloads

of waste left over these studs are going to have off cuts that go into a waste pile same with siding same with drial all whereas with 3D printing he says you only print what you need so in short like if an alien came down to planet Earth and saw these two ways of building And said from first principles which is better the alien would go Stronger Faster termite resistant fire resistant like by a mile this is the best way to build though old school construction workers May disagree if Ballard sounds a little like a revved

up salesman or a preacher there's a reason for that he grew up in East Texas a studious outdoorsy spiritual kid first in his family to graduate from college you were thinking about becoming an Episcopal Priest yeah I was almost an Episcopal priest but along the way I started just like getting this like itch about housing not being right so I studied conservation biology I got involved in Sustainable Building and I worked at the local homeless shelter and so now I'm thinking about homelessness and I'm working in Sustainable Building along the way my hometown gets destroyed

by a hurricane and I have to go help my family pull drywall out of their house I Feel like uh life is just putting housing in front of me right as I've been like approved to go to Seminary and so I go to my Bishop the bishop of Texas Andy Doyle he's still the bishop of Texas and uh I said what do I do and at the end he said Jason I want you to pursue this housing thing like this is your priesthood this is your vocation and if it doesn't work out the church has

been here for a long time we'll still be here but that must have turned The switch for you it did it made it more than a hobby or a business right that it sort of became a mission he began began pursuing that mission with Evan Lumis a buddy from Texas A&M who had gone into Finance as we looked at it like nobody had Incorporated kind of the Holy Trinity of innovation to housing which was robotics Advanced Materials and software so in a borrowed Warehouse on nights and weekends and having read everything they could find about

the Mechanics of 3D printing they tried to design a 3D printer that could make a building how big was it it was 10 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet so it would have it would have printed if we had ever gotten into work which we did not uh it would have printed like a 100t like demonstration building they didn't get it to work but enter Alex Laro a recent Bor Engineering Graduate who was tinkering with a similar idea did you ever actually build anything yeah I did What was it a printed shed the shed

doesn't sound too cool but it was a big milestone it's a real structure the three co-founded icon in 2017 and soon got funding to print a small house to unveil at Austin South by Southwest Festival the following spring they built a new larger printer that worked and we got really excited okay Jason where are we right now we are printing the world's uh first permitted 3D printed house but the Kinks hadn't quite been worked out So at one point we ran the printer into the print to explain that supposed to go up and it went

down and then drove into the house like pushed a bunch of layers off funny now but not so much at the time some Engineers folks who were like helping us sat us down and said guys it's been a great effort but you're not going to get there so like why don't you guys get some rest and we were basically like get out of here like true anyone who wants to to finish this home may Stay everyone else needs to leave and the three of you all agreed on that yeah we knew that we were to

something and like we this was like our shot and we weren't going to miss it Alex they worked around the clock and made the festival deadline by just hours hey valard any words for the victory lot never never never never give up I stand by those words yeah sure never give up he showed us the 350 square ft finished house it's a small little house But it's kind of elegant well I'll be that's not so bad I mean I think that's kind of how people felt about it like better than they expected and it was

easy to believe well they'll get better that small little house won icon a lot of attention an innovation award investors meetings with the military and with another Austin innovator Alan Graham who created a village called Community First that provides small homes to several Hundred of the formally homeless our goal was really the most despised Outcast lost and forgotten of our community wow average time on the streets is 9 years average age of death is 59 it's an absolute Miracle out there and so when uh we were ready to start building homes uh one of the

first organizations we reached out to was Alan Graham so icon 3D printed a welcome center and then six small houses for Village residents that's 73-year-old Tim Shay who battled heroin addiction for decades in 2020 became the first person in this country to live in a 3D printed home before I saw these houses in my mind I thought it must be cold you're shaking cuz you don't think that no just the opposite you feel embraced or you know enveloped people that live that are in the economic Strat of the men and women that we serve are

going to be the last people on the planet that are going to benefit out of new technology and he Wanted to make sure that they were the first the first person in North America to live in a 3D printed house was homeless yeah I isn't that s the years since have seen tremendous growth for Icon a new Factory to build more printers and improve the quality of its concrete and a facility called printland to experiment with new designs icon has printed small homes in rural Mexico vehicle hide structures for the Marine Corps huge Barracks for

the Army and Air Force and a deluxe showcase home featuring wavy walls and curves that would be prohibitively expensive if built traditionally but not when programmed into a 3D printer so in your minds is your C customer a homeless person or is your customer me there's a trick here because what our heart wants to do is to serve the very poor and it's often been like confusing for people to understand it's like I thought you guys were helping homelessness why are you Building that fancy house yeah I would resign if I was only allowed to

build luxury homes and we would go bankrupt right now if all we built was 3% margin homes for homeless people but once this technology arrives in its full force um I think it fundamentally transforms the way we build and not just on the earth 3D printing on the moon when we come back it has been a staple of Science Fiction forever humans living and Working on the moon but for NASA that dream is almost within reach there their new Artemis program plans to return American astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than

50 years this time not just to visit but eventually to stay and even use the moon as a base for exploring Mars and Beyond but staying on the moon requires infrastructure landing pads roads housing and you can't exactly bring 2x4s and sheetrock on a spacecraft that's with 3D printing comes In NASA is partnering with Jason Ballard's company icon to Pioneer 3D printing on the moon 3 2 1 and liftoff of emis 1 last fall NASA launched the first in a series of Artemis missions the next with crew on board is scheduled for next fall and

by the end of the decade an icon printer is supposed to fly to the moon to test print part of a landing pad Jason Ballard who once applied to be an astronaut but was rejected can't wait if the schedule holds or even approximately holds the first object ever built on another world will be built with icon Hardware he wants icon to be the first company to make something on another world so do we at Marshall space flight center in Huntsville Alabama NASA scientists Jennifer Edmonson and corki Clinton run a program called impact spelled mm P

Moon toor's planetary Autonomous Construction Technologies whoa you people at Nasa you come up with these very very long names that's why we call it impact the key word there is autonomous we want to be able to make structures that we need without having to be tended by astronauts if you're going to have a truly sustainable presence on the lunar surface you have to be as Earth independent as possible NASA was interested in 3D printing having looked At an early version almost 20 years ago so when they heard about the progress icon had made with their

first houses in Austin Corky Clinton traveled there to take a look being an engineer I spent a lot of my time going around and looking at the size of the beads and how they went around the corners and I'll tell you I was really impressed with what they had accomplished impressed enough that NASA gave icon development money in 2020 and Then last fall a $57 million contract welcome to space lab Lesley this is where we figure out how to build on other worlds Ballard and Evan Jensen who leads the project explain the fundamental challenge to

bring an object roughly this size from Earth to the Moon surface would be $1 million and think of how many sort of brick-sized things we would need to do Launchpad Landing Pad roads habitats so we have to learn to live off the land you have to learn to Build it there and use the materials from there that's right but that's no easy feet it means using what's called lunar regolith which covers the moon's surface rather than concrete and water as a building material regolith is made up of rock that has been pummeled over billions of

years from asteroids comets and things is it like sand it's actually finer than sand icon has a big tub full of simulated Moon regolith and they have invented and built a robotic system to 3D print with it you're going to build all those roads and buildings out of this that's correct to the robots will this is actually the mission that we are scheduled to fly as he pointed out in this rendering our robotic arm with our laser system they've created a whole new way to 3D print with lasers instead of a nozzle squirting out soft

conrete a high-intensity laser beam will melt the powdery regolith to transform it into a hard strong Building Material they're Running experiments Now using the laser to create a small sample once that red light is on we're hot oh lots of power here we go here we go we watched on monitors as the arm got into position there's the laser oh that white thing's the laser so it's melting right now it's going up to say 1500° C it's going to complete its second pass you can see it emerging there see the dark object on the screen

that's the object we just made with the laser they can add more Regolith and Laser again and again to build in layers to go as high as they want which will be done remotely from Earth it takes hours to cool so they showed me a sample they' made days earlier this is pretty darn hard that's our Landing Pad you're holding it yeah I'm holding The Landing Pad that's exactly right it's pretty cool that's a scientific term icon sends them to NASA where they're blasted with this special plasma torch The torch will be about 4,000 de

to see if they can take the heat a landing pad would have to with stand see there oh there it is the torch is so bright you have to watch on a monitor that was it a few minutes later out it came oh it's just a little bit warm it looks good to me I don't see any loss of material I don't see any cratering it survived the test pass the test with flying colors the next test will be Operating the entire robotic arm and Laser we'll put in a large scale simulant Bed inside NASA's

giant thermal vacuum chamber which mimics the moon's extreme cold heat and vacuum conditions this is sort of like a Ballard's idea is to eventually send mobile 3D printers to the moon so this moves the printer around with a longer robotic arm sticking out of the top to print whatever is needed and then they would build the road and then they would build Those habitats right it's and it wouldn't stop there if we can do it on the moon we can do it on Mars the Moon is actually harder it's harder Mars is uh almost in

every way easier except for it's so far away easier they agree because for one thing Mars doesn't have extreme temperature swings still in my mind it's science fiction but in your minds it's absolutely in the palm of your hand it's going to happen we can see the steps in the technology to get Us there now that's thrilling it's exciting quality can't go backwards in Block four icon says trying to 3D print on the moon and Mars is helping with their work here on Earth they are formulating new mixes to reduce the carbon footprint of their

concrete we think we'll be there by end of year and they're trying out more radical architecture quite complex shapes and geometri almost looks like ripples on the surface of water patterned walls It's very subtle oh look at this yeah it almost looks impossible and next year as in these renderings they'll be printing round hotel rooms in Marfa Texas and futuristic looking designer homes you see a bedroom on that end with a shower and a bedroom here and here's a some renderings of the Interior wow right it gets you going doesn't it we're living at a

time right now where a lot of CEOs have been caught over promising hyping um thinking of feros you're absolutely Right and it it's it's it's a tougher thing than you know because part of the job is to get your investors get your team and in our case the world um to believe the things you are saying except the things you are saying don't exist yet uh you need you need to get them to believe so it's hard to know like even in this interview I actually haven't yet told you all the things I believe we're

going to do because I'm like measuring myself give us one Example something wild I mean in the future I think most buildings will be designed by AI most projects will be run by software and almost everything will be built by robots and I don't think that's that far away I at my age find that very depressing but I'm sure young people that world housing will be more abundant more affordable more beautiful it will make this version of housing look depressing by example you know that Expression if it seems too good to be true it is

or I do know that expression uh but cars and airplanes and moonlanding seem too good to be true for a moment as well and so like maybe the only proof I can give you is like I'm betting my life on it like I have this one precious Life to Live and I'm using it to do this and if I could think of a better way I'd be doing that in instead or I'd go fishing like this is so hard And you like fishing and I love fishing we don't often think about how the sense of

touch makes our lives possible we grip a paper coffee cup with perfect Force to hold it but not crush it our feet always find the floor but for people with artificial limbs or those with spinal injuries the loss of touch can put the world beyond their grasp 17 years ago the defense department launched a $100 million project to revolutionize prosthetic Limbs the robotics you're about to see is amazing but as we first reported earlier this year even more remarkable is how the feeling of feeling is returning to people like Brandon prestwood for me me it

was it's a battle if I wanted to live or die you weren't sure you wanted to live no I didn't know if I wanted to or not Brandon prestwoods battle began with the loss of his left hand in 2012 he was on a maintenance crew reassembling an Industrial conveyor belt when someone turned it on my arm was dragged in pretty much up to the shoulder it crushed my bones in my arm and uh fed my arm through a gap about one inch how did they save your life The Other M guys jumped in they started

basically taking the machine back apart uh once we got it back apart I could look in and see what was there and uh one of the gentleman was a Vietnam veteran and the Vietnam veteran knew what to do Yeah the Vietnam veteran knew tourniquets but Presswood lost his hand and couldn't return to his job go eat with this yeah that sounds good after four years with a hook he told his wife Amy he wanted to volunteer for experimental research involving surgery at the VA I was not 100% on board to start with but I knew

he had his mind set that he was he had to do this and I I couldn't hold him back 6 years later thanks to defense department and VA Projects Presswood controls this hand with nothing but his thoughts everything still feel good probably when I get her turned around here electrodes implanted in muscles in his arm pick up his brain's electrical signals for movement a computer translates those signals to the hand how about the middle finger now sensors in the plastic fingers are connected to nerves in his arm to return a basic sense of touch close

your eyes Tell me when you're feeling each of these which he can demonstrate with his eyes closed pinky index that's not bad middle still requires a little bit but it's not bad biomed engineer Dustin Tyler leads This research at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland VA touch is about connection it's connection to the world it's about connection to others it's connection to yourself right I mean we never Experienced not having touch it's the largest sensory organ on our body all right so go ahead Tyler first attempted an artificial Connection in 2012 he switched it

on in a volunteer and wondered what would happen so I was concerned would it his whole hand would it be painful would it not feel anything we had no idea uh so one of those big moments in my career was he came in we first turned on the stimulus and he kind of stopped for a second and he goes That's my thumb that's the tip of my thumb this happened right away it didn't require any training of the brain no that was the beauty of it my thumb Brandon Presswood remembers the instant it happened to

him that's my fingers I'm feeling my fingers that I don't have anymore I'm feeling them a definite feeling he told us but different it doesn't feel exactly like my right hand it's a tingling sensation it's not painful it's kind of like if your if Your hand's been to sleep right at the end right before it wakes up that very for me it's Pleasant it's a pleasant tingling let's see if you can do on a cherry here a tingling that's light with a light touch but grows stronger the harder he presses eyes closed he can pinch

a cherry firmly enough to pull it from its stem but not crush it you can feel this is light I had to use my lightest touch so if I hold this right here with an empty Eggshell I can feel that I feel it in I feel it here and here it's a feeling more than a decade in the making at the beginning of this research how did you even imag imagine that this would be possible I didn't imagine I thought I imagined it was not going to be possible San Ben mayor at the University of

Chicago is among the world's leading experts on the Neuroscience of touch in 2008 he joined the defense Department's project to revolutionize Prosthetics but He didn't think the Pentagon knew what it was up against there are a 100 billion neurons in the brain interconnected with a 100 Brillion synapses I mean the the the human brain is like the most complex system in the known universe too complex he believed to Target electrical stimulation to exactly the right neurons and when we electrically stimulate we activate hundreds thousands of them at the same time in ways that would never

happen Naturally it just seemed like that very impoverished interface with this nervous system would never do any able to do anything useful and turns out I was wrong he was proved wrong by his own research how you doing Scott nice to meet you nice to meet you Scott with volunteers including Scott Embry and you can feel that I feel it on my fingertips whose movement and sense of touch are limited by a spinal injury from a car accident computer ports in EMB skull are Wired to the motor and sensory parts of his brain electrodes pick

up the brain's electrical signals that were intended for the muscles a computer translates those signals to the robot arm we first saw this brain machine interface 10 years ago at the University of Pittsburgh but back then there was no sensation index finger in collaboration with pit neuroscientist slan bmea showed that signals for touch could be turn to the brain how can you possibly know what Part of the brain is the tip of the index finger we took Scott and we put him in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner and then we had him imagine moving

his thumb imagine moving his index imagine moving his his digits as we monitored his brain activity and lo and behold the sensory and motor parts of the brain that are involved in the hand lit up middle Ring index there are challenges eventually the brain builds Scar Tissue at the implants limiting the motor electrodes but one patient's implants have lasted 8 years in counting Scott EMB have been working more than 2 years you have been a subject of this work for years now and I wonder why I wanted to have someone else have the opportunity to

become independent again the most meaningful work of your life Yes sir 100% the greatest Independence might be no prosthetic at all and we saw this astounding possibility with a Pioneer Austin Bean his brain impulses are rooted not to a robot but to implants in his own arm that fire his muscles what function did you have in this hand before the implants oh absolutely n nothing you couldn't move it at all now so only thing I can do really is shrug my shoulders and kind of shift Them unfortunately that was all that came back after my

accident his accident was on a vacation celebrating his college graduation diving into a submerged Sandbar left him quadriplegic now motor and sensory impulses flow through the ports in Bean's skull and a computer bypassing his damaged spine relax clothes the research is led by bolu AO a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University our goal is to restore Complete functionality of the upper arm including dextrous hand function and the ability to reach out so that Austin and others who have suffered you know severe spinal cord injury can regain some level of functional Independence bring my arm

forward the Cradle under his arm only supports the weight all of the motion is his own it takes effort he has to concentrate little bit quicker open hand relax hand Clos hand relax hand open hand relax hand and the Computer needs frequent adjustment how'd that feel good good but his parents Shelly and Brad showed us where this could lead carrot or would you like to have a nice granola bar I'll take the granola bar I figured Bean retained limited feeling after his injury which makes him ideal for evaluating the artificial sens touch point a finger

so if I can extend first his motor skills let me open my hand for you Continue to grow squeeze around it you'll feel me really start to dig in right there you got a grip yeah it really is let go yeah and I'll bring the arm back up congratulations yeah thank you thank you so muching amazing advances are coming quickly Danny wner lost his foot in Vietnam it's on okay but but 47 years later he was reconnected to touch in an artificial foot can you feel that on your toes yep which helps him balance Climb

stairs and walk on uneven ground Brandon prestwoods next device will replace some wiring with Bluetooth connections especially the Thumb Thumbs spot on the cost of his experimental rig and surgery is estimated at roughly $200,000 but an eventual commercial system May cost significantly less while delivering moments that are Priceless what did that mean to you to feel Amy's hand in yours the world I was a whole person Again I didn't have to worry about those dark thoughts creeping back in it's just giving me back my husband hband who means the world to me um he's hisself

again himself because the feeling of feeling is so much of what makes us human maybe that's why when we see a tender moment it is said to be touching I love you with a new strain of covid On The Rise and flu season just getting started We thought now would be a good time to consider what the pandemic has taught us about preventing the spread of potentially deadly respiratory infections it turns out viruses like the one that causes covid-19 can travel through the air much farther than 6 ft so Public Health advice focusing on social

distancing handwashing and masking wasn't enough air quality scientists say from the start of the pandemic it also should have focused on Improving the air we all breathe indoors now some companies are doing just that for the health of their workers and the health of their bottom line the original sin of the pandemic was the failure to recognize Airborne transmission Professor Joe Allen of Harvard's th Chan School of Public Health believes the rapid spread of covid in early 2020 was preventable think about the public health gains we've made over the past 100 years We've made improvements

to water quality outdoor air pollution our food safety we've made improvements to sanitation absolute basics of Public Health where has indoor air been in that conversation it's totally forgotten about and the pandemic showed what a glaring mistake that was what do you think was lost because of that lag in understanding of how this was spread tens of thousands of lives in the US many more more globally not an Exaggeration it's also no exaggeration to say those early days of covid were Unforgettable in the US by March 2020 the virus began taking its toll in places

like the Life Care Center Nursing Home in Kirkland Washington 60 Mi away in Mount Vernon Washington the scet valley Corral held one of its weekly rehearsals in a church half the members stayed away but the other half showed up among them were board members Debbie Amos Mark and Ruth Backland and koise bettinger so we just thought hand sanitizer wash your hands a lot you know don't hug each other cuz that's touch none of it was good enough within a few days Corral members began to get sick in all Co hit 53 of the 61 people

there that night two of them both in their 80s died a week we were going th this has got to be spread some other way it because we were good we were good So Co was percolating and you thought you were doing everything you were Supposed to do yes right scatchet County Health officials said the rehearsal could be considered a super spreading event one of the earliest in the country and concluded that choir members had an intense and prolonged exposure to surfaces droplets and possibly even microscopic Airborne particles called aerosols containing the virus that caught

the attention of Lindsay Maher of a Virginia Tech University Professor specializing in aerosol science and Several of her fellow researchers even though the medical community was focused on droplets surfaces and handwashing these researchers strongly believed covid was mostly an airborne disease but needed more proof so they launched their own analysis I thought wow this is even worse than I thought this has to be airborne there's really no other explanation for it some people are going to say oh they all touched the same door knob but after the first few people Touch that doorknob there there's

no more virus left that's what happens with our exhaled breath now Professor Maher used a portable fogger to help explain how so many choir members could have gotten sick when they're singing they are releasing virus particles into the air constantly probably like this and those are going to drift around in the room notice they're not just falling to the ground and now as we continue to sing there's more and more Of them in the room and you can see as they're drifting around they're reaching these other people nearby and they were there for 2 and

1 half hours and you can imagine that after that amount of time the other people would have breathed in enough of them to get sick themselves especially if at night the HVAC system was turned off as far as we know it wasn't running and so there were very there was very poor ventilation in that room when this was all happening an HVAC Unit short for heating ventilation and air conditioning is the heart and lungs of any building the researcher suspected the thermostat most likely shut off the HVAC unit because the Corral members were generating enough

heat on their own and right now there's no ventilation very very low okay and actually it's similar to what was in the church where the the the group was rehearsing then Professor Mah turned up the circulation to show us how better air flow could Have helped remove aerosols and slow the spread of virus instead of just drifting all over the room oh you can actually see it right going up I sure can that is dramatic to see that the analysis led to one of the most significant papers on the importance of ventilation published during the

pandemic then last year a study in Italy went further it found that by using a school's fans and air ducts to mechanically exchange indoor air with outdoor air five times an hour The risk of covid-19 infections decreased by at least 80% but in the US it took until this past May for the CDC to recommend an air exchange rate at all if you look at the way we design and operate buildings and I mean offices schools local coffee shop we haven't designed for health we have bare minimum standards in schools the minimum air change by

Design is about three air changes per hour and remember we want at least four to six if we'd had These indoor air quality targets before the pandemic how do you think the pandemic would have unfolded differently we still would have had spread this isn't an end the pandemic thing we would have had a lot less of it and we've had a lot less of these super spreading events think about the early days of the pandemic with flatten the curve stay home why wasn't improve indor air quality part of flatten the curve we had tools to

protect ourselves masking great Tool it's a filter but we ignored the building side of this so Ain buildings are Allen's business as the founder of Harvard's healthy buildings program he diagnoses problems in air quality systems and comes up with solutions for clients that include cbs's parent company Paramount and commercial real estate companies like Beacon Capital partners with buildings like this one in downtown Boston and he advised Amazon before These new 22-story towers opened last May in Arlington Virginia where gave us a tour what does a state-of-the-art building look like in terms of air well you

see a lot of the elements in this building you have a dedicated outdoor air system that's delivering air above the minimum requirements then it's going through two Merv 13 filter Banks you have highly filtered air MV stands for minimum efficiency reporting value a rating of 13 means it catches up to 90% Of Airborne particles depending on their size as the first line of defense not just just against covid but other Airborne respiratory viruses like flu and RSV this is the part of the building nobody ever sees but this determines whether or not you're healthy or

sick in the building really what happens in this space you can just see the filters on the right here at Amazon's new offices the top floor is a maze of Motors pipes and air ducts this is the air intake Part of a $2.5 million haax system that begins with massive rooftop Vents and dampers right here this is the whole air handling system this is where the air comes into the building it's filtered it's cooled and then delivered this determines how much air actually reaches the office space where people are working and how clean that air

is downstairs each floor has a sensor that tells building Engineers about the quality of the indoor air such as levels Of carbon dioxide known as CO2 we breathe out the carbon dioxide that's right the less carbon dioxide the better the ventilation really straightforward high carbon dioxide means you're not getting enough outdoor air from that system we just looked at if it's low you're in good shape then we also measure particles that tells us things about like outdoor air pollution the entire system can be monitored and controlled from the basement remember we Talked about carbon dioxide

as an indicator for ventilation well I can see in this building all of these are Under 800 parts per million so that's good that's great and really important if a lot of people went into a space the CO2 level would rise this system would recognize it the dampers would open up and bring in a lot more outdoor air Katie Hughes Amazon's director of health and safety pointed to the waves of wildfire smoke that have swept down from Canada as the ultimate test of the indoor air quality system not too long ago Washington and Virginia were

sort of smothered by this smoke coming down from Canada what happened in this building you would expect the air quality within the facility to not be great our buildings were performing very well again Hughes says Amazon has been updating many of its HVAC systems including in its warehouses a recent survey of facility managers in the US And Canada found that since March 2020 roughly two-thirds of respondents have upgraded their myrr filters and increase their air exchange rates in New York City JP Morgan Chas says its new headquarters will have state-of-the-art air quality controls and this

new skyscraper called one Vanderbuilt already runs a modern back system Co shifted everybody's mindset in terms of air quality in terms of communicable or infectious diseases are you finding that Amazon is making a business decision partially by saying look it's okay for you to come back to work because we're telling you that the air inside this building is safe I think it's one of many reasons why we expect or would like people back in the office that is a a good thing to have it's probably one of many things a well operating HVAC system is

not only good for the health of employees it can be good for the health of companies too especially with people Working remotely leaving many commercial building owners looking for tenants there's empty office space in New York City and elsewhere how do you think this new thinking might affect that in terms of people even wanting to come to work the dynamic has changed it's a total buyers or tenants Market all outs equal which building are you going to go to you have your choice right now this building that put in healthy building controls or this building

that's Designed the way we've always designed buildings and is prone to being a sick building so it actually can help the bottom line in addition to of course improving Health yeah what about retrofitting a building that's old I think it's a misconception that old buildings can't be healthy buildings some of these fixes don't take much improving the level of fil ation that's easy it's cheap protects against covid-19 influenza also protects against Wildfire smoke and outdoor air pollution protects against allergens simple absolute basic things that can be done the scet valley Corral rehearsals are now in

a different church with the new HVAC system doors stay open to bring in fresh air regardless of the season and there are even portable carbon di dioxide monitors to track ventilation we've been through a traumatic experience and we've tried to learn from that and did help the science with the Aerosol study and now we're moving on in a way that we can still sing but in a more safe manner do you worry that when the spotlight of the pandemic starts to fade that people will forget and that they won't act the way they should in

terms of buildings I'm a bit more optimistic than that I think there are fundamental shifts that have happened the scientific and medical literature is being Rewritten the government and standard setting bodies are setting new Health-based standards businesses are responding and won't forget what this meant to their employees health and their business so I don't think we're going to forget these lessons we better not this year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of concentration camps across Europe most of the survivors Who Remain are now in their 80s and

90s so soon there will be no one left who experien The horrors of the Holocaust firsthand no one to answer questions or bear witness to Future Generations but as we first reported earlier this year a new and dramatic effort is underway to change that by harnessing the Technologies of the present and the future to keep alive the ability to talk to and get answers from the past hi Aaron hello can I ask you some questions You can ask me anything you want within reason our interview with Holocaust Survivor Aaron ster who spent two years of

his childhood h in a neighbor's attic was unlike any interview we have ever done Aaron tell us what your parents did before the war they owned and operated a butcher shop it wasn't the content of the interview that was so unusual where did you live I was born in a small town in Poland called sov podlaski it's the fact that this interview was with a man Who was no longer alive Aaron ster died two years ago what's the weather like today I'm actually recording I cannot answer that question the survivors were getting very old Heather

Mayo came up with the idea for this project she had worked on exhibits featuring Holocaust Survivors for years and wanted future generations to have the same opportunity to interact with them as she' had I wanted to talk to to a holocaust Survivor like I would today with that person sitting right in front of me and we were having a conversation she knew that back in the 90s after making the film Schindler's List Steven Spielberg created a foundation named for the Hebrew word for the Holocaust shaah come on ahead and sit on down to film and

collect testimonies from as many survivors as possible you're they have interviewed nearly 55,000 of them so far and have Stored them at the University of Southern California but Mayo dreamed of something more dyamic being able to actively converse with survivors after they're gone and she figured in the age of artificial intelligence tools like Siri and Alexa the technology had to be creatable I've been involved in interviewing Holocaust Survivors for over 20 years iot she brought the idea to Steven Smith executive director of The USC showa foundation and now her husband he loved it but some

of his colleagues weren't so sure one of them looked at me she was like you want to talk to dead people and you said yes because that's the point that's the point well maybe people thought you're turning the Holocaust into something maybe hokey yeah they said that you're going to Disney by you know Disney by the Holocaust we had a lot of push back on This project is it the right thing to do what about The Well of the survivors are we trying to keep them alive beyond their death everyone had questions except for one

group of people the survivors themselves who said where do I sign up I would like to participate in this project no barriers to entry actually I did both I actually first Survivor they signed up to do a trial run was a man named Pinkus gutter who was born in Poland and deported to the Midic concentration camp with his parents and twin sister Sabina at the age of 11 he's the only one who survived they flew Pinkus from his home in Toronto to Los Angeles and asked him to sit inside this so you're in this Dome

what yeah I called it the sphere they called it the Dome and then eventually it was called a bubble a bubble surrounding him with lights and more than 20 cameras what's our f- stop the goal was to Future prooof the Interviews so that as technology ad advances and 3D hologram like projection becomes the norm they'll have all the necessary angles so the very first day we went to film pinkas we had these Ultra high-speed cameras that were all linked together and sync together to make um this video of him so and we sit down and

they press record nothing happens so Pinkus is sitting there with 6,000 LED lights on him and cameras are don't work can I go back to sleep now Sunglasses shielded his eyes when are we going to start I was bored sitting in that chair so I started singing to [Music] myself so suddenly Steven had this idea oh he's singing we're going to record some songs of his he was such a good sport he was really good sport eventually the cameras rolled and Pinkus was asked to come back to the Bubble for the real thing how long

were you in that chair a whole week from 9: to 5:00 a week we were there with breaks for lunch and but I was there from 9: to 5:00 answering questions oh my gosh it took so long because they asked him nearly 2,000 questions the idea was to cover every conceivable question anyone might ever want to ask him did you have to look exactly the same I had to wear the same clothes and I had three pairs of the same jackets the same shirts the Same trousers the same shoes every morning Pinkus can now be

seen in those shirts trousers and shoes at Holocaust museums in Dallas Indiana and here at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in skoki outside Chicago where visitors can ask him their own questions what kept you going or what gave you hope while you were experiencing hardship in the camps we did hope that that the Nazis would lose their War Pink's image is Project Ed onto an 11t High screen what we see Here Smith joined us to explain how the technology works so what's happening is all of the answers to the questions that Pinkus gave uh go into

a database then when you ask a question the algorithm is looking through all the database do I have an answer to that and then it'll bring back what it thinks is the closest answer to your question I'm going to try talking to pinkas yes all right did you have a happy childhood I had a very happy childhood my parents were wine Makers my father started teaching me to become a wine maker when I was three and a half years old and by the age of five I could already read and I could already write wow

you're very smart thank you I've noticed there's a little jiggle right before pinka starts to talk what is that what you seeing here isn't a human being it's it's video clips that are are being buttered up to each other and played and it searches and brings The clip in you just you're seeing a little bit of a a jump cut the jump Cuts stop being distracting once we started talking about the fate of Pink's family tell us what happened when you got to the camp as soon as we arrived there we were being separated into

different groups and my sister uh was somehow pushed towards the children and I saw her she must have spot at my mother so she ran towards my mother I saw my Mother and she hugged her and since that time I all I can remember whenever I think of my sister is her long big long blonde braid that was the last time he saw his twin sister Sabina he learned later that day that she and both his parents had been killed in the gas Chambers Pinkus was alone at age 11 put to work as a slave

laborer did you ever see anybody killed unfortunately I saw many people die in front of my eyes there were People I wasn't sure how a recording would handle what I wanted to ask Pinkus next how can you still have faith in God how can you possibly not believe in God well how did he let this happen God gave human beings the knowledge of right and wrong and he allowed them to do what they wished on this Earth to find their own way to my mind when God sees what human beings are up to especially things

like genocide he Weeps wow Stephen I could ask him questions for 10 hours and on the screen yeah W since Pinkus gutter was filmed the shawa foundation has recorded interviews with 21 more Holocaust Survivors each for a full week and they've Shrunk the setup required so they can take a mobile rig on the road to record survivors close to where they live they've deliberately chosen interview subjects with all different wartime experiences survivors of a Hidden children and as we saw last fall in New Jersey going to hook me up again yep 93 yearold Alan Mosin

who isn't a holocaust Survivor he was a liberator entering that camp was uh the most horrific site I've ever seen or ever hoped to see the rest of my life Mosin was an 18-year-old private when his army unit liberated a little known concentration camp called goons Kirin there was a pile of skelet like bodies on the left there was another pile of Skelet like bodies on the right those poor souls that's the term my lieutenant kept screaming oh my God you look at these poor souls look each of Alan mosin's answers is then isolated by

a team of researchers at the Sha Foundation office I remember the expression and the attitude of all of us what in the freak what is this God Almighty who add into the system a variety of questions people might might ask to trigger that response for every Question that we asked there are 15 different ways of asking the same question and that's fed in and that's all manual editors rotate the image turn the green screen background into black and then a long process of testing begins some of it in schools so Mr pinkas on your screen

students are asked to try it out ask whatever question they want and see if the system calls up the correct answer how did you find out that you Your city was getting invaded by Germany would you ever want to seek revenge how did you feel about your family can you rephrase this please every question and response is then reviewed we log every single question that's asked of the system and see if there is a better response that addresses that question more directly as we discovered it's still a work in progress tell us about your family

when you were a little boy how about you ask me about life after The war so a couple of things about artificial intelligence it is mainly artificial and not so intelligent yet for now but the beauty of artificial intelligence is it develops over time so we aren't changing the content all the answers remain the same but over time the range of questions that you can ask will be enhanced considerably and you had to stay silent questions to draw out what it was like For Aaron ster hiding in that attic 75 years ago I used to

pray to God to let me live till I was 25 I wanted to taste what adulthood would be like the rest of that conversation with Aaron elster as well as one with a survivor of Joseph mangala's Infamous twin experiments at owitz when we come back so am I a lucky guy yes I am the whole point of the showa foundation's project is to allow meaningful conversations with Holocaust Survivors to continue even after the survivors themselves are gone and of the more than 20 men and women who've participated so far four have passed away already tonight

we wanted to share conversations with two of them conversations that at times felt so normal we could almost forget we were talking to the digital image of someone who was no longer living first a spunky 4 fo9 woman named Eva core an identical twin who together with with her sister survived aitz and the notorious experiments of Dr Joseph mangala Eva core spent her life after the war in terot Indiana she died last summer at the age of 85 hi Eva how are you today I'm fine and how are you I'm good it felt natural to

answer her question before posing my own so how how old were you when you went to aitz when I arrived in aitz I was 10 Years old and I stayed in AIT until Liberation which was about 9 months later when we were liberated so we made a little announcement about the fact we were starting this project I get a call the next day from A lady called Eva cor I didn't know her at that point in time and she says I want to be one of those 3D interviews I Steven Smith executive director of the

USC showa foundation and his wife and Colleague Heather Mayo Smith were running the project I said well I'm traveling I'm very sorry where are you going uh well I've got to go to New York I'm going to DC when are you going to go to DC I'm going to DC turns out we were going to the same event in DC I arrive at my hotel she's sitting in the lobby waiting for me when Eva on the right and her twin twin sister Miriam arrived at aitz they were pulled away from their parents and older sisters

and taken to a Barrack full of twins they never saw their family again 50 years ago at a railroad 60 Minutes reported on mangala's Twin experiments in a story back in 1992 and the reason that my number is not and we actually interviewed the living Eva core at her home in terot Eva told us then about becoming extremely sick after an injection mangala came in every morning and every evening with four other doctors and he Declared very sarcastically laughing too bad she's so young she has only two weeks to live when I heard that I

knew he was right and I immediately made a silent pledge that I will prove you you Dr mangala wrong imagine picking up a conversation almost 30 years later and after Eva's death Eva tell us about Dr mangala what was he like he had a gorgeous face a movie star face and very pleasant actually dark hair dark eyes when I looked into his Eyes I could see nothing but evil people people say that the eyes are the center of the soul and in manger case that was correct Eva and Miriam are visible in footage taken by

the Soviet forces that liberated awit 75 years ago they went back to the camp many times Eva continuing to go even after Miriam's death in 1993 because if the train came on that direction it was on one of those visits that Eva made a stunning announcement I Eva Moses that she had decided to forgive her Nazi captors hereby give amnesty to all Nazis who participated she came under blistering attack from other survivors how can you forgive H how is that possible my forgiveness does not mean that I forget what happened which is impossible my forgiveness

is an act of self-healing self Liberation and self-empowerment are you able to forgive Aaron I cannot forgive Aaron ster disagrees for them to get forgiveness they have to ask my little sister Sarah whom they brutally murdered I have no right to forgive and I will not forgive what's important for me in this project is that we have Holocaust survivors who have different points of view about God and religion and faith and forgiveness and that's what this project will allow us to do Aaron ster unlike many Holocaust Survivors never spent time in a concentration camp as

Jews were being rounded up in his Town's Marketplace and sent to trinka his father told him to run he was 9 years old and I managed to crawl into the seore that went along the marketplace the street and kept crawling till I felt I was out of sight stood up and started running he made it to the building of an older polish couple named the gersis who'd been customers at his family's butcher shop he shows up and She didn't want to take him he started crying and then she let him upstairs Aaron how long did

you stay in the attic I lived in that attic for close to two years two years with just one visit a day to bring food and water what was it like in the Attic oh there's so many things that I remember the hunger the fear the absolute total loneliness what do you do all day you're sitting there I used to catch flies out Of desperation tear their wings off so they wouldn't fly away so I H them there h how did you survive how did you survive in that attic I had the ability to daydream

I used to write novels in my head I was the hero all the time and we have that ability to either give into our misery and our pain and die or absorb the physical pain but keep your mentality keep your soul Keep your mind so was I bored was I scared was I in need of somebody to accept me or to tell me that I'm okay that I'm a nice kid sure but that was not part of my life we got a phone call to say that Aaron elster had suddenly passed away I was at

a conference at that time the next morning I went into the uh little room that we had and I turned on Aaron st's testimony and I realized I was going to be the first person ever to click that Little button and ask a question of somebody who was no longer alive when for the next 6 hours people came in and out of that room his funeral had not yet taken place and yet the Legacy was already continuing and it was a very powerful and touching moment you're good you're doing great a touching moment that may

soon be available to others beyond the community of Holocaust Survivors they're going to come in and they're going to have you look Heather Mayo Smith says in the process of developing and testing this technology she was barraged with inquiries there wasn't one person literally not one that didn't ask me if they could do a similar interview with either a loved one for themselves unrelated to the Holocaust unrelated completely unrelated can I do this with someone that I know what's the answer yes she has started an independent company that's trying to expand the use of this

technology I was An astronaut for NASA recording interviews with other historical figures like astronauts and eventually with anyone at all what unit were you in during World do you think that this is just going to be a tool that people use everybody will be recording their histories other people can interview them mhm it'll just be life yeah we're going to go ahead and get started for now though the race is on to capture interviews With as many Holocaust Survivors as possible while there's still time so the conversations can continue always with people like Aaron elster

do you want revenge when I was a Youngster I wanted Revenge very very very much and I hate it I hate it but most of the perpetrators most of the killers are dead so who am I going to hate the grandchildren that had nothing to do with it's not right revenge is not part of my life not Part of my thinking you know here you have these people who were basically destined to be annihilated that they survived as the miracle but they were supposed to be murdered killed and now they have immortality they were not

supposed to have a name they were supposed to be destroyed for all time and now through this program they will be able to continue to answer questions hundreds of years after the Nazis have gone it's that never forget we've had a Lot of cliches around the Holocaust you know never again never forget we must remember all this sort of thing what this does it makes sure that there isn't closure because it's not about a statement it's not about a particular thing that's being instructed of you the onus is on you to ask the questions the

onus is on you to be curious and to want to know and so in a sense it turns the learning on its head and says I'm not going to tell you what the lessons of The Holocaust are I'm not going to tell you what the Holocaust means but if you want to find out then you can ask it's so terribly important so there we were at a special moment in time when the living pink scooter could talk to the one who will live forever would you ask you a question for us I will ask the

one which is my favorite okay can you sing me a song from your youth you want me to sing it for you yes [Music] [Music] please what does that mean what is the song is it a happy song yeah with a happy song It's like a brother and a sister which of course my twin sister are traveling in the woods or on the on the road and they can't get over how beautiful the world is oh my God [Music] [Music]